HGB Ep. 662 - Mort's Cemetery Critters/Ghost Animals

Moment in Oddity - The Tower House (Suggested by: Michael Rogers)

The Tower House Sanctuary in Saugerties, (saw ger teez) New York, stands as an extraordinary architectural anomaly, clashing with the traditional notions of home design through its whimsical, hand-sculpted layout. Crafted over fifteen years by late Muppets set designer John Kahn, the five-story circular tower lacks traditional flat surfaces, featuring continuously curved interior walls wrapped around a grand central column made from whole tree trunks. It is fundamentally unusual not just for its materials, which include a mix of stone, timber, slate, and copper—sought out and repurposed by the artist, but for its eccentric design choices. Including custom-engineered windows modeled after ship steering wheels, an exterior fifth-floor catwalk offering 365-degree forest views, and a master bathroom where the toilet sits on an elevated center stage facing a panoramic window view. Blending the boundary between a livable residence and a massive outdoor sculpture, this fanciful, fairy-tale fortress defies standard engineering norms to create a living space that feels entirely free of the rules of conventional architecture and it certainly is odd.

Mort's Cemetery Critters/Ghost Animals 

On this episode, we are going to share several stories that feature ghost animals or what we are lovingly referring to as, Mort’s Cemetery Critters! We're digging up tales of animals that refuse to stay dead. We've got phantom dogs, spectral cats, haunting horses, ghostly chickens and even undead camels. We often wonder if animals are more than just physical beings. Do they have a soul like we do and can they go on after death? Try not to get eaten, or pecked, or licked to death by something that's been dead for 20, 50 or 100 years as we share these stories of ghost animals.

Mort: Frankly, I have enough trouble keeping the two-legged variety in their graves. The four-legged ones are just showing off. And let me remind everyone that I work in a cemetery, not a petting zoo.

There are numerous legends of the Old West and many of these are ghost stories. There are tales of dead gunslingers, sheriffs, bank robbers, gamblers and prostitutes whose spirits remain and haunt various locations dating back to the Old West. This is true of many of the animals of that time period as well. Here are three stories featuring ghost animals of the Old West. In April of 1860 an advertisement appeared in California requesting: “Young, skinny, wiry, fellows not over the age of 18, Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.” This was the beginning of the Pony Express. Mail before this time traveled West by wagons and stagecoach because the railroads and telegraph lines stopped at St. Joseph, Missouri. The trip could take months for the mail to be delivered. Sometimes the mail never did arrive. A new system was needed and the Pony Express was the answer. As the ad highlights, riding for the Pony Express was dangerous. The terrain was rough and there was always a danger of severe weather or Native American attacks.

One hundred and eighty-three men were hired as riders. Most of them were in their twenties and they all weighed under 125 pounds. They were paid 25 dollars a week to ride 75 to 100 miles at which point another rider would take over. The switching of riders would take place at Pony Express stations run by Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express. 

One hundred of these stations dotted the Pony Express Route, which ran 2,000 miles from St Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California. The company bought 400 horses for the riders to use. The horses consisted of Morgans, thoroughbreds, pintos and mustangs and they were saddled with lightweight saddles. Each horse would carry around 165 pounds and travel at 10 miles per hour. That weight included the rider, a special saddlebag called a mochilla that could hold 20 pounds of mail and was padlocked, a water sack and the rider's revolver. A rider would travel from one station to the next and trade out horses. The Pony Express ran for 18 months and 35,000 pieces of mail were carried for 650,000 miles. Only one sack of mail was lost. One of the Pony Express stops was located five miles northeast of Hanover, Kansas. It still stands today and is named Hollenberg Station. It was built along Cottonwood Creek in 1857 by Gerat H. Hollenberg. The station had six rooms and he set it up as a tavern, grocery store and unofficial post office. When it became a Pony Express station three years later, it was the largest stop along the route. When the Pony Express shut down after the telegraph bankrupted it, most of the stations fell into disrepair. The townspeople of Hanover decided to save their station and it is now located on a state historical park and operates as a museum and visitor’s center.

But this does not seem to be the end of the Pony Express run for riders or for the horses. Visitors and staff members claim to see disembodied riders and horses making their way along the former route. One rider still has the arrows in his back and is seen lying on the floor bleeding and in agony. Strange sounds are heard and cold spots are felt at the station. But the most prominent supernatural occurrence that has been heard time and time again is the sound of pounding hooves, followed by the call of the riders for their horses.

Then there is the legend of Stampede Mesa. There was a cattleman named Sawyer who was driving 1000 head of cattle through Crosby County Texas. He was taking the herd to the railway in Kansas. In order to get there, he had to cross over another man's land, a man who was not pleased to have a huge herd of cattle coming through his property. To make matters worse, the man had his own cattle and soon, several of Sawyer's mavericks were mixed in with the other man's cattle. A storm was cresting on the horizon and Sawyer knew he needed to get his herd to a safe place, but the man insisted that he get the cattle separated properly. Sawyer said he would take care of it the next day. The man was enraged and informed Sawyer that he would stampede the herd. Sawyer responded by pulling his gun and telling the man to run or he was dead. The man walked away and Sawyer drove the herd over to a mesa top that had water and grass. He stationed two of his men to guard the herd through the night. The angry landowner was not done with Sawyer and he slipped passed the guards. He got behind the herd and pulled out a blanket and a gun. He waved the blanket while shouting, then shot his gun into the air. The herd stampeded in terror and ran off the mesa edge. Seven hundred of the thousand cattle fell to their deaths. Sawyer rounded up the rest of the cattle and then went with his men to get the landowner.

They captured the man and blindfolded him. They grabbed one of his horses and brought them both to the top of the mesa. They loaded the man onto his horse and drove them both over the edge, just as the cattle had been driven over the edge. The mesa was called Stampede Mesa after that time. 

Barbed wire would stop cattle drives from crossing over property in the future. A forest ranger from Texas wrote a song about the legend in 1948. The song details a cowboy in Hell doomed to chase the Devil’s cattle for eternity. Fifty performers have recorded the song, putting their own twist on it. We know it mainly today as "Ghost Riders in the Sky." And it inspired the Doors to write "Riders in the Storm." Cattlemen who have taken their herds to Stampede Mesa, which is located eighteen miles southeast of Crosbyton in Blanco Canyon, claim that their cows stampede in a panic without reason. People claim that when a storm gathers over the mesa, the ghost of the landowner is seen. He is blindfolded on horseback and chasing a phantom herd of cattle across the sky. The sound of a stampeding herd is heard often and the earth feels as though it is rumbling.

The third story features camels in the Old West. Henry Wayne was the Quartermaster Major in 1848 and he suggested to the War Department that they start using camels for military purposes. They were great pack animals that could endure harsh conditions on the frontier. Camels could carry twice the weight of what horses and mules could carry. 

Two years later, Secretary of War and Mississippi Senator, Jefferson Davis, tried to persuade the Senate to look into the use of camels for the U.S. Army. They initially voted the idea down. Eventually, in 1854, the Senate passed a bill to appropriate $30,000 for an experiment using camels. Seventy-two camels were brought into the country in 1857 and they were moved out into the southwest where they carried supplies. Things were fine at first, but soon the soldiers were tired of dealing with the animals. The camels proved to be temperamental, they scared the horses and they wandered off at night. By the time the Civil War broke out, camels were falling out of use and most had been auctioned off or set loose in the desert. For years after that, people would see camels roaming in the desert, especially in southern Arizona. Along with these real sightings, a number of legends and tales began regarding these wild camels. The most popular is the tale of a camel known as the Red Ghost. A woman was found trampled to death with clumps of reddish fur next to her body in 1883. There were large hoof prints nearby too, but nobody could figure out what had happened to the woman. A few days later, a large beast burst into the tent of two miners. They didn't see the creature, but reddish fur and large hoof prints were left behind. People eventually realized that there was a camel on the loose in their area. One day, a man saw the camel running through a ravine and he could have sworn that it carried a man on its back. The rider appeared to be dead. Prospectors saw the camel too and noticed that something fell off its back. They found a human skull on the ground. People started calling the camel "Red Ghost,” and it continued carrying its headless rider. 

