Moment in Oddity - Whispers of Yellowstone Lake
Suggested by Carren Sanders
Science has been able to document and explain many weird atmospheric occurrences that have happened throughout the years, but when it comes to the Whispers of Yellowstone Lake, they have documented the phenomenon, but never explained it. The first reports of these sounds were collected in 1893 and published in Science Magazine by Edwin Linton. He had heard the strange noise himself twice. But accounts go back much further than that to the fur trappers and mountain men. For many years after Linton's article, nobody mentioned the sounds, but reports started again in 1924. Jack Haynes was a photographer and he was with a group in a boat on Yellowstone Lake early one morning. They all heard this low roar that got louder and rose in pitch and then faded, only to start up again from another direction. It happened a third time and all of this took place in less than a minute and then it was silent. People who have heard the Whispers say that they sound like these weird ethereal aerial sounds that mimic an electric harp and that they sound as though they are coming up out of the lake or that the sound is hanging over the lake. They are like a low hum that increases in decibels and it sounds almost as if the hums pass right over the person who hears them. It then fades away.. There have been several causes suggested over the years. Some say it is caused by swarming bees, but the sound is still around in the winter. Others believe it is just the wind blowing through the trees. A man named Ed Henry suggested that the weird sound was created by air currents created by the mountains and many agree. The sound is always heard when the lake is calm and early in the morning after an unusually cool evening. Whatever it is that causes the whispers, they certainly are odd! And here is a sample shared by the National Park Service!
This Day in History - Pulse Nightclub Massacre
In the month of June, on the 12th, in 2016, Omar Mateen, opened fire inside the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida and killed 49 people and wounded 53 others. The Pulse Nightclub was opened in 2004 by Barbara Poma and Ron Legler as a gay bar and nightclub that hosted various theme nights. This particular night happened to be Latin Night, so most of the victims were Latino. Mateen was a security guard who had been to the club a few times. He had sworn allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and a recent event in which the U.S. killed Abu Waheeb, the leader of the militant group Islamic State in Iraq, triggered him. That would not only make this a mass shooting and hate crime, but also a terrorist attack. The attack started around 2am with Mateen marching into the club carrying a SIG Sauer MCX semi-automatic rifle and a 9mm Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol. An off-duty police officer working as security called in the police immediately. There was an initial engagement, but Mateen barricaded himself inside and created a hostage situation. He claimed to have explosives, which made the police more cautious about bursting in, but in actuality there were no explosives. At the time of the attack, this was the deadliest mass shooting by a single shooter in US history. Today, it is still the deadliest act of violence against the LGBTQ community in US history. The Pulse Nightclub is now a memorial site and museum, slated to open in 2020.
It's a Haunted Gay Life
This episode is going to be a little different and why shouldn't it be since this is officially HGB's 300th episode! June 2019 marks a few things. I've been producing the podcast for exactly 4.5 years. We've hit a big episode number and have almost 4 million downloads of the podcast. And the month of June is gay pride and 2019 marks 50 years since the StoneWall Riot that started the big push for gay rights in America. This coming together of big milestones inspired this episode and what I will present here for your listening pleasure is a bit of gay history that has hauntings connected to it and after producing a haunted history podcast for this many years, I have changed my opinions, beliefs and practices in regards to the paranormal and will share that perspective. Plus, my top 10 most haunted places I've visited! Join me on an exploration into my haunted gay life!
For podcasters, big milestone shows usually mean rolling out a big topic. I struggled. What did I want to do? I haven't done Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum yet. How about Skinwalker Ranch? Or perhaps Raynham Hall in England? But these places have been done to death and I really enjoy doing the obscure places. But I wanted this episode to be different. I thought that I might share my top haunted locations based on my own experiences - and I will throw a few of those in - but this would be repeating things from other episodes. Almost like a review show. Then I thought about the fact that I've been doing History Goes Bump for a year now, on my own. I've settled into my own skin and realized that my views have changed from the very first episode. I listened to Episode 1 a few weeks ago and once again cleaned up the audio a little bit and added an intro disclaimer in hopes that people would not just listen to that episode and decide they didn't like HGB, but give it a chance as the production has drastically improved. As I listened, I realized that I had changed my mind on a few things and even more importantly, in the last four and a half years, I've had quite a few of my own experiences that I can't explain. I also got really inspired by a podcast I just binged. The latest season of Uncover by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is titled The Village and it explores the history of the Toronto Gay Village and unsolved murders of gay men and transsexuals that have happened there. That trip through history made me think of American gay history and my own. Things have changed so much. And wouldn't you know, as I explored the history, I found some haunts in some very important landmarks.
I turned sixteen in 1987. I guess that makes me a little old for some listeners as the vast majority of podcast listeners are millennials. While most teens at that age are concerned with passing their driver's license test, I was realizing what it was exactly that made me seem different then everybody else and it wasn't just that I wished I lived in the attic of the Addam's Family House while they all lived downstairs. I was gay. It amazes me as I sit back today and see that we live in a culture where people don't even have to claim a gender anymore and can love anybody they want to love. That wasn't the case when I was a teenager and it certainly wasn't for the decades before I came out to myself. There was a time when a relationship of mixed religious beliefs or races was taboo and even illegal. My how things have changed and I'm so happy for young people today. There are definitely still places where it isn't accepted and families that will still lay down judgement, but for the most part, we are pretty close to being where we should be.
I like to educate on this podcast, so let's take a trip back 50 years to one of the most momentous moments in gay history here in America. There was a time when not only was homosexuality considered a mental illness, it was illegal to practice. Come with me to The Stonewall Inn
The Stonewall Inn
The Stonewall Inn got it's start in 1930 as a speakeasy located at 91 Seventh Avenue South. Vincent Bonavia was the owner, so it was known as Bonnie’s Stonewall Inn and its cover was that it was just a basic tearoom serving up light faire and some non-alcoholic beverages. It eventually was raided by prohibition agents, but it continued to operate. When Prohibition was repealed, Bonavia decided he wanted to move to a better location. There was a building on Christopher Street that had once been stables back in the mid-19th century. Bonnie's Stonewall Inn moved in there in 1934 and took up two storefronts, 51-53 Christopher Street. The bar and restaurant was very successful until the inside was gutted by a fire in 1964. The place needed somebody new to love it.
In walks the Mafia. They were all about making a profit and they saw a need in New York City for gay bars. So in 1966, three members of the Mafia refurbished the Stonewall Inn and reopened as a gay bar. At that time, it was the biggest gay establishment in the U.S. This not only made it popular with the gay community, but it put a big target on it for the police. It was customary for the New York Police Department to raid bathhouses and gay bars. Every establishment got hit at least once a month. The ludicrous rules in place at the time were that it was illegal for same sex people to dance close to each other, it was illegal to serve gay people alcohol and customers had to wear clothing specific to their genders. For example, a woman needed to wear three pieces of feminine clothing. A police raid usually happened early in the evening and if the bar was lucky, they would have been tipped off, so they could hide a bunch of liquor and continue business after the raid. The police would come in and turn on all the lights. Everybody would be lined up along the wall, verbally harrassed and they would have to present their IDs. If you didn't have ID or were a man dressed in drag or a woman dressed butch, you would be arrested. Bar employees would also sometimes be arrested.
By 1969, the gay community in New York had had enough. On June 28, 1969, the gay community would make their stand and their frustration would erupt in riots. At 1:20 in the morning, eight police officers raided the Stonewall Inn. They expected the typical subjugation, but the 200 patrons refused to cooperate. They were all informed they were under arrest, but the cops needed more paddy wagons. As they waited for the wagons, a crowd began to form outside and before long, it was ten times its original size. The wagons arrived and the first to be loaded was a lesbian. She pushed back and refused to get in the wagon and as she fought she was hit in the head with a billy club. She was picked up and thrown into the wagon. And that was all it took.
Some of the crowd pushed against the paddy wagon trying to tip it over, while others threw beer bottles and bricks at the other wagons. There were ten officers against a crowd of 600 and in a true twist of irony, they ended up seeking shelter in the very gay bar that they made unsafe for the gays. Despite this being their place to love and dance, the rioters turned on Stonewall and threw anything they could at the windows, from bottles to rocks to garbage cans. Attempts were made to bust down the doors. The Tactical Police Force was called in and they managed to squash the rebellion and arrested a bunch of people. The streets were cleared by 4am. Several people had been injured including four of the officers. Damage to Stonewall was devastating. Everything was broken.
This would not be the end to the riots. News spread quickly through Greenwich Village and riots occurred on the next five nights. Things quieted down and the raids stopped. The next year on June 28th, a parade was hosted marching from Greenwich Village to Sheep Meadow in Central Park. This would be the first gay pride march and they have continued in city's around the world all the way until today. I'll never forget my first pride parade. It was so much fun and even though at the time, the city of Denver only gave us access to one side of Colfax Avenue, we were able to celebrate, rather than hide who we were.
The Stonewall Inn did not go on however. It closed. And for the next twenty years, a variety of businesses used the building. There was a shoe store, a bagel shop and a Chinese restaurant. In the early 1990s, the block of Christopher Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues was co-named "Stonewall Place" and another gay bar named just Stonewall opened in part of the building where the original Stonewall had been. Through the efforts of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, the area was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999. Things went well for the bar until 2006 when it closed again due to mismanagement and noise complaints. Another group of investors took over in 2007 and renovated the neglected club and was reopened as the Stonewall Inn in March 2007. It is still going strong today.
With this kind of history from Prohibition to the launch of a national push for human rights, it is easy to believe that some energy is inside this building and there are both patrons and employees who claim that Stonewall has ghosts.One employee said, "We think we have ghosts. Doors slam if no one is there, so we say there are two guys and one girl ghost upstairs. It's an ongoing, running joke." And the upstairs is indeed where most of the run-ins with apparitions take place. That's all I could find, but I'm sure if I ever got the chance to talk to employees there, I'd hear a lot more.
Harvey Milk's Old Castro Camera Shop
Harvey Milk was born on May 22nd in 1930 in Woodmere, New York. His parents were Lithuanian Jews who owned a department store. He worked in the store when he was growing up. It was also as he was growing up that he figured out he was gay. He attended New York State College for Teachers in Albany, which is now known as State University of New York. He studied math and history and became a writer for the school paper. Many of his columns featured commentary on diversity. When he graduated in 1951, he decided to enlist in the Navy and he was enrolled in officer training. He did well and ended up stationed as a diving instructor in San Diego. His naval career would come to an abrubt end when his orientation was discovered. He resigned at the rank of lieutenant junior grade. He decided to get a job as a teacher and did so working as a public school teacher on Long Island. He later would work as a stock analyst in New York City and then as a production associate for Broadway musicals. The Vietnam War would get him more active in politics and activism.
He eventually made his way to San Francisco in 1972 and opened up a camera store on Castro Street. The Castro District and gay culture go hand-in-hand. The Castro Street Fair has been hosted for 45 years and was started by Milk in 1974. He started it because of the discriminatory policies of local merchants who tried to block two gay men from opening a store. It was an offshoot of the Castro Village Association, the first US organization for gay businesses. The influence of the Castro Street Fair was much of why Castro transformed into the center of the LGBTQ community.
Milk went on to announce that he would be running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He lost the race, but he was now a prominent figure in politics. He ran again for the combined San Francisco City/County supervisor seat in 1975 and almost won. Mayor George Mascone appointed him to the city’s Board of Permit Appeals. This was a precedent and made Milk the first openly gay city commissioner in the United States. Milk ran for state assembly and lost, but this spurred him to champion an amendment that would replace at-large elections for the Board of Supervisors with district elections and he won his next race. He was inaugurated as a San Francisco City-County Supervisor on January 9, 1978. He became an advocate for many people, especially the gay community. He once said during a speech, "Gay people, we will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets. We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions. We are coming out to tell the truths about gays, for I am tired of the conspiracy of silence, so I’m going to talk about it. And I want you to talk about it. You must come out." Many people hated Milk though and he received daily death threats.
Former city Supervisor Dan White was really angry. The bad blood between him and Milk went back to an early controversy over the building of a mental health facility for troubled youths. Both White and Milk opposed it, but then Milk changed his mind and voted against White who lost on the issue. White never forgot that and voted against every issue Milk supported after that. White would resign his seat on November 10, 1978 citing that the money was not enough to support his family. He then changed his mind, but the Mayor would not let him back. Now White hated Mayor Moscone too. On November 27, 1978, White managed to get into City Hall with a gun through a basement window. He went to Moscone’s office and killed him, then walked down the hall and killed Milk. White used the Twinkie Defense, which basically was claiming he had so much sugar that he had lost his sanity so he was not accountable for what he did. And it worked. He was acquitted of murder charges and given a lesser sentence for manslaughter. People rioted on Castro Street and set police cars on fire. The police in turn raided gay businesses and beat people.
Perhaps this is why Harvey Milk is not at rest. I mentioned that Milk opened up a camera shop when he first moved to San Francisco. This shop would become a neighborhood center. Milk's spirit is said to have returned here and taken up residence. Moviemaker Gus Van Sant definitely felt this was the case as he filmed the movie Milk. For the film, Van Sant recreated the former Castro Camera Shop in the gift store that took its place. He tells the following story, "The gift store owners were very into the legacy of the store and willing to let us close their shop down and move our set in. They had a mural of Harvey Milk. During a shot at night there was a take where we were using most of the room and there were three or four actors in the scene. Some people were sitting on the sofa which was outside of the shot and during one of the takes somebody walked in from outside and sat down on the sofa during the shot. After the shot was over and I yelled 'Cut,' he apparently got up and walked out. The actors were like, 'Did you see that guy?' I didn't see anybody, but they kept describing Harvey, so I figure it was the ghost of Harvey walking into the store for a brief second."
Milk would make another appearance via a Ouija Board in 2012. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to name a Navy vessel for Milk and it just happened to be his 82nd birthday. Supervisor Scott Wiener said, "LGBT people have always served in our armed forces. For many, many years, our community was hidden and oppressed in the armed services. Now, because of the repeal of 'don't ask, don't tell,' our community can serve openly and proudly. We must support our LGBT soldiers past and present. I can think of no better way to do that than to name a vessel for a Navy officer who went on to become one of the most important civil rights leaders in history."
Another supervisor named John Avalos suggested they ask for Harvey Milk's opinion on a Ouija Board. He described what happened as, "We actually put our hands on the Ouija board and the letters g-o-o-d-r-i-d-d-a-n-c-e-d-a-d-t came out. We asked Harvey, and Harvey gave us these letters: 'Good riddance don't ask, don't tell.' It was quite clear that Harvey Milk would have been opposed to 'don't ask, don't tell.' I can honestly say that's one aspect of this resolution that's really valid."
Upstairs Lounge
Our final stop is at a location in New Orleans. This was a bar known as the Upstairs Lounge and it was located on the second floor of a three-story building at the corner of Chartres and Iberville Streets. The tragedy that occurred here was made worse by the fact that this location had only one entrance and patrons had to climb up some wooden stairs to get to the bar. We need to go back to the summer of 1973 in June. The French Quarter has always been an open and party kind of place, but back in the 70s, gay people still needed to keep their gathering together underground. It was the last Sunday in June and was the final day of Gay Pride for the city. Such a celebration was new as Stonewall had only happened four years prior.
Happening at the same time in America was a not so well known targeting of gay churches. The Metropolitan Community Church, MCC, had been founded in 1968 by Troy Perry. MCC churches were starting in big cities, many of them having to share space at community centers or spaces. Earlier in 1973, a Nashville MCC was burned as well as the Los Angeles headquarters for the MCC. A fledgling MCC congreation in New orleans had asked the Upstairs Lounge if they could use the space for church services. Since the Upstairs Lounge was a gay bar, it was a no brainer and they said yes. The group would move services to their pastor's house just a couple weeks before the Upstairs Lounge would be firebombed, but this was still a spiritual center for them.
The afternoon of June 24th, the lounge hosted an all-you-can-eat buffet and free beer. Around 130 people attended. The beer ran out and only about 60 people stayed, mostly MCC members. They gathered around the piano and sang some songs together. At 7:56 pm, the buzzer downstairs sounded. This usually meant that a cab had come to pick someone up, but no one had called for a cab. One of the guys went to the steel door that led to the stairs leading downstairs and when he opened it, flames rushed inside the club. Someone has deliberately set the wooden stairs on fire. The bar was an immediate inferno and as I told you, this was the only exit. There were windows, but they were boarded up or had iron bars over them. There was no marked emergency exit. Some bars were far enough apart that a few people were able to squeeze through and jump down to the sidewalk.
The local MCC pastor was Rev. Bill Larson and he was at the lounge. He attempted to get through the bars and became stuck. He burned to death wedged in the window. This would become an image of the mass murder as his body remained in that window into the next day. A bartender named Buddy Rasmussen knew where the emergency exit was and he managed to get fifteen people out. One of those men, MCC assistant
pastor George "Mitch" Mitchell, ran back inside to get his partner and both men ended up dying. Twenty-nine people died that night and three more would died later from their injuries. More people died that night then died when the entire French Quarter burned down in 1788. Not only was it troubling that someone would set out to burn a gay club and murder gay people, but the city had a very tepid reaction. It was as if no one cared. Descriptions of the aftermath were horrible and none of the coverage mentioned that this was a hate crime.People claimed it was God's judgement and a cab driver even said, "I hope the fire burned their dress off." Two days after the firebombing, the story disappeared from headlines. And to be honest, I knew nothing of this until I heard Mark Bologna cover it on his podcast "Beyond Bourbon Street"
Major Henry Morris, chief detective of the New Orleans Police Department, said of the victims, "We don’t even know these papers belonged to the people we found them on. Some thieves hung out there, and you know this was a queer bar." As if gay people didn't carry ID or were unworthy of identification. Churches refused to host memorial services. Clearly, there are many reasons why spirits would be here in the afterlife. We have a painful death, murder and no justice because nobody was ever caught in connection to this crime. Not to mention the community's reaction. Several victims were dumped into a mass grave at a Potter's Field because their shamed families wouldn't claim the bodies.
The Upstairs Lounge was not rebuilt or reopened. There is a bar in the first floor under the lounge called The Jimani Bar. Patrons and employees all claim to have unexplained experiences. People feel as though they are being watched and that someone or something they can't see, is there. Disembodied voices are heard both in this bar and on the third floor. Voices are also caught on EVP and they have told investigators their names and that they don't want to be forgotten. Full-bodied apparitions have been seen walking on the second floor and in the kitchen area of the Jimani. And obviously, the vision of these ghosts is horrible as they are seen charred. The smell of smoke floats on the air and I can only imagine that occasionally there is another smell as well.
Gay history is important and I'm glad that I was able to share a few key pieces of that history. Are these locations haunted? That is for you to decide!
