HGB Ep. 524 - St. Ignatius Hospital

Moment in Oddity - Exploding Casket Syndrome (Suggested by: Kim Gasiorowski)

Many of our listeners are taphophiles and enjoy the peace and tranquility of a beautiful cemetery. Walking along, admiring various headstones and often times extravagant mausoleums. We would imagine a sudden BOOM from an explosion of a mausoleum would scare and shock most people. If the explosion didn't scare you the noxious fumes assaulting your nasal passages would certainly disgust you. This phenomenon typically happens in above ground crypts. You see, when bodies are in a state of decomposition, they release gases as they begin to liquify. If there is no way for those gases to be released from a mausoleum coffin, Ka-BAM! You end up with a putrid mess and possibly a cracked mausoleum wall or two. The solution to this ghastly issue is to be certain that the casket itself has a burper installed. Yes, you heard that correctly, a burper valve allows the gases to be released and oxygen to enter the casket so that the dehydration process can occur. Sounds similar to some Tupperware containers, doesn't it? Now, we read some articles that indicated that this whole story may just be an urban legend, however, the thought of experiencing the malodorous discharge of decomposition gases from a mausoleum explosion due to lacking a casket burper valve, certainly is odd.

This Month in History - The Introduction of Alka Seltzer

In the month of February, on the 21st, in 1931, Alka Seltzer was first sold in the United States. It's origin can be followed back to the flu epidemic that hit the states back in 1928. The president of Miles Laboratory, Hub Beardsley, had heard a rumor that the employees of the local newspaper were all healthy and working. Meanwhile, the majority of the townsfolk were suffering quite badly with flu symptoms. Upon visiting the newspaper, Beardsley found the staff working like normal. Inquiring about any illnesses within the company, Hub was told that any time the employees were feeling any flu like symptom, they would drink a mixture of aspirin and baking soda which eliminated any signs of illness. When Beardsley returned to the laboratory, he conferred with his head chemist who developed a mixture of aspirin, sodium bicarbonate and anhydrous citric acid. The antacid would become effervescent when added to water. To test the new product, Beardsley took 100 pills on a cruise and supplied free samples to anyone who was feeling ill. The results were that every person who took the novel medication received some form of relief. Due to this test, Miles Laboratory introduced Alka Seltzer to their line-up of medications. Although there are variations of the original formulation, one constant that remains is the "plop, plop, fizz, fizz, Oh what a relief it is" jingle that we are all familiar with.

St. Ignatius Hospital (Suggested by listener: Nate)

St. Ignatius Hospital dates back to the 1890s and was started by a group of nuns from Montreal. For over seventy years it served as a healthcare facility and then reopened as an assisted living facility that shuttered in 2003. The building was left to decay for many years, but was taken under the wing of the Colfax Chamber of Commerce and the Whitman County Historical Society in 2015. Tours have been hosted since then and some of them include talk of ghosts. Join us and our guest Valoree Gregory as we explore the history and hauntings of St. Ignatius Hospital. 

St. Ignatius was designed and built by Mother Joseph. Mother Joseph was born as Esther Pariseau in 1823 in Quebec, Canada. She entered the Sisters of Charity of Providence convent in 1843. She led her congregation to the Pacific Northwest of the United States and they established a network of schools and healthcare facilities. Mother Joseph was the first female architect in British Columbia and she built 11 hospitals, seven academies, five schools for Native American children and two orphanages. These were spread through four states. She died of a brain tumor in 1902.

In early 2021, the hospital was purchased by Laura and Austin Storm. They have been doing a ton of renovation that started with repairing a large hole in the roof that had allowed extensive damage to the interior for over 20 years. Decades of neglect had left the building in poor condition so that it has appeared on the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation’s “Most Endangered Watch List” every year since 2015. Funding of the renovations is provided by historic and ghost tours and ghost hunts. There does seem to be a lot of activity here. Paranormal Lockdown visited in 2017 and Ghost Adventures visited in 2019. The GA Crew caught an anomaly in a photo from one of their full-spectrum cameras. It appeared to show “a white misty apparition.”

The first patient that died at the hospital was a local railroad employee who tragically was crushed between two railroad cars. Some people believe his spirit is the one that is described as a large, angry black mass that tries to attack people. 

Nuture Your Soul visited in December of 2023 and wrote of the experience on Facebook, "What I experienced there personally - were communications of love & excitement that I could see / hear. I saw 4 small children following us & peering out the windows at us as we passed by - which was delightful to them & to me. I felt palpable whimsey & delight that so many people still choose to visit there & I felt nothing terrified, stuck, angry or regretful. In fact, quite the opposite!"

Valoree shared the experiences that she has had in the hospital. 

St. Ignatius Hospital is a building in need of a lot of love and it seems that it has people who want to honor it and rehab it now. There seem to be many souls that have not passed on and decided to stay within the confines of that building. Is St. Ignatius Hospital haunted? That is for you to decide!

HGB Ep. 403 - Butterworth Building

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Moment in Oddity - The Devil of Scott County (Suggested by: The haunted Scott County Jail in Tennessee)

The town of Helenwood got its name from a tragedy. In 1935, the town suffered a horrific explosion and the townspeople referred to it as "Hell in the woods" and that name stuck and became Helenwood. This name seems oddly appropriate since the Devil came to Helenwood and Scott County in the 1920s. Cruis Sexton was a resident of Scott County who had recently come back from China. He had been fascinated by the statues he saw in China and decided to build his own. He found some clay near an abandoned coal mine and he started building a demon-like statue that was taller than any man and very detailed with horns, the muscles were outlined and there was a chain from an arm to a leg. Sexton's mother soon found out what he was doing and after the man moved the statue to a relatives house, word started to spread that the Devil was in Helenwood. So many people wanted to see the Devil that Sexton and his relative set the statue in a massive coffin and took it to the railroad station. People came from all around the country to see it. They paid 25 cents for a 20-minute view. Some people fainted at the sight of the creature. The Devil eventually ended up getting sold to the World's Fair. The Devil of Scott County certainly was odd!

This Month in History - Washington Lays Capitol Cornerstone

In the month of September, on the 18th, in 1793, George Washington laid the cornerstone for the Capitol. The United States had no official capital building as a new country and members of Congress had met in eight different cities. Washington probably had no idea that the building would take a century to build and that he would feature in the center of the dome rotunda with Constantino Brumidi's The Apotheosis of Washington. This is a weird and highly symbolic artistic rendering of Washington rising to the heavens in glory surrounded by the gods of mythology. The dome was made from cast iron. The original design was created by Scotsman William Thornton, but a series of project managers and architects would work on the capitol through the decades. Some people may not realize that the Capitol's dome is meant to serve as the womb to the Washington Monument's phallic symbol and that it was inspired by the way the Vatican is set up. The cornerstone laying ceremony was headed by the Masons of which Washington was a member and he wore full Masonic regalia. Many people probably also do not know that the building was going to be called the Congress House, but Thomas Jefferson insisted on calling it the Capitol after the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on Capitoline Hill, one of the seven hills of Rome. That's why you sometimes hear the Capitol referred to as the Temple of Democracy. And now all state's have a capitol too.

Butterworth Building

The Butterworth Building in Seattle, Washington is home to Kells Irish Restaurant & Pub. This building had once been home to a mortuary and the man who built and ran that is credited with creating the terms mortuary and mortician. Nearly all of Seattle's dead at that time passed through the doors here and with that many dead bodies, there is little surprise that this building has many ghost stories connected to it. Join us as we explore the history and hauntings of the Butterworth Building!

The Butterworth Building is uniquely designed because it is on a hill. The part of the building on First Avenue has three stories while the side on Post Alley has five stories. To us, the building almost looks like it is squeezed between two other large and taller buildings. The building is close enough to Pikes Place Market that it is included in that historic district. There is a great history here for us HGB people. We love our cemeteries and mortuaries. And this building was specifically built to be a mortuary. How lovely is that? Edgar Ray Butterworth had the building made and he was the first mortician and this guy is going to be fascinating to talk about because he never meant to be an undertaker.

E. R. Butterworth was born in the Boston suburbs in 1847 and as a teenager worked as a hatter there. Then he studied law. With that start, no one would think he would end up as a cattleman in Kansas, but that is what happened. While in Kansas, he met up with a settler whose wife and newborn baby had just died. The settler needed to make a coffin, but there was no lumber around. Butterworth tore wood off of his own wagon and fashioned a coffin for the man. In 1881, Edgar moved on to Washington and found that this was not a place for cattle, so he built a steam-powered flour mill. He and his family, which consisted of his second wife - the first died in childbirth - and a son, moved to Centralia, Washington. Butterworth started a furniture shop and got involved with politics serving as mayor and then in the state legislature. Then an epidemic of black diphtheria hit and Butterworth was called into action with building coffins and his life as an undertaker was under way.   

Seattle had a problem with bodies piling up from mining accidents, epidemics of diphtheria, tuberculosis and Spanish Flu, crime and poor sanitation. The situation was so dire that bodies would regularly just appear on the streets of Seattle and the city issued a standing offer to any undertakers that they would be paid $50 for each body they took off the street. Call this a morbid community clean-up program. Butterworth had relocated to Seattle and he saw a real opportunity here because he already been offering coffins through his furniture business. He purchased a controlling interest in the Cross & Co. Undertakers that was located in the Masonic Temple on the northeast corner of Second Avenue and Pike street and had five of his sons join him in business. These would be Gilbert Butterworth and his half-brothers Charles Norwood Butterworth, Frederick Ray Butterworth, Harry Edgar Butterworth, and Benjamin Kent Butterworth. Butterworth named the business E. R. Butterworth & Sons. There are claims that Butterworth would pocket half of the $50 for every body brought to his mortuary, if a regular citizen brought the body in and there are even claims that there was some kind of undertaker race that the Butterworths took part in as they tried to be the first to get to all the dead bodies. Descendants say that any claims of corruption are just wrong.

Butterworth decided he needed to build a bigger location specifically made to handle the dead, so in 1903 he hired English architect John Graham. Graham's firm would go on to build the Space Needle. For this project, he designed a five-story building with a chapel that could hold up to 200 people, a casket showroom, a crematorium, a columbarium and the very first elevator on the West Coast. It took eight design changes before Butterworth saw what would become his perfect palace of death that he would later dub a mortuary. The building was built in the Beaux Arts architectural style of the era and featured four sculpted lion heads on the facade and the inside had lavish embellishments of bronze, mahogany, brass, stained glass, Flemish oak and Victorian filigree. The bottom floor held the horses and hearses and was level with Post Alley, so that the moving of bodies was discreet. The heating plant for the building was located here too. The first floor was above the grade of Post Alley, but still below the First Avenue grade and this had what they called the "stock room." There were fireproof vaults here for storing bodies. This was the first time Seattle had a place to properly store the dead while families made decisions about what they wanted to do as a memorial for their family member. 

