Moment in Oddity - Poop Chisel Rescue
There is a legend about a famous Arctic explorer, anthropologist and author named Peter Freuchen (FROY kuhn). He was a large Danish adventurer, standing at 6 foot 7 inches. He spent years mapping uncharted areas of Greenland and helped establish the well-known Thule trading post. However, one thing Freuchen (FROY kuhn) is most well known for are his stories of extreme survival. In 1923, he was traveling with his Arctic sled dog team when a terrible storm demobilized them. He took shelter under his sled and remained there for 30 hours. Once the storm passed, Freuchen (FROY kuhn) discovered that he was unable to escape his icy shelter with his bare hands. Thinking swiftly, he made a BM deposit and shaped it to form a chisel. Once frozen, Freuchen (FROY kuhn) used the turd tool to tear through the solid ice to free himself of his tomb. In addition to this terrifying tale, after hiking 3 hours to safety, he used a pliers and hammer to remove three of his toes that were frost bitten beyond repair. In 2019, a study from Kent State University was released, covering experimental archeology. They wanted to see if frozen feces could really prove to be a valuable tool in emergency circumstances. I for one would NOT wish to be a conductor of this experiment. To simulate a close excrement dietary match, one of the experimenters consumed a high protein and fatty acids diet for 8 days. Fecal samples were molded to replicate knives and chisels. They were stored at -20 degrees Celcius. Unfortunately, despite their best effort, the anthropologists' experiences with the turd tools simply deteriorated upon usage. One scientist said, "It was like a brown crayon". Nothing came close to the capability described by Freuchen (FROY kuhn). Was this legend supplied by a larger-than-life man true, or was he just full of....cough, well, you know. either way, this story certainly is odd.
Haunted Cheltenham (Chelteh num)
Cheltenham in Britain is a wealthy, historic spa town that is a renowned center of cultural activity featuring wonderful Regency architecture. The town has been described as an unspoiled Cotswold town and it lies in the center of the Cotswolds. The very first major investigation by the Society for Psychical Research took place in Cheltenham and the results inspired the story of The Woman in Black. This is a very haunted place with stories of poltergeists, banshees, phantoms, headless horsemen and ghosts of military men and monks. Join us for the history and hauntings of Cheltenham, Britain.
A church was in Cheltenham as early as 803, probably from Celtic origin with an early name referring to being a settlement on a steep hill. Documents reveal a substantial settlement with markets and fairs in 1223. The Cotswold area was known for sheep herding with cot meaning "sheep enclosure" and wold meaning "hills." The land was unsuitable for farming. Three mineral springs were discovered in 1716 and Cheltenham became a health and holiday spa town, under the direction of Captain Henry Skillicorne. He had inherited the property through his marriage to Elizabeth Mason. He built a pump to regulate water flow. A billiard room and ballroom were also built. Horse racing is popular here and started in 1815. King George III visited in 1788. The United States Army Services of Supply used Cheltenham as its primary headquarters and this became a giant storage depot for countless trucks, jeeps, tanks and artillery pieces for the D-Day invasion. Several cultural festivals are held here annually. And many locations apparently have ghosts. During the English Civil War that was fought from 1642 to 1651, there were numerous skirmishes around Cheltenham. The town was involved in the Siege of Gloucester and the Battle of Stow-on-the-Wold. Roundheads supported a constitutional monarchy with a Parliament holding supreme control and the term started as a form of derision since they kept their hair closely cropped. Oliver Cromwell and his Parliamentarians won the Civil War and King Charles I was executed in 1649. The Cavaliers had supported King Charles I and supported an absolute monarchy. Roundhead and Cavalier apparitions are seen all around the area.
Ellenborough Park
What would become Ellenborough Park started with a tenant farmer named Thomas Goodman who built a house block by block in 1485, carting much of the supplies from his former home in Southam. The ancient Great Hall contains remnants going back to this time with Goodman's original coat of arms on the front door and there are bullet holes left over from the Civil War.
