Moment in Oddity - Reindeer Killed By Lightning (Suggested by: Chelsea Flowers)
Many people and animals have a natural fear of lightning. Powerful and beautiful in its own right, lightning can also be very destructive. A clear example of lightning's power occurred back in August of 2016. On Norway's Hardangervidda Plateau, an unbelievable weather event took place. The unimaginable aftermath was discovered by a park ranger who found 323 wild tundra reindeer which had been killed by an unusual lightning event. After the mass kill off, instead of removing the carcasses, the park decided to leave the reindeer's bodies where they were. They allowed nature to take its course, thus giving scientists the opportunity to study this island of decomposition and how it might change the arctic tundra ecosystem. Predators, in the form of wolverines, golden eagles and arctic foxes, exploited the easy meals afforded to them while the getting was fresh. Then scavengers like ravens and crows moved in. From there, the 'landscape of fear' in the animal world was additionally studied by the scientists. The decisions animals made in relation to food vs safety trade-offs was revealed as scientists watched the carcasses of bloated reindeer bodies decomposed into dry skeletons. With such an unusual situation afforded to scientists to observe, it's easy to imagine that much was learned during the study. However, a beautiful Norwegian Plateau covered by over 300 desiccating reindeer carcasses caused by a freak storm of nature, certainly is odd.
This Month in History - National Hot Dog Day
In the United States, on the third Wednesday of every July, one particular food item is celebrated and to many Americans, it is the epitome of summer. Some of us of a certain age can recall the commercial jingle, "Oh I WISH I was an Oscar Meyer Weiner, That is what I'd truly like to be, Cause if I was an Oscar Meyer Weiner, Everyone would be in love with me..." Whether you love Pink's, Oscar Meyer, Dodger dogs, turkey or veggie dogs, this particular BBQ fare for American's just screams SUMMER! *Fun Fact, over 25 million hot dogs are sold at baseball stadiums every year. Whether your dogs are grilled, pan fried, rotisseried, toasted over a campfire or boiled, they are sure to satisfy, especially with such a variety of toppings. If you're a purist then you will go with just mustard and ketchup, or you can add onion, relish, chili, mayo, cheese and even sauerkraut, the toppings can go on and on. According to the website, National Day Calendar, "On May 31, 2012, a world record was set for the most expensive hot dog. The “California Capitol City Dawg” sold for $145.49 at Capitol Dawg in Sacramento, California. That particular hot dog consisted of: a grilled 18″ all-beef, in natural casing frank from Chicago, served on a fresh-baked herb and oil focaccia roll spread with white truffle butter, then grilled and topped with whole grain mustard from France, garlic and herb mayonnaise, sauteed chopped shallots, organic mixed baby greens, maple syrup, marinated/fruitwood smoked uncured bacon from New Hampshire, chopped tomatoes, sweetened dried cranberries, moose cheese from Sweden basil olive oil and pear-cranberry-coconut balsamic vinaigrette and ground peppercorn. That sounds like quite the intermingling of flavors for one's taste buds! Proceeds from the sale of each 3 lb.'super dog' were donated to the Shriners Hospitals for Children that year. To those who will be celebrating National Hot Dog Day on July 17th this year, enjoy.
Winnipeg's Hamilton House
Dr. T. G. Hamilton was a trail blazer in the field of Paranormal Research. Hamilton was a medical doctor and because of his experiences with death, he began to wonder if there was a way that we could figure out what happens to us after we die. Hamilton and his family moved into a large home in Winnipeg and it was here that he carried out much of his research, along with his wife. Their children continued the legacy of peering behind the veil. And perhaps that is why the Hamilton House of Winnipeg, Canada is said to be haunted. Join us as we explore the history and hauntings of Hamilton House.
The area where the Hamilton House stands was named Elmwood after the nearby cemetery of the same name that opened in 1902. This neighborhood would become one of the most industrialized areas of Winnipeg. Winnipeg itself was founded at the confluence of the Assiniboine (Uh sin a boyne) and Red Rivers. The name Winnipeg comes from the Cree words "win" and "nippee" meaning murky water. Many First Nation tribes made this there home before Europeans arrived, from the Red River Metis (Meh tease) to the Ojibwe (Oh Jeeb way) to the Dakota peoples and, of course, the Cree. Europeans built several forts in the area to facilitate fur trading and the Red River Settlement was started in 1812 by Scottish farmers. They were known as Selkirk Settlers and their presence intensified issues between the two fur trading companies in the area, Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company. There was a battle and a merger. The unincorporated village of Winnipeg emerged from the Red River Settlement in 1862 and Winnipeg eventually was incorporated in 1873.