The main floor faced First Avenue and had the chapel complete with a choir balcony, an embalming room, morgues, private offices and a storage room with flourish items like pedestals, canopies and laying-out beds. There was a private room for clergy and family to meet as well. A best show room featured the high end caskets that could cost as much as $890, which was pretty expensive for that time. The upper floor had three flats for employees to live in and right below them was the main showroom. On this floor, there were women's burial garments, a consulting room, a showroom for child coffins and a private reception. The variety in burial clothing and coffins revealed that this was a mortuary for everyone in the city, whether they were poor or rich. And Butterworth & Sons was the main mortuary for everyone in the city. Some of the bodies that came through here reputedly belonged to victims of Doctor Linda Hazzard who we covered on our episode about Starvation Heights. She starved her patients to death. There is a scandal connected here because Butterworth cremated the emaciated body of Claire Williamson quickly and presented a different body at the funeral. The mortuary had also picked up the body without a license and one of the employees plead guilty to that charge. The Butterworths were never charged with any wrong doing, but people in town did whisper and despite E.R.'s protests, papers claimed they were friends with Hazzard.

The Butterworths revolutionized the funeral business and introduced many of the rites that we still carry on today. Funeral packages included transporting of the body via a hearse service; washing, embalming and dressing the body; publishing death notices; providing flowers; a choir and musicians; burial permits and an air-sealed vault. Everybody in town seemed to love the Butterworths and there were always plenty of handshakes and pats on the back when they walked the streets. They were a part of the elite class of Seattle, members of the Masonic order and regulars at the Arctic Club, which was a cognac-sipping and cigar-smoking salon where the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition was planned. This club is today a DoubleTree Hotel by Hilton, but it still features the walrus head carvings that decorate the outside. And wouldn't you know, this place is supposedly haunted. The Arctic Club was started by two men who made their fortunes during the Yukon Gold Rush. This would become a club where adventurers traveling to and from Alaska could stop in to drink and share their stories. Later, the offices of congressman Marion Zioncheck would be here and this guy was quite the character, given to outrageous antics and even some mental health breakdowns, the last of which led to him leaping to his death from the fifth floor. His spirit is said to haunt the building now. People feel cold spots, hear a disembodied male voice and disembodied footsteps. And the elevator can be erratic and likes to stop on the fifth floor even when nobody has pushed that button. Some people even claim to see the residual body of Zioncheck on the street.

Gilbert and Frederick would continue on in the business after the passing of their father and several of their own sons joined them in the business. The Butterworth Building would lose its death anchor in 1923 though, when the business moved to a different building on Melrose. This had more room. The former chapel at the mortuary hosted the second funeral of Bruce Lee and would go on to become the Chapel Bar and then The Pine Box Bar. This location is apparently haunted by to ghosts: an angry older man and a little girl. White Noise Paranormal investigated in 2013 and they caught an EVP of a little girl asking, "We're asleep?" and a whispered, "Go home." And they heard an audible "no." A chain mechanism that was installed in the basement was attached with a screw that takes 47 turns to get it to come free and one night the staff heard it crash to the floor. They have no idea how it came undone, but when they counted to see how many turns it took to release they were blown away wondering how a ghost managed to do that.

The Butterworth Building now no longer was a mortuary and ownership gets a bit murky. Unfortunately, much of the interior was lost over time. On the first floor where the old chapel and mortuary office once was, there was a restaurant here for a bit called Cafe Sophie owned by Scott and Sue Craig that lasted until 1997 and then a restaurant called Avenue One owned by Arnie Millan was here from 1997 to 2002 and then a Chinese Restaurant owned by John David Crow called Fire and Ice Lounge, which opened in 2003 and finally the Starlite Lounge was here until 2007. Restaurants had a hard time staying in this space. Patrick McAleese and his sister Karen opened Kells Irish Restaurant and Pub in 1983 in the basement, which has managed to stay here through the decades. The stock room is used as a private banquet room. Word is that this pub holds the city’s largest collection of single malt scotch. Throughout their time here, they have done a lot of renovations which stirred up activity. During one period of renovation, Kells lost their construction permit because construction was going on in the building at 4am. Karen explained that it was just the ghosts and the city responded by taking their permit away for a year.

It is not surprising that a former mortuary has ghost stories. There are at least two spirits in the building according to most employees and patrons. One is a little girl who appears to be eight-years-old with long red hair. She seems to like to play, but this playing usually comes off as pranks. She is most active during the day when there are other kids in the restaurant and she likes Irish music and appears when that is playing. It is believed that she died during the 1918 influenza outbreak. One reason people believe that is because the paranormal activity here seems to ramp up in November and it was during November of 1918 that the flu hit Seattle especially hard. 

The other ghost is thought to be male and has the name Charlie or according to another account we read, Sammy. Charlie seems to be attached to a mirror for Guinness beer. He'll show up in the mirror and then quickly disappear. He is always wearing a derby hat. Some say that you'll see him in the mirror looking right at you and then he'll vanish and then if you look away and then look back again, his visage reappears and this time he will be smiling at you. He can leave the mirror too though because musicians claim he is more active when live music is being played and they have witnessed his dark shadow near the stage.

Sue Craig from Cafe Sophie once saw shoes in a stall in the bathroom that disappeared. Arnie Milan of Avenue One said, "Two wine bottles flying off the rack, narrowly missing a manager’s head. A long-missing vase inexplicably placed on a window table that had just been set; a diner who fled after he was sure he saw an old woman hugging a shawl disappear into a wall." When the Fire and Ice Lounge was here, Crow claims that he watched a hanger straighten itself and then rock like a seesaw on a door handle. The wife of his business partner was in the restaurant late at night and she heard a door shaking. She went to the door and put her hand on the door and it stopped shaking. When she pulled her hand away, it started shaking again. Crow decided to call in a Shaman and the Shaman claimed there were 19 ghosts in the building. The Shaman blessing did little to help. A pastry chef was working at 2am and witnessed a female apparition in an "unearthly white linen dress" float by. A restaurant manager claimed to see the same apparition at a different time. Michelle Mace, a former Fire & Ice manager who worked many late nights, said, "You always feel someone is there and no one is there."

The bartenders at Kells claim to see glasses move across the bar top all on their own and sometimes even slide off, crashing to the floor. Karen McAleese tells a story about a mirror in the bar. They came in to the pub early in the morning and they see the mirror on the floor shattered, but none of the pieces of the mirror had scattered. The mirror was still all together. Karen also said that they were watching security footage one day to see who had gotten into the pub at night. Their camera was motion sensitive and would come on if triggered. It was triggered many times, but they never saw anybody in any of the recorded footage. Karen has seen two full-bodied apparitions. She told the Seattle Times that on All Saint’s Day in 2005 she saw "a tall man who looked like he was part black, with a suit jacket on. He had very thin hands. He walked to the end of the bar and just kind of faded.” And she also saw the little girl. She described her as wearing a red taffeta+ dress carrying a Raggedy Ann type of doll.

A few people have seen hands pressed upon the windows that leave behind dirty hand prints even though there is no person attached to any of this. Mercedes Carraba, had run the Market Ghost Tours and she claimed to have spotted a pair of muddy, dirty hands pressed up in the windows of the First Avenue entrance to the building. Carraba says that area outside of the bar was near a Duwamish burial site and that a 19th-century settler’s graveyard is just a block away and perhaps this spirit is connected to either of those things. The Duwamish were the area's only indigenous tribe. There may be other spirits here though too. After all, how many bodies came through this place? Candles are kept all around a small, ornate whiskey bar in a back corner of the restaurant and they often all light up by themselves. Silverware levitates and a chef who worked at Cafe Sophie claims that he set a knife down on the butcher block and it started spinning around on its own. He took off his apron, threw it on the ground and left, never returning. And the stairs in the back seem to have a lot of activity. People catch orbs and hear disembodied voices. A contractor was once up on a ladder changing a light in the chapel and when he looked down, he witnessed a parade of people walk through the chapel as though it were a funeral procession and then it all just disappeared.

Ghost Adventures investigated the building during Season 4. As happens so often when Zac is interviewing owners, the guys had an experience. Nick Groff was running the camera and he thought he saw a male figure peek out from behind a corner that was down a hallway from where Zac and the owner were standing. They all thought that maybe it was the audio guy until he stepped out from where he was on the other side of a wall, which had no access to where Nick had seen the figure. They captured an EVP that said, "Get off that thing." Zac claimed that some people have seen the ghost of a miner on the upper floor and they used some gold they panned earlier as a trigger object. Nothing really happened with that. Karen joined the guys for an EVP session in the chapel and they captured an EVP that she actually was able to decipher and she thought it said, "Get me outta here."

I watched a video featuring a tour guide who regaled her tour group with a bizarre story. The Fire and Ice Restaurant had signed a seven year lease for the building. They lasted nine months. On their final night of business, something so horrifying happened that the owners ushered the patrons all out of the restaurant while they were still eating and they locked up the doors. People passing by for a time afterward could look in the windows and see the meals still sitting on the tables. Every one, including employees had left the restaurant in a hurry. Mercedes tried to find out what happened and they would not tell her.

Kells looks like a great Irish Pub to hang out at and have a pint and with a great history connected to mortuary history, it's right up our alley. Is the Butterworth Building haunted? That is for you to decide!

HGB Ep. 378 - Thornewood Castle

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Moment in Oddity - William Cosper and Lightning (Suggested by: Breanne Sanford)

We live in the lightning capital of the United States here in Florida. We've even had a scary incident in which one of my managers, whom also is a neighbor that lives a couple of blocks away, had his house struck by lightning. The bolt went through the roof and hit his son's bed, whom thankfully was not in the bed at the time. It was a reminder of how dangerous lightning can be. But your chances of being hit by lightning is about 1 in 500,000. Unless you are William Yeldell Cosper. Then you might be hit more than once and even have issues in the afterlife! Cosper was born in 1844 and and died in 1919 at the age of seventy-five. In that year, he was struck by lightning while standing on his front porch. He was injured, but survived.After recovering, he went home and more than likely stayed off the front porch. That wouldn't save him from being struck again. He was hit this time while inside his house and this strike proved to be fatal. His family was devastated and had him buried in the Childersburg Cemetery in Alabama. The darn lightning would not leave Cosper to rest in peace. His headstone was hit and destroyed by lightning. The family pooled their funds and had another tombstone made. And guess what? Yep, the headstone was struck by lightning and destroyed again. The family couldn't afford to replace it, so it still sits in bits to this day. Being struck by lightning four times, twice while in the grave, certainly is odd!