A farmer managed to kill the camel in 1893 and while it still carried a saddle, the dead man who had been on his back was gone now. Legend claims the rider had been a timid soldier who had been tied to the beast's back to get him to learn how to ride it and that the camel took off and the soldier being unable to free himself, had died of exposure on the animal.

By the early 1900s, the Camel Corps were almost completely gone. In April 1934, the Oakland Tribune reported: "The Last American Camel Is Dead.” That camel was known as "Topsy”  and after she trekked across the desert of Arizona into California, she was taken to Griffith Park to live. She later became crippled and the zoo keepers were forced to put her down. But camels went on to still be seen in the desert. Only these camels, were no longer alive. One of these ghost camels belonged to a prospector named Jake. He hit it big brought his camels into town, laden with gold. He sold his ore and headed to the saloon. Jake was careful not to give away where his strike was, but a man named Paul Adams followed him back to the spot. Adams murdered Jake while he slept and then one of the camels went mad and attacked him. Adams was nearly killed, but he managed to get his gun back and aimed it at the camel. The camel bit him viciously and Adams fired. The camel dropped dead. Later, Adams tried to find the mine. Jake had fooled him by camping in a different spot. Adams came running into town one night, terrified. He screamed to anyone who would listen to him that he saw a ghostly Jake riding the spirit camel and that they had come after him. Of course, once he had said that, he knew he was in trouble. Everyone wondered how Jake and the camel could be ghosts. Jake and his brave camel are said to still roam the desert.

Dogs can be pretty protective animals and death does not necessarily change this fact. A woman named Kathleen knows this to be true. In the 1960s, Kathleen's mother was a single mother struggling to raise five kids. The family needed an affordable place to live and they found the perfect place in the form of a rundown farmhouse in British Columbia. 

The history behind the house was that it had been owned by a Japanese family, but they lost it during the war when they were sent to an internment camp. The only drawback to the house was its proximity to an asylum for the criminally insane. Kathleen was twelve when they moved into the house and she and her siblings worried that someone would escape and come attack them at the house. One day, a beautiful white dog came up the road of the property. The dog's white coat was whiter than white. Impossibly white and clean is what Kathleen thought. The family already had a dog, but the children were excited to have this friendly visitor and they hoped to keep the dog. It acted somewhat odd. When the children tried to touch it, it would back away. Almost as though it were afraid to be touched. It was inquisitive and did not run away, but it never let anyone touch it. There was a collar and tag around its neck, but no one could get close enough to read it. The kids decided to leave some water and food on the porch for the white dog since it had decided to hang around. Kathleen sat up watching television alone and eventually fell asleep on the couch. She was awakened at 2am by the barking of the family dog. It was barking very loudly. The white dog was still on the front porch and Kathleen heard it give off  a deep guttural growl. Kathleen began to walk to the door to see what was wrong with the dog. She was immediately struck with fear when a large shadow fell across the front door window. She at first thought it was her own shadow, but when she moved her head, the shadow's head did not move. The moon was full and made it hard for her to see, but she knew that some strange man must be at the door. He loomed much larger than the door.

Kathleen was struck by a fear she had never known before. And what made her blood run cold was the realization that whoever was at the door could probably see her perfectly. She was frozen to her spot. She could still hear the white dog growling outside and then she heard it start barking in a ferocious manner. She could hear the dog jump forward and the shadow of the man moved abruptly. 

Kathleen ran to her mother's room and pushed aside the curtains so that she could see into the front yard. She could see the dark figure running up the walk with the white dog chasing after him. It glowed white in the moonlight.The next morning, the white dog was nowhere to be found. Kathleen searched the property and beyond, but found no trace of it. None of the neighbors owned such a dog and none of them had seen the pup. And it never returned to the house. She also noticed that it had not touched the food and water they had left out for it. It was gone as quickly as it came. Her mother remarked that the dog must have been sent by God to protect them. The family never found out who the stranger at the door was and they assumed that the white dog was either an angel or a protective ghost.

Pond Square is located on the site of a former pond in Highgate Village in London. That pond was filled in in 1864. Pond Square is within walking distance of Highgate Cemetery and the most popular pub in Highgate, The Flask, borders the square. The trees are ancient and towering and the landscaping is lush. No one would ever expect this to be home to the ghost...of a chicken!

Sir Francis Bacon was born on January 22, 1561 in London, England and would go on to become a lawyer, statesman, philosopher and scientist. Bacon is credited with being the father of empiricism because he argued for an empirical and inductive appraoch to experimentation. We know this today as the Scientific Method. Bacon eventually would go on to be knighted by King James I for his work. One of the areas of research he worked on is in the use of freezing to preserve meat. It would be this area of experimentation that would eventually kill Bacon. Chemical changes in foods like fruits, vegetables and meats causes the tissue to deteriorate and spoil. Lowering the temperature of food slows microorganism growth. In Bacon's time, scientists did not know about microscopic organisms, but they obviously understood that food spoiled over time. In April of 1626, Bacon was riding with the King's physician, Dr. Winterbourne, through the snow in Highgate. As they road along, the freezing temperature seemed to inspire Bacon to try an experiment. He reasoned that freezing flesh, might keep it from rotting and then the food could be thawed out and eaten. He asked to stop along the way so that the men could purchase a chicken. They found a peasant woman at the bottom of Highgate Hill and purchased the bird from her. The men slaughtered it and then plucked it. Bacon was just starting to stuff the chicken with snow, when the doctor pointed out that his fingers would be frozen by the snow and so some gloves were borrowed from the coachman.

According to a letter written to King James from Sir Francis Bacon, the experiment was a success. He noted the practicality of freezing in preserving food for warfare or famine. There was just one problem, Bacon had caught a horrible chill that made him terribly ill. He was taken to nearby Arundel House. He was placed in a damp bed that made his condition even worse. 

He managed to write a letter to his absent host Lord Arundel and it read, "My very good Lord,—I was likely to have had the fortune of Caius Plinius the elder, who lost his life by trying an experiment about the burning of Mount Vesuvius; for I was also desirous to try an experiment or two touching the conservation and induration of bodies. As for the experiment itself, it succeeded excellently well; but in the journey between London and Highgate, I was taken with such a fit of casting as I know not whether it were the Stone, or some surfeit or cold, or indeed a touch of them all three. But when I came to your Lordship's House, I was not able to go back, and therefore was forced to take up my lodging here, where your housekeeper is very careful and diligent about me, which I assure myself your Lordship will not only pardon towards him, but think the better of him for it. For indeed your Lordship's House was happy to me, and I kiss your noble hands for the welcome which I am sure you give me to it. I know how unfit it is for me to write with any other hand than mine own, but by my troth my fingers are so disjointed with sickness that I cannot steadily hold a pen."

John Aubrey wrote of the event in his book Brief Lives, "The Snow so chilled him that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not return to his Lodging ... but went to the Earle of Arundel's house at Highgate, where they put him into ... a damp bed that had not been layn-in ... which gave him such a cold that in 2 or 3 days as I remember Mr Hobbes told me, he died of Suffocation." That's right, Sir Francis Bacon died of pneumonia caused by his experiment. And this is where our ghost chicken comes into the story.