Thomas Glendenning Hamilton, or T.G., was born in 1873 in Toronto. His early years were spent in a sod house. When he was ten, his family moved to Saskatchewan and his father died shortly thereafter. His mother moved the family to Winnipeg in 1891. T.G. attended Manitoba College and then moved on to medical school and graduated from Manitoba Medical College in 1903. He married Lillian May Forrester in 1906 and they would have four children, Margret, Glen and Arthur and James who were twins. In 1910, Dr. Hamilton and Lillian moved into a house at 185 Kelvin Street (which is today 183 Henderson Highway) in Winnipeg that the doctor would set up as his medical office. The medical practice was on the main level and surgery was in the basement and the family lived on the upper two floors. The house was built in the classical revivalist style, which combined Greek and Roman embellishments with columns. It has a simple elegance. There is nothing particularly special about it on the surface.
T.G. was a well respected practitioner who eventually became president of the Manitoba Medical Association, president of the Canadian Medical Association, the founder of the Manitoba Medical Bulletin and a fellow at the American College of Surgeons. So he is not the type of man one would assume would get involved in the paranormal field. But that is just what he did. He became the first president of the Winnipeg Society for Psychical Research. T.G.'s journey into the paranormal started with the death of his son Arthur who died from the Spanish Flu in 1919. He had a deep desire to know what had become of his son after death. And don't we all understand that quest? Because of his background, T.G. wanted to use science to figure out where we go after we die. Hamilton would join an international group of scientists exploring psychical phenomenon who were well respected like Nobel Prize–winning French physiologist Charles
Robert Richet and British chemist and physicist Sir William Crookes. Hamilton first investigated telepathy and after being satisfied that this was a thing, he moved on to telekinesis and then to working with mediums.
The Hamilton family all took part in experiments and research and they documented everything in pictures and text. These documents are called fonds and the Hamilton family donated their fonds to the University of Manitoba. This research was conducted from 1918 to 1945 and covered all aspects of spiritualism and unexplained activity from teleplasm to telekinesis to psychic phenomenon. The collection includes 1300 notes and documentation and 700 photos. The Hamiltons held hundreds of seances in their home, most accounts claim that they hosted 1,000 in a room of their house. We worked our way through many of the photos. There is a teleplasm coming from a woman's mouth that has the face of a man in the center of it. It looks like a photo that has been placed in the middle of cotton. The teleplasm had to have been a favorite because there are many pictures of this. Some are just barely forming at the mouth and others have pictures, some with as many as five pictures in the middle. One of these pictures featuring three faces we'll share on Instagram and it was described as "A photograph of a teleplasmic mass that contained the faces of Lillian Hamilton's aunt Christine and her brothers that appeared during a seance at the home of the British chemist, Mr. Myers, in August 1932."
One of the favorite experiments of the Hamiltons was table tipping. A friend had visited their house and asked if they had ever tried it and he explained that it was an old parlor game he had witnessed in the old country. He had experimented with it and gotten good results. The Hamiltons were intrigued and they bought a small wooden table that was about the size of a piano bench. They sat on two sides and had two other people sit on the other sides and everyone placed their fingertips lightly on the table. The table immediately became agitated, described as though it were in the hand of a giant, and it began to pound up and down and tilted on two legs. The action was described as aggressive. The Hamiltons then began to call out letters of the alphabet and the table would tip to indicate which letter was chosen. Lillian's mother was there and she wrote down the letters on paper. After a few minutes, the experiment was stopped and the lights turned up, so that they could study the message. The message had come from somebody claiming their name was Myers and he said he was the chief spokesman. The message was "Plato Book 10 allegory very true. Read Lodge. Trust his religious sense. Myers instead are here. Stead answers doctor's questions."
The Hamiltons weren't acquainted with the works of Plato, so they certainly didn't know that there were 10 books in Plato's "The Republic." Book 10 was Plato's argument that philosophy-based education was superior to traditional poetry-based education. At his time, poets were thought to be the wisest. The Myers who brought the message was Frederic W.H. Myers who founded the Society for Psychical Research. He had passed in 1901 and he put forward the idea that the human self survives bodily death and he tried proving this through his own psychical research. Myers was described as a man who had lost his Christian faith and was seeking a new religion that would reassure him that the soul went on after death. The name Lodge referred to Oliver Lodge who was a Christian Spiritualist who wrote "Survival of Man" in 1909. The name Stead referred to the famous journalist and Spiritualist William T. Stead who died on board the Titanic. During his first seance, a spirit communicated to him a prophecy: "Young man, you are going to be the St. Paul of Spiritualism." He popularized psychical research through his writing and he founded the magazine Borderland in 1893 with the renowned medium Ada Goodrich Freer. The focus of the magazine was on Spiritualism and research of the paranormal.