My Most Haunted 2019
I've been doing ghost tours since I was a kid. At this point, I've lost count of how many I have done. I've been going into haunted locations just as long, but for most of those years I was not actively seeking interactions. As we like to say around here, I didn't tempt the spirits. For those of you that have been on this journey with me - and that includes any of you that have binged the back catalogue - you know that I have been tempting the spirits more and more and starting here in 2019, I have been doing actually ghost hunting or investigations. What changed that got me doing that? Number one is that I really wanted to start getting my own answers. Number two is that I had been afraid to interact with the spirit world, partly because of my religious upbringing and partly because I didn't have a partner in crime to do it with. I wrote down a list of haunted locations that I have visited that have been discussed either on a regular episode or a BonusCast. These are places that I've actually been inside and wandered around a bit. I'm sure I've missed a few places or forgotten about some. I have 25 of them: Mammoth Cave, Mineral Springs Hotel, King's Tavern (Natchez), The Colosseum, Moses Cone Manor, Sorrel-Weed House, Driskill Hotel, Biltmore Estate, 1725 Captain Taylor House, Old Charleston Jail, Disneyland, Hotel Cassadaga, The Stanley Hotel, Queen Mary, Croke-Patterson House, Molly Brown House, Sugar Mill in St. Augustine, Cuban Club, Treehouse Bar in Orlando, Lillian Place House, Baker House, Waverly Hills Sanitorium, Lemp Mansion, Ripley's Odditorium and the St. Augustine Lighthouse.
Of those 25, I would say that in ten of them, I have had some kind of unexplained experience. So I guess that makes it easy to do a top 10 most haunted locations based on my experiences. But before I share that, I want to talk a bit about some of my beliefs that have changed. Obviously, I'm more open to tempting the spirits although I would say there are certain methods I'll never use...can you say Ouija Board? I used to really wonder about child spirits and I didn't think that a child's spirit would just be left here. But I'm not sure where I stand on what happens directly after we die, so it is possible in my mind that a child spirit might still be around. And the thing that has convinced me the most about this are the EVP of children I have caught myself. As for what a ghost is, I'm still open to ghosts being sourced from many things, but I lean most heavily on some kind of trapped energy. I think this is why the most common experiential thing we hear when it comes to the paranormal is that someone feels weird in some way.
10. King's Tavern
9. Croke-Patterson Mansion
8.Lillian Place House
7. 1725 Captain Taylor House
6. Treehouse Bar
5. Mineral Springs Hotel
4. Ripley's Odditorium
3. St. Augustine Lighthouse
2. Baker House
1. Waverly Hills Sanitorium
So I've done 300 episodes and way more locations than just that. Am I running out of material? No way! I've counted 200 locations on my suggestions list still left and you guys add to it consistently. Some of them don't have enough for a regular episode, but they make it into a BonusCast. And speaking of those, I have over 150 of those available and some of those have been my favorite to produce. So I can sit back at the end of this episode and declare, "It's a haunted gay life!" Or is it? That is for you to decide!
Thursday, June 20, 2019
Thursday, June 6, 2019
HGB Ep. 299 - Haunted Cemeteries 13
Moment in Oddity - Giant Skeletons Found in Lake Okeechobee
We have a lot of lakes in Florida. There are so many in the county in which I live, that it is actually called Lake County. Some of the lakes here are pretty big with Lake Okeechobee being the largest. It's the one you see when looking at a map of Florida and you see what looks like a hole in the side of a well...I won't say, but we all know what the shape of Florida looks like *ahem*. Indigenous cultures flocked to the area around Lake Okeechobee and many of them are thought to have been very advanced, building canals and causeways. There are even legends here that claim that some of these tribes were giants. It's easy to laugh off a legend, until bones are found. Settlers in the early 1800s claimed to have seen thousands of massive skulls bobbing on the surface of the south end of Lake Okeechobee. They described it as looking "like a field of pumpkins." No formal investigation must have been done at the time, but things would be different when a drought that started in 2006 receded the water level of Lake Okeechobee. The black muck revealed thousands of human skeletons. The Anthropology Department of Florida Atlantic University started digging up the bones and artifacts as quickly as they could. What they found was startling. This was a cemetery with two levels. The lower level had small-boned indigenous skeletons that were typical of the Native peoples of Central America and the Amazon Basin. The upper level contained the bones of a very tall people. The bones were larger and belonged to people measuring over seven feet in height. Their skulls were massive and many had intentional deformations. An article that I read about this stated, "Whether or not they were of mixed human-extraterrestrial humanoid ancestry has not been determined and of course, is a matter of conjecture." There are those who believe that these giants descended from the Paracus People of Peru and were wiped out by a devastating hurricane. Giants living in southern Florida, certainly is odd!
This Month in History - First Drive-in Theater Opens
In the month of June, on the 6th, in 1933, the first drive-in theater opened in Camden, New Jersey. I love drive-in theaters. They are the perfect place for watching a good scary movie and how fitting that the first would open with the start of the summer season. I have the newspaper ad here and it reads, "Opens tonight 8:30, Drive-in near Central Airport, 2 miles from Camden Bridge. Sit in your car and enjoy talkies. World's finest automobile movie theater. Individual driveways three times the length of your car. 25 cents per car and for each person. Family admission $1. Three shows nightly: 8:30; 10; 11:30." The original term for drive-in theaters was park-in theaters and Richard Hollingshead who was a sales manager at Whiz Auto Products received the first patent. He got the idea when he watched his mother struggle to get comfortable in her theater chair and he thought that people would be more comfortable in their cars. He used his driveway to experiment and mounted a 1928 Kodak projector on the hood of his car and pinned a screen to some trees with a radio behind the screen for sound. His initial investment was $30,000 and he opened his first drive-in in the Pennsauken Township district of Camden, NJ were he lived. The film he showed was the 1932 British Fox comedy “Wives Beware” starring Adolphe Menjou. There were no in-car speakers back then. There were just three speakers mounted near the screen, making it a little difficult to hear, especially at the back of the theater and one can only imagine what the neighbors thought. I'd love to know, do you have a drive-in theater near you somewhere. They are unfortunately a dying breed. We have the Silver Moon Drive-In here in Lakeland, Florida.
Haunted Cemeteries 13
There are various types of cemeteries all around the world. There are those that are huge with grand sculptures and palatial mausoleums. Others are boring with flat stones and markers and fake flowers. Still others seem abandoned to the elements and time. The one thing they all hold in common is that they are a testament to humanity. We lived and we died. And hopefully, somebody cared. Sometimes these cemeteries are haunted. On this episode, we'll explore graveyards in New Hampshire, Florida, Colorado, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Georgia. Join me for Haunted Cemeteries 13!
I do care. It's what makes me a taphophile and I know many of you are too. By reading the names on headstones, we remember, we care. I used to wonder why a cemetery would be haunted. Why hang out with the dead when you can spook the living? I never considered that I love cemeteries in life, so why wouldn't I in death? Perhaps that is why there are spirits in graveyards. There are other reasons too. There was a time when a "sinner" couldn't be buried in hallowed ground. This always perplexed me. Aren't we all sinners? Perhaps it's this irony that causes a spirit to be at unrest. Or there are claims that an improper burial could cause hauntings. Many wartime mass graves are thought to be haunted because they are so impersonal. And then there is the business of unfinished business. Can a spirit be rooted to their body as a kind of homebase from which they come and go to finish up what they need to complete before moving on to whatever is next? And let's not forget the residual ghost that carves out the same path in the cemetery, over and over. It never ceases to amaze me that every time I think I have finished up these haunted cemeteries episodes that a bunch of new ones come along. And we have several to explore here!
St. Mary's Cemetery in Salem/Peabody
St. Mary's Cemetery is located on Route 114 at 226 North Street near Salem in Peabody, Massachusetts. The gate is stone and wrought iron with the name "St. Mary's Cemetery" formed in the wrought iron. The cemetery is attached to St. Thomas Church and was founded as a Catholic cemetery in 1849.Inside the cemetery is a bronze bust sculpture of Reverend John J. Gray that was sculpted by Samuel J. Kitson. Gray had been that pastor of St. James Catholic Church in Salem and was founder of St. John's Church in Peabody. US Congressman George Joseph Bates is buried here. He was a member of the Massachusetts State House of Representatives from 1918 to 1924, and served as mayor of Salem from 1924 to 1937. In 1937, he became a US Congressman and was re-elected, serving 12 years until he was killed in 1949 in a plane crash. Also buried here is Peacetime Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient, Patrick Francis Bresnahan.
The forest that lies down the hill from the cemetery gives people a really uneasy feeling. Faint white lights move about in the forest and into the cemetery. But that isn't the main haunting here. There is a female spirit clad in gray that has been seen as a full-bodied apparition here. Tour guide Sarah-Frankie Carter has seen her on multiple occasions. The first time was a few years ago around 3am. She and some friends had been walking by the cemetery when they noticed what looked like a large white trash bag caught up in a tree. The bag seemed to dislodge itself and float down towards them. They soon realized that it wasn't a bag, but a spirit and she was glowing. And it wasn't just floating at them. It was crawling down the tree and then it started running at them. The women ran out of the cemetery completely terrified. Ms. Carter returned some time later with a psychic friend who saw the female apparition. The psychic said that she appeared to be around twenty-years-old and she had died at that young age. Another encounter was with a skeptical friend who claimed that he didn't believe in ghosts. He went into the cemetery with Ms. Carter and they ran into the female apparition. He must have started believing because he quickly ran out and would not go back to the cemetery.
Gilson Road Cemetery
Gilson Road Cemetery is in Nashua, New Hampshire. The town of Nashua was originally part of a tract of land known as Dunstable that was established at the confluence of the Nashua and Merrimack Rivers. The Dunstable part that was in New Hampshire was renamed Nashua in 1836. The name means "beautiful stream with a pebbly bottom" in the Nashuway tribe's language of Penacook. The town became a textile town, starting originally with fur trading and eventually developing textile and cotton mills. After World War I, the city fell into decline as the textile industry changed and moved, but high tech revitalized it. Gilson Road is home to a cemetery of the same name and this graveyard has a big reputation for being haunted.
Gilson Road Cemetery is a little knock-about, rural graveyard. It is isolated and hard to find because a stone wall shields the cemetery from view. The history behind the cemetery has been lost to time, but most people agree that it probably started as a family plot dating back to colonial times. The stone wall is thought to have been built to mark the border of a farm. The farmhouse there is said to have burned down and that the victims of the fire were buried in the cemetery. A later house that was built on the property also burned down with the people killed in this fire being buried in the graveyard. It was decided to just leave the property as a cemetery as the luck here for homesteading was no good and so many people were already buried on the land. Could this be a reason why visitors experience EMF anomalies, cold spots, record EVP and see apparitions? Another legend claims that two Native American groups clashed here. The battle was very bloody.
One apparition that is famously seen here has been named Betty. The urban legend that goes with her claims that if you walk farther up Gilson Road heading to the northwest and shout, “Betty Gilson, I have your baby,” her ghost will appear. She is seen wearing colonial era garb and is around thirty-years-old. There are some witnesses who claim that her apparition appears without any prompting and some people have nearly driven off the road when she appears in the middle of it. Others claim that she hides behind a tree that you will only see her peeking around the tree. Sometimes, just her hand is seen grasping a tree. She's not the only spirit seen on the road though. A little boy was killed on the road and his spirit is seen darting across it.
One paranormal group investigating the cemetery claimed to see shadowy figures moving through the woods behind the cemetery. Mysterious fogs and strange lights are also seen in the wooded area on clear nights. The apparition of a male Native American was seen in the back left corner. This group also claims that the burials of the Lawrence family seem to be the most active with orbs repeatedly showing up in pictures. And perhaps it is a member of this family that is our woman in white here. This lady is seen wearing a flowing white gown as she traipses through the gravestones.
There is something angry here too. Disembodied voices are sometimes heard and many times this voice is threatening. There have been times when people have felt almost as though something is pushing back against them at the entrance gate. And a really strange claim is that the back corner where the Native American apparition has been seen seems to disappear at night, along with some of the headstones there. (Maybe it's just really dark?) And there is a hole in one headstone that appears and disappears - don't know what that is all about.
Another person claimed that as he was driving by the cemetery, he saw a man dressed in clothes dated to the late 1800s. He was just sitting on the stone wall and watched the man as he drove by. They locked eyes and the man who saw the spirit said, "It was one of the scariest things I ever saw. I was just driving by not thinking about anything, just listening to the radio, something just caught my eye so I looked over at the cemetery and there he was. There was no way the man could have walked, or even ran that fast to not be seen by the time I drove back. Paranormal is not something I believe in but I have to be honest, this really freaked me out!
Page Jackson Cemetery in Sanford, Florida
The Page Jackson Cemetery located in Sanford, Florida is in need of a lot of love. Nature has been taking back this historic cemetery that has burials belonging to many of Sanford's pioneers. Old oaks are laden thickly with Spanish Moss, thick brush makes certain areas impenetrable and many family plots are surrounded by old, iron fences in need of repair. It is part of the Evergreen Municipal Cemetery that is basically five cemeteries that form an arterial network of graves. Page Jackson is the only one that is maintained by volunteers rather than the city or a church and that is why it has fallen into disrepair. Some of the graves have sunken in as much as two feet and many burials have only the original rusted out metal markers from the mortuary to mark where they are located.
The town of Sanford is great and I've done the ghost tour there, which is excellent. It starts in a homebrewing shop because the owner of that establishment, also runs the tour. Sanford was laid out by General Henry Sanford who bought twelve thousand acres of land near Lake Monroe and founded the town in 1870. It was officially incorporated in 1877. The cemetery was established around that time and was named for the gravedigger William Page-Jackson who allowed many people to bury their dead for free for many years. He had been a farmer who had land adjacent to the cemetery and worked digging the graves. The graveyard had originally been called the Odd Fellows Cemetery, but they changed the name to honor him. They figured they should honor him with something. Many of those dead were black and this was Sanford's first black cemetery.
*Rabbit Hole: Slaves died by the thousands of course with the mortality of black children being unbelievably high. The mortality rate for black children on the South Carolina and Georgia coastal rice plantations was around 90% before the age of 16. On more interior cotton plantations, one in three children died before reaching adulthood. Obviously, for decades POC were segregated in every way and this was very true in cemeteries. Many times they wouldn't even be buried in a special section, they had to be buried in a completely separate graveyard. And these fell in to ruin and neglect, so many are unknown today. Many of these graveyards would be on the plantation property on land not used for growing. Very occasionally, a slave might be buried in the family plot of the owner. Researcher Elsie Clews Parsons wrote of the cemeteries, "They were hidden away in remote spots among trees and underbrush. In the middle of some fields are islands of large trees the owners preferred not to make arable, because of the exhaustive work of clearing it. Old graves are now in among these trees and surrounding underbrush." Headstones were a rarity and if they were used, they were fashioned from wood and paint was used to mark them. Sometimes a wooden staff that was ornately carved would be used or iron pipe, sometimes the type used for the railroad. Natural things were used too like large shells or plants. A favorite choice of plant was the Yucca as its prickly nature might help fend off evil spirits in the cemetery. A tree could symbolize that life could continue after death.
Most of the burials happened at night, since that was when work was no longer done and it made it possible for slaves to attend from other plantations. There would be prayers and singing and they were really big affairs continuing into the wee hours of the morning. Much of what I read claimed that POC were buried with their head to the west and this would be so that the dead person would not have to turn around when Gabriel blew his trumpet in the east or they would be buried facing Africa. I imagine much of this was based on spiritual beliefs of the individual. Offerings were left or brought later and could include knives, tomato cans, spoons, cups, saucers, clocks, cigar boxes, medicine bottles and even false teeth. It was thought that the dead could use these things in the afterlife. And this was a key difference between white and black cemeteries. Death was idealized by the whites who chose favorable and parklike locations, while death was not denied by the blacks and random burial was the norm and there were not things like family plots.
So the slaves definitely had a belief in an afterlife and they did believe in hauntings. One reason why a plantation might be haunted by a former slave is that the individual was not buried where they had wanted to be buried. Folklore tells of a story of a slave who begged to not be buried in the graveyard of his cruel master. His dying request was ignored and it was said that his spirit haunted the plantation in retribution.*
This is a cemetery I had not heard of before here in Florida and so I was quite surprised to read claims that this is considered one of the top ten haunted cemeteries in Florida. Backpackerverse actually has it at number ten on their list. I've been to three of these cemeteries, so I have some visiting to do! People have had many unexplained experiences here. They describe feeling cold spots and feeling very uneasy. There have also been shadow figures and strange noises. One person who has heard those strange noises is Kevin Young who bought a house adjacent to the cemetery. He initially didn't even know it was there because of all the brush. He was outside one night when he saw a greenish glowing light moving through the brush and heard hollow-sounding moans. He ran inside his house, but that would not be the last of the light or sounds. He claims to hear them regularly.
The spirit of a young boy named Neal is said to be here. Kissimmee Paranormal Investigators have been to the cemetery many times and one night they took the author of "Ghosthunting Florida," Dave Lapham for an investigation one night. They heard some rustling in some bushes and then a faint happy whistle. Dave was told that this was Neal. One of the women named Kim told him that she first met Neal a few years before and that he had presented as a shadow that eventually stepped out to reveal a Tom Sawyer-like boy who was barefoot. He seems friendly. Kim also claims that there is a spirit named Annie that she has spoken with several times. She was a girl who passed away in her teens in 1911. She had been attending a picnic near the cemetery and the next thing she knew was being buried in the cemetery. She appears as a red-haired spirit and occasionally is heard singing. Both see and Neal have been caught on EVP a few times, so they are not just the imaginings of psychics apparently. And a phantom horse has been heard and seen riding in Page Jackson.
Pinewood Cemetery in Daytona Beach, Florida
Kelly and I visited this cemetery a few months ago when we went to check out a haunted location in Daytona Beach that we shared on a BonusCast. We wanted to see where the members of the family who owned the haunted Victorian house we toured, were buried. The cemetery is right in the middle of this old downtown area, right across from the Boot Hill Bar. The bar caters to bikers and it was really loud while we were there. I was trying to record video, but I really couldn't use it because of the noise from music and yelling. So needless to say, I imagine spirits have a hard time resting here. Although I will say, those bikers have been instrumental in saving the cemetery and they have raised $90,000 for its upkeep. We had no idea at the time that the cemetery was supposedly haunted, but it's number nine on the Backpackerverse list.