Ever since the death of Bacon, there have been frequent reports of a phantom white bird, generally resembling the look of a plucked chicken, appearing in Pond Square. The ghostly chicken then runs around the square in erratic circles, flapping its wings.One story is told about a man named Terence Long. The year was 1943, and he was crossing Pond Square late one night. He was suddenly startled by the sound of carriage wheels rumbling along near him and the beat of several horse hooves. It was as if a carriage was riding right past him, but he couldn't see it. Then there was a weird and very loud shriek. A ghostly chicken suddenly appeared before him and ran around the square before it vanished. A motorist had a car breakdown in the 1960s near the square. He got out to look under the engine when he spotted the apparition of the chicken flapping around the square. It disappeared shortly after he saw it. A couple was sitting in the square in the 1970s for a little make-out session when they were suddenly interrupted by something dropping down onto them and then landing on the ground. They realized it was a chicken and were terribly freaked out when the chicken disappeared.

There have not been many sightings in our more recent times. Was there really a ghostly chicken running around Pond Square for a few centuries? Isn't it ironic that the Scientific Method makes it hard to prove any kind of supernatural events and this ghostly chicken seems to have resulted from an experiment conducted by the father of the Scientific Method? 

The Crescent Hotel had a resident cat named Morris and he was considered an important member of the staff. One can find Morris' grave in the garden area. There is a granite tombstone with an etching of a cat at the top that records his date of birth in 1973 and date of death in 1994. In the lobby of the hotel is a memorial plague with a tribute to Morris that reads, "In Memory of Morris, the Resident Cat at the Crescent Hotel. He filled his position exceedingly well. The General Manager title he wore, was printed right there on his own office door. He acted as greeter and sometimes as guide. Whatever his duties, he did them with pride. He chose his own hours and set his own pace. The guests were impressed with his manners and grace. Upstairs and down he kept everything nice. They might have had ghosts, but they never had mice. Due to the fact he was growing quite old, he'd doze by the fire when the weather got cold. His years were a dignified twenty and one, when at last he retired his nine lives were done. He filled his position exceedingly well, the Resident Cat at The Crescent Hotel." Based on the picture featured on the plaque, Morris was an orange tabby cat, but a woman named Laura from Kansas City, Missouri had an experience with a ghost cat at the Crescent Hotel in 2001 that was black in color. She went to the hotel with a group of college friends. They drove from Kansas City to Arkansas. She said, “I grew up an hour away from Eureka Springs, so I had been down to the Crescent Hotel several times. My high school boyfriend had an experience and freaked out and still will not go down there to this day. That was fifteen years ago.” When she told her college friends this, and they wanted to go, so they went down for a long weekend. They took Laura's dog Little Bear with them. He was a thirty-pound mutt about the size of a cocker spaniel, but looked like a Labrador.

As the group of college friends slept, the tags on Little Bear’s collar jingled, and she growled. She was a pretty easy going dog, so Laura was slightly alarmed. She looked toward the vanity where Little Bear was staring. “I saw a black cat sitting on it,” she said. “I saw her in the mirror, but she wasn’t sitting on the vanity. It was on the other side of the mirror.” 

Laura rubbed her eyes, thinking she was seeing things. She was even more amazed by what she saw next. “The cat walked out of the mirror, jumped on the seat of the vanity, and walked through the wall. As the cat stepped out of the mirror, Little Bear started barking. My dog went nuts and woke up everyone else. That’s when I realized I didn’t dream it.” Unfortunately, none of Laura's friends woke up in time to see the ghost cat. Laura said, “They didn’t see it. I saw it, so I was the one who was terrified. I’ve been down there since, but I haven’t stayed there. Since this experience with the cat I decided I didn’t want to stay there again.” Most reports of a ghost cat at the hotel feature Morris. His unseen spirit has been felt winding his body through the legs of guests. Occasionally, guests claim to feel as though a cat has jumped onto a bed or their lap. His apparition has been seen padding down the hallways. Visitors claim to see him sitting in his favorite easy chair and he walks in the garden where he is buried as well. 

A sad fact about our world is that there are many domesticated animals that have been left abandoned. Thousands of these animals are dogs. One of these stray dogs was named Brownie and he made Daytona Beach in Florida his home. He was so attached to that place that even after he died, his spirit has continued on there.

Brownie wandered into Daytona Beach in 1940. He wandered Beach Street for several days and finally picked a spot outside of the Daytona Cab Company to lay his head down at night. The owner of the cab company was Ed Budgen and he took Brownie under his wing. The friendship began with a shared sandwich. He built him a doghouse from cardboard that eventually was upgraded and expanded and Ed added a collection box to help with feeding and caring for the dog. Local business owners would share their scraps with Brownie as well and soon the city had basically adopted the animal. The police force also took Brownie in as an honorary officer. He would join them on their nightly rounds, accompanying them down dark alleys and sniffing out any trouble. It wasn't long before Brownie caught the attention of the entire country. National magazines and newspapers started writing stories about Daytona Beach's Dog and when tourists came to town, they would seek out Brownie so they could get a picture taken with him. At Christmas, Brownie would receive gifts and cards from all over the nation and Ed's wife Doris took to sending thank you cards along with a picture of Brownie after receiving the gifts. Unfortunately, as we all painfully know, the lives of dogs are far too brief and although Brownie had a long life for a large dog, he did pass away in 1954 from old age. A funeral was held and seventy-five people attended. Riverfront Park, which was across from the Daytona Cab Company provided a spot to lay Brownie to rest and his collection box had enough money to provide a headstone. It features the dates 1939 to 1954 and reads "A Good Dog" with a carving of Brownie's likeness in the granite. The entire nation mourned at his passing.

But this was not the end of Brownie's presence in Daytona Beach. His spirit seems to have continued on. Dusty Smith is the founder of Daytona Beach Psychical Research Group and he went to visit Brownie's grave. He gazed at the headstone and wondered aloud if people came to visit Brownie and if people brought him flowers or dog biscuits. 

He decided to make it a point to visit the grave. He decided to head over to a bench one day and he invited Brownie to come sit with him. He soon felt a warmth sitting next to him on the bench. Some people ran up shortly after and Dusty felt the warmth slip away. he pulled out his camera and snapped a picture next to where he had been sitting and captured an orb that had the clear head of a dog within it. It seemed that Brownie joined him on the bench. The ghosts of dogs have been caught in many pictures. A retired Scotland Yard inspector named Arthur Springer was taking a photo at a tea party in 1916 and caught the blurry image of a dog standing next to a woman who was seated at a table and holding a cup of tea. In 1926, Lady Hehir was visiting a spot that had been a favorite for her two dogs, Tara and Kathal. Kathal was a Cairn Terrier and she had passed away six weeks earlier. A friend took a picture of Lady Hehir standing next to Tara who was a large Irish Wolfhound. When the picture was developed the head of Kathal was peering over the backside of Tara. 

A boxer named Preston likes to go trick or treating. This is in the Belmont Hillsboro neighborhood in Nashville. The legend claims that Preston saved a child from being hit by a car when he went trick or treating with a group of children. Preston took the hit himself. His body was never found, but people claim to see his ghost around the neighborhood. Some people claim to feel something nudging them back toward the sidewalk if they get too close to the street.