So let us just stop here for a moment and pull the listeners into a rabbit hole with a big side of synchronicity. The day before Diane started the research for this episode, she was going through the movies playing on Pluto TV and saw that Titanic was on, so she turned it on. About 30 minutes into the movie, she checked her messages on Instagram and saw that listener Jimmy Tucker had sent a reel about a flood at the suburban Chicago Titanic exhibit. The strange thing about the story is that no one could find the source of the water. There were no pipe leaks. This wasn't from a flood of rain. It was a complete mystery. You can find the story from a couple weeks ago. So we have a weird phenomenon connected to a Titanic exhibit and Diane is learning this while randomly watching the movie Titanic. Fast forward to the next day and here we have this Stead who died on the Titanic. And here is some strangeness with that. The British Association for Victorian Studies published an article entitled "Ghostly Messages from Beyond the Titanic: W.T. Stead, Spiritualism and The Blue Island." This is from the article, "For his spiritualist daughter Estelle, her father’s tragic death was merely the beginning of a series of extended séance communications she would have with him through the medium, Pardoe Woodman. Purportedly voiced by her father after the Titanic’s sinking, Estelle and Woodman published The Blue Island: Experiences of a New Arrival Beyond the Veil, in which Stead revealed his journey into the spirit world, from floating above the sinking Titanic, to his observations of the spirit world’s aesthetic appearance. In climactic detail, the narrative opens with Stead relaying emotive descriptions of the ship’s destruction and the effect on the spirits who passed on: ‘here were hundreds of bodies floating in the water —dead —hundreds of souls carried through the air, alive; very much alive, some were. Many, realising their death had come, were enraged at their own powerlessness to save their valuables. They fought to save what they had on earth prized so much. The scene on the boat at the time of striking was not pleasant, but it was as nothing to the scene among the poor souls newly thrust out of their bodies, all unwillingly’. The rest of the narrative is lighter in tone, focusing on practical details of the afterlife, including the clothes ghosts wear, architecture in the spirit world, and the change in corporeal desires, such as not needing to smoke, and only consuming food as a means of ‘refreshment’, rather than as vital sustenance. However, it was the triviality of many of these details that led one critic to deem Stead’s bold visualisation of the afterlife ‘a trifle dull’." And then, a couple nights later, Kelly shows Diane a video of a guy on the street in NYC trying to convince people to sing a song while he plays his guitar. He manages to wrangle in a girl who tells him that she is performing in Titanique just a couple blocks over and the man who is with her plays in Foreigner. We looked up Titanique to see what that was and its a parody of Titanic featuring the songs of Celine Dion and a woman portraying Dion breaks into a bunch of the scenes being re-enacted on stage, singing her songs as well as the cast sang Dion's songs too. Let us just say, if we were scheduled to be taking a cruise anytime soon, we would be cancelling. All this Titanic has been a bit much!
Okay, so back to this message they got while doing the table tipping. The Hamiltons saw the message as evidence that they should continue on and they regularly held table sittings with the same group that had been in the room when they had this first message. In February 1921, Lillian started meeting with the family's nanny, Elizabeth Poole, in a darkened room on the second floor of the house to use the Ouija board. After the first table tipping experiment, the two women switched to table tipping and they would get the table to strike the floor in a regular rhythm up and down. The two felt this was an upgrade to the Ouija board that they had used before this time. This room became the main room used for experiments and was kept locked when not in use. A red bulb was in the center of the room for light. The Hamiltons also began to conduct experiments in other people's homes like Sylvia Barber.
The Hamiltons often worked with a medium by the name of Mary Marshall and she claimed to be able to channel a German spirit guide named T.A.M. Marshall was a British medium who was introduced to the Hamiltons by their nanny Mrs. Poole and she manifested raps, levitation of tables, writing on glass and knotting of handkerchiefs under the table-leaf. During a seance in 1932, T.G. photographed Marshall producing a nasal ectoplasm with various images in it, including the face of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The plasm sure looks like cheesecloth. Doyle actually visited Hamilton House and took part in a seance and he claimed that a table went flying across the room. He described Winnipeg as a psychic center. The Hamiltons never claimed to be spiritualists and were active members of the United Church of Canada. Guests they invited to witness the seances and participate included lawyers, fellow doctors and even clergymen. T.G. had started down this road because of the death of his son Arthur and he claimed that he had contacted Arthur.