Goodman didn't finish the house before he sold it in 1520 to Sir John Huddleston and he dedicated himself to finishing the place. His granddaughter, Eleanor De la Bere, became the next owner in 1554 and she lived there with her family for many years and then the house passed to her son Richard. Each of these owners has a crest still representing them in the manor house. The De la Bere family would hold the house for over 200 years and in 1788, King George III would stay here when he visited the spa waters in Cheltenham. Edward Law bought the house in 1833. He was said to have been a brilliant orator, which may be why he was quite vain and apparently had a tumultuous marriage to Lady Jane Digby. Lady Jane was 17 when she married the 32-year-old Law in 1824. She was the most famous debutante in London and highly sought after, so one would think Law would pay her a lot of attention. That wasn't the case. Remember, he was vain. His political career was everything to him and he ignored Lady Jane and cheated on her multiple times. So, she retaliated against him by having affairs, the first with her cousin Colonel George Anson. She got pregnant and had a son and Law accepted the child happily even though it probably wasn't his. She caused a huge public scandal by having an affair with Prince Felix Schwarzenberg of Austria. There was no secrecy to this affair and she was quite boisterous about it. She also got pregnant again and there was no chance that it was Law's child because they hadn't been around each other in months. Law, who was also known as Lord Ellenborough, divorced Lady Jane in 1830 and she became a social outcast. Jane had an amazing life. We encourage listeners to look her up. She went on to be married three more times - the final time to a sheik, she had affairs with two kings, gave birth to five children, and lived a life that would have scandalized any woman on earth, but she was happy to be free to live as she wished.
Ellenborough added towers to the house to make it look more castle-like. He brought back relics from Indian Palaces and they still are a part of the building. In 1871, Ellenborough died and Mrs. Ratcliff and her daughters Lilian and Phyllis lived in the home through the World Wars. They held parties in the manor and nursed soldiers back to health.
In 1947, the manor became a high school for girls and remained that until the school closed in 1972. The house became a hotel in 1973 named De la Bere and was open until financial difficulties caused its closure in 2008. A three-year refurbishment took place at that time. The hotel officially became Ellenborough Park in 2011 and featured 61 rooms on 90 acres of grounds. There is a bar and restaurant here as well. Guests and staff have reported seeing the spirit of a former matron of the girls' school. She was a harsh woman who terrorized the pupils. The matron was dismissed from her position and she was unable to cope with that and herself in her bedroom. The hotel bar is now where that room had been and her spirit haunts the bar, appearing as a distinct figure. Guests have reported waking in the middle of the night and seeing the figure of a woman hovering over their beds. One of the stories goes back to the De La Bere Hotel era. A businessman was attending a conference in Cheltenham and he checked into the hotel late. He told the front desk the next day that he awakened around 3am with an overwhelming sense of being observed. When he opened his eyes, he saw a woman in a period dress standing at the foot of his bed. He was frozen in bed until she vanished a minute later. He checked out and went to another hotel. A maintenance worker also saw the woman during an early morning shift. He was walking in a hallway when he noticed a woman at the far end of the hall, wearing a period dress. At first he thought it was a guest because it entered a room, but this was the room he needed to fix a plumbing issue in and no one answered the door. He opened the locked door and found the room empty. The worker later checked with the front desk and was told that no guest was registered in that room.
People claim to have a feeling of being watched and cold spots are felt throughout the building. Now this is Britain where cold spots throughout an old building seem normal, but these cold spots move around as if something unseen passes through the space. A former bartender recalled an evening when she felt an intense cold pass through her body that lasted several seconds. She was left shaking. She turned to see if the door was open, but it was sealed tight.
The Ivy Montpellier Brasserie (mawn-pel-yay brah-suh-ree)
The Ivy says on its website, "Since 1917, The Ivy has been synonymous with refined dining in the heart of the West End. Today, that legacy continues at The Ivy Montpellier Brasserie (mawn-pel-yay brah-suh-ree) - celebrated as one of the best Cheltenham restaurants, blending timeless British classics with impeccable hospitality." The restaurant is located in a beautiful Victorian building on the town's Promenade and is known for its high-end cuisine. Henry Thompson opened the original Montpellier (mawn-pel-yay) Spa on this spot in 1809. A new building was built to replace the original in 1817 and this was designed by George Allen Underwood. J.N. Papworth bought the building and added the rotunda dome in 1825 and continued running this as a spa until people weren't interested in the waters anymore. The place was transformed into a concert and dance hall and the rotunda proved perfect for that. A bank moved into the building in 1882 and became Lloyds Bank in 1926. Abel Giandolini opened the original Ivy in 1917. He was joined by Mario Gallati a few years later. There are several locations and this one in the Montpellier (mawn-pel-yay) Rotunda was opened in 2017.