There are many graves here that are terraced and lots of beautiful funerary art and mausoleums. The walls and arches are made of coquina and everything is very white, making it practically glow in the sun. The first burial was in 1877 for the daughter of a John Smith, Alena Beatrice, who had passed away from small pox as a teenager. He called the cemetery Memento and ironically, it had been a piece of land he had already set aside for Alena that she would receive upon her marriage. In the early 1900s, the Pinewood Cemetery Corporation took over the cemetery, but the company was wiped out by the Great Depression and the graveyard fell into disrepair. Burials continued up to the 1970s. One of those burials was in 1979 for a man named Albert Kingston who left money in a trust for the upkeep of the cemetery. One of the peculiar burials here says John H. Abraham and Wife. I mean, come on! The wife doesn't get her name on the tombstone? He was buried in 1927 and she followed two years later. Thankfully Find-A-Grave found her in census records and her name was Eliza. One of the mausoleums has a bricked in door that I would imagine was more of a door or gate, but vandalism took a toll. Schon Rawlings Adler is buried here and some teens broke into the vault one night and threw his decayed body into the street. They had a party in his crypt until the cops came and ran them off. The skull of Adler was never found and some say they have seen a headless spirit roaming the streets that might be him. Eighteen Confederate soldiers are buried here too.
One of the spirits that reputedly walks the grounds is Alena. After all, this was her land and she loved it. The first sighting of her happened in the 1920s and she has been seen ever since. Most often, she appears on the anniversary of her death, April 15th. Her apparition is seen wearing a lone white gown, so I guess she would be out Lady in White here. There are also the spirits of a man who is described as a "giant of a man" and a woman who is described as a "tiny wisp." They are together in death as they were in life. This couple is Slim and Bonnie. Bonnie had worked at a saloon in Daytona Beach called the Brass Rail Saloon. She would carry a little bar stool around with her since she was a little under five feet tall to make her a little taller. Slim on the other hand stood nearly seven feet tall. He would stop in at the saloon in the evenings after working all day at the livery stable. He fell in love with Bonnie at first sight, but he was shy. She managed to pull him out of his shell and the two became a couple. Slim started saving his money so they could marry. He was walking Bonnie home one night and since he had drank several beers, he had the courage to ask her to marry him and she said yes. Unfortunately, it was never to be. Slim was riding home after dropping Bonnie off and he hit his head against a tree while riding his horse. The fall from the horse broke his neck. He was buried in Pinewood Cemetery and Bonnie was devastated. She tried to go on, but a couple weeks later, Bonnie's boss found her hanging in her home, the stool she carried everywhere, kicked over under her feet. She too was buried in Pinewood and the couple seem to have found each other in the afterlife. Their apparitions have been seen, videotaped and caught in pictures.
The largest burial belongs to a Daytona Beach pioneer named Charles Burgoyne. He came to the area in 1896 and really turned the area into a tourist destination. He passed away in 1916 and a giant cross made from coquina blocks marks his final resting place. His wife was very sad about her loss and she would go to his grave every day, dressed all in black for 28 years. A spirit described as a shadowy figure dressed in black is seen at the Burgoyne plot, usually sitting down.
The McCoy burial plot is the most active. And if you've ever heard the statement, "Is that the real McCoy?" then you know a little something about the boys buried here. Bill and Ben McCoy were brothers who built luxury vessels. By the 1920s, their kind of boats were falling out of fashion and they needed another way to make money. Along comes Prohibition and these brothers became rum rummers bringing rum up from the Bahamas to New York City's speakeasies. They made a ton of money and Bill got a reputation for honesty. Many rum runners watered down their booze to up profits, but Bill refused to do that. Thus came along the saying, "the real McCoy." The Coast Guard finally caught up to the McCoys and ended their business. Bill spent nine months in a New Jersey jail. He died in 1948 from a heart attack and ptomaine poisoning and his brother survived him by many more years. I had heard that both were buried here, but another account claims that Bill's asses were spread at sea and only his brother is buried in the cemetery. Sounds are heard at the plot that include laughter, breaking glass, singing and the scent of cigarette smoke is smelled. But there is a bar across the street and Bill was supposedly a teetotaler. Many orbs have been caught in photos at this plot.
Riverview Cemetery in Canton
Riverview Cemetery is located in the city of Canton, Georgia. It was established in 1844 after Judge Joseph Donaldson donated a plot of land for burial. This was not land that was unfamiliar with graves. There were Native Americans already buried here and one of them is thought to have been a Cherokee chief, although his name has been lost to history. His plot is marked with a stack of granite rocks. And he apparently is one of our ghosts here. Strange golden orbs show up in pictures of the grave on such a regular basis, that it's hard to just discount them as bugs. One man who walked in the cemetery nightly with his dog said that everytime they were near this particular spot, his dog would go nuts with barking.
An even stranger set of stories occurred on Halloween night several years ago. A special ghost tour was being offered in the cemetery and everyone on the tour witnessed the apparition of a horsedrawn hearse sitting at the back of the old church there. There were glass panels on either side, which revealed a dark coffin inside.Dark colored horses were hitched to it and their harnesses were decorated with plumes of black feathers. The tour goers all thought that it had been rented for the event, until it was no longer there. The tour company said they had not rented a hearse for the event either.
This tour usually doesn't have jump scares, but they changed it up for Halloween. One of the guides was sitting and waiting for the group to come by when he heard his cue to get into position: the girl role playing the gravedigger walked near him. When he heard her footsteps, he got into position. But no group came and he didn't see the gravedigger. He waited several minutes. Still no group. He stood up and walked over to where he had heard the gravedigger and there was no one there. He was positive that he must have heard disembodied footsteps. That theory was solidified when he was later pushed down by something he could not see.
A tour guide saw a spirit while giving a tour one day. She noticed a young man about her height standing off to the side of the group when she was telling them about a certain plot. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt without buttons or fasteners of any kind, a vest and drawstring pants. The outfit was definitely from another time, but she just thought that maybe he was someone on the tour she hadn't noticed before. When they arrived at the next spot she wanted to share, he was gone.
It is my understanding that only one plot here has a statue and it is this burial where most of the paranormal activity takes place. This generally involves people being touched. A young lady in a wheelchair was there with her mother and they both were touched by something they could not see. Another time, a woman was on the tour with her young daughter and when they got to this plot, the little girl said "baby." The mother and guide asked her what she saw and she said she saw a baby sitting there. The burial is a grave for an 11 month old baby girl at this plot. The statue at this plot is said to roam the cemetery at night and there are people who claim that they have seen it shift from foot to foot.
Other spirits seen in this cemetery include a tall man dressed in dark clothing, ghost animals, a trapper, a red-headed man wearing overalls a white shirt and tie, a woman who weeps at a grave towards the back of the graveyard and shadow figures.
Old Sheldon's Churchyard (Suggested by NestorGirl)
Haphazard is the term I would use here and that is because this is a ruin. The Old Sheldon Prince William's Parish Church in Yemassee, South Carolina, had once stood here and it had the customary churchyard attached to it. All that is left are red brick walls and columns and gravestones that lean or are sunken with a few above ground crypts. The church was built between 1745 and 1755. It was burned down by the British during the Revolutionary War in 1779 and was rebuilt in 1826. The church was again burned down in 1865, this time by the Federal Army under General Sherman during the Civil War. Although a letter in 1866 written by Miton Leverett stated that “Sheldon Church not burnt. Just torn up in the inside, but can be repaired.” The tearing up was to use the materials inside the church to rebuild homes burnt by Genral Sherman. The name Old Sheldon was taken from the ancestral home of the Bull family who had come over from Warwickshire in England. One can tell from the ruins that this was once a large and beautiful church with a flair towards medieval/castle-like structure.
There are graves scattered throughout the ruins. And there are ghosts here too. Our lady in white here is actually dressed in brown, in an outfit that looks like it dates to the time of the pilgrims. She is seen most often standing over the grave of an infant. While many people feel a sense of peace at this location, it is near this infant's grave that many are struck with a great sense of sorrow. Disembodied footsteps are heard here as well and there are those that have seen strange, flashing lights.
Be sure to include a stop at the Carolina Cider Company. This roadside shop is close to the ruins and offers a huge variety of ciders, fresh pies, jams, pickles and more.
Silver Cliff Cemetery in Silver Cliff, Colorado
And finally, we have Silver Cliff Cemetery in Colorado and is owned and operated by the town of Silver Cliff and was founded in the early 1880s. Silver Cliff was once the third most populous town in Colorado, right behind Denver and Leadville. It was incorporated in 1879 and got its start as a silver mining town. The big mine here was called the Geyser Mine and it did well until eastern stock manipulators came in and several unscrupulous stock promoters managed to bankrupt two of the mining companies who owned the mine. It never turned a profit after that even though it was one of the deepest mines in Colorado.
The gate to the cemetery is just a simple metal arch with the name formed in metal. The land is treeless and pretty barren with mostly scrub grass and there are two sections, one for Catholics and one for Protestants. It is famous for the Silver Cliff Lights, which look similar to blue lantern lights or bright white spheres. They are seen bouncing among the tombstones. They were first seen by a group of miners who were taking a shortcut through the cemetery. They got lost, but saw the lights and found their way. Word spread and people came from all around to see them. The lights were featured in the August 1969 National Geographic Magazine, Volume 136, No. 2. We sometimes get things called Swamp Lights here or Wildfire, also known as Will-o-the-Wisp and that is what people think this may be.
Lots of great stories here and that is what makes cemeteries so interesting. The stories in the stones. Are there spirits moving around among those stones? Are these cemeteries haunted? That is for you to decide!
We have a lot of lakes in Florida. There are so many in the county in which I live, that it is actually called Lake County. Some of the lakes here are pretty big with Lake Okeechobee being the largest. It's the one you see when looking at a map of Florida and you see what looks like a hole in the side of a well...I won't say, but we all know what the shape of Florida looks like *ahem*. Indigenous cultures flocked to the area around Lake Okeechobee and many of them are thought to have been very advanced, building canals and causeways. There are even legends here that claim that some of these tribes were giants. It's easy to laugh off a legend, until bones are found. Settlers in the early 1800s claimed to have seen thousands of massive skulls bobbing on the surface of the south end of Lake Okeechobee. They described it as looking "like a field of pumpkins." No formal investigation must have been done at the time, but things would be different when a drought that started in 2006 receded the water level of Lake Okeechobee. The black muck revealed thousands of human skeletons. The Anthropology Department of Florida Atlantic University started digging up the bones and artifacts as quickly as they could. What they found was startling. This was a cemetery with two levels. The lower level had small-boned indigenous skeletons that were typical of the Native peoples of Central America and the Amazon Basin. The upper level contained the bones of a very tall people. The bones were larger and belonged to people measuring over seven feet in height. Their skulls were massive and many had intentional deformations. An article that I read about this stated, "Whether or not they were of mixed human-extraterrestrial humanoid ancestry has not been determined and of course, is a matter of conjecture." There are those who believe that these giants descended from the Paracus People of Peru and were wiped out by a devastating hurricane. Giants living in southern Florida, certainly is odd!
This Month in History - First Drive-in Theater Opens
In the month of June, on the 6th, in 1933, the first drive-in theater opened in Camden, New Jersey. I love drive-in theaters. They are the perfect place for watching a good scary movie and how fitting that the first would open with the start of the summer season. I have the newspaper ad here and it reads, "Opens tonight 8:30, Drive-in near Central Airport, 2 miles from Camden Bridge. Sit in your car and enjoy talkies. World's finest automobile movie theater. Individual driveways three times the length of your car. 25 cents per car and for each person. Family admission $1. Three shows nightly: 8:30; 10; 11:30." The original term for drive-in theaters was park-in theaters and Richard Hollingshead who was a sales manager at Whiz Auto Products received the first patent. He got the idea when he watched his mother struggle to get comfortable in her theater chair and he thought that people would be more comfortable in their cars. He used his driveway to experiment and mounted a 1928 Kodak projector on the hood of his car and pinned a screen to some trees with a radio behind the screen for sound. His initial investment was $30,000 and he opened his first drive-in in the Pennsauken Township district of Camden, NJ were he lived. The film he showed was the 1932 British Fox comedy “Wives Beware” starring Adolphe Menjou. There were no in-car speakers back then. There were just three speakers mounted near the screen, making it a little difficult to hear, especially at the back of the theater and one can only imagine what the neighbors thought. I'd love to know, do you have a drive-in theater near you somewhere. They are unfortunately a dying breed. We have the Silver Moon Drive-In here in Lakeland, Florida.
Haunted Cemeteries 13
There are various types of cemeteries all around the world. There are those that are huge with grand sculptures and palatial mausoleums. Others are boring with flat stones and markers and fake flowers. Still others seem abandoned to the elements and time. The one thing they all hold in common is that they are a testament to humanity. We lived and we died. And hopefully, somebody cared. Sometimes these cemeteries are haunted. On this episode, we'll explore graveyards in New Hampshire, Florida, Colorado, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Georgia. Join me for Haunted Cemeteries 13!
I do care. It's what makes me a taphophile and I know many of you are too. By reading the names on headstones, we remember, we care. I used to wonder why a cemetery would be haunted. Why hang out with the dead when you can spook the living? I never considered that I love cemeteries in life, so why wouldn't I in death? Perhaps that is why there are spirits in graveyards. There are other reasons too. There was a time when a "sinner" couldn't be buried in hallowed ground. This always perplexed me. Aren't we all sinners? Perhaps it's this irony that causes a spirit to be at unrest. Or there are claims that an improper burial could cause hauntings. Many wartime mass graves are thought to be haunted because they are so impersonal. And then there is the business of unfinished business. Can a spirit be rooted to their body as a kind of homebase from which they come and go to finish up what they need to complete before moving on to whatever is next? And let's not forget the residual ghost that carves out the same path in the cemetery, over and over. It never ceases to amaze me that every time I think I have finished up these haunted cemeteries episodes that a bunch of new ones come along. And we have several to explore here!
St. Mary's Cemetery in Salem/Peabody
St. Mary's Cemetery is located on Route 114 at 226 North Street near Salem in Peabody, Massachusetts. The gate is stone and wrought iron with the name "St. Mary's Cemetery" formed in the wrought iron. The cemetery is attached to St. Thomas Church and was founded as a Catholic cemetery in 1849.Inside the cemetery is a bronze bust sculpture of Reverend John J. Gray that was sculpted by Samuel J. Kitson. Gray had been that pastor of St. James Catholic Church in Salem and was founder of St. John's Church in Peabody. US Congressman George Joseph Bates is buried here. He was a member of the Massachusetts State House of Representatives from 1918 to 1924, and served as mayor of Salem from 1924 to 1937. In 1937, he became a US Congressman and was re-elected, serving 12 years until he was killed in 1949 in a plane crash. Also buried here is Peacetime Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient, Patrick Francis Bresnahan.
The forest that lies down the hill from the cemetery gives people a really uneasy feeling. Faint white lights move about in the forest and into the cemetery. But that isn't the main haunting here. There is a female spirit clad in gray that has been seen as a full-bodied apparition here. Tour guide Sarah-Frankie Carter has seen her on multiple occasions. The first time was a few years ago around 3am. She and some friends had been walking by the cemetery when they noticed what looked like a large white trash bag caught up in a tree. The bag seemed to dislodge itself and float down towards them. They soon realized that it wasn't a bag, but a spirit and she was glowing. And it wasn't just floating at them. It was crawling down the tree and then it started running at them. The women ran out of the cemetery completely terrified. Ms. Carter returned some time later with a psychic friend who saw the female apparition. The psychic said that she appeared to be around twenty-years-old and she had died at that young age. Another encounter was with a skeptical friend who claimed that he didn't believe in ghosts. He went into the cemetery with Ms. Carter and they ran into the female apparition. He must have started believing because he quickly ran out and would not go back to the cemetery.
Gilson Road Cemetery
Gilson Road Cemetery is in Nashua, New Hampshire. The town of Nashua was originally part of a tract of land known as Dunstable that was established at the confluence of the Nashua and Merrimack Rivers. The Dunstable part that was in New Hampshire was renamed Nashua in 1836. The name means "beautiful stream with a pebbly bottom" in the Nashuway tribe's language of Penacook. The town became a textile town, starting originally with fur trading and eventually developing textile and cotton mills. After World War I, the city fell into decline as the textile industry changed and moved, but high tech revitalized it. Gilson Road is home to a cemetery of the same name and this graveyard has a big reputation for being haunted.
Gilson Road Cemetery is a little knock-about, rural graveyard. It is isolated and hard to find because a stone wall shields the cemetery from view. The history behind the cemetery has been lost to time, but most people agree that it probably started as a family plot dating back to colonial times. The stone wall is thought to have been built to mark the border of a farm. The farmhouse there is said to have burned down and that the victims of the fire were buried in the cemetery. A later house that was built on the property also burned down with the people killed in this fire being buried in the graveyard. It was decided to just leave the property as a cemetery as the luck here for homesteading was no good and so many people were already buried on the land. Could this be a reason why visitors experience EMF anomalies, cold spots, record EVP and see apparitions? Another legend claims that two Native American groups clashed here. The battle was very bloody.
One apparition that is famously seen here has been named Betty. The urban legend that goes with her claims that if you walk farther up Gilson Road heading to the northwest and shout, “Betty Gilson, I have your baby,” her ghost will appear. She is seen wearing colonial era garb and is around thirty-years-old. There are some witnesses who claim that her apparition appears without any prompting and some people have nearly driven off the road when she appears in the middle of it. Others claim that she hides behind a tree that you will only see her peeking around the tree. Sometimes, just her hand is seen grasping a tree. She's not the only spirit seen on the road though. A little boy was killed on the road and his spirit is seen darting across it.
One paranormal group investigating the cemetery claimed to see shadowy figures moving through the woods behind the cemetery. Mysterious fogs and strange lights are also seen in the wooded area on clear nights. The apparition of a male Native American was seen in the back left corner. This group also claims that the burials of the Lawrence family seem to be the most active with orbs repeatedly showing up in pictures. And perhaps it is a member of this family that is our woman in white here. This lady is seen wearing a flowing white gown as she traipses through the gravestones.
There is something angry here too. Disembodied voices are sometimes heard and many times this voice is threatening. There have been times when people have felt almost as though something is pushing back against them at the entrance gate. And a really strange claim is that the back corner where the Native American apparition has been seen seems to disappear at night, along with some of the headstones there. (Maybe it's just really dark?) And there is a hole in one headstone that appears and disappears - don't know what that is all about.
Another person claimed that as he was driving by the cemetery, he saw a man dressed in clothes dated to the late 1800s. He was just sitting on the stone wall and watched the man as he drove by. They locked eyes and the man who saw the spirit said, "It was one of the scariest things I ever saw. I was just driving by not thinking about anything, just listening to the radio, something just caught my eye so I looked over at the cemetery and there he was. There was no way the man could have walked, or even ran that fast to not be seen by the time I drove back. Paranormal is not something I believe in but I have to be honest, this really freaked me out!