This Month in History - First Liquid-Fueled Rocket Launched Successfully

In the month of March, on the 16th, in 1926, the first liquid-fueled rocket successfully launches. The Chinese had developed the first rockets out of gunpowder in the early part of the 13th century and these were probably glorified firework rockets. Europe would follow later that same century with gunpowder-propelled rockets. There was a man named Robert H. Goddard whom had big dreams and found inspiration in the writing of H.G. Wells. He wanted to build a rocket that would go to space, but clearly gunpowder rockets were never going to be able to do that. He was a physics teacher and he proved that rockets could propel in an airless vacuum-like space. After that, he started experimenting with various liquid fuels like hydrogen and oxygen. Goddard made his test rocket out of thin pipes. It was ten feet tall and he filled it with liquid oxygen and gasoline. On that 16th day of March, Goddard launched his rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts and it traveled for 2.5 seconds at a speed of about 60 mph. It reached an altitude of 41 feet and landing 184 feet away. Goddard was initially ridiculed in the press for his ideas as they scoffed at the idea of a rocket to the moon with the New York Times writing in 1920, "[Dr. Goddard] seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” Goddard continued working on rockets until his death in 1945. He never got to witness the work of NASA and all they would accomplish, but his name does appear on NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Thornewood Castle

Thornewood Castle is located in Lakewood, Washington. The English Tudor/Gothic mansion is the only private castle on the West Coast and is known as the house that love built. The property and castle are so gorgeous that they have become a popular venue for weddings and have been featured in several films and series, including Stephen King's "Rose Red." Which makes us wonder, is the castle really haunted? The answer seems to be yes. Join us as we explore the history and hauntings of Thornewood Castle!

Lakewood, Washington was originally known as The Prairie, which was a beautiful area that the Nisqually and Steilacom Native American tribes used as a gathering spot and hunting ground. Before long, settlers and trappers arrived in the area and the Hudson Bay Company built a fur trading post here known Fort Nisqually in 1833. As fur trading declined, Fort Nisqually closed and was sold to the United States in 1869. Uprisings between settlers and the Native Americans occurred throughout these decades of the fort and settlers building farms and the Nisqually Chief Leschi would be wrongly accused of murder and hanged in 1858. Several mills would be built in the Praire, along with a schoolhouse and the western terminus of the Northern Pacific Railway would make its way to nearby Tacoma. Homes would eventually erase the Prairie and many estates would be built along the shorelines of the lakes that remained. One of those stately manors would be The Thorne Mansion. 

The Thorne Mansion would be named for the man who had it built, Chester Thorne. Chester had been born in New York City to Edwin and Charlotte Thorne in 1863. The Thorne family went back to 1645, when William Thorne settled on Long Island. Chester's father worked in the leather trade, but Chester had his sights set on other things. He went into civil engineering getting his initial training at a military school in Poughkeepsie, N. Y. and then he attended Yale. His first big job was with the Missouri Pacific Railway. He eventually moved to Tacoma in 1890 and got involved with the National Bank of Commerce and later became its president. The Panic of 1893 took many people and banks down, but Thorne had such good financial prowess, he kept the bank stable and eventually it flourished again. He co-founded the Port of Tacoma and became involved with a variety of Pacific Northwest Companies through the years from Pacific Alaska Navigation Company to Tacoma Savings Bank & Trust Company to Alaska Pacific Steamship Company to Pacific Cold Storage Company and even helped in the development of Rainier National Park. Chester had pushed to have Mount Rainier named Mount Tacoma. He became the first president of Rainier National Park Company.

A few years before moving to Tacoma, Chester married Anna Hoxie in New York City. The couple would have four children, a son named Edwin and three daughters, Charlotte, Anita and Patricia. Based on Find-a-Grave, it seems that only one daughter was still alive when Chester passed away. Chester had always dreamed of having a uniquely designed country estate and he made that dream a reality in 1908 when construction started on Thornewood Castle. The architect was Kirtland Kelsey Cutter and the style was in the Tudor Gothic. To make sure this estate was authentic, Chester actually purchased a 400-year-old  Elizabethan manor in England and then had the whole thing dismantled and shipped across the pond. And since this was the early 1900s, there was no Panama Canal. So three ships had to make their way down the Atlantic Ocean and around Cape Horn and up through the Pacific Ocean to Washington State. This included the front door, an oak staircase, oak paneling, red brick. There were also 100 pieces of stained glass that were salvaged from European churches dating back to the 15th and 16th century. This collection of art glass had belonged to an English duke who collected it over forty years.

The initial construction started with a three-foot-thick foundation. The exterior walls were built from concrete and the imported brick was then reinforced with steel. They were ten inches thick. The floors were made from eighteen inches of concrete. Construction took three years and when the house was completed, it had fifty-four rooms, twenty-two bedrooms and twenty-two bathrooms covering 27,000 square feet. It had cost a million dollars to build. There are seventeen chimneys made from sandstone, but only around half of them are actually connected to fireplaces fashioned from Florentine marble. The other half are ornamental. Forty servants were employed at the house to meet the needs of the family.

The manor was not only grand, but so were the grounds. Frederick Law Olmsted was a renowned landscape architect who designed Central Park in New York City and was credited with being the Father of American landscape architecture. He must have taught his sons, the Olmsted Brothers, well because they became renowned landscape architects in their own rights and they designed Thornewood's landscape. There were 100 acres total that made up the estate and they would turn 37 acres into an English Garden. Nisqually River soil was laid out over that acreage, eighteen inches thick. Wisteria, pillar roses, purple clematis and climbing hydrangea were planted. Sculpted fountains and many pieces of statuary were also included. The "Kingsdale Hounds" are part of this collection. This garden is part of the Smithsonian Institute Heritage Exhibit. A special sunken garden was designed for Anna, which she dubbed her secret garden. This garden was featured in several publications. Nearly all rooms had lake views, but Anna's sitting room view was her garden. Twenty-eight gardeners had to be employed to keep up with the grounds and one in particular was known as the color gardener. That person's responsibility was to coordinate color schemes according to the seasons.

Two presidents visited the manor, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Chester, or Chess as his friends called him, had left his mark on Tacoma by the time he died in 1927. The Tacoma Times wrote of him after his death, "He was one of this city’s best loved men, a great leader in industrial and civic enterprises, a true friend to hundreds in all walks of life. He was the father of the Port of Tacoma and to it he gave much of his time during the later years of his life, serving as Port Commissioner." Anna and Chester had been married forty-one years at the time. She would continue to live another twenty-seven years and passed away in 1954. The Thorne's daughter, Anita, married and she and her husband, Cadwallader Colden Corse, lived at the mansion with their son and Anna. Just three weeks after Chester passed Cadwallader was taken to the hospital by ambulance with a serious injury. A bullet from a rifle lodged in his head behind his right eyeball, which had to be removed. The claim was that this was an accident that occurred while he was carrying the rifle, but no one knows for sure what happened.

Anita eventually divorced Cadwallader and married Major General David Stone who was building the nearby Fort Lewis. He was eventually tranferred to the Panama Canal and Anita left Thornewood Castle in 1937. Her mother, Anna, found the big house too much and too lonely and she moved into a smaller Georgian home in Tacoma that she had built. Eventually, Anita and the General came back to Thornewood and Anna joined them once again and she died at the manor. When General Stone died in 1957, Anita sold the house to Harold St. John. He left the mansion on four acres and sold the rest of the land for 30 home sites. Parts of the house were turned into apartments. St. John sold the property in 1965 to Frank McMillan and he later sold it to Perry Palmer. Steve Redwine bought it in the 1980s and it was added to the Register of Historic Places. Richard and Debbie Mirau bought Thornewood in 1995 and they would be the ones to bring the manor back to its former grandeur. Deanna and Wayne Robinson bought the house in 2000. 

The renovations they continued on the house were painstaking and amazing. The great hall had been blocked off into rooms to make an apartment. The fireplace was bricked in to about half its size. Ceiling molding was damaged in many places. They redid everything, opening up the hall once again, restoring the fireplace to its original size and redoing the wood floors and wood paneling . They used a special technique to restore the ceiling molding. To make sure it all matched, they taped off areas that were undamaged and used a rubber compound to make a mold they could use to make new ceiling molding.

Today, Thornewood Castle is a bed-and-breakfast featuring suites filled with antiques and historical pieces. There are also vacation rentals on the property and special events like weddings and corporate retreats are hosted here. The manor has also appeared in several movies and television series. Stephen King’s "Rose Red," a made-for-television movie set in Seattle, was filmed at the castle in 2001 and aired on ABC-TV on January 27, 28, and 31, 2002. A lot of restoration and construction was done for the movie and paid for by the movie. The Robinsons have collected memoribilia from the filming that is at the manor. Guests can watch their copy of Rose Red too. The prequel to Rose Red was "The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer," which was written by Ridley Pearson and this series was filmed mainly at Thornewood Castle. Daniel Day Lewis' film "There Will Be Blood" used exterior shots of the house. Bly Manor from the series "The Haunting of Bly Manor" seems to favor the castle as well, especially with its grand gardens.

And this has inspired us to go down a little rabbit hole. For those who don't know, the Haunting of Bly Manor was inspired by several works written by Henry James, in particular The Turn of the Screw. James was inspired to write that story after he heard about a haunting at an estate called Hinton Ampner in Hampshire, England. There had once been a Tudor mansion that stood about fifty yards from the current structure there today. That house had acquired a sinister reputation. It seems the guy who had once lived here, Lord Stawel, was thought to be an evil guy. After his wife died, he took her younger sister as his mistress. The two were rumored to have had a baby, but the child disappeared. The mistress died and many said it was some kind of revenge from the dead wife or some type of karma. Lord Stawel died a year later. Shortly after that, people started reporting hearing strange sounds coming from the house. Locals also claimed to see the apparition of Lord Stalwel. The Ricketts family moved into the manor in 1765. 

They had a few strange things happen, so they resolved that something was haunting the place. Mr. Ricketts went away fro business and the activity increased dramatically. Mary Ricketts reported hearing the swishing of a woman's dress, a disembodied shrill female voice and then a man's voice that she found unsettling. The male and female voices would continue throughout the nights. Mary said they would start when she went to bed and continued until daybreak. She became so frightened that she asked her brother for help and he brought a friend. The two men searched every room with pistols and found nothing. But soon, they heard disembodied groans and felt unseen things pass by them. Mary's brother said the house was unfit for living in and Mrs. Ricketts and her children fled it. By 1797, the manor was an abandoned wreck and so it was torn down. Workers found a box full of bones and a small skull under the floor. Could this have been the baby of Lord Stalwel. Was this why the place was so haunted? One can see why Henry James was inspired by the location and its stories.