There are some lingering spirits here. Staff and patrons have claimed to hear disembodied voices and whispers and there are unexplained chills in parts of the building. The lights flicker and turn off and on by themselves. No one is sure who she is, but a female ghost in a period dress has been seen a few times on the upper level of the restaurant.
The Old Courthouse
British architect Thomas Charles Sorby designed the old courthouse in the Italianate style and built it between 1869 and 1871. The building had a large public waiting area on the ground floor and there was also a clerk's office and the Counsel and Solicitors Room. The first floor had the court chamber with public benches and the court room separated by Corinthian columns. There was also an office for the judge. The basement was the jail. The courthouse was built in response to changes being made in the local civil court system. This was an effort to nationalize the recovery of small debts and set up 60 districts with a judge over each district. Juries were made up of five people and they had to rule unanimously. This courthouse was open until the beginning of the 21st Century, closing in 2005. The reason for closure was that it had fallen into considerable disrepair. One judge said of his time in the courthouse, "We rarely had a jury in court. However, I recall one case that lasted five days that required one. They sat each day in hats, scarfs, coats and gloves with electric fan heaters warming their feet. Such was the design and disrepair of the old building that it was either freezing cold or tropically hot due to the large glass feature in the ceiling. When it rained the water would dribble down the electric cables that the lights were suspended from and drip onto my chair." An Italian restaurant moved in for awhile and then the gastropub Brunning and Price moved in and did a proper remodel to the building, retaining its historic charm, but upgrading everything. A bar now replaces the judge's bench. The original Court Chamber is still here with marbled columns and wood-paneled docks. The old prison cells are still in the basement. The gastropub opened in 2018. They feature over 130 types of gin.
Patrons and staff claim to occasionally hear the banging of a judge's gavel. A shadowy male ghost in period dress is seen in the jail area and some think he might be a former inmate there. Slamming doors are heard as well as disembodied footsteps. People claim to have the unsettling feeling of being watched as well.
The Cheltenham Theatre
The Cheltenham Theater is on Bath Road and fittingly, is started out as a bathhouse. Henry Thompson built it in 1806 and named it Thompson's Baths. This was a small bathhouse with six baths and a small laboratory for pulling the salts out of the water to be sold for medical use or for people to add to their own baths. These were called The Real Cheltenham Salts. The selling of the salts was very successful and Thompson enlarged the lab in 1818. Two years before that, in 1816, author Jane Austen visited the baths. Thompson died in 1820 and his son Pearson took over management and he added to the building, installing more wash baths and a large swimming pool in 1847. A mill and bakery would be added as well. The Great Flood of 1855 came through and did quite a bit of damage. The insurance company foreclosed on Pearson and he lost the bathhouse. The Cheltenham Montpellier Gardens Company took over the property and made renovations in 1862. In 1898, the Corporation of Cheltenham bought the property and they closed the bath for two years. This reopened as the Montpellier Baths in 1900 with a refurbished swimming pool that was covered over in the winter for indoor cricket and dinners for soldiers during World War I. In 1940, it was covered over for good. The medical baths were still open through all of this. Local civic theaters were being opened in towns and Cheltenham didn't want to be left behind so they started looking at the bathhouse as a possible place to open a temporary theater. In 1945, this opened as the Civic Playhouse. In 1954, it was decided to make the playhouse permanent under the Cheltenham Theatre & Arts Club. Today, this runs as an intimate 186-seat theatre, with a wide range of performances and events.
Several people died in the building over the years. A Captain William Layman was found in the bath with his throat cut. Josiah Jessop had lived here and managed the baths and he suffered a short illness in 1881 and died. Lillian earl Davies was 11-years-old and at the baths with her school mistress who left her unattended. The girl pulled the two supporting pins out of a gymnasium vaulting horse and it fell on her, killing her.
The ghost of a little girl is seen and people believe that this is Lillian. After one play, a patron went to the front office and said they had liked the play, but couldn't understand the point of the little girl who sat on the edge of the stage through the whole second act. The person in the front office had no idea what this patron was talking about. One evening, the man working the spotlight reported to the stage manager that a little female actress was sitting cross legged on the side of the stage, far enough out that the audience could see her. The stage manger radioed back, "What little actress?" She didn't see her. An adult female ghost is seen on one of balconies. It is thought that this was Florence Hudson, the wife of the superintendent of the Baths, who died in 1948. Her disembodied voice is also heard. The theater's website reported, "An electrician was carrying out testing throughout the building in 2009 and, on returning to the main office, reported that while on the top floor he kept feeling as if someone was behind him, watching him, enough that he turned around several times to check. He realised after the third time, he said, that it was merely his brain playing tricks on him and he was responding to the noise of someone moving furniture around in the room below. There was, of course, no one in the locked room below and no furniture to be moved around."