A person on Reddit wrote, "I have a few actually. We had two dogs and two cats. One of our cats got sick, had a fever and decided he wanted to sleep in the bathtub. Probably because it was cool? Idk, but that's where he wanted to be for a weekend before I could take him to the vet. Sadly, he died in the car on the way to the vet. About a week after he died I was sitting in my office near the bathroom when I heard my dog bark. It was a happy bark like my husband was home. Suddenly both dogs and the other cat came running down the hallway and dove into the tub. They tore down the shower curtain but all 3 of them were in the tub. My dogs hate getting a bath. They have never willingly gone in the tub but they were happy and wagging. The only way I can explain it is that my cat came to say goodbye to his buddies and they were overjoyed to see him. Years later after the other cat died, I saw him and so did the dogs. I was watching TV when he ran by. It wasn't even shocking at first because that's just what he did when he had the zoomies so it didn't seem out of the ordinary until it hit me that the cat had died weeks ago. The dogs chased him into the kitchen so I know they saw him too. But of course when I went into the kitchen, all that was there was two dopey dogs. Last story might get long so I apologize in advance. My dad and stepmother had a mastiff. Dad had passed 5 years prior to stepmom. Stepmom was very depressed and wasn't taking care of things like she normally did. We found out she had cancer and she was placed in home hospice care. My sister called a "house call" vet to come see the dog. He could barely move and was in pitiful shape. The vet said that the dog had horrible hip displasia, a bad skin infection , and was in a lot of pain. We didn't want to tell stepmom, she was dealing with too much already. So the vet gave us meds to keep the dog comfortable until stepmom died. They were both in hospice care at the same time. The day after stepmom passed, the vet came back to put that poor dog out of his misery. The following day, we began the task of cleaning up the house to sell it. I washed the windows in the living room, ran the vacuum, just small things to keep busy. When my sister and I came back the next day, there was a giant paw print on the inside of one of the windows that I had just washed the day before. My sister razzed me "ya missed a spot" I laughed it off thinking she must be right. A few months later we had an estate sale at the house. I was in the back yard when a customer pulled up. She got out of her car and said "what a beautiful mastiff! What's it's name?" I was dumfounded. My sister asked "where did you see a dog?" The lady answered "laying on your front porch, cant miss it, it's huge!" When I went to look there was no dog there. My sister told the lady "oh, must have been the neighbor dog who decided to go home." But we both knew, he was there. So in answer to your question, yes, animals have souls, and do come back to visit."

WiseOldChicken on Reddit wrote, "When my black lab, Rudy, died, we had him cremated. When I went to pick up his ashes I decided to walk home. In the shop windows I noticed the reflection of a dog and it appeared to be following me. I stopped and turned around but there was no dog. As I turned to continue home I saw the reflection clearly in a glass window. It was Rudy." 

SquishyGerbil wrote on Reddit, "I got another that is my mom's story. My grandma was dying and they had to get to her to say goodbye . We live in illinois she was in Wisconsin. My mom went to pick up her brother. While she was there his dog had a seizure and passed away. (Shit timing I know ). So they had to race to Wisconsin to say goodbye. When they got there my grandma was out of it. She asked my uncle why his dog was running around the hospital room and she was laughing. She didn't even know he had a dog or that the dog passed away. She just kept saying Steve your dog is running around the room ! And she passed like an hour or so after that." 

Sir William Martyn built Athelhampton House in 1485. The family had an unusual pet, an ape. A chained ape was even featured on the family crest, paired with the motto: "If you look at Martin's ape, Martin's ape will look at you." A legend claims that a heartbroken daughter went into a secret room intending to end her life. The ape had followed her into the room and became trapped where it eventually passed away. Visitors to the house claim to hear the ape scratching at walls, and some have even seen him swinging from the ceiling. 

HGB Halloween Special 2026

Happy Halloween Spookies! Welcome to the HGB Halloween Special for 2026. In earlier specials we shared about the history of key elements of Halloween like carving pumpkins and wearing costumes and trick or treating. Then we've looked at the history of haunted attractions, vintage Halloween decor, horror hosts, and 1980s Halloween horror movies. We weren't sure what our theme was going to be this year and then we got contacted about this black comedy/horror/pseudo documentary film named Guillotine and then we had our theme: the history of the guillotine! 

The guillotine is a mechanical execution device created during the French Revolution to provide a fast, equal, and supposedly humane form of decapitation. It was proposed by Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, for whom it is named, and built by German harpsichord maker Tobias Schmidt, and designed by Dr. Antoine Louis. The first prisoner was executed with it on April 25, 1792, and remained France’s official method of execution until 1981. Guillotine is an award winning film that is narrated by legendary actress Sean Young and was co-written, produced and directed by Iranian-American Filmmaker Ray Izad-Mehr (EE-zahd Mare) and I had the opportunity to interview him, which we are going to share here. This is a great film to put on tonight. It's available on TUBI. Kelly, probably the most fascinating thing about this film is this section about consciousness after the head chop. Something I had heard years ago is that it takes 3 seconds after the head is removed for death to occur and you explore this question of how long one is conscious after the beheading. Now I know that this is considered an urban legend, but one of the sections features famous French chemist Antoine Lavoisier (ahn-TWAHN lah-vwah-ZEE-ay) who was sentenced to death by the guillotine in 1794 during the French Revolution and he decided to conduct one final scientific experiment right at the scaffold: he told his assistant or colleagues that he would try to blink his eyes for as long as he remained conscious after being decapitated so they could measure how long a human head retains awareness. There are various claims that he successfully blinked anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds.

Halloween is our favorite night of the year. We've got the garage all decorated to scare the little kiddies while we dish out the candy. We hope you all have some scary or fun or both plans for tonight. There's plenty of haunts on History Goes Bump to keep you company. Happy Halloween from the crew here at HGB: me, Diane, Barnaby the Ghost, Mort the Gravedigger and our new mascot, Poe the Raven. 

HGB Ep. 660 - Haunted Cemeteries 32

Moment in Oddity - Burro Schmidt Tunnel

In the Mojave Desert, in the early 1900's, there was a unique fellow named William "Burro" Schmidt. He began carving a legendary tunnel through the solid granite of Copper Mountain in 1906. Burro was driven by grueling ambition to create a shortcut for hauling his mining ore to the local smelter. For thirty-two years, he worked entirely alone in the isolation of the northern Mojave Desert. He operated as a human mole using nothing more than a pick, a shovel, a hand-drilled four-pound hammer, and dynamite. He lived very frugally, patching his clothes with burlap sacks and walking miles with his pack burros, Jack and Jenny, to gather water and kerosene. He squirreled away money to live on by working during the summer months for local ranchers. By the time he finally broke through the southern face of the mountain in 1938, Schmidt had single-handedly fractured and hauled out an estimated 5,800 tons of rock to create a nearly half-mile-long passageway. However, in a twist of irony, a new valley road had already rendered the route obsolete.  'Burro' never used the tunnel to transport a single ounce of ore, but he did host tours of the tunnel to curious onlookers. A lone man, single-handedly digging a roughly 2,087 foot tunnel through a granite mountain, to have it later be turned into a famous tourism destination, certainly is odd. 

Haunted Cemeteries 32

Cemeteries are some of our favorite locations and when they are haunted, it's like they are wrapped in a giant purple bow. Some are just little rural knockabout places with few burials. Others are large cemeteries with grand mausoleums. Some have legends that lean more towards the invented, while others have videos confirming that shadowy figures wander through the tombstones. All of them honor the dead, which may be why spirits are comfortable hanging out in them. Join us for Haunted Cemeteries #32! 

Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, South Dakota

Deadwood had an issue with its original burial ground, Ingleside Cemetery. It was getting very crowded and it was prone to flooding, which unearthed a few coffins here and there. So the Lawrence County government decided that another boot hill cemetery needed to be built. In 1878, this cemetery was laid out by Deadwood's Masons, higher up on the hillside of a rough mountain top. This would be a classic Victorian cemetery set in the northern Black Hills. They named it Mount Moriah Cemetery because in Masonic literature there is a line that reads, "Bury him on the hill west of Mount Moriah." Also, the Bible and Jewish Torah served as inspiration and that is represented in the road names in the cemetery. The cemetery gateway has several symbols on it representing the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Freemasonry, and the Star of David. Around 3,700 people are buried here and several of them were moved here from the Ingleside Cemetery that was closed and emptied for housing. People sometimes still find bones in their backyards. *Fun Fact: The American flag flies here 24 hours a day based on tradition.* There are four Potter's fields within Mount Moriah and there is a children's section because so many died from typhus, cholera and small pox outbreaks. A mass grave was dug for victims of a devastating fire. On March 12, 1883 at around 11:00 p.m., a fire broke out at the Hood & Scott sawmill boarding house at the Brownsville Wood Camp, which was 9 miles south of Deadwood. Inside the boarding house were 11 sawmill workers who became trapped and killed inside the burning wooden structure. Contemporary reports noted that several victims might have survived had they not re-entered the building to try and retrieve personal belongings.  

In 1879, Colorado Charlie Utter supervised as Wild Bill's remains were moved to a new burial site at Mount Moriah. Wild Bill was born as James Butler Hickok in 1837. He is one of the most famous people from the American Old West and was a bit of every thing, lawman, scout, gunslinger, showman, gambler, cattle rustler and soldier. He was involved in several famous gunfights, one of which we covered on a haunted Springfield episode in which he had a duel with a man named Davis Tutt. He killed Tutt and was charged with manslaughter, but a jury cleared him. Wild Bill was a criminal by the time he turned 18 and he left his home state of Illinois for the frontier territories, getting a job as a stagecoach driver. He would later spy for the Union army during the Civil War. Wild Bill came to his end at the age of 39 in Deadwood on August 2, 1876 when he was shot and killed while playing poker in a saloon by Jack McCall. The hand Wild Bill held, two pairs, black aces and eights, and another unknown card, became known as the dead man's hand.

Martha Jane Canary was a unique woman. She wasn't given to frilly dresses and certainly wasn't very ladylike. She became the famous Calamity Jane, a legendary frontierswoman, sharpshooter and storyteller and that last one makes it hard to know exactly what was true about her life story. She embellished an autobiographical booklet for a tour she headed, but we do know she was born in Missouri in 1852 and died in South Dakota in 1903 and she was a beer drinker, foul-mouthed and chewed tobacco. She claimed, "It was during this campaign [in 1872–73] that I was christened Calamity Jane. It was on Goose Creek, Wyoming where the town of Sheridan is now located. Capt. Egan was in command of the Post. We were ordered out to quell an uprising of the Indians, and were out for several days, had numerous skirmishes during which six of the soldiers were killed and several severely wounded. When on returning to the Post we were ambushed about a mile and a half from our destination. When fired upon, Capt. Egan was shot. I was riding in advance and on hearing the firing turned in my saddle and saw the Captain reeling in his saddle as though about to fall. I turned my horse and galloped back with all haste to his side and got there in time to catch him as he was falling. I lifted him onto my horse in front of me and succeeded in getting him safely to the Fort. Capt. Egan, on recovering, laughingly said: 'I name you Calamity Jane, the heroine of the plains.' I have borne that name up to the present time." Calamity Jane ventured to Fort Laramie in July 1876 and it was there that she joined a wagon train that included Wild Bill and this was when the two met. The wagon train ended up in Deadwood. Calamity Jane remained in Deadwood after the death of Wild Bill and saved a bunch of passengers on a stagecoach that was attacked by Indians and she nursed victims of a small pox epidemic. By 1881, she was in Montana running an inn and in 1893 she joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. She died in 1903 from an inflamed bowel and pneumonia. She was buried next to Wild Bill Hickok. Rumor has it that Jane’s dying wish was to be buried next to Hickok, though he supposedly didn’t care for her that much.

Blanche Colman was a German Jewish immigrant who grew up in Deadwood and left for Washington, D.C. to work for a South Dakota congressman. She eventually returned to the Hills and got a job in the law office of Chambers Kellar who was Seth Bullock’s son-in-law. While doing that work, she was inspired to teach herself the law and she became the first female lawyer in South Dakota. She was admitted to the South Dakota Bar when she was 27. Blanche died in 1978 at the age of 93 and was buried on Hebrew Hill, a special Jewish section, along with about 60 others. 

The grandest plot in the cemetery belongs to Seth Bullock who was born in 1849 in Canada. He ran away from home several times as a teenager because his dad beat him. He became a sheriff in the Montana territory and then moved to Deadwood in 1876 to open a hardware store. Deadwood was a rowdy place at the time and Bullock became its first sheriff in 1877. Bullock also bought a ranch and introduced alfalfa farming to the region. There was also a flouring mill, mining and Bullock became a US Marshal. Teddy Roosevelt described Bullock as "a true Westerner, the finest type of frontiersman." Bullock died of colon cancer in 1919 and he was buried in a grave that faces Mt. Roosevelt on a high trail to White Rocks above Mount Moriah. 

Dora DuFran was an infamous madame in Deadwood. She began her life in England and emigrated to America in 1869 when she was a toddler. For some reason I don't know, she got started in prostitution when she was 14 and she also became a dance hall girl. Dora arrived in Deadwood when she was 15 and she opened a brothel - maybe youngest madame ever? Dora was friends with Calamity Jane and employed her several times as a cook and housekeeper. She owned several brothels with the most popular being Diddlin' Doras. There was dining, drinking and dancing here and it claimed you could bring your mother. A client said he wouldn't want his mother to know he had been there. Dora died of heart failure in 1934 and was buried next to her husband and parrot in Mount Moriah. 

People who enter the cemetery immediately feel as though they are being watched. Two female employees were locking up one night and did their standard walk through to make sure that no one was left in the cemetery. They saw a couple of shadows and when they investigated to see what was causing the shadows, they found nothing. Full bodied apparitions of Chinese workers have been seen in the Chinese section of the cemetery. The interesting thing about this is that nearly all of the Chinese bodies were disinterred and shipped off to China for burial due to religious reasons. The front gates open and close on their own at times. Voices have been heard in the cemetery and sometimes it is multiple voices that seem to be carrying on a conversation.  

Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, NY (Suggested by: Amy Marie Osgood)

This is said to be one of the most haunted cemeteries on the East Coast. Mount Hope Cemetery was founded in 1838 in Rochester, New York and was the first municipal rural cemetery founded in the United States. The cemetery covers 196 acres and has 350,000 burials. Burials continue today. The Gate House is gorgeous and was designed by architect Andrew J. Warner in the High Victorian Gothic and Neo-Romanesque style. It was completed in 1874. There are wonderful monuments and statuary. One of the memorials is for men, women and children whose unmarked graves were discovered in Highland Park. It is named "Invisible No More: Honoring the Deceased Buried in the Public Section of Mt. Hope Cemetery" and was unveiled in 2023. There are around 1,000 people and they came from the almshouse, penitentiary and asylum in Monroe County. Another monument for a group plot represents the Rochester Orphan Asylum, which was founded in 1837. In January of 1901, a boiler at the asylum ignited a fire that killed 31 people, 26 of them were children. The tragedy led to Rochester revamping its fire codes. And speaking of fire codes, the Firemen’s Plot was designed in 1843 for the purpose of burying fallen firefighters. In 1880, the Rochester Firefighters Benevolent Association bought a larger section and the previously buried firefighters were moved to it. A 50 foot obelisk was constructed for the new plot. 