But how about Thornewood Castle. Does it have stories? The answer seems to be yes and it all starts back with the construction of the manor. Native Americans helped to construct Thornewood Castle. Just like slave builders we have talked about on previous episodes, the Native Americans had certain customs that they followed when building to help prevent bad energy or spirits from coming into a home. These Native Americans made these hanging sticks that form the shape of a wishbone and that is what some people call them, "Wish Bone Sticks." They placed them in various places along the foundation wall in the basement. The hope was thought that these would not only protect the Thorne's, but bring them good luck. It's really cool to think that despite having five owners, no one touched or removed those sticks. The Robinsons went so far as to host a 2004 Smudging Ceremony to recharge, if you will, the sticks. Rayna and Bob Bearclaw conducted the ceremony. From the Thornewood Castle website, "White sage and cedar are burned and the smoke is then fanned over the object with eagle and hawk feathers. This is to cleanse, purify, and bless objects, homes, and people. It works to lift and dispel negativity and darkness, similar to lifting a burr off an animal’s fur. In the same manner, we as humans sometimes allow and engage depression, negative thoughts, despair and the weight of daily rigor to stick to us and weigh us down. This ceremony helps us to actively dislodge these encumbrances and frees us to once again allow the positive forces and light to renew our spirit."

Anna Thorne loved this home and she loved her garden. She would sit for hours at the window, gazing on that secret garden. Today, Anna's former room is the Bridal Suite and it has been a center of activity for years. Guests and staff have reported seeing Anna seated at the window, looking out at the garden. A mirror that is original to the house sits in this room and there are several people who have claimed to see Anna's reflection behind them. And man and lady have been seen on the main staircase wearing clothes from another era. The man smells of old leather and is wearing a leather outfit. The woman wears an Empire style dress with a high waist and some garland in her hair. Could this be the Thornes? Chester is said to be seen both inside the house and on the grounds wearing riding attire.

The Smoking Room has activity connected to the lighting. The spirits in the manor don't seem to like much light and it is in this room that they have attempted to fix the lighting to be more suitable. Owner Deanna Robinson had noticed on several occasions that when she entered the room, she would find a random light bulb unscrewed. She would screw it back in only to find a different light bulb unscrewed. Another lamp in a different room had arms that could swing and a guest witnessed those arms swing erratically on their own until they crashed into each other and shattered the light globes. The glass fell into a pile right under the lamp. Weird Washington visited the manor to interview Deanna and they wrote, "When I visited Thornewood Castle, we talked in a side parlor. In the middle of our interview, I noticed that one of the light fixtures was not working. Sure enough, the light bulb was unscrewed just enough to turn it off. I am reasonably certain that it was lit when we walked in. Deanna believed that this is Mr. Thorne’s way of getting people’s attention. He got mine."

Out by the lake, the apparition of a child has been seen. It so startles guests that many rush out to grab the child before they drown, only to find that the child disappears. It is believed that this is the grandchild of  former owner who drowned in the lake. Activity seemed to pick up during the filming of Rose Red. Several scenes of the miniseries Rose Red were filmed at Thornewood, and the crew found the filming didn’t go that easily, possibly due to the hauntings there. Workers reported that their tools went missing. Sometimes they’d find them again, other times not. There were odd power outages, and doors opened and closed on their own, sometimes interfering with filming certain scenes.

Almost like a scene from "The Others," Deanna felt as though she were the ghost during an experience she had when alone in the the great hall. The Thorne's loved to host cocktail parties in this room. Deanna was reading a book in there when she suddenly heard the sounds of a cocktail party going on around her. There was the sound of music, the clinking of glasses, the noise of people dancing and disembodied conversation. It was as though she were sitting at a cocktail party hosted at her house, but she was the only one in the room. She felt unnerved as though she were the ghost. She decided to get out of the great hall and leave them to their party. Deanna believes that the great hall is more than just haunted. She thinks there is some kind of vortex in there. And that is because she saw it one night on the grand staircase. She then saw several spirits come through.

AGHOST Paranormal Team investigated in February 2020. They tried various experiments and captured a couple of EVP. One features a female voice saying, "Behind you" and the other a male voice saying "Mark" when asked what his name was. They got nothing in the great hall. They captured some disembodied footsteps as well. What was interesting is that they were staying in a lakeside apartment and that is where they caught most of their evidence.  

One guest wrote, "The hotel is beautiful, I was staying the night for a wedding. I stayed in a colonial style room. Occasionally you would get a scent of smoking tobacco or a cigar, and I went into the “media room” just a room with a bunch of dvds to pick from, and no one was in there with me. The floor creaked right behind me and I could feel as if someone stepped right behind my right leg. I ran back to my room and my sister in law said I had no color in my face."

Other activity reported by guests include a guest looking at something in the third floor closet when she felt someone behind her. When she turned, she saw a man in period clothing with his hands on his hips as though he were perturbed that she was going through the closet. She turned away and looked back and he was gone. A white-haired female apparition has been seen going into the office, but no one is in there when she is followed. There is a hall of mirrors with a carpet runner down the middle. This runner is always off center. Employees put it back to center and even though no one is in the house, they'll find it off center once again. A man wearing a gray suit has been seen in the Music Room. And this story is funny. Apparently a woman and her daughter were looking at a portrait painting and insinuated that the woman in the portrait was ugly. They both felt a need to apologize as though someone had over heard them. Later, they went to go down the stairs and the woman fell down right in front of the portrait. Her daughter laughed and then proceeded to slip down several stairs before catching herself. Perhaps they were clumsy. Or was it the picture?

Thornewood Castle has to be one of the most beautiful manor houses we've seen. And it has the perfect creep factor to be used in any horror movie. Does it have real creeps? Is Thornewood Castle haunted? That is for you to decide!

HGB Ep. 330 - Starvation Heights

Moment in Oddity - Chainsaw Invented to Help With Childbirth
Suggested by: Lori Aceto Garcia

We all know what a chainsaw looks like and we all naturally assume that they are used for either cutting up wood or cutting off people's appendages in horror movies. Now while that last one may seem pretty far from the reason why the chainsaw was invented, it's actually closer than you think. The original chainsaw-like tool was designed in the late 18th century by Scottish doctors, John Aitken and James Jeffray. This chain hand saw appears in Aitken's Principles of Midwifery or Puerperal Medicine. A German orthopedist named Bernhard Heine invented another chainsaw in 1830 that had a chain link with small teeth guided by a sprocket wheel and was used to cut bone. But regardless of who got there first and who invented what, there was this early chain saw with a fine serrated link chain that was used in surgery. Specifically to cut out diseased joints. But it was also used in symphysiotomy, which was basically cutting away bone, tissue and cartilage from the birth canal, when a woman was having a difficult labor like breech or the baby became stuck and was suffocating. The chainsaw was far more effective in quickly handling the situation versus a knife. The idea that the chainsaw was actually invented to help with childbirth before it was used to fell trees, certainly is odd.

This Month in History - Milicent Patrick and the Creature From the Black Lagoon
Suggested by: Shadow Hunter on Instagram

In the month of March, on the 5th, in 1954, Universal International Pictures released the film "Creature from the Black Lagoon." This film introduced another classic Universal Monster known simply as the Gill Man. The film was shot in Florida and the basic premise is that a group of scientists go on an expedition to the Amazon where they find the Gill Man. This creature falls in love with a female team member and kidnaps her. Nearly all the listeners probably know what the creature looks like, but we imagine most don't know that the creature was created by a woman. And that's probably because most people don't know that, since the artist was not credited with this accomplishment for 50 years. Her name was Milicent Patrick and she began her career with Walt Disney Studios in their ink and paint department. She went on to become one of the first female animators at Disney. She created the animated creature Chernabog in Fantasia. She left Disney in 1941 and became a model for a time. Bud Westmore at Universal hired her and she became the first woman to work in a special effects makeup department. In 1953, she designed the Gill-man suit. She was sent on a promotional tour to talk about the creation and initially it was called "The Beauty Who Created the Beast" Westmore was beyond jealous of the attention and insisted that the name be changed to "The Beauty Who Lives With the Beast." He was given full credit for the creation and when Patrick got back from the tour Westmore got Universal to fire her. The 2019 book "The Lady From the Black Lagoon" written by Mallory O'Meara, definitively proved that Patrick was the designer of the monster. Patrick died in 1998 never getting that full credit and she would only do small acting gigs after that. But now you know that Anna Prado Frias' favorite monster, was created by a woman!

Starvation Heights (HTC 1)

The desire to be thin and healthy has been with us since the dawn of human existence. Many of us have tried some kind of diet fad at least once. Not many diets work because they require deprivation and humans have a hard time sticking with something that limits them. We crave freedom in all areas of our lives. But for most of us, keeping the pounds off, especially as we age, can be difficult. There seems to be only one sure fire way to lose weight and keep it off for good, but the risk outweighs the results, because the risk is death. The only sure thing for losing weight is starvation. And that is just what Dr. Linda Hazzard was offering the desperate people who came to see her. Imagine a serial killer who is paid to do their killing. Join us as we discuss the history and haunts of Starvation Heights.

She looks like the sweet neighbor next door. Her face a little hardened by age, revealed more fully because of the neat bun-style in which she keeps her hair. There's nothing fancy about her dress and she seems so concerned and helpful when it comes to health. How could she possibly be a serial killer? And how could a serial killer come from a nice little town across from Puget Sound known as Olalla? This was a place where farmers, fisherman and loggers made a living. Not many people had even heard of Olalla until it ended up in all the papers, with the town entering center stage as headlines splashed across newspapers read, "Officials Expect to Expose Starvation Atrocities: Dr. Hazzard Depicted as Fiend" and "Woman ‘M.D’ Kills Another Patient." So who exactly was this Dr. Hazzard?

Linda Burfield was born in Minnesota in 1867. Little is known about her childhood. She married for the first time when she was only 18 years old and had two children. The marriage did not last. She had big dreams and those did not include being a wife and mother and in 1898, she left that life behind. The divorce became final in 1902 and it was that same year that Linda killed her first victim. Linda was a big believer in the idea that too much food was the root of all disease and that fasting was the cure. Now, I think we can all get behind the idea that giving our digestive systems a little break from food and fasting for a time can be beneficial. Many people do periodic fasts that last a day or two or maybe a little longer. Even Jesus himself fasted for 40 days. Although that was pretty extreme. Linda had read some books, like "The Gospel of Health" by Dr. Edward Hooker Dewey, and devised a plan for a system incorporating extreme fasting. She just needed to test someone. She found a woman willing to give it a try. After several months, the woman died. The coroner ruled that the woman died from starvation and requested that Linda be arrested. There were a couple of problems though. The woman had volunteered to do the fast and Linda was not a licensed doctor in Minnesota, so there was nothing that could be done. The coroner also noticed another particular issue. The victim had no jewelry, so he asked Linda about that and she was evasive. She was able to go on with expanding her work with fasting unimpeded.