Page Jackson Cemetery in Sanford, Florida
The Page Jackson Cemetery located in Sanford, Florida is in need of a lot of love. Nature has been taking back this historic cemetery that has burials belonging to many of Sanford's pioneers. Old oaks are laden thickly with Spanish Moss, thick brush makes certain areas impenetrable and many family plots are surrounded by old, iron fences in need of repair. It is part of the Evergreen Municipal Cemetery that is basically five cemeteries that form an arterial network of graves. Page Jackson is the only one that is maintained by volunteers rather than the city or a church and that is why it has fallen into disrepair. Some of the graves have sunken in as much as two feet and many burials have only the original rusted out metal markers from the mortuary to mark where they are located.
The town of Sanford is great and I've done the ghost tour there, which is excellent. It starts in a homebrewing shop because the owner of that establishment, also runs the tour. Sanford was laid out by General Henry Sanford who bought twelve thousand acres of land near Lake Monroe and founded the town in 1870. It was officially incorporated in 1877. The cemetery was established around that time and was named for the gravedigger William Page-Jackson who allowed many people to bury their dead for free for many years. He had been a farmer who had land adjacent to the cemetery and worked digging the graves. The graveyard had originally been called the Odd Fellows Cemetery, but they changed the name to honor him. They figured they should honor him with something. Many of those dead were black and this was Sanford's first black cemetery.
*Rabbit Hole: Slaves died by the thousands of course with the mortality of black children being unbelievably high. The mortality rate for black children on the South Carolina and Georgia coastal rice plantations was around 90% before the age of 16. On more interior cotton plantations, one in three children died before reaching adulthood. Obviously, for decades POC were segregated in every way and this was very true in cemeteries. Many times they wouldn't even be buried in a special section, they had to be buried in a completely separate graveyard. And these fell in to ruin and neglect, so many are unknown today. Many of these graveyards would be on the plantation property on land not used for growing. Very occasionally, a slave might be buried in the family plot of the owner. Researcher Elsie Clews Parsons wrote of the cemeteries, "They were hidden away in remote spots among trees and underbrush. In the middle of some fields are islands of large trees the owners preferred not to make arable, because of the exhaustive work of clearing it. Old graves are now in among these trees and surrounding underbrush." Headstones were a rarity and if they were used, they were fashioned from wood and paint was used to mark them. Sometimes a wooden staff that was ornately carved would be used or iron pipe, sometimes the type used for the railroad. Natural things were used too like large shells or plants. A favorite choice of plant was the Yucca as its prickly nature might help fend off evil spirits in the cemetery. A tree could symbolize that life could continue after death.
Most of the burials happened at night, since that was when work was no longer done and it made it possible for slaves to attend from other plantations. There would be prayers and singing and they were really big affairs continuing into the wee hours of the morning. Much of what I read claimed that POC were buried with their head to the west and this would be so that the dead person would not have to turn around when Gabriel blew his trumpet in the east or they would be buried facing Africa. I imagine much of this was based on spiritual beliefs of the individual. Offerings were left or brought later and could include knives, tomato cans, spoons, cups, saucers, clocks, cigar boxes, medicine bottles and even false teeth. It was thought that the dead could use these things in the afterlife. And this was a key difference between white and black cemeteries. Death was idealized by the whites who chose favorable and parklike locations, while death was not denied by the blacks and random burial was the norm and there were not things like family plots.
So the slaves definitely had a belief in an afterlife and they did believe in hauntings. One reason why a plantation might be haunted by a former slave is that the individual was not buried where they had wanted to be buried. Folklore tells of a story of a slave who begged to not be buried in the graveyard of his cruel master. His dying request was ignored and it was said that his spirit haunted the plantation in retribution.*
This is a cemetery I had not heard of before here in Florida and so I was quite surprised to read claims that this is considered one of the top ten haunted cemeteries in Florida. Backpackerverse actually has it at number ten on their list. I've been to three of these cemeteries, so I have some visiting to do! People have had many unexplained experiences here. They describe feeling cold spots and feeling very uneasy. There have also been shadow figures and strange noises. One person who has heard those strange noises is Kevin Young who bought a house adjacent to the cemetery. He initially didn't even know it was there because of all the brush. He was outside one night when he saw a greenish glowing light moving through the brush and heard hollow-sounding moans. He ran inside his house, but that would not be the last of the light or sounds. He claims to hear them regularly.
The spirit of a young boy named Neal is said to be here. Kissimmee Paranormal Investigators have been to the cemetery many times and one night they took the author of "Ghosthunting Florida," Dave Lapham for an investigation one night. They heard some rustling in some bushes and then a faint happy whistle. Dave was told that this was Neal. One of the women named Kim told him that she first met Neal a few years before and that he had presented as a shadow that eventually stepped out to reveal a Tom Sawyer-like boy who was barefoot. He seems friendly. Kim also claims that there is a spirit named Annie that she has spoken with several times. She was a girl who passed away in her teens in 1911. She had been attending a picnic near the cemetery and the next thing she knew was being buried in the cemetery. She appears as a red-haired spirit and occasionally is heard singing. Both see and Neal have been caught on EVP a few times, so they are not just the imaginings of psychics apparently. And a phantom horse has been heard and seen riding in Page Jackson.
Pinewood Cemetery in Daytona Beach, Florida
Kelly and I visited this cemetery a few months ago when we went to check out a haunted location in Daytona Beach that we shared on a BonusCast. We wanted to see where the members of the family who owned the haunted Victorian house we toured, were buried. The cemetery is right in the middle of this old downtown area, right across from the Boot Hill Bar. The bar caters to bikers and it was really loud while we were there. I was trying to record video, but I really couldn't use it because of the noise from music and yelling. So needless to say, I imagine spirits have a hard time resting here. Although I will say, those bikers have been instrumental in saving the cemetery and they have raised $90,000 for its upkeep. We had no idea at the time that the cemetery was supposedly haunted, but it's number nine on the Backpackerverse list.
There are many graves here that are terraced and lots of beautiful funerary art and mausoleums. The walls and arches are made of coquina and everything is very white, making it practically glow in the sun. The first burial was in 1877 for the daughter of a John Smith, Alena Beatrice, who had passed away from small pox as a teenager. He called the cemetery Memento and ironically, it had been a piece of land he had already set aside for Alena that she would receive upon her marriage. In the early 1900s, the Pinewood Cemetery Corporation took over the cemetery, but the company was wiped out by the Great Depression and the graveyard fell into disrepair. Burials continued up to the 1970s. One of those burials was in 1979 for a man named Albert Kingston who left money in a trust for the upkeep of the cemetery. One of the peculiar burials here says John H. Abraham and Wife. I mean, come on! The wife doesn't get her name on the tombstone? He was buried in 1927 and she followed two years later. Thankfully Find-A-Grave found her in census records and her name was Eliza. One of the mausoleums has a bricked in door that I would imagine was more of a door or gate, but vandalism took a toll. Schon Rawlings Adler is buried here and some teens broke into the vault one night and threw his decayed body into the street. They had a party in his crypt until the cops came and ran them off. The skull of Adler was never found and some say they have seen a headless spirit roaming the streets that might be him. Eighteen Confederate soldiers are buried here too.
One of the spirits that reputedly walks the grounds is Alena. After all, this was her land and she loved it. The first sighting of her happened in the 1920s and she has been seen ever since. Most often, she appears on the anniversary of her death, April 15th. Her apparition is seen wearing a lone white gown, so I guess she would be out Lady in White here. There are also the spirits of a man who is described as a "giant of a man" and a woman who is described as a "tiny wisp." They are together in death as they were in life. This couple is Slim and Bonnie. Bonnie had worked at a saloon in Daytona Beach called the Brass Rail Saloon. She would carry a little bar stool around with her since she was a little under five feet tall to make her a little taller. Slim on the other hand stood nearly seven feet tall. He would stop in at the saloon in the evenings after working all day at the livery stable. He fell in love with Bonnie at first sight, but he was shy. She managed to pull him out of his shell and the two became a couple. Slim started saving his money so they could marry. He was walking Bonnie home one night and since he had drank several beers, he had the courage to ask her to marry him and she said yes. Unfortunately, it was never to be. Slim was riding home after dropping Bonnie off and he hit his head against a tree while riding his horse. The fall from the horse broke his neck. He was buried in Pinewood Cemetery and Bonnie was devastated. She tried to go on, but a couple weeks later, Bonnie's boss found her hanging in her home, the stool she carried everywhere, kicked over under her feet. She too was buried in Pinewood and the couple seem to have found each other in the afterlife. Their apparitions have been seen, videotaped and caught in pictures.
The largest burial belongs to a Daytona Beach pioneer named Charles Burgoyne. He came to the area in 1896 and really turned the area into a tourist destination. He passed away in 1916 and a giant cross made from coquina blocks marks his final resting place. His wife was very sad about her loss and she would go to his grave every day, dressed all in black for 28 years. A spirit described as a shadowy figure dressed in black is seen at the Burgoyne plot, usually sitting down.
The McCoy burial plot is the most active. And if you've ever heard the statement, "Is that the real McCoy?" then you know a little something about the boys buried here. Bill and Ben McCoy were brothers who built luxury vessels. By the 1920s, their kind of boats were falling out of fashion and they needed another way to make money. Along comes Prohibition and these brothers became rum rummers bringing rum up from the Bahamas to New York City's speakeasies. They made a ton of money and Bill got a reputation for honesty. Many rum runners watered down their booze to up profits, but Bill refused to do that. Thus came along the saying, "the real McCoy." The Coast Guard finally caught up to the McCoys and ended their business. Bill spent nine months in a New Jersey jail. He died in 1948 from a heart attack and ptomaine poisoning and his brother survived him by many more years. I had heard that both were buried here, but another account claims that Bill's asses were spread at sea and only his brother is buried in the cemetery. Sounds are heard at the plot that include laughter, breaking glass, singing and the scent of cigarette smoke is smelled. But there is a bar across the street and Bill was supposedly a teetotaler. Many orbs have been caught in photos at this plot.
Riverview Cemetery in Canton
Riverview Cemetery is located in the city of Canton, Georgia. It was established in 1844 after Judge Joseph Donaldson donated a plot of land for burial. This was not land that was unfamiliar with graves. There were Native Americans already buried here and one of them is thought to have been a Cherokee chief, although his name has been lost to history. His plot is marked with a stack of granite rocks. And he apparently is one of our ghosts here. Strange golden orbs show up in pictures of the grave on such a regular basis, that it's hard to just discount them as bugs. One man who walked in the cemetery nightly with his dog said that everytime they were near this particular spot, his dog would go nuts with barking.
An even stranger set of stories occurred on Halloween night several years ago. A special ghost tour was being offered in the cemetery and everyone on the tour witnessed the apparition of a horsedrawn hearse sitting at the back of the old church there. There were glass panels on either side, which revealed a dark coffin inside.Dark colored horses were hitched to it and their harnesses were decorated with plumes of black feathers. The tour goers all thought that it had been rented for the event, until it was no longer there. The tour company said they had not rented a hearse for the event either.
This tour usually doesn't have jump scares, but they changed it up for Halloween. One of the guides was sitting and waiting for the group to come by when he heard his cue to get into position: the girl role playing the gravedigger walked near him. When he heard her footsteps, he got into position. But no group came and he didn't see the gravedigger. He waited several minutes. Still no group. He stood up and walked over to where he had heard the gravedigger and there was no one there. He was positive that he must have heard disembodied footsteps. That theory was solidified when he was later pushed down by something he could not see.
A tour guide saw a spirit while giving a tour one day. She noticed a young man about her height standing off to the side of the group when she was telling them about a certain plot. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt without buttons or fasteners of any kind, a vest and drawstring pants. The outfit was definitely from another time, but she just thought that maybe he was someone on the tour she hadn't noticed before. When they arrived at the next spot she wanted to share, he was gone.
It is my understanding that only one plot here has a statue and it is this burial where most of the paranormal activity takes place. This generally involves people being touched. A young lady in a wheelchair was there with her mother and they both were touched by something they could not see. Another time, a woman was on the tour with her young daughter and when they got to this plot, the little girl said "baby." The mother and guide asked her what she saw and she said she saw a baby sitting there. The burial is a grave for an 11 month old baby girl at this plot. The statue at this plot is said to roam the cemetery at night and there are people who claim that they have seen it shift from foot to foot.
Other spirits seen in this cemetery include a tall man dressed in dark clothing, ghost animals, a trapper, a red-headed man wearing overalls a white shirt and tie, a woman who weeps at a grave towards the back of the graveyard and shadow figures.
Old Sheldon's Churchyard (Suggested by NestorGirl)
Haphazard is the term I would use here and that is because this is a ruin. The Old Sheldon Prince William's Parish Church in Yemassee, South Carolina, had once stood here and it had the customary churchyard attached to it. All that is left are red brick walls and columns and gravestones that lean or are sunken with a few above ground crypts. The church was built between 1745 and 1755. It was burned down by the British during the Revolutionary War in 1779 and was rebuilt in 1826. The church was again burned down in 1865, this time by the Federal Army under General Sherman during the Civil War. Although a letter in 1866 written by Miton Leverett stated that “Sheldon Church not burnt. Just torn up in the inside, but can be repaired.” The tearing up was to use the materials inside the church to rebuild homes burnt by Genral Sherman. The name Old Sheldon was taken from the ancestral home of the Bull family who had come over from Warwickshire in England. One can tell from the ruins that this was once a large and beautiful church with a flair towards medieval/castle-like structure.
There are graves scattered throughout the ruins. And there are ghosts here too. Our lady in white here is actually dressed in brown, in an outfit that looks like it dates to the time of the pilgrims. She is seen most often standing over the grave of an infant. While many people feel a sense of peace at this location, it is near this infant's grave that many are struck with a great sense of sorrow. Disembodied footsteps are heard here as well and there are those that have seen strange, flashing lights.
Be sure to include a stop at the Carolina Cider Company. This roadside shop is close to the ruins and offers a huge variety of ciders, fresh pies, jams, pickles and more.
Silver Cliff Cemetery in Silver Cliff, Colorado
And finally, we have Silver Cliff Cemetery in Colorado and is owned and operated by the town of Silver Cliff and was founded in the early 1880s. Silver Cliff was once the third most populous town in Colorado, right behind Denver and Leadville. It was incorporated in 1879 and got its start as a silver mining town. The big mine here was called the Geyser Mine and it did well until eastern stock manipulators came in and several unscrupulous stock promoters managed to bankrupt two of the mining companies who owned the mine. It never turned a profit after that even though it was one of the deepest mines in Colorado.
The gate to the cemetery is just a simple metal arch with the name formed in metal. The land is treeless and pretty barren with mostly scrub grass and there are two sections, one for Catholics and one for Protestants. It is famous for the Silver Cliff Lights, which look similar to blue lantern lights or bright white spheres. They are seen bouncing among the tombstones. They were first seen by a group of miners who were taking a shortcut through the cemetery. They got lost, but saw the lights and found their way. Word spread and people came from all around to see them. The lights were featured in the August 1969 National Geographic Magazine, Volume 136, No. 2. We sometimes get things called Swamp Lights here or Wildfire, also known as Will-o-the-Wisp and that is what people think this may be.
Lots of great stories here and that is what makes cemeteries so interesting. The stories in the stones. Are there spirits moving around among those stones? Are these cemeteries haunted? That is for you to decide!
Thursday, May 23, 2019
HGB Ep. 298 - Haunted Ybor City
The Moment in Oddity - The Bloody Pit
The Hoosac Tunnel took twenty-four years to complete at a cost of $21 million. It is a railroad tunnel that stretches nearly 5 miles in western Massachusetts. Many people have nicknamed the tunnel, The Bloody Pit. Construction was started in 1851 and you can imagine at that time that cutting through a mountain was quite the feat. Techniques that are used today for tunnel drilling were created at this time and in 1975 the tunnel was made an Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. Workers would pay a hefty price in creating this marvel. One hundred ninety-six of them would die from accidents. One accident trapped thirteen men who lived long enough to make a raft to keep from drowning when the pumps failed and water rose in the shaft in which they were trapped. They eventually suffocated. Another accident left two men dead after an explosion. A third man that was with the other two men, Kelly Ringo, escaped the explosion even though he was the one to actually set it off on accident. A little over a year later, Ringo was working in the tunnel again. He was found later strangled to death. No one was ever caught in connection to his murder. Legend claims that the two men who died in the blast he triggered had come back to exact their revenge. And it's easy to believe because there are many supernatural things that happen here from lanterns swaying on their own to disembodied voices to shadow figures. The ghosts of two men killed in a construction accident coming back to get the man who caused it, certainly is odd!
This Month in History - Balloon Bomb Killed Six Near Bly
Suggested by: Shelley Emary
In the month of May, on the 5th, in 1945, six people were killed by a balloon bomb near Bly, Oregon. It was a beautiful day, the perfect day for a picnic. Reverend Mitchell and his wife decided to head to a wooded area along Leonard Creek to do just that. They invited five kids from their Sunday school class to join them. The Reverend dropped everyone at the picnic spot and then drove away to park the car. The Reverend describes what happened as he got out of the car, "As I got out of the car to bring the lunch, the others were not far away and called to me they had found something that looked like a balloon," Mitchell said. "I heard of Japanese balloons so I shouted a warning not to touch it. But just then there was a big explosion." Balloon bombs were constructed by the Japanese during World War II and they made as many as 9,000 of them. At least 285 of them made it all the way to the west coast of America. The balloons were made of paper and inflated with hydrogen. Each balloon carried a variety of bombs. Mitchell ran to where he had dropped his pregnant wife and the children. There was a crater a foot deep and 3 feet wide and everyone was dead. The victime were his pregnant wife; Dick Patzke, 14; Jay Gifford, 13; Edward Engen, 13; Joan Patzke, 13; and Sherman Shoemaker, 11. This was the only enemy-inflicted attack that caused casualties on the U.S. mainland during World War II. Be careful! Some bombs were never found and could still be out there and as proof of that, one was found in British Columbia in the Monashee Mountains in 2014.
Haunted Ybor City
When people claim that a town was the wildest in the west, we have certain images that come to mind. We envision gunfights in the street, brothels, saloons, cowboy hats and spurs. But what about a city that was dubbed the "Wild West of the South?" Change those cowboy hats to gangster fedoras and the spurs to cigars and you get Ybor City. This neighborhood just outside of Tampa, Florida has an amazing history, which has led to some interesting haunts. Join me as I explore the history and hauntings of Ybor City.