Michael Filon was mayor of Rochester from 1862-1863. He was also one of the founders of the Rochester amusement park named Seabreeze that opened in 1879 and is the fourth-oldest operating amusement park in the United States. Filon got the idea to use a train to transport people from downtown Rochester to the lakeside Seabreeze area while attending the 1876 Centennnial Exposition in Philadelphia. He gathered investors and the new rail line and recreational resort became a reality. Filon is buried with his wife beneath statuary that features a seated woman with a child sitting at her feet that she has her arm around. 

Nathaniel Rochester was the founder of the city. Rochester was born in Virginia in 1752. He went on to become a Revolutionary War soldier and land speculator and it was during his time doing that that he founded the settlement that would become Rochester. He platted out the streets and plots in 1811 and it was called Rochesterville. Nathaniel was part of a committee that petitioned for the formation of the Erie Canal as well. He and his wife Sophia had 12 children and 28 grandchildren. He died in 1831.

The father of the Pacific Railroad is buried here, Dr. Hartwell Carver. He was an early promoter of a transcontinental railroad. He helped hammer in the Golden Spike that officially joined the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads on May 10, 1869 at Promontory, Utah. The Union Pacific Railroad paid for his grand 54-foot monument that features a tall column with a statue of a robed woman depicting faith atop the column. She holds a Bible, has a star on her forehead and is pointing with one finger up towards heaven.

Kurt Vonnegut was a writer and author who published the novel Slaughterhouse Five in 1969. The novel is a semi-autobiographic science fiction anti-war work that features a main character named Billy Pilgrim. Pilgrim is based off the real life person Edward R. Crone. Crone had been imprisoned with Vonnegut during World War II during the Dresden Bombings. Crone had been captured after the Battle of the Bulge. He died from starvation while imprisoned. 

Frank Gannett, the founder of the Gannett Company is buried here. Gannett was an American publisher who began his career in newspaper and then founded the media corporation that carries his name. At his death, he owned 23 newspapers, 4 radio stations and three television stations. he wasn't into yellow journalism and gossip and kept his papers focused on standard news rather than big crime or sensational stories - so boring. Gannett Corporation is today known as USA Today Co, Inc. That just changed in 2025. Gannett died in 1957 at the age of 81. 

Susan B. Anthony is buried here under a fairly simple headstone. Anthony is one of the most famous suffragettes in America who traveled and lectured across the country, advocating for abolishing slavery and for women's rights in property ownership, labor organizing and voting. She did this work for over 60 years and faced violent mobs and armed threats and was beaten and imprisoned several times. Her image was hung in effigy and dragged through the streets. She died from pneumonia in 1906 at the age of 86. 

Seth Green was known as the Father of Fish Culture in North America because he pioneered work in aquaculture and fisheries conservation. People refer to him as the most important fisherman in American history. He established the first fish hatchery in New York in 1864. Green died in 1888 and is buried beneath a large monument with a female figure pointing to heaven and holding an anchor.

Dr. Charles Terrell Lunsford was Rochester’s first black physician. He practiced medicine from 1921 to 1972. He once entertained Martin Luther King Jr. at his house because he was also a Civil Rights activist. He is buried next to his wife and sister under a large headstone with the name Lunsford and the and the emblem of the American medical Association. 

The father of the telegraph, James D. Reid, has a monument that is a square column set on three graduated marble steps. There is a bronze portrait plaque of Reid and a bronze tablet that reads, "A pioneer of the telegraph and its first superintendent. Friend and associate of Morse. A kindly gentleman of beautiful character and stainless life. This monument was erected 1914 by telegraphers in appreciation and loving memory of his unselfish helpfulness."

And the great Frederick Douglass is here. He was born in 1818 and became a champion of civil rights after being born into slavery He learned to read and write from the wife of an owner and also from white children in his neighborhood. A new owner acquired him when he was 16 and this owner decided to break him since he seemed to be uppity. Douglass fought back and scared the man from attempting to hurt him again. He finally escaped from bondage when he was 20 and he moved north where he married a free black woman named Anna Murray. In the north, he joined the abolitionist movement and wrote and gave speeches. This propelled him forward as a symbol of the intellectual capabilities of black people.  He traveled extensively, both through the U.S. and abroad, and also aligned himself with the Irish nationalist movement. Douglass pushed for the women's right to vote as well and was the only black man to attend the landmark 1848 Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls. His wife died in 1882, and in 1884 Douglass remarried to a woman named Helen Pitts, who was a white woman 20 years his junior. He died in 1895. 

The land beneath the cemetery is said to have been haunted before Mount Hope was founded. Euro American settlers claimed that there was eerie phenomenon coming from the swampy, wooded area that included floating lights, powerful screams and groans, and figures emerging then disappearing into thin air. The reason why this may be the case is the Native Americans felt this land was sacred and then a dark energy seemed to move in because of a large cholera outbreak. There is a section of the cemetery that is sunken down and known as the “Devil’s Bowl.” There are rumors that occult rituals are conducted here and people claim to feel a malevolent energy there. A grave robbery in 2000 doesn't help these rumors. During the summer solstice in 2000, authorities found disturbed bones. It seemed that the skeleton of General Elisha G. Marshall had been removed from its grave and now the skull was missing. Police thought that perhaps this was taken for a ritual because satanic symbols were found near some of the bones. The general himself was described as being an evil genius. There are also reports of the apparition of an old man walking halfway across the road before vanishing directly in front of cars. A phantom jogger has also been seen.  

Gurnsey Hollow in NY (Suggested by: Ruth Dempsey)

We don't know when this cemetery was founded. Headstones go back to the early 1800s. Bill Burk wrote for The Villager in January 2024 about this cemetery, "Just outside of Frewsburg, New York, deeper in the woods than might be comfortable, past a small V-shaped ravine, there’s a low wooded area tucked into a valley. You access it by pathways that grow increasingly remote, highway to lane, pavement to dirt, road to path, then by foot into a dense copse. There are no landmarks to orient you, the walking track is your only guide. As you hike into the forest, there’s a Blair-Witch sense of displacement, you can’t help but feel it, either because of the surroundings, or invented by your subconscious, knowing where you’re headed, a disconcerting detachment, passing through the looking glass. As you ascend a small rise, a rusted metal fence looms, uneven and twisted, the teeth of a predator, as if you were standing still and the fence was thrust out of the ground." A legend claims that a prominent white cross sits in the cemetery and a local superstition warns that visitors must bow, curtsy, or "kiss the cross" out of respect before exiting the cemetery gates, or they will face a tragic fate.

Visitors have reported seeing a ghostly lady in white, a young boy, spectral orbs, and the apparition of a young girl or the sound of her moans. The girl is alleged to have been mentally handicapped and murdered by townsfolk for unknown reasons; some believe that the lady in white and young boy roam the graveyard to protect this girl. The Ghoul Guide visited the cemetery and had an experience while there. She was wandering through and recording videos and heard the faint sound of a music box. She said it sounded like the same notes as the paranormal music box. She wrote, "I remember standing there, saying something out loud about it as I glanced around, hoping to hear something else along with it - but it was silent, and there was nothing around that could have made that noise. It hadn't been until I got home and researched a bit more to find out the claims of phantom children playing there. Perhaps, I stumbled upon them playing. 

Chris Gethard, writing on the web site Weird U.S. says, “I am fascinated by every site I have visited in the course of researching and writing Weird NY. But none have intimidated me and frightened me as much as the Gurnsey Hollow Cemetery. My trip there was easily one of the more chilling experiences I have had in my entire life—including my five years in the employ of the Weird NJ/Weird US family of magazines and books, which have led me to visit hundreds of purportedly haunted sites personally. I don’t think words or even pictures can do justice to the atmosphere of this very unique and disturbing place.” 