Ross Andrews wrote in his book Paranormal Cheltenham:
The Bottle of Sauce is one of several pubs owned by the Dodo Pub Company and is located on Ambrose Street. This was the third pub they had opened and the largest. The name is cockney rhyming slang for horse. There had once been a railway station nearby named the Great Western Railway Cheltenham Spa Station and this was the Railway Tavern. We couldn't find a date for when it was built, but there seems to have been a smaller building on the site going back to 1848. The hotel would become the Railway Hotel in 1883 and was owned by the Stroud Brewery from 1891 to 1903. It would later change its name to the St. James Hotel because it was located in St. James Square. This probably happened in the 1970s. The building went through a series of owners through all these years with Dodo Pubs acquiring in and opening The Bottle of Sauce in 2016 after a major renovation.
This is said to be Cheltenham's most haunted pub, although the activity here seems to run the same cycle as all the others with cold spots, flickering lights and disembodied voices. There are stories of two ghosts here. One is the apparition of a man in period clothing and the other is of a small boy and this one was caught on the pub's CCTV back in 2018. To us it just looked like a secondary reflection on the glass of the entrance doors. The child ghost is often seen walking across the garden late at night and making his way to the games room in the building.
Yates
Yates is a lively sports pub located at Promenade House on Crescent Terrace. This was the former Gloucestershire Echo Building. That was the local paper. It moved in 1997. Before that it was a private residence built by Charles Henry Hale in the first half of the 19th century. Yates is Britain's oldest pub chain going back to brothers Simon and Peter Yates from Preston. In 1994, it became a public company and has 70 locations today. Patrons and staff have seen a spirit that looks like a man in old-fashioned clothing wandering the upper floors. He is thought to be a guest who died in the hotel. Objects have been known to move on their own and glasses have mysteriously shattered.
Cheltenham General Hospital
The Cheltenham Hospital was originally opened in 1813 as the Cheltenham Provident Dispensary. It moved to the Seward House in 1839 and changed its name to Cheltenham General Hospital, which is what it remains today. A new building for it was built in 1848 as designed by D. J. Humphries and the hospital is still in that building today. It joined the National Health Service in 1948 abd features 16 wards and a number of specialist departments. The ghost that haunts this location is nicknamed "The Gray Lady" and is seen both dressed in an old-fashioned nurse uniform or wearing a grayish shroud. She is generally seen standing directly outside the mortuary entrance. Several employees have gone running when they have seen her.
The Cheltenham Ghost
And then finally we have the most famous ghost in the town and one that probably all the listeners are familiar with and that is the Woman in Black. She's technically known as The Cheltenham Ghost. This particular haunting came onto the radar for the Society for Psychical Research in London because one of the members' mothers lived in Cheltenham. This member was Frederic Myers and the investigation into this haunting would be the first for the SPR. One could say that this was the birth of ghost hunting. The SPR was founded in London in 1882
by Henry Sidgwick, Frederic Myers, and Edmund Gurney. The SPR went
forward with the purpose of "investigating mesmeric, psychical and
‘spiritualist’ phenomena in a purely scientific spirit." These weren't people who automatically believed in ghosts. Leaders of the
group created a framework with which to go forward with study and they
started a scholarly journal for reporting their research. Most members
were prominent figures in science and philosophy and they wanted to be respected. Coming from this
scientific basis, the group became adept at spotting fake mediums and
were not misled by tricks. Investigations were conducted into all
varieties of psychical phenomenon from hypnotism to mental telepathy to
apparitions to haunting activities. The first volume written on this
research, "Phantasms of the Living," was published in 1886. Seven
hundred personal experiences were cataloged in the book and Edmund
Gurney concluded that most were a form of telepathically-generated
hallucination caused by life-threatening situations. So definitely something paranormal, but not necessarily spirits.
This case involved the Despard family who had moved into a house on Pittville Circus Road. When Frederic Myers published the story, he changed the name of the family to Morton, so in some places it is referenced as The Morton Case or The Morton Ghost.