A small group of us took the Ybor City Ghost Tour a couple of weekends ago and our minds were blown about the history going on in this town. When you drive down the main drag, 7th Avenue, it becomes clear that this truly is Cigar City, but then you notice something else peculiar. There are Mardi Gras beads hanging from trees and littering the roofs of the businesses. That is because this city is built to reflect the French Quarter in New Orleans and in many ways, it does. Bars dot the landscape and the roads are built from brick. But rather than having the scent of stale beer and urine in the air, there is the sweet pungent smell of cigar smoke. And everybody smokes big stogies here, including that seventy-something woman we just passed, sitting outside of one of the haunted locations here. A must here is to watch a cigar being hand rolled. This street was named as one of the "10 Great Streets in America" in 2008. Another nod to New Orleans is the street trolley that runs up and down the street.
Ybor City was founded by a group of cigar manufacturers looking for a place to relocate. They were originally located in Key West, a place that presented higher costs and transportation issues. Tampa was still near enough to Cuba to keep the price of the Cuban tobacco low and it also had the plus of new railroad lines being built throughout the state of Florida to facilitate transportation of the cigars to the rest of the United States. There was also the plus of lots of land. Key West was small and land poor, but in Tampa, workers could actually buy land and build their own homes. So workers migrated from Key West to Tampa. The leader of this group of cigar manufacturers was Vincente Martinez-Ybor and he built his workers homes and sold them for basically cost. The area was founded in 1885 and named for Ybor. The success of the city led Tampa to annex it in 1887. This was the state's first industrial town.
Ybor's cigar factory was the largest brick building in Florida. Immigrants came from everywhere to work here. The city took on a European atmosphere as these immigrants arrived from Germany, Romania, Italy and Spain. And, of course, many Cubans arrived too. Each group had their own club and all array of ethnic holidays were observed. These different groups brought their own specialties and soon shops were popping up all over Ybor City, as well as restaurants. German lithographers invented the cigar label. This made Ybor City pretty special. The ethnic clubs provided social outlets as well as healthcare for their members and workers were happy as they were not beholden to a company. This sounds like a company town, but it wasn't since the workers could own their own property. And what also makes this area great is that so many of these buildings - the factories, social clubs and balconied storefronts - still exist today.
So Ybor City sounds like a great place to work and live, but this area was called the Wild West of the South for a reason. There was no law here. When Prohibition was enacted throughout America, Ybor City completely ignored it. The taps here continued to run. Tunnels were built under the city and these were not constructed to facility the sewage system. These tunnels helped crime run rampant. They were used for transporting illegal goods or to help criminals escape when nightspots were raided. The lawlessness attracted the mob and gangsters. Speakeasies popped up everywhere, along with brothels and murder and mayhem were rampant. Organized crime ran a gambling game called Bolita, which is Spanish for little ball. This is a game of chance like a lottery. A bag is filled with small numbered balls and one is pulled at random and this is the winning number. A notorious gangster named Charlie Wall ran many of the Bolita games and he used the proceeds to fund his criminal projects. As the 1930s rolled into the 1940s, residents of Ybor City took to calling it the "Era of Blood." The city continued to deteriorate and the buildings were abandoned. In the 1980s, the neighborhood took on new life as an artist colony developed in Ybor City. Soon bars and restaurants and stores moved in and the nightlife has been alive ever since. Also alive here, as remnants of the crazy past, are spirits.
Fun Fact: This is the only place where you actually can stand in Cuba while still being in America. There is a park dedicated to Cuban poet and revolutionary Jose Marti in Ybor City and it is owned by Cuba. The United States does not maintain it, so volunteers in the Cuban community take care of it.
King Corona Cigars Cafe and Bar
Our first stop is the King Corona Cigars Cafe and Bar. The outside patio area along the street is dotted with tables and people sit here sipping wine or a craft beer and puffing on cigars. The cafe and bar were founded in 1998 by Don and Brenda Barco and they both have run it through all these years until Don passed away this past March 2019. The building has housed other businesses previously though. I believe the original store was a dress shop opened by Raul Vega and he ran that for sixty years. The twelve years following that, it was a women's upscale store called La Nica Fashions. And then the building was empty for two years until Don bought it. His family had been in the cigar business for five generations. The building needed a lot of renovations and Don enlisted some friends to help him. This is when they would discover that there was something other than dust left behind.
Joe Howden was one of those friends helping Don and he was there late one night by himself. He couldn't shake the feeling that he was not really by himself. He grabbed a hammer and walked towards the back of the building where he saw a very large man standing there. Joe didn't want a confrontation, so he held the hammer in front of his body and backed up towards the front door, hoping to run away. It turned out that he wouldn't have to run because the large man just evaporated into thin air. This large man was not the only spirit here. Another friend helping renovate was named Sarah. She was painting the walls when she saw a young girl at the back of the store. The girl just stared at Sarah and Sarah could see that she was wearing a period dress. Sarah said "Hello" but got no response. As she approached the girl, she disappeared. Patrons and workers have experienced disembodied voices and strange, unidentifiable sounds.
Mediums who have visited the cafe have seen the large man spirit and claim that it belongs to Raul Vega. One medium, named Joanne, walked to the back of the store and claimed to see a lot of blood everywhere as though someone had been killed here. She also claimed to see the spirit of a young girl cowering in a back storeroom and that this child spirit was terrified of something. The energy was so negative around her that Joanne ran from the room and would not go back inside. A few years later, another medium named Sheila joined writer Dave Lapham at the cafe. She saw the same pools of blood in the back of the store and Dave had told her nothing about the place. And she saw the little girl ghost cowering in the corner too.
Don Vincente de Ybor Historic Inn
Casa Ybor is the former Don Vincente de Ybor Historic Inn, which was established in 1895. The man who founded Ybor City built this building and did it in the Mediterranean style. Today, it offers retail, residential and office spaces, but it is best remembered as the Don Vincente de Ybor Inn and that is what it was when Dead Files visited. Originally, this was a real estate office, Ybor Land and Improvement Company, a planning and development office for the community and then it transformed into El Bien Publico Clinic, a medical clinic, in 1903. It would change names to The Gonzalez Clinic after the El Bien Publico closed in 1973. This would run until 1980. The building sat empty for 18 years and then Jack Shiver bought it in 1998 and fully refurbished the interior into a beautiful period decorated inn. It took two years and two million dollars. The beautiful staircase was restored as was the hand carved wooden bar and the brass and blush pink light fixtures. Persian rugs, beautiful French chandeliers and antiques were added. One of which was an imposing grandfather clock that was the grand prize winner at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco. The basement had been a speakeasy at one time and was renovated to be a large gathering place. The Inn closed in May of 2015 and is now Casa Ybor. Darryl Shaw had bought the building for $2.2 million in 2014, so he probably decided it was worth more to have it as offices. It still was not open and was being renovated when we went by it.
During the clinic time, this was really a celebrated hospital. There was a man named Jose Luis Avellanal who had been born in Tampa in 1903. His father had founded the first clinic in the building. One of his father's first patients was a young boy that Jose had shot in the eye. Jose was a really bad kid and he was going to grow into a really bad guy. He would develop what he called an electric chair when he was young and confinced a neighborhood boy to help him test it. Needless to say, this would be another patient for his father. His father put him in solitary confinement hoping it would straighten him up, but he just escaped and stole his dad's car. He was shipped off to military school. He moved around when he became an adult with a stop in tennessee where he was charged with possession of drugs and kidnapping a woman. When he returned to Ybor City, he claimed that he was a doctor, but many feel the diploma was fake. He set up shop at El Pasaje Hotel where he conducted bizarre and macabre experiments. He told people he could raise the dead and even tried to publish articles on resurrecting the dead. Apparently, he was bringing dead cats back to life. At least, that was his claim. He also experimented with cryogenics. He practised as a plastic surgeon and gynocologist, so I can only imagine what kind of a horror show that was. He also established Southern University, which was really only a diploma mill and he was charged with fraud. He visited Mexico and returned claiming that he had been given the title of lieutenant general and he was often seen in full uniform around town. He eventually died in 1982. An interesting note, as if the rest of this wasn't, is that Jose wrote a suicide note. In it, he claimed to have had 500 sexual relationships. The note was nine pages of rambling and disturbing narcissism.
Locals have called this location, Hotel Hell. Dead Files on the Travel Channel featured this in the first season and Amy really didn't like the place. The first entity she experiences is a nurse who worked in the clinic. She sees the spirit going back and forth over and over in what seems to be a residual manner as she continues to do her work in the afterlife. The nurse's name is thought to be Tabby.
There were 16 rooms in all and the two main haunted rooms in the inn were Room 303 and Room 305. The water is said to come on by itself and footsteps are heard. Outside of Room 305, Amy thought she saw the body of someone lying face up. When she entered the room, she felt a very negative energy and she felt sick. She felt like a murder-suicide had happened in the room. But this incident did not happen while this was an inn. Did it happen in the clinic? The front desk clerk, Ray, and he said a woman told him that she saw a ghost that stared at her in Room 305.
Tessa is the daughter of Jack Shiver and she helped run the inn. She was scared of the basement and always took the stairs two at a time when she was going up. She told Steve about a terrifying experience she had one day in the restroom down in the basement around 2:30 in the afternoon. She looked up into the mirror and saw a woman in a Spanish veil standing behind her. She could see right through the woman. She fell backward screaming in terror, spilling her purse and all its contents everywhere.
Jack Shiver himself had experiences too. He was down working in the basement and he saw a light and then a very small lady. There are no windows in the basement. The woman looked back at him and he thought she was a Spanish woman too. He could see through her, so he knew she wasn't human.
The basement had served as a speakeasy at one time and Amy could see that there were many people there. She had to leave the area after she was overwhelmed by at least twenty entities. She said that it felt as though many of them had killed somebody at some point. Some had crushed faces and they were vibrating. It all sounded very weird. She could sense the tunnels coming to the basement. Remember that Ybor City had these tunnels everywhere. So was this facilitating bringing in alcohol during Prohibition? Keep in mind that anything went in this city, so they really didn't need to hide stuff in tunnels. These tunnels could have helped Jose to move bodies as well. Did that happen? Amy thinks that perhaps her visions of people in the walls down in the basement was actually a morgue.
It will be interesting to hear what happens after the offices open. Will people in Casa Ybor experience the same things as though who ran and visited the inn that was here before?
The Cuban Club
In 1902, the Cuban immigrants in Ybor City formed El Circulo Cubano, which means Circle of Cubans. The original Cuban Club was made of wood and burned down in 1916. The club was quickly rebuilt in the same spot at the corner of Palm Avenue and 14th Street and this time they used brick, but not any old brick. They used yellow brick because it was three times the price of red brick and they wanted to one-up the Spanish Club and show off their wealth. The style was neoclassical and the club was opulent, boasting a gym with the latest exercise equipment of the time, a running track, a basketball court, a bowling alley, a pharmacy, a library and a swimming pool. Now the pool was only 10 ft. x 10 ft. and 10 feet deep, so it was more like a spa, but it was the only pool in Ybor City. There is a theater here with the ceiling painted like the sky. There is a small balcony and a little ticket booth just outside the doors. The dressing rooms are off to one side backstage and are small. The Grand Ballroom had elaborate murals painted on the ceiling and Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Campbell played their Big Band tunes there. The building was decorated with imported tile floors, stained-glass windows and elaborately carved scraffito spandrells. The fortunes of the club waned in the 1960s, but the Cuban Club Foundation bought the building and have preserved it.
Our tour guide told us that there were 300 known ghosts here. I'm skeptic, so obviously I find that to be a stretch, but there definitely do seem to be a few spirits here. EMF detectors were handed out and they went off most of the time we were in the building. I personally feel that much of the issue was electrical. There was wiring in the columns, people didn't have their cell phones on airplane mode and who knows what the wiring was like throughout the building.
The first spirit is a little boy named Jaime who drowned in the pool. This reminded me of the Queen Mary and the little girl who drowned and haunts the pool there. The pool had been down in the basement, but it is no longer there. Ghost Hunters visited in 2009 and they communicated with Jaime via the flashlight experiment. But no right away. They tried for an hour with no luck and then it occurred to them that maybe Jaime doesn't understand English. Once they started asking questions in Spanish, they started getting responses. A few years ago, the tour guide had a woman with the group who had an infant with her. While everybody was walking around the basement with their EMFs, she stood off to the side to cradle her baby to sleep. She snapped a few pictures of the room while she stood in the corner and when she got home, she discovered that one of the pictures had what looked like the head of a little boy peering over a counter. The guide showed us the picture and it does indeed seem to be the head of a young person looking over a counter. The picture is grainy, but I found it interesting. There was something interesting here with a ball in the basement as well. (EVP of Jaime caught by Yoselis Ramos in 2014 - Saying Hi?) Photo of possible ghost by stairs where pool used to be:
There is a Lady in White here. She was a young girl who was the bell of the ball, around sixteen years of age. She had caught the eye of a gangster and he pursued her heavily. She wanted nothing to do with him and rejected his advances several times. This angered him and if he couldn't have her, nobody would. When he found her out on the balcony patio, he picked her up and threw her off the top of the club. Her brother stabbed the gangster to death outside the club that evening. The tour guide had a group of five nineteen and twenty year old girls he was touring through the Cuban Club. They were up on the fourth floor where the ballroom is and he counted six silhouettes. When they got downstairs, there were only five women again. He is positive that he saw a sixth figure with the girls. This woman is seen in a white dress and red heels and is often seen walking up and down the stairs.
The theater is haunted by a young man who wanted to be an actor and a director. It took him two years to write and develop his original play. In 1919, he rented the theater and had his family and all the Cubans in the city come to see his debut. Halfway through the play, he forgets the lines to his own play. He is laughed off the stage and he runs away. He still had the keys to the theater, so he returns at four in the morning. He walked up on the stage, put a rope over the center beam and tied a noose on the end. He stands on a chair with the noose around his neck and finishes the play. The young man then stepped off to his death. His spirit haunts the theater and usually shows up around 4am. He is most often heard reciting his lines in Spanish. In the 1920s a member of the board was killed by another member during a heated argument. That murdered board member's ghost is said to walk throughout the building. A piano has been heard playing by itself in the theater as well.
Ybor City is a great place to visit. If you are coming to Tampa, make time to visit this neighborhood and walk those brick streets. Are these locations in Ybor City haunted? That is for you to decide!
Show Notes:
Ybor City Ghost Tours: https://www.yborghosttour.com/
The Hoosac Tunnel took twenty-four years to complete at a cost of $21 million. It is a railroad tunnel that stretches nearly 5 miles in western Massachusetts. Many people have nicknamed the tunnel, The Bloody Pit. Construction was started in 1851 and you can imagine at that time that cutting through a mountain was quite the feat. Techniques that are used today for tunnel drilling were created at this time and in 1975 the tunnel was made an Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. Workers would pay a hefty price in creating this marvel. One hundred ninety-six of them would die from accidents. One accident trapped thirteen men who lived long enough to make a raft to keep from drowning when the pumps failed and water rose in the shaft in which they were trapped. They eventually suffocated. Another accident left two men dead after an explosion. A third man that was with the other two men, Kelly Ringo, escaped the explosion even though he was the one to actually set it off on accident. A little over a year later, Ringo was working in the tunnel again. He was found later strangled to death. No one was ever caught in connection to his murder. Legend claims that the two men who died in the blast he triggered had come back to exact their revenge. And it's easy to believe because there are many supernatural things that happen here from lanterns swaying on their own to disembodied voices to shadow figures. The ghosts of two men killed in a construction accident coming back to get the man who caused it, certainly is odd!
This Month in History - Balloon Bomb Killed Six Near Bly
Suggested by: Shelley Emary
In the month of May, on the 5th, in 1945, six people were killed by a balloon bomb near Bly, Oregon. It was a beautiful day, the perfect day for a picnic. Reverend Mitchell and his wife decided to head to a wooded area along Leonard Creek to do just that. They invited five kids from their Sunday school class to join them. The Reverend dropped everyone at the picnic spot and then drove away to park the car. The Reverend describes what happened as he got out of the car, "As I got out of the car to bring the lunch, the others were not far away and called to me they had found something that looked like a balloon," Mitchell said. "I heard of Japanese balloons so I shouted a warning not to touch it. But just then there was a big explosion." Balloon bombs were constructed by the Japanese during World War II and they made as many as 9,000 of them. At least 285 of them made it all the way to the west coast of America. The balloons were made of paper and inflated with hydrogen. Each balloon carried a variety of bombs. Mitchell ran to where he had dropped his pregnant wife and the children. There was a crater a foot deep and 3 feet wide and everyone was dead. The victime were his pregnant wife; Dick Patzke, 14; Jay Gifford, 13; Edward Engen, 13; Joan Patzke, 13; and Sherman Shoemaker, 11. This was the only enemy-inflicted attack that caused casualties on the U.S. mainland during World War II. Be careful! Some bombs were never found and could still be out there and as proof of that, one was found in British Columbia in the Monashee Mountains in 2014.
Haunted Ybor City
When people claim that a town was the wildest in the west, we have certain images that come to mind. We envision gunfights in the street, brothels, saloons, cowboy hats and spurs. But what about a city that was dubbed the "Wild West of the South?" Change those cowboy hats to gangster fedoras and the spurs to cigars and you get Ybor City. This neighborhood just outside of Tampa, Florida has an amazing history, which has led to some interesting haunts. Join me as I explore the history and hauntings of Ybor City.
A small group of us took the Ybor City Ghost Tour a couple of weekends ago and our minds were blown about the history going on in this town. When you drive down the main drag, 7th Avenue, it becomes clear that this truly is Cigar City, but then you notice something else peculiar. There are Mardi Gras beads hanging from trees and littering the roofs of the businesses. That is because this city is built to reflect the French Quarter in New Orleans and in many ways, it does. Bars dot the landscape and the roads are built from brick. But rather than having the scent of stale beer and urine in the air, there is the sweet pungent smell of cigar smoke. And everybody smokes big stogies here, including that seventy-something woman we just passed, sitting outside of one of the haunted locations here. A must here is to watch a cigar being hand rolled. This street was named as one of the "10 Great Streets in America" in 2008. Another nod to New Orleans is the street trolley that runs up and down the street.
Ybor City was founded by a group of cigar manufacturers looking for a place to relocate. They were originally located in Key West, a place that presented higher costs and transportation issues. Tampa was still near enough to Cuba to keep the price of the Cuban tobacco low and it also had the plus of new railroad lines being built throughout the state of Florida to facilitate transportation of the cigars to the rest of the United States. There was also the plus of lots of land. Key West was small and land poor, but in Tampa, workers could actually buy land and build their own homes. So workers migrated from Key West to Tampa. The leader of this group of cigar manufacturers was Vincente Martinez-Ybor and he built his workers homes and sold them for basically cost. The area was founded in 1885 and named for Ybor. The success of the city led Tampa to annex it in 1887. This was the state's first industrial town.