There were some famous deceased people that the Hamiltons also claimed to have contact with and these included missionary and explorer David Livingstone, British author Robert Louis Stevenson and preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon. Hamilton made great effort to prevent fraud during seances as well. From the start Hamilton had taken measures to preclude the possibility of fraud during the seances. He would set up 11 cameras to catch all angles and had a remote-control apparatus. He and his guests would physically check mediums and sitters before any experiments. Mrs. Poole even channeled a ghost telling the group they needed to give mediums a sponge bath before seances to guard against fraud. This could just be that Mrs. Poole enjoyed that and we're shocked she didn't go for the massage add-on. And special scrutineers were invited specifically to watch for fraud. Politician William Lyon Mackenzie King attended a seance in August 1933 and he wrote of the experiments in his diary that they were "amazing beyond all words." T.G. wasn't shy about sharing his findings with his medical peers either. The British Medical Association and the Canadian Medical Association held a joint convention in Winnipeg in August of 1930 and Hamilton presented the results of his psychical research to more than 500 delegates. Dr. Henry Bruce Chown had participated in several of the investigations and he came out as a believer in the phenomena, but he also, interestingly, said that he didn't believe that it was a result of spirit activity. And that is the side that many of us fall on. Could these manifestations be due to something other than a human spirit manifesting strange things? As we look back at our episode on Carl Jung, he definitely was finding other possibilities for unexplained events, especially of the psychical nature.
T.G.'s experiments came to an end on April 7, 1935 when he had a massive heart attack and died at the age of 61. His wife Lillian continued to conduct seances until 1945 and Hamilton House continued to be a meeting place for a circle of Spiritualist mediums. T.G. had always thought of Lillian as an equal and she partook as much in the research as he did at a time when women didn't get much credit for that. T.G. Hamilton hadn't published a complete record of his research on psychical phenomena before he died, so his children continued his legacy. His youngest son, James, edited a book Hamilton had started called "Intention and survival: psychical research studies and the bearing of intentional actions by trance personalities on the problem of human survival" and got it published in 1942. His daughter, Margaret, published a sequel named "Is survival a fact? Studies of deep-trance automatic scripts and the bearing of intentional actions by the trance personalities on the question of human survival" in 1969.
Margaret lived in the house until 1986. She eventually sold the house and it became a variety of businesses like the Olive Branch, which was a gift and art shop that sold work crafted by artists in Kenya and other parts of the world. The upper stories were rented out as Air B&B apartments for a time. The Hamilton House was acquired by the current owner, Gags Unlimited Inc, in 2021 and they have put forward an effort to share not only the house with the public, but to rebuild its energies and continue to conduct psychical experiments. They offer meeting space, tours of the house, group seances, metaphysical workshops and psychic readings. There is also a shop on the first level. And they offer overnight private paranormal investigations because the house is reputedly haunted.
Cheryl Wiebe (Weeb), who owns Gags Unlimited, has had her own experiences in the house. She told Winnipeg's CTV News, "'My personal experience is when I was waiting for the appraiser and I was at the front counter, which is right 10 feet from the door, and I heard a knock at the door. I went to go and answer the door and it is glass, and nobody was there. So I went to the back door thinking someone was there, that it was the appraiser and nobody was there.' Wiebe said a similar experience happened when she was renovating the home with her son. He went to use the washroom and heard a knocking sound. When he returned, he asked his mother if it was her. I said, ‘I’m not knocking. I was hanging wallpaper.’ He said ‘I was downstairs and somebody knocked on the door,’ and he knocked on the wall. He said it was clear, like that."
CTV News' photojournalist Zachary Kitchen who shot the interviews had some weird experiences. Nearly all the batteries on his electronics drained. And this next one is really weird. He was using a wagon to haul his camera gear and when he was unloading the equipment for the shoot, he found a ring that he hadn't put in the wagon. Turns out this was a ring that had been found buried in the carpet during renovations by Cheryl and she keeps it on a counter. Only Cheryl and Zach were in the house at the time.
Psychic Medium Bernice Bisson had an opportunity to read the house one summer and she experienced doors opening and closing on their own and unexplained noises. There is a window on the second floor where many people have seen a woman in the window when no one is in the house. She seems to be gazing out across the street to the cemetery where all the family members are buried. This woman even showed up in the listing picture when the house was for sale. She appears to have short hair and light-colored clothing.
Many of the photos captured by T.G. Hamilton seem hard to believe, but they have garnered a cult following in the artistic world and despite the fantastical claims of the Hamiltons, they were very much respected and continue to be even today. The fact that the University of Manitoba took their collection and have shared it with the world is proof of that. In the end, it is up to the listeners to decide. Did the Hamiltons and their various friends and guests contact the other side? Is their former home haunted? That is for you to decide!
Show Notes:
A video of Hamilton's ectoplasm photos: https://youtu.be/W0HncGNBCqY?si=_Kjt4P5RUIbeQY0Y
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