Linda met her match in Samuel Christman Hazzard, a drunkard who threw away his West Point military career with brawling and boozing. Sam was married to his second wife when he met Linda, but that didn't stop the couple from getting married. There was a trial for bigamy and Sam went to jail for two years. In 1906, the couple decided they needed to get out of town and start over somewhere new and they moved to Seattle, Washington. They set up their own health business focusing on fasting. The plan that they designed had a lot more than fasting involved and the ultimate goal was more than likely to swindle people and send them off into death. Linda had no medical training, but a loophole when it came to alternative therapies allowed her to get licensed to practice medicine in the state of Washington. As long as her therapies were drugless, she was fine. She wrote several books on the positive aspects of fasting, including  "Fasting for the Cure of Disease."In that book, she put forward her ideas that the best way to cure disease was to remove fat and impurities from the human body. She neglected to mention that incorporating torture helped too. At least in her sick mind.

Hazzard started insisting that people call her "Dr. Hazzard." If they referred to her as Mrs. Hazzard, she would say that that name was her mother-in-law's. She made some grandiose claims like many snake oil salesmen. People would be told that she could cure something as small as a toothache or something big like Tuberculosis. The Hazzards had bought a 40-acre plot of land in Olalla, Washington and named it Wilderness Heights. Linda planned to build a sanitarium there. Until that time, she took the ferry across the Sound to Seattle where she practiced among a community of free thinkers who liked her ideas. One of those people was a 38-year-old woman named Daisey Maud Haglund. In 1908, she decided to ask Hazzard to help her get healthier and she would become the second known victim. Haglund had a three-year-old named Ivar who would go on to become a Seattle entrepreneur and restaurateur behind Ivar's Fish and Chips. Linda put her on a strict 50 day fast.

The strict diet Hazzard designed consisted of an orange for breakfast and some kind of mashed or strained soup for lunch and dinner. Everyone was required to endure these horrendous enemas that were given daily and they would last for hours. Up to twelve quarts of water would be used on one person. People would cry out in pain. And then there were the massages. While massage should be a relaxing modality, Hazzard's brand of massage consisted of beating her patients. She would use her fists to beat people on the back and on their forehead and she would scream out "Eliminate" while she was beating them. This is what Daisey endured for 50 days. This only stopped when she died. Two more women would join that list of dead patients in 1908. They would be Ida Wilcox and Mrs. Elgin Cox. The next year, Blanche B. Tindall and Viola Heaton would die. Maude Whitney died in 1910 and Earl Edward Erdman died in 1911.

Erdman was a civil engineer from Seattle. He was a believer in this method and decided to keep a diary of his progress. Rather than serving as a record of his success, it helps reveal just how harsh Hazzard's fasting method was. It read: 

February 1- Saw Dr. Hazzard and began treatment this date. No breakfast. Mashed soup dinner. Mashed soup supper.
February 5 through 7- One orange breakfast. Mashed soup dinner. Mashed soup supper.
February 8- One orange breakfast. Mashed soup dinner. Mashed soup supper.
February 9 through 11- One orange breakfast. Strained soup dinner. Strained soup supper.
February 12- One orange breakfast. One orange dinner. One orange supper.
February 13- Two orange breakfast. No dinner. No supper.
February 14- One cup of strained tomato broth at 6 p.m.
February 15- One cup hot strained tomato soup night and morning.
February 16- One cup hot strained tomato soup a.m. and p.m. Slept better last night. Head quite dizzy. Eyes yellow streaked and red.
February 17- Ate three oranges today.
February 19- Called on Dr. (Dawson) today at his home. Slept well Saturday night.
February 20- Ate strained juice of two small oranges at 10 a.m. Dizzy all day. Ate strained juice of two small oranges at 5 p.m.
February 21- Ate one cup settled and strained tomato broth. Backache today just below ribs.
February 22- Ate juice of two small oranges at 10 a.m. Backache today in right side just below ribs.
February 23- Slept but little last night. Ate two small oranges at 9 a.m. Went after milk and felt very bad. Ate two small oranges 6 p.m.
February 24- Slept better Wednesday night. Kind of frontal headache in a.m. Ate two small oranges 10 a.m. Ate on and a half cups hot tomato soup at 6 p.m. Heart hit up to ninety-five minute and sweat considerable.
February 25- Slept pretty well Thursday night. Ate one and a half cups tomato broth 11 a.m. Ate one and a half cups tomato broth 6 p.m. Pain in right below ribs.
February 26- Did not sleep so very well Friday night. Pain in right side just below ribs in back. Pain quit in night. Ate 1 and a half cups tomato broth at 10:45 a.m. Ate two and a half pump small oranges at 4:30 p.m. Felt better afternoon than for the last week…

The authorities started to take notice that bodies were piling up under the care of Linda Hazzard, as did the press. Newspapers started reporting on the deaths, but patients just kept coming to Hazzard looking for her miracle cure. We have to believe that there had to have been some people that had success and didn't die to get other people interested. Perhaps people who didn't have much to steal were just put on the regiment for a month and since killing them was not a financial pull, they were sent out of the program as testimonials. That's all conjecture, but seems logical. Whispers began to spread that Hazzard was practicing some kind of black magic and mind control. Health authorities claimed that their hands were tied when it came to Hazzard because she was licensed and patients were voluntarily coming to her for treatment. She started performing her own autopsies as well, so that she could list the cause of death as anything but starvation. We're not sure how a naturopath or someone licensed as a drugless medical provider got away with doing autopsies, but it apparently happened. Neighbors started contacting police about seeing these skeletal patients wandering around the property, some of whom would beg for food.

There was one victim who had not died from starvation at this time. Eugene Stanley Wakelin had a bullet in his head. He was the son of an English lord, but had no money to his name. It is believed that the Hazzard's shot him in frustration because he had no money. They claimed it was suicide. So perhaps our theory on people without wealth getting out of this program alive is not correct. The end would come for Hazzard when Dorothea and Claire Williamson came to what locals started calling Starvation Heights. The sisters were hypochondriacs and filthy rich. They were perfect marks for the Hazzards. It was 1911 and Hazzard told the sisters that the sanitarium was not ready yet, but that she could treat them in Seattle. They rented two rooms at the Buena Vista Apartments. The doctor offered to keep the women's valuables at her office to make sure they were safe. She then started them on the diet of vegetable broth. They also were given the standard enemas and massage. Within a month, the sisters were emaciated. Obviously, a starved brain is not a reasoning brain. Hazzard had the sisters transferred to the sanitarium in Olalla and obtained Claire's signature on a document giving money to Hazzard if Claire should die. The contract also directed Hazzard to cremate the body. At this point, Claire was delirious.

Somehow, the sisters got a message to their childhood nanny named Margaret, begging her to visit. When she got to Seattle, Hazzard met her at her office and told Margaret that Claire had died from cirrhosis. Maragaret wanted to see the body, so Linda showed her Claire's body at the mortuary. Margaret didn't recognize Claire, clearly because she was so emaciated. It was then that she knew that Claire had starved to death, She demanded to see Dorothea and Hazzard agreed, but she warned her that Dorothea was insane. Margaret couldn't believe how thin Dorothea had become. She was going to take her away, but Dorothea insisted that the treatment was doing her a world of good even though she was skeletal. Margaret had no legal right to take Dorothea and one can only imagine how frustrating that would be. She stayed and tried to sneak flour and rice into the tomato broth soup fed to Dorothea. We're amazed that Linda let her stick around, but she probably feared if she was not hospitable that Margaret would run to the cops. Margaret would visit other patients at the sanitarium and see how they were doing. Two of those patients begged her to help them escape. They said they were prisoners. And Margaret found out Dorothea was a prisoner too.

When Margaret informed Hazzard that she was leaving and taking Dorothea, Hazzard produced a document giving her and her husband legal guardianship of Dorothea. They claimed she would be staying with them forever. Margaret also discovered that the Hazzards had been helping themselves to the Williamson sisters' funds. Margaret came up with a plan that included the women's uncle and he sent a letter demanding that Dorothea be released from the sanitarium. Hazzard gave them a bill for $2000. At this point, Dorothea weighed sixty pounds. The uncle paid what equated to a small ransom and got Dorothea out of there. Dorothea managed to get her faculties back and helped to pay for the prosecution of Linda Hazzard because the state said they did not have the funds to go after the doctor. Upon her arrest, Hazzard claimed she was being persecuted. Evidence was provided revealing forged documents and diary entries and there was no doubt that many people starved to death under the care of Dr. Hazzard. Hazzard was convicted of manslaughter. But even after all these deaths, she only served two years at the Walla Walla Pentitentiary.

When she was released, she and Sam moved to New Zealand where she continued to practice her brand of fasting for health. She became very wealthy. She returned to Olalla in 1920 and finished construction on her sanitarium. She again started starving people to death. The sanitarium burned down in 1935 and Hazzard starved herself to death three years later. Apparently, she was a true believer in her own cure. Which then makes one wonder if she was a killer due to neglect and some kind of mental illness or if she was a methodical serial killer. In total, there were more than two dozen victims and possibly more. We've heard there could possibly have been 40 victims. No one knows for sure how many people the Hazzards killed, but they rank up there with the most prolific serial killers.

The house and sanitarium at Starvation Heights no longer stand today, but when they did, there were reports of haunting activity. Opal and Chuck Abundis owned the Hazzard house in the 1990s and after Gregg Olsen's book "Starvation Heights" came out, they started offering tours of the place. People claimed to see strange symbols on the fireplace that indicated that it was the seventh gate of Hell. Opal's mother lived next door at the time and she claimed to hear disembodied footsteps on her porch nearly every day. When she would go to check the porch, nobody would be there. Chuck said, "You hear footsteps on the stairs. It sounds like people are walking around upstairs. One time I was in the bathroom, and there is no draft down there and it was a warm day, and I got the coldest feeling. It felt like they touched me on the back of my right arm and it was cold. A week ago I was wiping off the counter by the toaster and the electrical cord came out by itself and dropped onto the floor." One of the more haunted areas was a small closet in the basement with a small hole cut out in the middle of the door just big enough to slip food through. Many wonder if this was like a solitary confinement for unruly patients.

A family of four would later move into the home where the Hazzards had lived in Olalla. They claimed to have experienced unexplained activity and ghostly phenomena over the years. The family claimed that they saw apparitions, felt cold spots and doors opened and closed on their own. The mother was cooking dinner in the kitchen one evening with the stove in front of her and the bathroom door behind her. She turned around while cooking and was shocked to see that every chair from the kitchen had been piled up against the bathroom door. She was the only person in the house at the time and was really freaked out.