Ybor's cigar factory was the largest brick building in Florida. Immigrants came from everywhere to work here. The city took on a European atmosphere as these immigrants arrived from Germany, Romania, Italy and Spain. And, of course, many Cubans arrived too. Each group had their own club and all array of ethnic holidays were observed. These different groups brought their own specialties and soon shops were popping up all over Ybor City, as well as restaurants. German lithographers invented the cigar label. This made Ybor City pretty special. The ethnic clubs provided social outlets as well as healthcare for their members and workers were happy as they were not beholden to a company. This sounds like a company town, but it wasn't since the workers could own their own property. And what also makes this area great is that so many of these buildings - the factories, social clubs and balconied storefronts - still exist today.
So Ybor City sounds like a great place to work and live, but this area was called the Wild West of the South for a reason. There was no law here. When Prohibition was enacted throughout America, Ybor City completely ignored it. The taps here continued to run. Tunnels were built under the city and these were not constructed to facility the sewage system. These tunnels helped crime run rampant. They were used for transporting illegal goods or to help criminals escape when nightspots were raided. The lawlessness attracted the mob and gangsters. Speakeasies popped up everywhere, along with brothels and murder and mayhem were rampant. Organized crime ran a gambling game called Bolita, which is Spanish for little ball. This is a game of chance like a lottery. A bag is filled with small numbered balls and one is pulled at random and this is the winning number. A notorious gangster named Charlie Wall ran many of the Bolita games and he used the proceeds to fund his criminal projects. As the 1930s rolled into the 1940s, residents of Ybor City took to calling it the "Era of Blood." The city continued to deteriorate and the buildings were abandoned. In the 1980s, the neighborhood took on new life as an artist colony developed in Ybor City. Soon bars and restaurants and stores moved in and the nightlife has been alive ever since. Also alive here, as remnants of the crazy past, are spirits.
Fun Fact: This is the only place where you actually can stand in Cuba while still being in America. There is a park dedicated to Cuban poet and revolutionary Jose Marti in Ybor City and it is owned by Cuba. The United States does not maintain it, so volunteers in the Cuban community take care of it.
King Corona Cigars Cafe and Bar
Our first stop is the King Corona Cigars Cafe and Bar. The outside patio area along the street is dotted with tables and people sit here sipping wine or a craft beer and puffing on cigars. The cafe and bar were founded in 1998 by Don and Brenda Barco and they both have run it through all these years until Don passed away this past March 2019. The building has housed other businesses previously though. I believe the original store was a dress shop opened by Raul Vega and he ran that for sixty years. The twelve years following that, it was a women's upscale store called La Nica Fashions. And then the building was empty for two years until Don bought it. His family had been in the cigar business for five generations. The building needed a lot of renovations and Don enlisted some friends to help him. This is when they would discover that there was something other than dust left behind.
Joe Howden was one of those friends helping Don and he was there late one night by himself. He couldn't shake the feeling that he was not really by himself. He grabbed a hammer and walked towards the back of the building where he saw a very large man standing there. Joe didn't want a confrontation, so he held the hammer in front of his body and backed up towards the front door, hoping to run away. It turned out that he wouldn't have to run because the large man just evaporated into thin air. This large man was not the only spirit here. Another friend helping renovate was named Sarah. She was painting the walls when she saw a young girl at the back of the store. The girl just stared at Sarah and Sarah could see that she was wearing a period dress. Sarah said "Hello" but got no response. As she approached the girl, she disappeared. Patrons and workers have experienced disembodied voices and strange, unidentifiable sounds.
Mediums who have visited the cafe have seen the large man spirit and claim that it belongs to Raul Vega. One medium, named Joanne, walked to the back of the store and claimed to see a lot of blood everywhere as though someone had been killed here. She also claimed to see the spirit of a young girl cowering in a back storeroom and that this child spirit was terrified of something. The energy was so negative around her that Joanne ran from the room and would not go back inside. A few years later, another medium named Sheila joined writer Dave Lapham at the cafe. She saw the same pools of blood in the back of the store and Dave had told her nothing about the place. And she saw the little girl ghost cowering in the corner too.
Don Vincente de Ybor Historic Inn
Casa Ybor is the former Don Vincente de Ybor Historic Inn, which was established in 1895. The man who founded Ybor City built this building and did it in the Mediterranean style. Today, it offers retail, residential and office spaces, but it is best remembered as the Don Vincente de Ybor Inn and that is what it was when Dead Files visited. Originally, this was a real estate office, Ybor Land and Improvement Company, a planning and development office for the community and then it transformed into El Bien Publico Clinic, a medical clinic, in 1903. It would change names to The Gonzalez Clinic after the El Bien Publico closed in 1973. This would run until 1980. The building sat empty for 18 years and then Jack Shiver bought it in 1998 and fully refurbished the interior into a beautiful period decorated inn. It took two years and two million dollars. The beautiful staircase was restored as was the hand carved wooden bar and the brass and blush pink light fixtures. Persian rugs, beautiful French chandeliers and antiques were added. One of which was an imposing grandfather clock that was the grand prize winner at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco. The basement had been a speakeasy at one time and was renovated to be a large gathering place. The Inn closed in May of 2015 and is now Casa Ybor. Darryl Shaw had bought the building for $2.2 million in 2014, so he probably decided it was worth more to have it as offices. It still was not open and was being renovated when we went by it.
During the clinic time, this was really a celebrated hospital. There was a man named Jose Luis Avellanal who had been born in Tampa in 1903. His father had founded the first clinic in the building. One of his father's first patients was a young boy that Jose had shot in the eye. Jose was a really bad kid and he was going to grow into a really bad guy. He would develop what he called an electric chair when he was young and confinced a neighborhood boy to help him test it. Needless to say, this would be another patient for his father. His father put him in solitary confinement hoping it would straighten him up, but he just escaped and stole his dad's car. He was shipped off to military school. He moved around when he became an adult with a stop in tennessee where he was charged with possession of drugs and kidnapping a woman. When he returned to Ybor City, he claimed that he was a doctor, but many feel the diploma was fake. He set up shop at El Pasaje Hotel where he conducted bizarre and macabre experiments. He told people he could raise the dead and even tried to publish articles on resurrecting the dead. Apparently, he was bringing dead cats back to life. At least, that was his claim. He also experimented with cryogenics. He practised as a plastic surgeon and gynocologist, so I can only imagine what kind of a horror show that was. He also established Southern University, which was really only a diploma mill and he was charged with fraud. He visited Mexico and returned claiming that he had been given the title of lieutenant general and he was often seen in full uniform around town. He eventually died in 1982. An interesting note, as if the rest of this wasn't, is that Jose wrote a suicide note. In it, he claimed to have had 500 sexual relationships. The note was nine pages of rambling and disturbing narcissism.
Locals have called this location, Hotel Hell. Dead Files on the Travel Channel featured this in the first season and Amy really didn't like the place. The first entity she experiences is a nurse who worked in the clinic. She sees the spirit going back and forth over and over in what seems to be a residual manner as she continues to do her work in the afterlife. The nurse's name is thought to be Tabby.
There were 16 rooms in all and the two main haunted rooms in the inn were Room 303 and Room 305. The water is said to come on by itself and footsteps are heard. Outside of Room 305, Amy thought she saw the body of someone lying face up. When she entered the room, she felt a very negative energy and she felt sick. She felt like a murder-suicide had happened in the room. But this incident did not happen while this was an inn. Did it happen in the clinic? The front desk clerk, Ray, and he said a woman told him that she saw a ghost that stared at her in Room 305.
Tessa is the daughter of Jack Shiver and she helped run the inn. She was scared of the basement and always took the stairs two at a time when she was going up. She told Steve about a terrifying experience she had one day in the restroom down in the basement around 2:30 in the afternoon. She looked up into the mirror and saw a woman in a Spanish veil standing behind her. She could see right through the woman. She fell backward screaming in terror, spilling her purse and all its contents everywhere.
Jack Shiver himself had experiences too. He was down working in the basement and he saw a light and then a very small lady. There are no windows in the basement. The woman looked back at him and he thought she was a Spanish woman too. He could see through her, so he knew she wasn't human.
The basement had served as a speakeasy at one time and Amy could see that there were many people there. She had to leave the area after she was overwhelmed by at least twenty entities. She said that it felt as though many of them had killed somebody at some point. Some had crushed faces and they were vibrating. It all sounded very weird. She could sense the tunnels coming to the basement. Remember that Ybor City had these tunnels everywhere. So was this facilitating bringing in alcohol during Prohibition? Keep in mind that anything went in this city, so they really didn't need to hide stuff in tunnels. These tunnels could have helped Jose to move bodies as well. Did that happen? Amy thinks that perhaps her visions of people in the walls down in the basement was actually a morgue.
It will be interesting to hear what happens after the offices open. Will people in Casa Ybor experience the same things as though who ran and visited the inn that was here before?
The Cuban Club
In 1902, the Cuban immigrants in Ybor City formed El Circulo Cubano, which means Circle of Cubans. The original Cuban Club was made of wood and burned down in 1916. The club was quickly rebuilt in the same spot at the corner of Palm Avenue and 14th Street and this time they used brick, but not any old brick. They used yellow brick because it was three times the price of red brick and they wanted to one-up the Spanish Club and show off their wealth. The style was neoclassical and the club was opulent, boasting a gym with the latest exercise equipment of the time, a running track, a basketball court, a bowling alley, a pharmacy, a library and a swimming pool. Now the pool was only 10 ft. x 10 ft. and 10 feet deep, so it was more like a spa, but it was the only pool in Ybor City. There is a theater here with the ceiling painted like the sky. There is a small balcony and a little ticket booth just outside the doors. The dressing rooms are off to one side backstage and are small. The Grand Ballroom had elaborate murals painted on the ceiling and Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Campbell played their Big Band tunes there. The building was decorated with imported tile floors, stained-glass windows and elaborately carved scraffito spandrells. The fortunes of the club waned in the 1960s, but the Cuban Club Foundation bought the building and have preserved it.
Our tour guide told us that there were 300 known ghosts here. I'm skeptic, so obviously I find that to be a stretch, but there definitely do seem to be a few spirits here. EMF detectors were handed out and they went off most of the time we were in the building. I personally feel that much of the issue was electrical. There was wiring in the columns, people didn't have their cell phones on airplane mode and who knows what the wiring was like throughout the building.
The first spirit is a little boy named Jaime who drowned in the pool. This reminded me of the Queen Mary and the little girl who drowned and haunts the pool there. The pool had been down in the basement, but it is no longer there. Ghost Hunters visited in 2009 and they communicated with Jaime via the flashlight experiment. But no right away. They tried for an hour with no luck and then it occurred to them that maybe Jaime doesn't understand English. Once they started asking questions in Spanish, they started getting responses. A few years ago, the tour guide had a woman with the group who had an infant with her. While everybody was walking around the basement with their EMFs, she stood off to the side to cradle her baby to sleep. She snapped a few pictures of the room while she stood in the corner and when she got home, she discovered that one of the pictures had what looked like the head of a little boy peering over a counter. The guide showed us the picture and it does indeed seem to be the head of a young person looking over a counter. The picture is grainy, but I found it interesting. There was something interesting here with a ball in the basement as well. (EVP of Jaime caught by Yoselis Ramos in 2014 - Saying Hi?) Photo of possible ghost by stairs where pool used to be:
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| Photo by Patty Summers |
The theater is haunted by a young man who wanted to be an actor and a director. It took him two years to write and develop his original play. In 1919, he rented the theater and had his family and all the Cubans in the city come to see his debut. Halfway through the play, he forgets the lines to his own play. He is laughed off the stage and he runs away. He still had the keys to the theater, so he returns at four in the morning. He walked up on the stage, put a rope over the center beam and tied a noose on the end. He stands on a chair with the noose around his neck and finishes the play. The young man then stepped off to his death. His spirit haunts the theater and usually shows up around 4am. He is most often heard reciting his lines in Spanish. In the 1920s a member of the board was killed by another member during a heated argument. That murdered board member's ghost is said to walk throughout the building. A piano has been heard playing by itself in the theater as well.
Ybor City is a great place to visit. If you are coming to Tampa, make time to visit this neighborhood and walk those brick streets. Are these locations in Ybor City haunted? That is for you to decide!
Show Notes:
Ybor City Ghost Tours: https://www.yborghosttour.com/
Thursday, May 9, 2019
HGB Ep. 297 - St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador
Moment in Oddity - Birmingham's Balloon Parade
The year was 1966 and Birmingham Alabama's Downtown Action Committee decided they wanted to have an animated balloon parade to celebrate the Christmas holidays. The Macy Thanksgiving Day Parade had these huge balloon figures and they wanted to do the same thing. They really hoped they could outdo Macy's efforts. They had plans for several blow-up balloons, many of which would be very unique, including monkeys, dogs and serpents. It was a grand plan. There was just one teeny, tiny little problem. You've seen the Macy's Parade on TV. Those balloons fly pretty high up in the air and many stand several stories high. I remember that there have been years that the balloon wranglers on the ground have had to keep the balloons held closer to the ground because of wind. But they have never had to keep the balloons low because of power lines or traffic signals. Unfortunately for Birmingham, their overhanging power lines and traffic signals were not conducive to floating balloons, so they had to mount the balloons on platforms and wheel them along the route. The first parade was themed as Fairyland and included Peter Pan, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast and of course, a vampire and Frankenstein's Monster...well, okay, I know that sounds weird, especially for Christmas, but here at HGB that sounds mighty fine to me! Hosting a balloon parade with all the balloons wheeled down the street, certainly is odd!
This Month in History - Jim Thorpe Born
In the month of May, on the 22nd, in 1887, Jim Thorpe was born. Thorpe was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation and his Native American name was Wa-Tho-Huk, which meant Bright Path. And he did have a bright path in front of him when it came to sports. Thorpe grew up in Oklahoma and attended school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania where he became All-American twice for the football team. He was a versatile athlete and competed in the US Olympic Track Finals to compete in the 1912 Olympics hosted in Stockholm, Sweden in the pentathlon and decathlon, which were being introduced for the first time. He went to the Olympics and made a record in the decathlon that would last for two decades. Thorpe won eight of the 15 individual events comprising the pentathlon and decathlon and took home the gold in both. And then things started to go downhill. He lost his gold medals because of the amateur rule in place at the time for Olympics. Thorpe had received meager pay playing professional baseball before the Olympics. He would marry three times, two of them ending in divorce. He had eight children, one child dying in childhood. He retired from sports at 41, just as the Great Depression hit, and he could not find work. He fell into alcoholism and died in poverty at the age of 65 from heart failure. Thorpe was a victim of racism. The New York Times even ran a headline that read, "Indian Thorpe in Olympiad; Redskin from Carlisle Will Strive for Place on American Team." In 1983, Thorpe's medal placement was reinstated, but not the original gold medals because they had been stolen. His children were presented with commemorative ones. He is listed as a gold medalist by the IOC, but his 1912 reults are not restored to the official Olympic record.
St. John's in Newfoundland and Labrador (Dedicated to Robyn and Chris White)
St. John's is one of the oldest cities in North America and is found in Newfoundland and Labrador on the coast of Canada. Based on my personal experience, these oldest cities have a plethora of ghost stories. And St. John's is said to be the most haunted city in Canada. There are numerous historic locations here with a haunted reputation and we are going to look at several of them. Join me as I explore the history and hauntings of St. John's!
Newfoundland and Labrador are a province of Canada. Newfoundland is an island and Labrador is a part of mainland Canada, found to the East of Quebec and above Nova Scotia. There are 10 provinces in Canada and this is the newest, having only joined in 1949. It was initially named Newfoundland having been coined New Found Launde by King Henry VII after John Cabot discovered it in 1497. The name Labrador is thought to have been coined by a Portuguese explorer named João Fernandes. He was a landowner, which in Portuguese is "llavrador" and people started calling the coast he explored in Greenland "the labrador's land." Labrador was once part of Greenland. The name was officially changed in 2001 to Newfoundland and Labrador. The people here are from indigenous, French, Irish and English backgrounds. *Fun fact: On the coast of Labrador, the Maritime Archaic Indians left behind a burial mound that dates back 7,500 years and this is said to be the oldest known funeral mound in North America. The capital city of the province is St. John's and it is found in Newfoundland on the southeastern end. As I said before, this is a really old city.
From the beginning, St. John's was a prominent harbor known for its fishing in the North Atlantic. The Spanish, Portuguese, Basques, French and English all came with the British rising in power in the area. The first permanent settlers set down roots in the early 1600s with a family named Oxford building a plantation. The oldest commercial street known as Water Street was established shortly thereafter. Along this path were bars, storehouses, warehouses and shops that drew traders, fishers, captains, naval officers and even pirates. St. John's was a major commercial center and for this it became a prime location for attack. Many of these attacks started as early as the mid 1500s. The last attacks came in 1762 when the British recaptured St. John's from the French. Municipal government would be set up in 1888 and the population would rise to 30,000. Electric street lights came along with electric street cars. St. John's would be incorporated in 1921 and today is the financial and commercial center for Newfoundland and Labrador and, of course, the capital of the province.
So many historic cities have stories of big fires. They were so common because most everything was built from wood early on and most cities did not have great resources for fighting fires. St. John's had several big fires and then a great fire. The Great Fire of 1892 broke out on July 8th and was the worst disaster to ever hit the city of St. John's. On that fateful day, a strong wind was blowing out of the northwest and the city was extremely dry as there had been little rain for days. Work on the water main made the water pressure insufficient. It was the perfect conditions for a fire and one was about to start. At the top of Carter's Field, on Freshwater Road, stood Timothy Brine's stable. A pipe was dropped there, and although a pipe is a small thing, the stable lit up. It was around 4:45 in the afternoon. The relatively small fire did not initially cause alarm, but since the conditions were ripe, the fire quickly spread.
Once the residents realized that they would not be able to contain the fire, they decided to use their energy to move their valuables to stone buildings, which they thought would be protective. Obviously, that was not the case. One of these locations was the Anglican Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. A description of what happened to the cathedral reads, "With one fearful rush the demonic fire seized upon the doomed cathedral, and sooner than tongue could tell the immense edifice, a gem of Gothic architecture, the masterpiece of Sir Gilbert Scott and the pride of every Newfoundlander, was a seething mass of flame. With a crash, heard even above the din of the elements the roof fell in, and the result of the labors and offerings of thousands for many years vanished in a cloud of smoke and dust." The fire ravaged the business district along Water Street and Duckworth Street.
The cries of terror from women and children and the frantic attempts to quench the flames did not end until the next morning. As the smoke cleared, the residents were able to see the destruction. Few walls stood and those that did were tottering. Chimneys stood as the last remnants of homes. There was 13 million in losses with very little covered by insurance. Money from Britain, the United States and the rest of Canada poured in and St. John's rebuilt. Most of the old buildings here date back to this time and have a Second Empire styling. That's why so many have mansard roofs with bonnet-topped dormers.