Erie Street Cemetery in Cleveland, OH

Erie Street Cemetery is Cleveland's oldest existing cemetery, located at 2254 E 9th St right across from Progressive Field in downtown Cleveland, Ohio. I was just listening to Game 3 of the National League Championship Series - we lost to the Guardians and they were playing at Progressive Field.  (pg. 65) in Haunted Cleveland by Beth A. Richards and Chuck L, Gove. 

Toronto Necropolis

Toronto Necropolis is a non-denominational cemetery in Canada with over 50,000 burials. The cemetery was opened during the 1850s to replace the Strangers' Burying Ground that closed in 1855. There is a gorgeous High Victorian Gothic gatehouse and small stone chapel. In 1933, the Necropolis opened Ontario's first crematorium and this ran until 1990. There are many notable people buried here. One of these people is David Ward who was an English-born settler of a nearby island named for him, Ward's Island. He was a fisherman and hotelier who died in 1881. He suffered a great tragedy in 1862 when a boating mishap on Lake Ontario left his five daughters drowned. His son William survived. Four of the daughters are buried with David. Dr. Anderson Ruffin Abbott was the first Canadian=born black surgeon. He served as an officer for the Union army during the American Civil War. He was invited to a White House reception in 1864 and is thought to have been the first Black military officers to do that and President Lincoln greeted him courteously. Most guests were stunned to see him there and he said of the event, "We could not have been more surprised ourselves or created more surprise if we had been dropped down upon them through a sky-light." Dr. Abbott died in 1913 at the age of 76. Roy Brown was the RAF officer and World War I fighter pilotwho shot down Manfred von Richthofen, the "Red Baron." William Lyon Mackenzie of the Mackenzie House that we covered in Haunted Toronto is buried here. And there is the founder of the Toronto Telegram, John Ross Robertson, who died in 1918.

Henry Box Brown who famously mailed himself in a custom-made box from Richmond to Philadelphia in 1848, spent his last two decades in Toronto. Brown had been born into slavery in 1816 and worked in a tobacco factory in Richmond, After his wife and children were sold away to North Carolina, he resolved to get free. He got the help of a couple of friends to ship him in a box to the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Once freed from the box, he lectured across New England and he eventually left for England to keep from being re-enslaved. He later became a hypnotist and magician. He died in 1897. My favorite burial here is for the amazing George A. Romero, who created, co-wrote and directed my favorite horror movie of all time, 1968's "Night of the Living Dead." Romero basically created the zombie film genre. Romero made other horror films like "Creepshow," "Monkey Shines," and he created the anthology television series "Tales from the Darkside." Not bad for a guy from the Bronx who got his start in commercials. He died in 2017. 

People feel as though they are being watched by something unseen. Full-bodied apparitions dressed in period clothing are seen on occasion. Orbs have been seen and photographed. Some visitors report being touched by disembodied hands. 

Oakwood Cemetery in Spartanburg, SC

Oakwood Cemetery is located at 184 Oakwood Avenue in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The cemetery was founded in 1883, making this one of Spartanburg's oldest active cemetery. The Oakwood Cemetery Corporation was formed by prominent citizens of the town and they bought 26 acres, which is now filled with around 6,000 graves. The grounds feature Victorian monuments and sculptures and there is also a Jewish section. This was also the city's potter's field and burial site for many prisoners from the state penitentiary. A family's personal burial ground is here too as it was on the acreage before the cemetery was founded. This was for the Thompson family and there are thirteen graves with death dates between 1828 and 1872. The Converse Garden was added in 2016. Unfortunately, in the 1940s, bankruptcy left the cemetery without care and this wouldn't change until 1983 when a woman named Martha Chapman reformed the Board of Directors a revived the cemetery. Many well-known families of the area are buried here, including the Twichells, Clevelands, Montgomerys, Floyds and DuPres. 

Other people buried here include Simpson Bobo who founded the oldest continually operating law firm in the United States: Bobo, Carlisle & Edwards, which operates today as the Bean Law Firm, Bobo also signed the ordinance of secession before the Civil War. John Belton White joined the American Expeditionary Force in 1917 and deployed to France during World War I. He fought in the Battle of the Somme and he sustained dozens of wounds from machine guns, rifles, bayonets, and shrapnel, earning six wound stripes. There were between 63 and 67 wounds. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by General John J. Pershing on the battlefield, plus the Croix de Guerre (krwah duh gair). The founder of Converse College, Dexter Edgar Converse is buried here as well. He was a pioneer in the cotton mill industry. 

Locals call the cemetery "Hell's Gate." Paranormal activity in the cemetery ranges from people hearing disembodied children's laughter to drained batteries to seeing glowing orbs that float around the tombstones to full-bodied apparitions. One of those ghosts is our famous "Woman in White." This spirit is usually in the middle of a mist and wearing the wedding dress she was probably buried in. Another spirit is a young boy who asks people to play with him. Homeowners around the cemetery claim to ahve some hauntings in their houses as well. Paranormal investigator Laurie Fowler said, "I’ve caught a lot of paranormal activity in there [Oakwood], we’ve had all kinds of stuff happen. I’ve had equipment go dead on me, cell phones don’t work, and I’ve caught orbs." mellowwynn on Reddit wrote, "First place I saw a ghost! It was a young girl with a hat covering her face. A few minutes later a friend said “you saw that girl huh?" brokencookie78 on Reddit wrote, "In the mid-nineties, I visited just before sunset with a few friends. It was just before dark, as the sun was setting. We encountered a woman wearing a dark colored dress and veil who was standing at a grave with her head down and holding a single flower. We passed by her and when I looked back, she was gone. There was no sign of her anywhere, no flower on the grave. It freaked us out, so we high-tailed it out of there."

HGB Ep. 659 - The Black Jail and Other Haunts of Guthrie

This Month in History - Sweetest Day 3rd Sat Every October

In the month of October, on the 8th, in 1921 Herbert Birch Kingston and a committee of local confectioners established the first Sweetest Day in Cleveland, Ohio. Prior to this, Candy Day was originated in 1916 by The National Confectioners Association as a commercial push to encourage people to buy more sweets. This promotion stopped temporarily because of sugar rationing during World War I. The celebration's evolution into The Sweetest Day was begun by Kingston and a group of candy makers who sought to bring joy and comfort to orphans, the elderly, and those who felt forgotten. Silent film stars like Theda Bara and Ann Pennington handed out candy in the 1930s, which made the charity event famous. Over the decades, it has evolved from a regional act of charity into a broader occasion for expressing appreciation, love, and friendship. Today, the Sweetest Day is celebrated every 3rd Saturday of October. People celebrate by sharing greeting cards, small gifts, or sweets with loved ones and neighbors as a simple reminder that a kind word can enrich daily life.

The Black Jail of Guthrie (GUH three)

An abandoned and decaying building in Guthrie, Oklahoma has served a number of purposes throughout its history. This started as the Black Jail and then became a place of worship for the Nazarene Church. Then it was a social club before a cult known as the Samaritan Foundation made this their headquarters. And then there was the murder. It's no wonder that people say the place is haunted. Guthrie has a couple of other haunted locations as well including a train depot, theater and former saloon. Join us for the history and hauntings of the Black Jail and other haunts of Guthrie.  