The attic seemed to have activity as well. Several low ledges were used for storage and a psychic who was visiting the house claimed that several of Hazzard's victims were sitting quietly on the ledges. As though they were scared to move. The psychic also claimed that the house was saturated with anguish. Washington State Paranormal Investigations and Research (WSPIR) visited Starvation Heights three times during 2005-2006. On their first visit the group divided into three teams. Each team had a psychic. The owners of the house had been instructed to hide anything that might inform the psychics of what they were investigating. The book Fasting for the Cure of Disease was clearly visible when the first psychic entered. The owners claimed that they had not left the book out and they had no idea how it got where it was found. The group picked up an EVP that said, “Help me!”
The second team caught EVPs, also. One EVP stated, “Are you talking about me now?” Another EVP said either, “Take us up” or “Dig us up.”

Dead Files did an episode featuring this location. The family used some of the wood from the previous house to build the new house and had been experiencing activity. It turned out that Steve found out while interrogating the son named Logan that he had conducted at least 17 seances in the house. Logan claimed to see the ghosts of a little boy and a little girl and that he tried to communicate with them. Amy also picked up on little kids running around the old house. Amy described seeing some kind of monster on the property that was almost smothering these children ghosts. Cannon was the name of another son on the property and he saw a male ghost wearing a cowboy hat sitting out by the wood pile. He could see through him which is how he knew it was a ghost. He also saw that male ghost in the cottage. Amy picked up on this spirit and that he ran the show there. He bragged about that. She also picked up that a woman had been raped there, probably by him.

She also saw a woman she described with a broken face that was trying to harm a living woman. This was really weird. It was like they figured out that Claire had been thrown down some stairs and that Hazzard was in the house and trying to throw someone else down the stairs since it had worked before, but when Amy had the spirit sketched, it looked like Hazzard rather than Claire. But Hazzard had starved to death. Is it possible that throwing down the stairs was a fill-in for starvation since Claire starved and Linda starved? Was Hazzard trying to kill the living woman at the house? So we don't know what was causing this activity. Were the ghosts already here? Did the seances bring spirits?

So as is probably clear, the cottage that was the sanitarium was eventually torn down and a new home was built. This was after the family had lived in a place where so many died and even used the original bathtub where bodies were dismembered. We have not heard of any hauntings taking place in the new home. Was Starvation Heights haunted? That is for you to decide!

HGB Ep. 235 - Manresa Castle

 
Moment in Oddity - The Skadegamutc

A Skadegamutc (skuh-deh-guh-mooch), is known as a ghost-witch. In the lore of the Micmac, the Passamaquoddy and Abenaki tribes, the Skadegamutc is an undead monster that is created out of the dead body of an evil magician who refuses to stay dead. This undead creature comes to life at night and lurks about seeking humans to throw curses at and humans to kill and eat. The only way to stop a ghost witch is to burn it by fire. The following story was told by Beulah Tahamont, a sixteen-year-old Abenaki from Lake George, New York: "An old shaman was dead, and his people buried him in a tree, up among the branches, in a grove that they used for a burial-place. Some time after this, in the winter, a Native American and his wife came along, looking for a good place to spend the night. They saw the grove, went in, and built their cooking fire. When their supper was over, the woman, looking up, saw long dark things hanging among the tree branches. 'What are they?' she asked. 'They are only the dead of long ago,' said her husband, 'I want to sleep.' 'I don't like it at all. I think we had better sit up all night,' replied his wife. The man would not listen to her, but went to sleep. Soon the fire went out, and then she began to hear a gnawing sound, like an animal with a bone. She sat still, very much scared, all night long. About dawn she could stand it no longer, and reaching out, tried to wake her husband, but could not. She thought him sound asleep. The gnawing had stopped. When daylight came she went to her husband and found him dead, with his left side gnawed away, and his heart gone. She turned and ran. At last she came to a lodge where there were some people. Here she told her story, but they would not believe it, thinking that she had killed the man herself. They went with her to the place, however. There they found the man, with his heart gone, lying under the burial tree, with the dead 'witch' right overhead. They took the body down and unwrapped it. The mouth and face were covered with fresh blood. The legend of the Skadegamutc certainly is odd!

This Month in History - Lady Nancy Astor Becomes the First Woman in the British House of Commons

In the month of December, on the 1st, in 1919, Lady Nancy Astor became the first woman in the British House of Commons. She was born as Nancy Lanhorne in Virginia. She married her first husband in 1897 at the age of 18. The marriage was an unhappy one due to her husband's alcoholism and she divorced him after four years. She went on a tour of England and fell in love with the country and so she decided to move to England. Nancy was 26 at the time. She met Waldorf Astor there and the two married. They were very similar people and even shared the exact same birth day.including the year. And both were expatriates. Waldorf succeeded to the peerage and became a part of the House of Lords. Nancy became interested in politics at this time and in 1919 she won his former seat in Plymouth as a member of the Conservative Party. She then became the first woman to sit as a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons. She served until 1945, when she was persuaded to step down.

Manresa Castle (Suggested by listener Jen Morgan)

Port Townsend claims to be one of the coolest small towns in America. The city had its heyday during the Victorian era and several of the historic buildings here are Victorian in design. Many of the earlier settlers envisioned the seaport becoming the largest harbor on the west coast. One of the prominent families in Port Townsend were the Eisenbeis and they built their home in 1892 in the style of a castle that is today known as Manresa Castle. This is a hotel, restaurant and lounge that not only provides accommodations for the living, but a couple of ghosts as well. Join us as we explore the history and hauntings of Manresa Castle!

In 1791, British Royal Navy Captain George Vancouver led an expedition from England with two ships, the Discovery and Chatham. The plan was to explore the Northwest Coast of North America. By May 1792, Vancouver's expedition had entered the Strait of Juan de Fuca and was exploring the northern side of the Olympic Peninsula. Captain Vancouver made it a practice to name the points that they mapped out on their journey for his friends, patrons and crewmembers. One of the places he named was Port Townsend, which was named for the Marquis of Townshend. The name was originally spelled ending with -shend, but today, the h has been dropped. Before the Europeans arrived, several tribes lived here: the Chimakum (or Chemakum), Hoh (a group of the Quileute), Klallam (or Clallam), Quinault, and Twana (the Kilcid band — Anglicized: Quilcene).

Port Townsend was called the "City of Dreams" because it was considered a safe harbor with the promise of being the largest harbor on the west coast of the United States. It did become a very active seaport. Port Townsend was founded as a city in the 1850s. Four men, Alfred A. Plummer, Loren B. Hastings, Charles Bachelder and Francis W. Pettygrove, met in a cabin that two of them had built on the beach below Point Hudson and they agreed to establish the town together and named it for Port Townsend. Soon thereafter, the town became the site of the U.S. Customs port of entry and the county seat of Jefferson County. Many homes were erected at this time as the population grew and railroads decided to add an extension of rail lines to the seaport. Those plans fell through though when the Depression hit and the rail lines stopped on the east side of the Puget Sound. The decline for Port Townsend was rapid as people moved away.

Other economies developed in the future with the installation of a paper mill and the Naval Magazine Indian Island, which is the US Navy's primary munitions-handling dock on the Pacific coast. More people started moving here in the 1970s and Port Townsend has developed into a tourist destination. They host blues and jazz festivals and in 1999 they launched an annual international film festival. Many people come to the town to see all of the Victorian architecture. Because so much of the town was abandoned and the economy was dying, no one tore down any of the buildings and built over the sites. So in essence, the Victorian buildings were preserved because of a lack of growth. Today, many have been restored as their value is appreciated.

One of these grand structures is the Manresa Castle. The castle was built in 1892 by Charles and Kate Eisenbeis. Charles Eisenbeis was a German emigrant who arrived in Rochester, New York in 1856. He learned baking from his family and worked doing that for a while. The Gold Rush was reaching its peak on the west coast and Charles decided to head west. He boarded a ship that sailed around Cape Horn, heading for Puget Sound. The weather was rough when they arrived at the Sound and the ship decides to dock at Port Townsend. The year is 1858 and this is where Charles decides to stay. His brother was traveling with him and the two men do odd jobs saving up money to open up their own bakery. They called it the Pioneer Bakery and they specialized in making bread for ships. the business was very successful and he became a very prominent man. So prominent that he became a part of the Big Five Syndicate, which was five men that control the entire economy of Port Townsend. When Charles first arrived in Port Townsend, he was married to a woman from Prussia named Elizabeth. She died in 1882 and he remarried a woman named Kate.

Twenty years after arriving in the town, Charles was elected the town's first mayor. He built several properties in Port Townshend: the Mount Baker Block, the Eisenbeis Building, a hotel, a brickyard, lumberyard, a brewery and the Eisenbeis Castle that was his home. The hotel was a grand structure with 120 rooms, but it never opened as the promise of the coming railroad was never realized. It burned down in a fire of mysterious origin. The Eisenbeis Castle was the largest residence in Port Townsend at the time and had 30 rooms. The home was constructed from brick and had a slate roof. The inside was designed and built by German artisans and featured finely crafted woodwork and tiled fireplaces. He didn't get to enjoy his home for long. Charles died in 1902. He was buried in nearby Laurel Grove Cemetery. The whole town turned out to see his burial. His casket is within a subterranean vault and was placed next to the Victorian glass-top coffin of his first wife, Elisabeth.

There is an interesting story connected to the burial. The vault was sealed for many years. The sandstone slab cracked and fell into the vault many years later and it was opened for repairs. Unfortunately, the slab fell in on Elisabeth's coffin and broke the glass. Another coffin was damaged as well.This one was a child's coffin that was on top of Charles' casket. The managers of the graveyard were befuddled. There should be no other coffin in the vault because there was no record of it. The great-grandchildren of Charles, Ann and Mayor Mark Welch, were called. "None of us knew anything about it," Ann Welch said. "The child's casket was a complete surprise." Plaques with the names of other family members are embedded in the solid cement around the white Victorian cenotaph and indicate where the ashes of Eisenbeis descendants were buried around the perimeter. Some other descendants were buried in the upper part of the cemetery. So who is this child? The child is buried in a coffin with a glass lid as well, which seems to indicate that she does belong in this vault. But why no indication as to who she was? Was she illegitimate? It remains a mystery.

Kate remarried in 1905 and she abandoned the castle to a caretaker, who was the only one to live there for twenty years. In 1925, a Seattle attorney bought the Castle and turned it over to nuns teaching in Seattle schools to use as a vacation home. The nuns didn't use it much and so Jesuit priests moved in in 1927 and used it as a training college. The priests spent their sixteenth and final year of training here studying ascetic theology. The Jesuits added a large wing housing a chapel and more rooms in 1928 and installed an Otis elevator. The outer bricks were stuccoed over to give the building a uniform look and they called the building Manresa Hall, after a town in Spain where Ignatius Loyola had founded the Jesuit order.