St. John's is the city of legends. Many of the buildings in this city have ghost stories attached to them and I am going to share many of them with you. So put on your walking shoes and let's go see haunted St. John's!
290 Duckworth Street
As I mentioned, the businesses along Duckworth Street were devastated by the fire. Our first stop is at 290 Duckworth Street at the corner of Cathedral Street. The building is large, standing four stories tall with the back of the building curving up a hill. This was originally a doctor's office that was much like a hospital because surgeries were conducted here. Later, it would run as a funeral parlor and then the Victoria Station Inn. More recently it went through a series of restaurants: Chez Briann, The Vinyl Room and the Reluctant Chef, which is now closed. Last I saw, the property is listed as a rental for office space. Paranormal experiences include some really creepy apparitions. One is a woman who seems to be sporting her autopsy scars and another is a young woman whom is paralyzed with coins over here eyes.
Duke of Duckworth
The Duke of Duckworth is said to be the best pub in town. The pub has been in business for 25 years and is located at 325 Duckworth Street. I've heard they have the best fish and chips in town. They also have a spirit here that has been affectionately named the Duke. I'm not sure why they call him The Duke because no one knows his story or who he is. The ghost seems to be friendly and is usually seen as an apparition looking out the window and waving. A local artist painting a picture of this and it can be seen hanging in the pub. Staff members claim that he has other antics like moving glasses and hiding things. So you can go for a pint and maybe even have a specter to share it with.
Anglican Cathedral Graveyard on Church Hill
The Anglican Cathedral of St. John the Baptist is the oldest Anglican cathedral in all of Canada and found at 16 Church Hill. The Anglican Parish was originally established in 1699. The first stone church was built in 1843 and was heavily damaged during the Great Fire of 1892. It took 10 years to repair the damage. Disembodied voices are heard within the cathedral. The ghost of a young stone worker who had helped with repairing the cathedral is said to haunt the church. He fell to his death from scaffolding. It is said that he was unable to leave his work unfinished. Many of his co-workers saw his ghost around the job site. Even more shocking, in 1850, a picture was taken of all the workmen after they repaired the nave. They were wearing their Sunday finest and stood in front of the cathedral. The deceased man showed up in the picture, wearing his work clothes.
South of the church is the Anglican Cathedral Graveyard. There are tales of apparitions seen floating around the cemetery. There is a legend here about a man who refused to be buried. This man was believed to be a merchant who had sailed into St. John's. His body was found in a downtown lane in the late 1800s. He was brought to the Anglican cemetery for burial. His casket was lowered into the grave,but about halfway through, the gravediggers heard a knocking coming from the coffin. They quickly shoveled out the dirt and called the doctor. He came and declared that the man was indeed dead, so they started to bury him again. The knocking was heard again. They repeated the process of unburying the man and having a doctor check him again. He was pronounced dead once again and the reburial began with the doctor standing by. The knocking happened again, but the doctor refused to let the men unbury him and the knocking eventually stopped. Strange knocking sounds are heard in the cemetery to this day.
The Captain of Queen's Road
This legend dates back to 1740. There was a captain of a ship who made regular rounds between England and Newfoundland and he had taken up with a woman who lived along Queen's Road in a home later owned by a man named Samuel Pettyham. The captain did not know that he was not the only suitor of this woman. She had a jealous lover and one night he ambushed the captain and killed him. And then he beheaded the captain with a sword. The Captain's ghost is now said to be seen along the area where he was killed and he appears headless. The first person to report the tale was Samuel Pettyham all those centuries ago.
The Majestic Theater
The Majestic Theater is inside a building nicknamed the "flat iron building" on 390 Duckworth Street. Theaters already have a pretty haunted reputation, but imagine one built over an area that had been used for hangings. That is what we have going on here. The building was constructed in 1918 and was refurbished and reopened in 2017 and then promptly caught fire. I'm not sure it is even open right now because all the ticket buying websites have no events for the location and the theater itself has no website. When it was open, workers and patrons claimed to hear the disembodied cries of men, probably those who were hanged. Their moans have also been heard. And there is poltergeist-like activity.
Christians Pub
Christian's Pub is located at 23 George St and is the oldest pub on George Street. I'm not sure what getting screeched in is, but apparently Newfoundlanders know and this is what this pub is known for. If you are not a native of Newfoundland, the Screech In ceremony makes you an honorary Newfoundlander. Most ceremonies include wearing a Sou'Wester (which is a collapsible oilskin rain hat), answering the question "Is ye an honorary Newfoundlander?" with the proper answer "'Deed I is me ol' cock, and long may your big jib draw" and then you get to kiss...a cod or the ass end of a puffin. Christian's Pub has a picture of Anthony Bourdain going through the process. They have one ghost here and they have named her Maggie. She can be a rather rowdy spirit and has occasionally damaged some of the bar equipment.
The Masonic Temple
The three-story Masonic Temple can be found on Cathedral Street. The Masons had a group in Newfoundland beginning in 1746 when the Grand Lodge of Boston issued them a Freemasonfy warrant, but they had no place of their own. They would meet at various places around the city. Their first official home would be a wooden structure on Long's Hill that was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1892. The Temple was built in 1894, which is why it is of Victorian design. It was constructed from large red bricks imported from Accrington and features multiple pediments, pilasters and free standing columns. The cornerstone was laid on August 23, 1894 in a Masonic ceremony led by Sir William Whiteway, a former Newfoundland prime minister who served for 17 years and he built the Newfoundland Railway. The building was consecrated by the Masonic order in 1896. Sir John Chalker Crosbie donated a large amount of money in 1916 and those funds were used to buy a large and beautiful pipe organ that decorates the main room. There are also paintings in the main room of Whiteway and an engineer named Alexander MacKay. He developed the telegraphic and electrical systems in Newfoundland. The Masons used the building until 2007 and then they sold the structure. The Spirit of Newfoundland owns the building now and hosts dinner shows and other artistic endeavours. The Temple was added to the Registered Heritage Structure by the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador in April 1995.
There are several ghost stories told here. One involves a caretaker who claims he was looking for his phone when he backed into someone. Or what he thought was someone. He turned and found no one. Another story was experienced after the Spirit of Newfoundland theater group took over the building. A delivery driver was bringing boxes of legal files into the building. He went to the top of the landing of some stairs and found a man whom he asked for directions as to where to put the boxes. The man gazed at him for a minute and then disappeared. That delivery driver ran out of the building. The man seen by the delivery drivers has been seen by others and he always disappears. The pipe organ in the main room occasionally has music emanating from it when no one is playing it. Disembodied voices are also heard.
Another experience happened during a wedding held in the building in 1999. A man who was a high ranking member of the Masons had passed away a little bit before the wedding. The wedding was his grandson's and at the start of the ceremony, the presiding judge came into the room where the wedding was taking place with a lit candle. He got halfway to the bride and groom when the candle went out. He returned to the doorway, lit the candle and started forward again. The candle went out at the halfway point again. He decided to just carry on and the wedding continued. One of the guests pointed out that two pictures of the groom's grandfather hung on opposite sides of the wall of the room. This was the same spot where the candles went out.
Newman Wine Vaults
The Newman Wine Vaults were built in the early 19th century and consisted of two brick-and-stone wine cellars. The name comes from the owner, an English firm named Newman and Company. Their specialty was port wine. Today, the wine vault is a museum. There is unexplained stuff going on here with the two main spectres belonging to an African slave and a child. These spirits pinch people and occasionally get more aggressive and shove people. There is photographic evidence too. During a wedding photoshoot in the vault, a mysterious figure appears.
The Grace Hospital Nursing Residence
The Grace Hospital Nursing Residence was built in 1923 and opened in September as the first maternity hospital in Newfoundland and was opened by the Salvation Army. It had 100 beds and soon served as the second nursing school in Newfoundland. The hospital was expanded over the years and grew to 200 beds. It was opened until the year 2000 and was left abandoned. Much of it has been demolished, save for the Nursing Residence. And it is this building that is said to be very haunted.
People who live near the property claim to see strange lights and apparitions. Strange noises come from the building as well. When the buildings were being demolished, a member of the demolition crew claimed that he saw someone peeking around door frames at him while he worked. He would just see this thing out of the corner of his eye, but one glimpse had him convinced that it was a little boy, so he decided to go find the child because he was not supposed to be here. He didn't see him anywhere, so he went back to work, but again saw the child. Then the child seemed to float and disappeared through a doorway. The child had been wearing a hospital gown. He didn't see him again.
A nursing student had gone home on break from his classes at university and his home was near the old Grace Hospital parking lot. He awoke at 4 am to a terrifying sound and when he looked out his window, he saw something terrifying. A figure was walking in the parking lot, but it had no legs. There was nothing below the torso. The noise he heard was a mournful call that the creature or thing would make every few minutes. It would walk around and then stop, lift its head to the sky and wail. The figure stopped after about 15miutes and walked towards the building where it disappeared.
On a winter day, a nurse was leaving her shift at the hospital when she saw a woman walking toward the back of the hospital. She was worried about the woman because she was not wearing a coat. She also wondered if she was a patient because she didn't recognize her as a member of the nursing staff. She followed her around a corner, but could not see her anywhere. She followed the footprints in the snow and found they they stopped right in front of a solid brick wall. The woman was nowhere and she clearly had not walked anywhere else, unless she had flown.
The LPSU Hall
At the corner of Duckworth Street and Prescott Street is a mural of a young man named Fred Gamberg. It is a memorial to him. On July 10, 1995, he was just 24 years old when he slipped from a cliff in Flatrock, Newfoundland and drowned in the North Atlantic. He was a fixture at LPSU Hall, working as a maintenance man and putting together music shows. He is said to haunt the building that can be seen behind the mural, LPSU Hall, a three storied timber-framed building. It is said that this is one of the most haunted buildings on one of St. John's most haunted streets. The building sits at 3 Victoria Street. This originally was home to the First Congregational Church of Newfoundland, which was built there in 1789. A fire destroyed it in 1817. Another church was built in its place, this time an ecumenical one. This one was also burned up in a fire, the Great Fire of 1892. The land was bought by the Sons of Temperance and they built their Temperance Hall there in 1893. They promoted abstinence from alcohol.
They didn't stay long and sold to the Longshoremen's Protective Union in 1912 and that is why this is called LPSU Hall. They renovated the building mostly on the inside. The exterior looks much the same as it did in the early 1900s. In 1976, the Resource Foundation for the Arts bought the hall and transformed it into the Resource Center for the Arts. It has twice been renovated since, once in 1984 and most recently in 2008. It is used as a theater and arts center.
There are several ghost stories here and why not since it is a theater. Strange sounds are a main part of the haunting. There are disembodied footsteps and then sounds with no reasonable explanation like things clattering to the ground, but nothing being on the floor when people search out a cause. And then there are the dark shadow figures that appear and disappear throughout the hall. I mentioned Fred. Reports of a young male ghost being spotted in the main theater sitting in seats started in 1995, right after Fred's death. A young woman was sitting next to him and she noticed that he was really enjoying the show. When the show was over, she turned to him to ask what he thought and when the lights came up, he completely disappeared before her eyes. She couldn't believe the seat was empty next to her. When she described the man later, people said that it sounded like Fred. And many people have seen him since then as well.
The New Courthouse
This location has the legend of Catherine Snow connected to it. She was accused of murdering her husband and was hanged from the window of the old courthouse on July 21, 1834. She was the last woman hanged in Newfoundland. Perhaps she haunts the location because she was actually innocent.
Catherine Mandeville was born in Harbour Grace, Newfoundland around 1793 and she eventually married John Snow and they had seven children. The marriage was not a happy one and the couple fought often with some fights getting violent. When John disappeared in August of 1833, people immediately started whispering that Catherine had done something to John. Dried blood was found at
John Snow's Salmon Cove wharf. Forget that we don't even know if this is human blood. The police arrested two men right away. One was Tobias Manderville who was Catherine's cousin and was reputedly carrying on an affair with her and the other was Arthur Spring, a household servant. Catherine ran for the woods when she heard about the arrests, but eventually turned herself in.
Spring confessed and said that the three of them had shot John and threw his body in the Atlantic Ocean. Catherine denied having anything to do with the crime and even though there was no evidence she had anything to do with it, she was convicted by a three man jury and condemned to hang. Manderville and Spring were hanged a few days later, but Catherine was pregnant, so they waited until she birthed and nursed the baby for a while before hanging her before a large crowd. Before dying she said, "I was a wretched woman, but I am as innocent of any participation in the crime of murder as an unborn child".
Several days after the execution, Catherine's ghost started showing up in the courthouse and outside where she had been hanged. The cemetery where she is buried also has had sightings. Local newspapers even reported the sightings. The old courthouse burned down in 1846,but this didn't stop Catherine. She was seen during the reconstruction and when the new building opened in 1847, her ghost was there again. The Great Fire of 1892 destroyed the courthouse yet again. It was rebuilt again in 1902 and Catherine's ghost was there again. Her spirit is seen throughout the building and people claim that phantom footsteps belong to her. The elevator goes up and down on its own as well.
St. Andrews Presbyterian Church was built in 1893 where the old catholic cemetery had been and there is no record that bodies were moved, including that of Catherine Snow. So perhaps that is why her spirit walks the grounds of the church here too. In 2012, nearly 200 years after she was tried and hanged, the case was reopened by the Newfoundland Historical Society, and Catherine was given a new trial. Two Supreme Court Justices, Carl Thompson and Seamus O'Regan sat in on the case and the defense lawyer was Rosellen Sullivan. Four hundred sixty people sat in the audience and served as jury. Catherine was exonerated, but that hasn't diminshed the activity.
The Four Sisters
There are four stone houses along Temperance Street at addresses 31 to 37 that were built by Samuel Garrett. They are formally called the Samuel Garrett houses, but everybody refers to them as the Four Sisters. Garrett built the homes over ten years, starting in 1893, to give to his four daughters as wedding gifts. Only two daughters would live in the houses. His daughter Mary died at 24 years old. His daughter Eliza never married and stayed at his home with him. Daughter Laurretta moved into number 35 with her new husband in 1901, and daughter Emily moved into number 37. Two of Garrett's grandchildren eventually would move into 31 and 33 when they were old enough. The houses were designated Registered Heritage Structures in 1988
There is a female ghost here. A family rented one of the homes and encountered this spirit. It began with their young daughter screaming and crying at night. She would tell her parents that she was visited by a woman who frightened her. Over time, the cries and screams stopped because the girl got used to the nightly visits and even started laughing and talking with the woman. People who pass by the homes claim to see a woman watching them from the window and sometimes even waving and then she disappears.
Others who have lived in the homes claim that a female ghost appears and then slides across the floor, passing through a wall. She will then sometimes appear in the house next door to where she has passed through. The reason for this is thought to be that this is a residual haunting and since the houses were once connected by doors, she is just walking through the doors rather than a wall. People claim to hear strange noises and to see ghostly lights coming from a tunnel that runs underneath the homes. The tunnel is thought to have once carried water from a lake that is 1.5 km away. When the buildings were abandoned, squatters claimed to have had several haunted experiences and made videos of the experiences to put up on YouTube.
There are hundreds of years of history here in St. John's. The buildings are beautiful architecture and each with its own special history. I've shared just a bit of that history with you here. Do these locations have ghosts walking around and continuing on in the afterlife? Are these buildings in St. John's haunted? That is for you to decide!
Show Notes:
One of the more well-known ghost tours here is the St. John's Haunted Hike: http://hauntedhike.com
The year was 1966 and Birmingham Alabama's Downtown Action Committee decided they wanted to have an animated balloon parade to celebrate the Christmas holidays. The Macy Thanksgiving Day Parade had these huge balloon figures and they wanted to do the same thing. They really hoped they could outdo Macy's efforts. They had plans for several blow-up balloons, many of which would be very unique, including monkeys, dogs and serpents. It was a grand plan. There was just one teeny, tiny little problem. You've seen the Macy's Parade on TV. Those balloons fly pretty high up in the air and many stand several stories high. I remember that there have been years that the balloon wranglers on the ground have had to keep the balloons held closer to the ground because of wind. But they have never had to keep the balloons low because of power lines or traffic signals. Unfortunately for Birmingham, their overhanging power lines and traffic signals were not conducive to floating balloons, so they had to mount the balloons on platforms and wheel them along the route. The first parade was themed as Fairyland and included Peter Pan, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast and of course, a vampire and Frankenstein's Monster...well, okay, I know that sounds weird, especially for Christmas, but here at HGB that sounds mighty fine to me! Hosting a balloon parade with all the balloons wheeled down the street, certainly is odd!
This Month in History - Jim Thorpe Born
In the month of May, on the 22nd, in 1887, Jim Thorpe was born. Thorpe was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation and his Native American name was Wa-Tho-Huk, which meant Bright Path. And he did have a bright path in front of him when it came to sports. Thorpe grew up in Oklahoma and attended school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania where he became All-American twice for the football team. He was a versatile athlete and competed in the US Olympic Track Finals to compete in the 1912 Olympics hosted in Stockholm, Sweden in the pentathlon and decathlon, which were being introduced for the first time. He went to the Olympics and made a record in the decathlon that would last for two decades. Thorpe won eight of the 15 individual events comprising the pentathlon and decathlon and took home the gold in both. And then things started to go downhill. He lost his gold medals because of the amateur rule in place at the time for Olympics. Thorpe had received meager pay playing professional baseball before the Olympics. He would marry three times, two of them ending in divorce. He had eight children, one child dying in childhood. He retired from sports at 41, just as the Great Depression hit, and he could not find work. He fell into alcoholism and died in poverty at the age of 65 from heart failure. Thorpe was a victim of racism. The New York Times even ran a headline that read, "Indian Thorpe in Olympiad; Redskin from Carlisle Will Strive for Place on American Team." In 1983, Thorpe's medal placement was reinstated, but not the original gold medals because they had been stolen. His children were presented with commemorative ones. He is listed as a gold medalist by the IOC, but his 1912 reults are not restored to the official Olympic record.
St. John's in Newfoundland and Labrador (Dedicated to Robyn and Chris White)
St. John's is one of the oldest cities in North America and is found in Newfoundland and Labrador on the coast of Canada. Based on my personal experience, these oldest cities have a plethora of ghost stories. And St. John's is said to be the most haunted city in Canada. There are numerous historic locations here with a haunted reputation and we are going to look at several of them. Join me as I explore the history and hauntings of St. John's!