Before the Despards moved in, the house had been empty for several years and was the subject of many ghost stories. A former market garden had been on the site at the corner of Pitville Circus Road and All Saints Road, so the house that was built here was named Garden Reach. The house was built in 1864 in the Victorian style and was four-stories tall and sat on a large acreage. Henry Swinhoe, a solicitor from Calcutta, bought the house and he moved into it with his wife Elisabeth Francis Higgins. The couple had five children. Elisabeth died at the age of 35 in 1866. Four years later, he married Imogen Hutchins of Clifton, Bristol. The couple fought often with the fact that Henry had hidden his deceased wife's jewelry in a secret hiding place under the drawing room floor being a source of consternation. Imogen wanted that jewelry, dammit. The couple were alcoholics on top of that and separated in 1876. Henry died a few months later and left the house empty for awhile. Benjamin Littlewood moved into the house in 1879 and renamed the mansion "Pitville Hall." And then, he was dead in a month.
The house sat empty again until 1882, when Irishman Captain Frederick W. Despard moved his family into the house and named it Donore. His first wife had died in 1858 and he had remarried to a woman named Harriet. The couple had six children together and Henry had an older daughter from his first marriage, but she was already off and married.
The eldest child in the home was named Rosina and she is apparently the first one to see the ghost. Rosina was 19-years-old when the appearances started and she wrote a friend about these sightings. That friend was Miss Catherine Campbell and she shared details of the haunting while not giving the actual letters to SPR because they contained private and personal details that some have surmised might mean the women were lovers. In June 1882, Rosina wrote, "The figure was that of a tall lady, dressed in black of a soft woolen material, judging from the slight sound in moving. The face was hidden in a handkerchief held in the right hand (...)on further occasions, when I was able to observe her more closely, I saw the upper part of the left side of the forehead, and a little of the hair above. Her left hand was nearly hidden by her sleeve and a fold of her dress. As she held it down a portion of a widow's cuff was visible on both wrists, so that the whole impression was that of a lady in widow's weeds." Rosina saw this apparition six more times over the next two years and she only told Miss Campbell about this. She didn't share any of these sightings with her family. Frederic Myers would obtain pictures of both of Henry Swinhoe's wives and asked Rosina if she recognized either woman and she said the apparition looked like Imogen Swinhoe. Now, Rosina goes on to become a medical doctor, so she was given to flights of fancy. And she should have said something to her family because she wasn't the only one seeing the woman. The eldest sister who was married, Freda, saw a figure across the hallway one night and thought it was a guest. A nun to be exact since the figure appeared to have a veil. A housemaid saw the figure in the house and though it was an intruder. A few months after these sightings, a young son named Wilfred was just outside the drawing room on a terrace, playing with a friend, when he saw a woman near the window he didn't recognize. She appeared to need help and he went inside and found the drawing room empty. When he asked a maid if she saw a woman leave the drawing room, she told him that they were the only ones home. So now, several family members have seen this figure over a couple of years.
The sightings would continue from 1882 to 1889 with them being at their height in 1886. Another sister, Edith, felt something she couldn't see pass her on the stairs. The only people who hadn't experienced anything were the Captain and his wife Harriet. Rosina finally told them what she had been experiencing. The Captain believed her and asked the landlord if anyone else in prior years had seen a spirit. The landlord wasn't forthcoming with information.
In total, 17 people would report this woman in black, so there was something to the stories. Frederic Myers' report said that the woman in black was not seen after 1889, but people still heard disembodied footsteps in the house for a while after that and then the haunting just seemed to stop. A solicitor named George Gooding wrote to the SPR in 1944 that he had been friends with one of the Despard boys and he remembered two haunting experiences of seeing the woman in black. One time, he saw the figure during the day in the garden. No one in the house was wearing a black mourning dress. The second time was in the drawing room and he and the Despards tried to make a ring around the figure and "she appeared merely to walk out between two people and then disappeared." The house then became a boys' boarding school and a few of the boys said that the would see a woman in black in the corridors. Then the house was St. Anne's and a diocesan house for the diocese of Gloucester and there was only one sighting during that time. In 1973, the diocese sold the house and it was turned into apartments and that is what it remains today. We haven't heard of any experiences in the apartments. There are those who hypothesize that the Captain had a mistress and this woman was concealing herself as she left the house. Other people wondered if the family was just hallucinating the haunting. It seems pretty tough to debunk 17 people all seeing the same thing.
Cheltenham is a fascinating and unique town in that it was founded as a spa town. Water and minerals help to feed paranormal activity. Is it possible that this is why the town seems to be so haunted? Are these locations haunted? That is for you to decide!