The Jesuits left in 1968 and the building became a hotel with the new name changing to Manresa Castle taking inspiration from the original home and the name the Jesuits used. Three other owners have held the building since 1968. Each has done renovations and brought the hotel up to modern standards. The Victorian elegance has been kept though. Some of those modern amenities include more bathrooms. There were only three during the Jesuits time and there are now 43. The Castle Key Seafood Restaurant has been added and offers the best in Northwest recipes and is open Tuesday to Sunday. There is a banquet room, several suites and romantic gardens making it the perfect setting for weddings. Another unique feature of Manresa Castle is, of course, the ghosts.

There seem to be three rooms that are haunted and they are all on the third floor. Rooms 302, 304 & 306 are reported to be home to two ghosts. One is a young lady thought to be named Kate, who is waiting for her beloved to come back to her after fighting in a war. He was killed in the war, so he could not come back to her and when she heard about that, she threw herself out the window. The other ghost belongs to a Jesuit monk who hung himself in the attic. Haunting events feature footsteps walking across the attic when no one is up there, drinking glasses in the chapel/cafe explode both when just sitting on the bar and also in people's hands and empty glasses are turned upside-down on their own. People claim to see writing on the mirrors with messages like, "Get out." And the full-bodied apparition of the female ghost has been seen many times. There are room journals where guests record their experiences.

One of the entries in the journal related, "At midnight, we heard singing coming from the bathroom. It was a woman's voice singing a ghostly tune. Well, needless to say, we all woke up. If we had known she was coming at midnight, we would have stayed up and waited on her. I got up to go to the bathroom and see who was in there and then the door eerily came open. There was a swish of cold air and a glowing light and then all the lights came on. After that we saw nothing else. We didn't get much sleep the rest of the night."

One family shared the following experience that they had, "The next morning James, 13, went down to use the restroom down the hall (Room 303 bathroom) and came back concerned that he heard a woman crying mournfully in the 305 bathroom, but the lights were out in that room. He brought his dad down the hall to show him and he heard it also. I, Lori, then went down there, but by the time I got there, she was no longer crying. I did; however, hear movement coming from inside the room. When I knocked on the door and asked if someone needed help, the response was two knocks back from whoever was in there. At that point we decided to call the front desk to tell them what was going on. They sent up four maids to check the situation out. When they opened the door it was dark inside and no one was in there. But the maid commented that 'someone had sure been into the Kleenex.' It had been strewn about. [The door was never left unattended the whole time of our experience.]"

Another family wrote, "Finally around 11:30pm, we started hearing things! Earlier we were looking forward to hearing things, but when we actually did hear things, we were huddled with the blankets to our noses! There wasn't really anything in the room. It was in the hallway! Definite dragging and walking sounds. They would stop right at the door. It was so scary. Then scratching and scraping sounds at the door. It was like someone was right on the other side and would open or come through the door. This all went on for about an hour and a half!"

Ghost Adventures visited the hotel during their eleventh season. Jody Reuther is the Front Desk Manager and she claims to have been a nonbeliever when she first started working there, but she has had enough experiences that she believes there are ghosts there. One day she was making up the bed in Room 310 with a housekeeper and she noticed that the maid went white looking at something behind Jody. Jody spun around and saw a woman pass the door to the room and Jody ran out to the hallway to confront her because nobody should have been in the hotel. She saw that the woman was wearing period clothing and then see noticed she could see the fire escape through the woman. And then she disappeared. The Breakfast Room has many strange occurrences and one of these was a door opening on its own while Zac interviewed Jody about the building. Mardella is a housekeeper who had a violent experience in the laundry room. She was left with a small handprint bruise on her leg, but she did not feel anything touch her. When she told the ghost out loud that she wanted to be left alone, something unseen punched her very hard in the face.

There seems to be unexplained activity in this hotel. While there are claims that there are only two ghosts, is it possible that there might be more? And are these ghosts or just the products of overactive imaginations? Is Manresa Castle haunted? That is for you to decide!

HGB Ep. 170 - Whidbey Island

 
Moment in Oddity - Killer Clothing
Suggested by: Ronda Borgen

Have you ever thought to yourself when you're trying to squeeze into those skinny jeans, "I'm going to get these on, even if it kills me?" Well, apparently back during the Victorian era, your clothes really could kill you. Arsenic could kill a person even without them having to ingest the poison. It was found that arsenic could be used to create a vibrant green dye and thus it was used to dye clothing, particularly dresses. Imagine sweating in these dresses over and over and having the dye absorb into your skin. And then there were hats that contained mercury. Men wore top hats made from fur and mercury was used to make the fur strands stick together to give it that sleek look. It was extremely toxic, especially if inhaled. Socks were made with aniline dye that inflamed feet and celluloid combs exploded. And the cotton that many women wore via their hoop skirts and costumes, were incredibly flammable and there were candles everywhere. A woman's dress could ignite and burn completely in 60 seconds. The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's wife died this way. While death for a wearer of these toxic clothes was rare, the danger to the makers was very real. Hatters went mad, inspiring the phrase "Mad as a Hatter," and dress makers or floral arrangers died from arsenic poisoning and that, certainly is odd!

This Day in History - Bill of Rights Ratified

On this day, December 15th, in 1791, the Bill of Rights is ratified. The Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. These were meant to define the basic rights that all humans have upon birth and that the Constitution already supported. Some felt that the Bill of Rights was necessary to make sure everyone understood what basic rights were, but others believed that putting these rights on paper would actually limit them in some way. A promise to attach the Bill of Rights to the Constitution was needed to get some states to ratify the Constitution. These rights included the freedom of speech, press, assembly, and the free exercise of religion; the right to fair legal procedure and to bear arms; and that powers not delegated to the federal government would be reserved for the states and the people. The ratification process was lengthy and there were fights over which amendments of the original twelve to include. Virginia was the tenth state of the fourteen states at the time to approve ten of the rights and that was what was needed to ratify the Bill of Rights.

Whidbey Island (Suggested by Marjorie Sneed)

Whidbey Island sits along Puget Sound and has a long history dating back to the 1800s. The island is the largest of all the islands making up Island County in Washington. It is a picturesque location that stretches for 55 miles making it the fourth longest and largest island in the contiguous United States. It is home to the Naval Air Station Whidbey Island. The island also is home to Fort Casey, Ebey's Landing, Admiralty Head Lighthouse and a few legends and stories of hauntings, that include The Lurker. Join us as we explore the history and hauntings of Whidbey Island.

Whidbey Island is one of nine islands located in Island County, Washington. It is about 30 miles north of Seattle and Whidbey Island is the northern boundary of the Puget Sound. Whidbey Island was once inhabited by Native American tribes that included the Swinomish, the Lower Skagit, Suquamish and Snohomish. A Spanish expedition led by Manuel Quimper and Gonzalo López de Haro on the Princesa Real, sighted the island in 1790, but the full exploration would come in 1792 at the hands of Captain George Vancouver. Further exploration and mapping would be done later by Peter Puget for whom Puget Sound is named and Jospeh Whidbey for whom the island is named. Captain Vancouver decided to name the island for Whidbey after he had circumnavigated the island in June 1792. We will talk about Isaac Ebey later, but he was a pioneer to the island who had great success and other families came based on that success in the mid 1800s. In 1860, a man named W. B. Sinclair built an inn, warehouse and postal station. Around 70,000 people call the island home today.

Fort Casey - There was a need to protect Puget Sound and so a Triangle of Fire was devised, which were three forts. There was Fort Worden in Port Townsend, Fort Flagler on Marrowstone Island and Fort Casey on Whidbey Island. Construction began on Fort Casey in 1897. It was named in honor of Brigadier General Thomas Lincoln Casey, the last U.S. Army chief of engineers. The fort was first activated in 1901 and it had a special feature when it came to its cannon guns. They could disappear. They were rigged on special carriages that could be raised up above the fortifications long enough to fire and then brought back down. And...they were obsolete in no time. They were no defense against planes flying overhead. During World War II, the guns were shipped to Europe and placed on railcars. The fort went inactive in 1935. Fort Casey is now a state park.

There is a lighthouse here as well named Admiralty Head Lighthouse. The Spanish style lighthouse is fairly short and barely rises above the two story keeper's lighthouse. The house has three bedrooms upstairs. A kitchen, dining room and living room were downstairs. It is named for the Admiralty Inlet that it keeps watch over. It was built in 1890 and then rebuilt in 1903. The original lighthouse lens was part of the house. The lighthouse was designed by German architect Carl Leick and it was the last brick lighthouse he designed. The Army used it as a place to train for their K-9 dog program. The lighthouse was deactivated in 1922 and its lantern house was moved to the New Dungeness Lighthouse in 1927. The lighthouse is reputed to be haunted. Some people claim to have seen the figure of a woman leaning over the top railing.

The things that people report experiencing at Fort Casey are weird noises and weird drawings on the walls. Somethings like claws are heard scratching on the walls. A disembodied female voice is heard screaming and apparitions have been seen. There are underground tunnels where people have prickly feelings on their arms. Sandi wrote of her experience, "We stayed in the converted officer duplexes at Fort Casey Inn from July 24-25, 2013; Duplex #5.  My 10 year old granddaughter was with her grandpa and I, and we had a car full of those things 10 year old girls MUST have in order to remain appeased and not eternally whining that everything is STUPID. I carried in the first load through the rear entrance of the duplex, while grandpa began unloading rhe overstuffed trunk of the car.  I walked in and I began to lay my load on the kitchen table, when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked up in time to see a young woman, maybe 19-20 years old with hair cut short like a "20's" kind of flapper style.  I figured she was one of the staff, perhaps a maid doing some last minute cleaning in our unit.  I did think it was odd that she was wearing a calf-length dress cinched at the waist, especially after encountering the office staff earlier who provided me the keys.  These girls were dressed in the standard t-shirt and jean uniform of most college students, so it seemed strange to see someone in such different clothing. I started to say something but she was headed out the door, and then gone.  When she didn't greet me and seemed in a hurry to leave, I got a little suspicious, and followed her to the screen door which was closed as soon as I got to it.  I pushed it and it gave a great groan.  I walked out onto the porch and those 100-year old boards beneath my feet squealed with every step.  Despite my following nearly in her footsteps, our mysterious maid had disappeared as if she had never been there. Nothing inside seemed amiss, and I rather forgot about it while trying to get everyone settled in.  It was only later that I realized that when the Mystery Woman fled out the screen door it had made no noise, whatsoever.  Nor did the porch register it's tired protest, as it had with me."