Newfoundland and Labrador are a province of Canada. Newfoundland is an island and Labrador is a part of mainland Canada, found to the East of Quebec and above Nova Scotia. There are 10 provinces in Canada and this is the newest, having only joined in 1949. It was initially named Newfoundland having been coined New Found Launde by King Henry VII after John Cabot discovered it in 1497. The name Labrador is thought to have been coined by a Portuguese explorer named João Fernandes. He was a landowner, which in Portuguese is "llavrador" and people started calling the coast he explored in Greenland "the labrador's land." Labrador was once part of Greenland. The name was officially changed in 2001 to Newfoundland and Labrador. The people here are from indigenous, French, Irish and English backgrounds. *Fun fact: On the coast of Labrador, the Maritime Archaic Indians left behind a burial mound that dates back 7,500 years and this is said to be the oldest known funeral mound in North America. The capital city of the province is St. John's and it is found in Newfoundland on the southeastern end. As I said before, this is a really old city.
From the beginning, St. John's was a prominent harbor known for its fishing in the North Atlantic. The Spanish, Portuguese, Basques, French and English all came with the British rising in power in the area. The first permanent settlers set down roots in the early 1600s with a family named Oxford building a plantation. The oldest commercial street known as Water Street was established shortly thereafter. Along this path were bars, storehouses, warehouses and shops that drew traders, fishers, captains, naval officers and even pirates. St. John's was a major commercial center and for this it became a prime location for attack. Many of these attacks started as early as the mid 1500s. The last attacks came in 1762 when the British recaptured St. John's from the French. Municipal government would be set up in 1888 and the population would rise to 30,000. Electric street lights came along with electric street cars. St. John's would be incorporated in 1921 and today is the financial and commercial center for Newfoundland and Labrador and, of course, the capital of the province.
So many historic cities have stories of big fires. They were so common because most everything was built from wood early on and most cities did not have great resources for fighting fires. St. John's had several big fires and then a great fire. The Great Fire of 1892 broke out on July 8th and was the worst disaster to ever hit the city of St. John's. On that fateful day, a strong wind was blowing out of the northwest and the city was extremely dry as there had been little rain for days. Work on the water main made the water pressure insufficient. It was the perfect conditions for a fire and one was about to start. At the top of Carter's Field, on Freshwater Road, stood Timothy Brine's stable. A pipe was dropped there, and although a pipe is a small thing, the stable lit up. It was around 4:45 in the afternoon. The relatively small fire did not initially cause alarm, but since the conditions were ripe, the fire quickly spread.
Once the residents realized that they would not be able to contain the fire, they decided to use their energy to move their valuables to stone buildings, which they thought would be protective. Obviously, that was not the case. One of these locations was the Anglican Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. A description of what happened to the cathedral reads, "With one fearful rush the demonic fire seized upon the doomed cathedral, and sooner than tongue could tell the immense edifice, a gem of Gothic architecture, the masterpiece of Sir Gilbert Scott and the pride of every Newfoundlander, was a seething mass of flame. With a crash, heard even above the din of the elements the roof fell in, and the result of the labors and offerings of thousands for many years vanished in a cloud of smoke and dust." The fire ravaged the business district along Water Street and Duckworth Street.
The cries of terror from women and children and the frantic attempts to quench the flames did not end until the next morning. As the smoke cleared, the residents were able to see the destruction. Few walls stood and those that did were tottering. Chimneys stood as the last remnants of homes. There was 13 million in losses with very little covered by insurance. Money from Britain, the United States and the rest of Canada poured in and St. John's rebuilt. Most of the old buildings here date back to this time and have a Second Empire styling. That's why so many have mansard roofs with bonnet-topped dormers.
St. John's is the city of legends. Many of the buildings in this city have ghost stories attached to them and I am going to share many of them with you. So put on your walking shoes and let's go see haunted St. John's!
290 Duckworth Street
As I mentioned, the businesses along Duckworth Street were devastated by the fire. Our first stop is at 290 Duckworth Street at the corner of Cathedral Street. The building is large, standing four stories tall with the back of the building curving up a hill. This was originally a doctor's office that was much like a hospital because surgeries were conducted here. Later, it would run as a funeral parlor and then the Victoria Station Inn. More recently it went through a series of restaurants: Chez Briann, The Vinyl Room and the Reluctant Chef, which is now closed. Last I saw, the property is listed as a rental for office space. Paranormal experiences include some really creepy apparitions. One is a woman who seems to be sporting her autopsy scars and another is a young woman whom is paralyzed with coins over here eyes.
Duke of Duckworth
The Duke of Duckworth is said to be the best pub in town. The pub has been in business for 25 years and is located at 325 Duckworth Street. I've heard they have the best fish and chips in town. They also have a spirit here that has been affectionately named the Duke. I'm not sure why they call him The Duke because no one knows his story or who he is. The ghost seems to be friendly and is usually seen as an apparition looking out the window and waving. A local artist painting a picture of this and it can be seen hanging in the pub. Staff members claim that he has other antics like moving glasses and hiding things. So you can go for a pint and maybe even have a specter to share it with.
Anglican Cathedral Graveyard on Church Hill
The Anglican Cathedral of St. John the Baptist is the oldest Anglican cathedral in all of Canada and found at 16 Church Hill. The Anglican Parish was originally established in 1699. The first stone church was built in 1843 and was heavily damaged during the Great Fire of 1892. It took 10 years to repair the damage. Disembodied voices are heard within the cathedral. The ghost of a young stone worker who had helped with repairing the cathedral is said to haunt the church. He fell to his death from scaffolding. It is said that he was unable to leave his work unfinished. Many of his co-workers saw his ghost around the job site. Even more shocking, in 1850, a picture was taken of all the workmen after they repaired the nave. They were wearing their Sunday finest and stood in front of the cathedral. The deceased man showed up in the picture, wearing his work clothes.
South of the church is the Anglican Cathedral Graveyard. There are tales of apparitions seen floating around the cemetery. There is a legend here about a man who refused to be buried. This man was believed to be a merchant who had sailed into St. John's. His body was found in a downtown lane in the late 1800s. He was brought to the Anglican cemetery for burial. His casket was lowered into the grave,but about halfway through, the gravediggers heard a knocking coming from the coffin. They quickly shoveled out the dirt and called the doctor. He came and declared that the man was indeed dead, so they started to bury him again. The knocking was heard again. They repeated the process of unburying the man and having a doctor check him again. He was pronounced dead once again and the reburial began with the doctor standing by. The knocking happened again, but the doctor refused to let the men unbury him and the knocking eventually stopped. Strange knocking sounds are heard in the cemetery to this day.
The Captain of Queen's Road
This legend dates back to 1740. There was a captain of a ship who made regular rounds between England and Newfoundland and he had taken up with a woman who lived along Queen's Road in a home later owned by a man named Samuel Pettyham. The captain did not know that he was not the only suitor of this woman. She had a jealous lover and one night he ambushed the captain and killed him. And then he beheaded the captain with a sword. The Captain's ghost is now said to be seen along the area where he was killed and he appears headless. The first person to report the tale was Samuel Pettyham all those centuries ago.
The Majestic Theater
The Majestic Theater is inside a building nicknamed the "flat iron building" on 390 Duckworth Street. Theaters already have a pretty haunted reputation, but imagine one built over an area that had been used for hangings. That is what we have going on here. The building was constructed in 1918 and was refurbished and reopened in 2017 and then promptly caught fire. I'm not sure it is even open right now because all the ticket buying websites have no events for the location and the theater itself has no website. When it was open, workers and patrons claimed to hear the disembodied cries of men, probably those who were hanged. Their moans have also been heard. And there is poltergeist-like activity.
Christians Pub
Christian's Pub is located at 23 George St and is the oldest pub on George Street. I'm not sure what getting screeched in is, but apparently Newfoundlanders know and this is what this pub is known for. If you are not a native of Newfoundland, the Screech In ceremony makes you an honorary Newfoundlander. Most ceremonies include wearing a Sou'Wester (which is a collapsible oilskin rain hat), answering the question "Is ye an honorary Newfoundlander?" with the proper answer "'Deed I is me ol' cock, and long may your big jib draw" and then you get to kiss...a cod or the ass end of a puffin. Christian's Pub has a picture of Anthony Bourdain going through the process. They have one ghost here and they have named her Maggie. She can be a rather rowdy spirit and has occasionally damaged some of the bar equipment.
The Masonic Temple
The three-story Masonic Temple can be found on Cathedral Street. The Masons had a group in Newfoundland beginning in 1746 when the Grand Lodge of Boston issued them a Freemasonfy warrant, but they had no place of their own. They would meet at various places around the city. Their first official home would be a wooden structure on Long's Hill that was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1892. The Temple was built in 1894, which is why it is of Victorian design. It was constructed from large red bricks imported from Accrington and features multiple pediments, pilasters and free standing columns. The cornerstone was laid on August 23, 1894 in a Masonic ceremony led by Sir William Whiteway, a former Newfoundland prime minister who served for 17 years and he built the Newfoundland Railway. The building was consecrated by the Masonic order in 1896. Sir John Chalker Crosbie donated a large amount of money in 1916 and those funds were used to buy a large and beautiful pipe organ that decorates the main room. There are also paintings in the main room of Whiteway and an engineer named Alexander MacKay. He developed the telegraphic and electrical systems in Newfoundland. The Masons used the building until 2007 and then they sold the structure. The Spirit of Newfoundland owns the building now and hosts dinner shows and other artistic endeavours. The Temple was added to the Registered Heritage Structure by the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador in April 1995.
There are several ghost stories told here. One involves a caretaker who claims he was looking for his phone when he backed into someone. Or what he thought was someone. He turned and found no one. Another story was experienced after the Spirit of Newfoundland theater group took over the building. A delivery driver was bringing boxes of legal files into the building. He went to the top of the landing of some stairs and found a man whom he asked for directions as to where to put the boxes. The man gazed at him for a minute and then disappeared. That delivery driver ran out of the building. The man seen by the delivery drivers has been seen by others and he always disappears. The pipe organ in the main room occasionally has music emanating from it when no one is playing it. Disembodied voices are also heard.
Another experience happened during a wedding held in the building in 1999. A man who was a high ranking member of the Masons had passed away a little bit before the wedding. The wedding was his grandson's and at the start of the ceremony, the presiding judge came into the room where the wedding was taking place with a lit candle. He got halfway to the bride and groom when the candle went out. He returned to the doorway, lit the candle and started forward again. The candle went out at the halfway point again. He decided to just carry on and the wedding continued. One of the guests pointed out that two pictures of the groom's grandfather hung on opposite sides of the wall of the room. This was the same spot where the candles went out.
Newman Wine Vaults
The Newman Wine Vaults were built in the early 19th century and consisted of two brick-and-stone wine cellars. The name comes from the owner, an English firm named Newman and Company. Their specialty was port wine. Today, the wine vault is a museum. There is unexplained stuff going on here with the two main spectres belonging to an African slave and a child. These spirits pinch people and occasionally get more aggressive and shove people. There is photographic evidence too. During a wedding photoshoot in the vault, a mysterious figure appears.
The Grace Hospital Nursing Residence
The Grace Hospital Nursing Residence was built in 1923 and opened in September as the first maternity hospital in Newfoundland and was opened by the Salvation Army. It had 100 beds and soon served as the second nursing school in Newfoundland. The hospital was expanded over the years and grew to 200 beds. It was opened until the year 2000 and was left abandoned. Much of it has been demolished, save for the Nursing Residence. And it is this building that is said to be very haunted.
People who live near the property claim to see strange lights and apparitions. Strange noises come from the building as well. When the buildings were being demolished, a member of the demolition crew claimed that he saw someone peeking around door frames at him while he worked. He would just see this thing out of the corner of his eye, but one glimpse had him convinced that it was a little boy, so he decided to go find the child because he was not supposed to be here. He didn't see him anywhere, so he went back to work, but again saw the child. Then the child seemed to float and disappeared through a doorway. The child had been wearing a hospital gown. He didn't see him again.
A nursing student had gone home on break from his classes at university and his home was near the old Grace Hospital parking lot. He awoke at 4 am to a terrifying sound and when he looked out his window, he saw something terrifying. A figure was walking in the parking lot, but it had no legs. There was nothing below the torso. The noise he heard was a mournful call that the creature or thing would make every few minutes. It would walk around and then stop, lift its head to the sky and wail. The figure stopped after about 15miutes and walked towards the building where it disappeared.
On a winter day, a nurse was leaving her shift at the hospital when she saw a woman walking toward the back of the hospital. She was worried about the woman because she was not wearing a coat. She also wondered if she was a patient because she didn't recognize her as a member of the nursing staff. She followed her around a corner, but could not see her anywhere. She followed the footprints in the snow and found they they stopped right in front of a solid brick wall. The woman was nowhere and she clearly had not walked anywhere else, unless she had flown.
The LPSU Hall
At the corner of Duckworth Street and Prescott Street is a mural of a young man named Fred Gamberg. It is a memorial to him. On July 10, 1995, he was just 24 years old when he slipped from a cliff in Flatrock, Newfoundland and drowned in the North Atlantic. He was a fixture at LPSU Hall, working as a maintenance man and putting together music shows. He is said to haunt the building that can be seen behind the mural, LPSU Hall, a three storied timber-framed building. It is said that this is one of the most haunted buildings on one of St. John's most haunted streets. The building sits at 3 Victoria Street. This originally was home to the First Congregational Church of Newfoundland, which was built there in 1789. A fire destroyed it in 1817. Another church was built in its place, this time an ecumenical one. This one was also burned up in a fire, the Great Fire of 1892. The land was bought by the Sons of Temperance and they built their Temperance Hall there in 1893. They promoted abstinence from alcohol.
They didn't stay long and sold to the Longshoremen's Protective Union in 1912 and that is why this is called LPSU Hall. They renovated the building mostly on the inside. The exterior looks much the same as it did in the early 1900s. In 1976, the Resource Foundation for the Arts bought the hall and transformed it into the Resource Center for the Arts. It has twice been renovated since, once in 1984 and most recently in 2008. It is used as a theater and arts center.
There are several ghost stories here and why not since it is a theater. Strange sounds are a main part of the haunting. There are disembodied footsteps and then sounds with no reasonable explanation like things clattering to the ground, but nothing being on the floor when people search out a cause. And then there are the dark shadow figures that appear and disappear throughout the hall. I mentioned Fred. Reports of a young male ghost being spotted in the main theater sitting in seats started in 1995, right after Fred's death. A young woman was sitting next to him and she noticed that he was really enjoying the show. When the show was over, she turned to him to ask what he thought and when the lights came up, he completely disappeared before her eyes. She couldn't believe the seat was empty next to her. When she described the man later, people said that it sounded like Fred. And many people have seen him since then as well.
The New Courthouse
This location has the legend of Catherine Snow connected to it. She was accused of murdering her husband and was hanged from the window of the old courthouse on July 21, 1834. She was the last woman hanged in Newfoundland. Perhaps she haunts the location because she was actually innocent.
Catherine Mandeville was born in Harbour Grace, Newfoundland around 1793 and she eventually married John Snow and they had seven children. The marriage was not a happy one and the couple fought often with some fights getting violent. When John disappeared in August of 1833, people immediately started whispering that Catherine had done something to John. Dried blood was found at
John Snow's Salmon Cove wharf. Forget that we don't even know if this is human blood. The police arrested two men right away. One was Tobias Manderville who was Catherine's cousin and was reputedly carrying on an affair with her and the other was Arthur Spring, a household servant. Catherine ran for the woods when she heard about the arrests, but eventually turned herself in.
Spring confessed and said that the three of them had shot John and threw his body in the Atlantic Ocean. Catherine denied having anything to do with the crime and even though there was no evidence she had anything to do with it, she was convicted by a three man jury and condemned to hang. Manderville and Spring were hanged a few days later, but Catherine was pregnant, so they waited until she birthed and nursed the baby for a while before hanging her before a large crowd. Before dying she said, "I was a wretched woman, but I am as innocent of any participation in the crime of murder as an unborn child".
Several days after the execution, Catherine's ghost started showing up in the courthouse and outside where she had been hanged. The cemetery where she is buried also has had sightings. Local newspapers even reported the sightings. The old courthouse burned down in 1846,but this didn't stop Catherine. She was seen during the reconstruction and when the new building opened in 1847, her ghost was there again. The Great Fire of 1892 destroyed the courthouse yet again. It was rebuilt again in 1902 and Catherine's ghost was there again. Her spirit is seen throughout the building and people claim that phantom footsteps belong to her. The elevator goes up and down on its own as well.
St. Andrews Presbyterian Church was built in 1893 where the old catholic cemetery had been and there is no record that bodies were moved, including that of Catherine Snow. So perhaps that is why her spirit walks the grounds of the church here too. In 2012, nearly 200 years after she was tried and hanged, the case was reopened by the Newfoundland Historical Society, and Catherine was given a new trial. Two Supreme Court Justices, Carl Thompson and Seamus O'Regan sat in on the case and the defense lawyer was Rosellen Sullivan. Four hundred sixty people sat in the audience and served as jury. Catherine was exonerated, but that hasn't diminshed the activity.
The Four Sisters
There are four stone houses along Temperance Street at addresses 31 to 37 that were built by Samuel Garrett. They are formally called the Samuel Garrett houses, but everybody refers to them as the Four Sisters. Garrett built the homes over ten years, starting in 1893, to give to his four daughters as wedding gifts. Only two daughters would live in the houses. His daughter Mary died at 24 years old. His daughter Eliza never married and stayed at his home with him. Daughter Laurretta moved into number 35 with her new husband in 1901, and daughter Emily moved into number 37. Two of Garrett's grandchildren eventually would move into 31 and 33 when they were old enough. The houses were designated Registered Heritage Structures in 1988
There is a female ghost here. A family rented one of the homes and encountered this spirit. It began with their young daughter screaming and crying at night. She would tell her parents that she was visited by a woman who frightened her. Over time, the cries and screams stopped because the girl got used to the nightly visits and even started laughing and talking with the woman. People who pass by the homes claim to see a woman watching them from the window and sometimes even waving and then she disappears.
Others who have lived in the homes claim that a female ghost appears and then slides across the floor, passing through a wall. She will then sometimes appear in the house next door to where she has passed through. The reason for this is thought to be that this is a residual haunting and since the houses were once connected by doors, she is just walking through the doors rather than a wall. People claim to hear strange noises and to see ghostly lights coming from a tunnel that runs underneath the homes. The tunnel is thought to have once carried water from a lake that is 1.5 km away. When the buildings were abandoned, squatters claimed to have had several haunted experiences and made videos of the experiences to put up on YouTube.
There are hundreds of years of history here in St. John's. The buildings are beautiful architecture and each with its own special history. I've shared just a bit of that history with you here. Do these locations have ghosts walking around and continuing on in the afterlife? Are these buildings in St. John's haunted? That is for you to decide!
Show Notes:
One of the more well-known ghost tours here is the St. John's Haunted Hike: http://hauntedhike.com
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