A woman named Ampbreia wrote of an experience she had at the Fort, "I felt the prickle of an extra presence there, but that was it. Nothing special; not for me anyway… but when we got back out into the sunlight, my mother, who been in the single file line between me and my step father, he leading – mentioned feeling it too and then we all looked at her in surprise because she was wearing a necklace now that she hadn’t been wearing before: a little gold cross I think.  Her hand went to her neck when she saw me frowning at it in puzzlement. 'Where did you get that?' I asked. 'What?' she asked in the same minute that her fingers found the necklace and froze with a similar frown on her face. She couldn’t crane her neck enough to see it properly with it on so I unfastened it for her and held it up.  'This.' She frowned.  'It’s pretty, but I have no idea.  I have never seen that necklace before…. But I felt…. Something….' I can’t recall if she put the necklace back on, but she kept touching her neck, uneasy as to how the necklace might have gotten there."

The Lurker - Whidbey Island has a Naval Air Station. The Base Exchange was constructed in 1942 as a hangar for the P-3 flying boats. When the Navy no longer needed the flying boats, the building was reconstructed to house the store. Inside, walls divide the building into a snack bar, large retail store, quickie food mart and some smaller specialty stores. It is here that an apparition known as The Lurker is seen.

In the late 1940s, mechanics worked on the P-3s in the hangar. One horrible day, a mechanic came to a gruesome end when he walked into a moving propeller blade. No one is sure if this was an accident or a suicide. Either would be tramatic enough to cause a haunting to occur. Ever since this happened, people have claimed to see a man wearing coveralls in the store. He is usually seen on the catwalks in the back portion of the warehouse. No one should be on those catwalks and when anyone approaches to find out what he is doing, he has disappeared. Employees claim to find piles of clothes on the floors when they open up in the morning. What is bizarre about the clothing is that it is usually found in a state as if someone had laid down and just disappeared. The underwear is inside the pants, socks are inside shoes and the shirt is tucked into the pants.

A strange smell accompanies the apparition that is described as being similar to the smell of popcorn and employees hear disembodied footsteps walking among the clothing racks. The hangar has a very secure key padlock and chain system to lock the building at night. There have been several occasions when the night manager has finished locking up and then hears the padlock clicking as it unlocks and opens. The chain and lock then fall free from the doors. Security has been unable to explain how it happens and even after they secure the door, the same thing happens. Very few are skeptical about the Lurker because so many have experienced him.

Crockett Farm Bed & Breakfast - This charming Bed and Breakfast is run out of a 150 year old home that had once belonged to Colonel Walter Crockett. He was born on January 29th in 1786 in Virginia. He served during the War of 1812 and served three legislative terms for Virginia. In 1838, he decided to move west for greener pastures and ended up in Missouri. He decided the Pacific Coast would be even better and he took his family on the dangerous journey there in 1851. He went with several other families. The family did very well with farming on 640 acres and the Colonel lived there for eighteen years before he passed. His sons Walter Jr. and Charles moved into the house. In 1895, Walter Jr. had the barn built from old growth timber with a "mortise and tenon" technique to secure the beam work. The architecture style is unique in that wood dowels were used to secure the beams, so no steel bolts or plates were used.

The Historic Crockett Farmhouse features five guestrooms, each with its own bathroom, a library and a dining room. There is also a barn on the property that is now only 11.5 acres. It is owned by Paula Spina and she hired historian Diana Peterson to be the proprietress. Before Paula owned the property, it was owned by Bob and Beulah Whitlow. They ran it as a bed and breakfast from 1984 until 2005. They even had Danny Devito, Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas stay there while they were filming a movie. They called in help to purge the evil from the house because they felt they had a ghost in the place. For years before they owned the place, it had been a crash pad for hippies. Much renovation was needed and it was during this time that the Whitlows started to feel an unpleasant presence. One time, Mr. Whitlow was trying to go upstairs to retrieve an item and he was physically stopped by something he could not see.

The Colonel's son, Charles, killed himself with a pistol in an upstairs bedroom on Dec. 12, 1893. He was having mental health issues and decided it would be better to die than be locked away in an asylum. There was blood everywhere and it soaked into the floor boards. It still can be seen underneath the carpeting. It is his spirit that roams the house in the afterlife. Mr. Whitlow was giving a tour to a group of women and when they were leaving the room that Charles killed himself in, glass fell with a crash out of the pane of a broken window. The Whitlows also discovered a hand-sized blood stain on the ceiling in a downstairs bedroom beneath Charles' room.

Gordon Weeks, a former reporter in Coupeville, lived for about six months in that very room and he reported having a number of supernatural experiences. “I felt like it was a benign presence,” he said. “I never felt like it was threatening." Most of the experiences were the basic catching movement out of the corner of the eye. The window shades went up by themselves one time and on another occasion, the bathroom door swung open on its own. It was after this that the Whitlows had the home cleansed and none of their guests ever reported having any issues. And the new owner says she has had no issues either. So perhaps, Charles is at rest now. The property is within the bounds of the Ebey's Landing National Historic Reserve.

Isaac Ebey and Ebey's Landing - Colonel Isaac Neff Ebey was born on January 22, 1818 in Ohio. The west called to him and he spent the early part of his life moving in that direction. He ended up in Missouri for a time where he studied law and he met a woman named Rebecca Davis. They were married in 1843 and had two sons named Eason and Ellison. Isaac wanted to continue to the west coast, but he did not think that would be a good idea for his family. So in 1848, he left his family with relatives and headed off to pursue the Gold Rush. He ended up in the Puget Sound area and after exploring Whidbey Island, he fell in love with the area. He entered a claim for 640 acres in October of 1850. The area came to be known as Ebey's Prairie. He wrote to his brother about the location, "I have taken my claim on it and am now living on the same in order to avail myself of the provisions of the Donation law. If Rebecca, the children and you all were here, I think I could live and die here content."

Rebecca did come and brought their three sons in 1852. She was also joined by her three brothers and a family named Crockett. Isaac built the family a blockhouse. His parents and brother soon joined his family on the island and built a home right next to his blockhouse. The land was very fertile and Isaac did very well. When others heard about the agricultural success, they moved their families to Whidbey. Rebecca died after the birth of their third child, a daughter named Sarah, in 1853. Sarah died as well. The Mainland Indian Wars started in 1855 and Isaac joined the fight leading a company of volunteers. He received the title of Colonel for his efforts. When he returned from the fight he became involved in territorial affairs and used his law degree as a prosecuting attorney.

Isaac remarried a widow named Emily Palmer Sconce and she joined Isaac at Whidbey with her daughter, Anna. Everything was very good at Whidbey except for one thing and that was the relationship with the Haida Tribe. There were several skirmishes and the Haida were finally forced to move north. The tribe agreed that they would go, but within their group they promised to take the heads of several prominent men, which they referred to as Tyee, before they left the territory. Isaac would be one of the men they would choose to attack. It was a peaceful summer day in August of 1857 and the Ebey family were entertaining friends. The dogs suddenly started barking and going nuts.

Isaac told everybody to stay put while he went out to investigate. He was attacked and beheaded by the Haida who ambushed him. We should note here that there is some debate as to who really attacked Isaac Ebey. The oral history of the Kake tribe, a sub-group of the Tlingit from Alaska, claims that they conducted the revenge raid in 1857. A delegation of Kake elders visited Coupeville in 2014 on the anniversary of Col. Ebey's death to offer restitution. Whichever tribe is responsible for the raid, it was brutal. The family and guests heard a gunshot and they escaped through a back bedroom window when the natives broke into the front of the family's cabin. They ransacked the rooms as the guests fled to the woods. Emily took the children to her father-in-law's house.

Isaac's brother, Winfield, wrote in his diary on August 14, 1857: "My Brother Isaac is Dead - My noble high minded brother is no more - shot and beheaded at his own door...Oh! the agony I have suffered for three long days and still suffer. It seems more bitter than death. On the morning of the 12th at about 2 o'clock, we were awakened by a knocking and shouting at the door. I...sprang from the bed and found R. C. Hill, H. Hill, R. H. Crosbie and Mrs Corliss. In a few words they told us that an attack had been made on Isaac's house by the Northern Indians, that Mrs. C- had jumped from a window got off, ran to Mr. Engle's and aroused them and came up here."

Winfield gathered a posse and they rescued the group from the woods. In the morning, Winfield went to Isaac's home to take care of his brother's body. He found his brother's headless body near the end of the porch. He was buried up the hill from his cabin at Sunnyside Cemetery next to his wife Rebecca and their daughter Sarah. Emily left the island after the attack with her daughter and Issac's sons were raised by their grandparents. The cabin was left deserted. The cabin burned down in 1860 and was rebuilt not long after.

In 1992, Phyllis Burns visited the cemetery where Issac is buried and she and her mother reported, "As we turned to leave, I saw a movement off to our right about 100 yards away. I looked and saw a woman in a long black dress with a long black hooded cape over it. She had the hood over her head. She was walking down the hill towards the cabin. Without saying anything, I touched my Mother's arm and pointed to the woman. We all turned and watched as the woman slowly walked then disappeared behind some large bushes. She never came out the other side. We walked over to where we had seen her, feeling a bit apprehensive. There was no sign of her. We walked down to the road that runs between the cemetery and the cabin - she was nowhere to be found. There were no vehicles on the narrow lonesome road except ours. We drove back to the mainland in silence, wondering who the woman in the black cloak was. I often wonder if the apparition was Ebey's first wife, Rebecca, and if she is somehow stuck in time. She must have loved her island paradise as much as Isaac did. Because she died young and unexpectedly, she must be searching for something to hold on to -- maybe looking for Isaac to help him cross over?"

Other hauntings in the area feature the misty, pale blue apparition of Isaac himself. He is generally seen in the cabin and this seems to be residual in nature as he leaves the cabin over and over as if heading out to meet his tragic end again and again. Other times, people claim to see his headless spirit wandering the fields near the cabin. Sometimes he is cradling his head under his arm. He is at unrest, perhaps seeking his head, although his scalp with ears attached was later returned to his brother. Legend claims a couple of things in regards to the scalp. One story says that his brother dug up his brother's coffin so that he could place the scalp in with the headless body. Another story claims that the family passed it down through generations.

Do the Lurker and Isaac Ebey still wander the island where they met their horrific ends? Do spirits wander Fort Casey and Crockett House? Is Whidbey Island haunted? That is for you to decide!

Show Notes:
We also feature the 7th installment in the third series of Tim Prasil's Spectral Edition. Check out more of his stuff at: http://merryghosthunter.wordpress.com

Photo courtesy of Brian Dilbeck

Photo courtesy of Brian Dilbeck