Guthrie was the first capitol of Oklahoma. The history of this town is a crazy one as it seems to have started overnight. The historic Land Run, or Harrison's Hoss Race, brought 10,000 people to Guthrie in a single afternoon, which was quite the thing for a town that was only a railroad stop before the Land Run.  In 1887, the spot was used as a coaling and water stop named Deer Creek along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. The Harrison part of the Harrison's Hoss Race name was for President Benjamin Harrison. He had signed a proclamation on March 23, 1889 opening up the Unassigned Lands in the Oklahoma District. This made two million acres available for settlement under the provisions of the Homestead Act of 1862, which stated that settlers could claim up to 160 acres of public land and if they improved it over the next five years, they would get the title to the land. Prospective settlers from across the United States came by wagon, horse or railroad. Fifty thousand people surrounded the Unassigned Lands on April 22, 1889 and at noon, the signal was given that the entry points were open. An avalanche of wagons and horsemen surged forward. Ten thousand of them ended up in Guthrie and a tent city sprang up, which was replaced quickly with wooden buildings and Guthrie became one of the largest cities west of the Mississippi. Wooden buildings were replaced by brick and sandstone later. The Guthrie Chamber of Commerce reports in their history by "August 1889, The Guthrie City Directory listed the following: 6 banks,16 barbers, 16 blacksmiths, 17 carpenters, 2 cigar manufacturers, 5 newspapers, 7 hardware stores, 15 hotels, 19 pharmacists, 22 lumber companies, 39 doctors, 40 restaurants, and an astounding 81 lawyers!" In 1890, Guthrie became the Territorial Capital. When Oklahoma became an official state in 1907, Guthrie was its first state capital. The state government moved to Oklahoma City in 1910. There are over 2,000 buildings in the Guthrie Historic District and just outside that boundary is the First territorial Jail, commonly known as the Black Jail. 

The Black Jail was one of the very first Federal Prisons in the Midwest. Today, it sits on the NW corner of 2nd Street and Noble Avenue and was built in 1892. The jail was constructed with 18-inch thick limestone and brick walls that were dark in color and so the inmates took to calling it the Black Jail. As was the case with these old jails, the stone construction and era left the interiors stiflingly hot in the summers and freezing in the winters. These temperature changes led to illness. 

Despite being solidly built and advertised as inescapable with a metal cage surrounding the front entrance on the second floor at the top of the stairs, inmates did escape. The first escapee was W.D. Lockett, who escaped in 1895 after he was imprisoned for counterfeiting. He escaped by prying the lock off his cell and then he went through a window connected to the kitchen. Bill Doolin was another of the inmates to escape. Doolin was an American outlaw who many believe was the Wild West's greatest gang leaders. He led the Doolin-Dalton gang and their specialty was robbing banks, trains and stagecoaches. Doolin had been born in Arkansas in 1858 and at the age of 23, he headed to Indian Territory to be a cowboy. He found work as a cattleman under Oscar Halsell who also employed a variety of men who would become outlaws. One of these men was Emmett Dalton. Emmett and two of his brothers would form the Dalton Gang. Doolin would have his first run in with the law in Coffeyville, Kansas when he got drunk and disorderly with some other guys and a shootout with lawmen ensued - that escalated fast! The lawmen were wounded and Doolin got away. He joined the Dalton Gang shortly thereafter and is thought to have been holding horses for them in an alley during a bank robbery that ended up with four of the gang members dead and Emmett wounded with 23 gunshots. Doolin formed his own gang at the end of 1892 that he called The Wild Bunch. The gang would be one of the most powerful in the Old West. Doolin was captured while using the sulfur springs in Eureka Springs, Arkansas and he ended up in the Black Jail. As Deputy Bill Tilghman escorted Doolin into Guthrie, a crowd of 2,000 people lining the street cheered. On July 5, 1896, Doolin and 13 other inmates broke out of the jail. Four of them had overpowered one of the guards. Doolin used a revolver to get the only other guard at the jail to unlock the cells of nine other prisoners. The group locked one guard in the bull pen and the other in a cell and then took a bunch of coats and vests that belonged to the jailer and guards and took a few weapons. They ran into the night. Doolin was tracked down two months later and killed by a posse.

The county no longer needed the jail by 1924 and it was closed. The Guthrie Church of the Nazarene bought the building and remodeled it so they could use it as their church building. The third floor was removed so the second floor could be expanded into a sanctuary. First floor cells were converted into classrooms. Another pastor took over the church in 1934 and the congregation surged, so the building was expanded again by 2,000 square feet. The original red sandstone was covered by white stucco. The church occupied it until 1970. 

The Logan County Association for [Mentally Handicapped] Citizens used the building for a while and then it was donated to the territorial Gunfighters Club in 1990. And then came the jail's cult period. The Samaritan Foundation Cult acquired the building in 1993. This cult was connected to the disappearance and death of Allen Ross. Allen Ross was a Chicago cameraman and indie filmmaker who made seven films with German filmmaker Christian Bauer. Right after they completed their final film, he vanished without a trace. Christian Bauer made the documentary "Missing Allen" in 2001, four years after Ross' disappearance, since the police didn't seem to be doing anything. He investigated what happened to his friend. The Samaritan Foundation was started by a woman named Linda Greene. Greene had become a nurse and was working in an innovative Oklahoma hospice in the 1980s. She was a sometimes actress and poet and married five times. Linda embraced the esoteric and before long, she had surrounded herself with 60 like-minded people that she at first led in self-help seminars. Before long, this was a religious cult based on her obtaining answers with dowsing. These people believed that Linda could answer the great mysteries of life by using swaying pendulums to give them answers. She would move a pendulum over objects and that pendulum would give the Samaritans guidance on the biggest and smallest of decisions. It was believed that the pendulum would fight off evil forces too. And then Linda also wrote books she believed would revolutionize the world. The teachings got crazier as the group went along as Linda promoted an obsessive fear of government agents and telephones and zombies. Yep, they feared the walking dead before it was a popular series. There was a custody battle that drew unwanted attention to the cult because a mother had taken her two children with her to the cult and then told her husband, Jonathan, she wasn't coming home. He fought for the kids and during the two days of testimony during the custody court case, the Samaritan Foundation’s teachings were exposed to the public. The Branch Davidian Waco thing had just happened and people thought the groups were connected. Jonathon testified to his wife’s “bizarre” behavior beginning 18 months earlier when she began receiving correspondence from the Samaritan Foundation. She was swinging a pendulum over things including the children to remove evil. To defeat bar codes on product labels, which Greene also claimed were evil, groceries were placed on circular drawings. He found the same drawings underneath the children’s pillows. It was also revealed that Linda taught her followers that vampires could steal their souls through the phone lines. And she claimed to be Christ. Johnathan won the case and this was the beginning of the end for the group as officials started paying attention to them and eventually condemned the jail building. The cult left Guthrie for Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1995 when the pendulum told them to go. After Allen disappeared, the group scattered to the wind. 

Allen Ross first picked up a camera as a teenager in Chicago. After leaving home, he worked driving a cab while he lived a bohemian life in a downtown loft. Allen met Christian and they started making films together featuring odd and unexplained topics. One of these films featured UFO abductees. 

In 1993, Allen met Linda Greene and fell in love with her. At the time, Linda was working as a nurse and writing books. Allen illustrated one of the books for her. He told all of his family and friends that he was very happy with Linda, but they were still shocked when he announced that he was leaving his beloved Chicago for rural Oklahoma. Linda and Allen ended up in Guthrie and Allen would send postcards back to his twin brother Brad. One such note read, "I seized the opportunity to seek answers for questions I had not been able to ask." Another cryptically read, "The masters will shut you up in a pen with others, then it will be up to you to find a house to enter." Allen told everyone that they were living in a former jail and church in Guthrie that Linda called The Monastery. Allen met up with Christian to make their final documentary in 1995 and they wrapped filming in New Orleans. Christian Bauer told Dennis Murphy in 2005 that Linda showed up in New Orleans and she was nothing like what he expected. He described her as being "very demanding. She was very controlling. She was not the caring kind of woman I had imagined her to be when I saw her on the picture the first time. Allen seemed embarrassed by her presence. When she mugged for his camera, Allen panned away. He's telling her, stay away from us but she follows the camera and she dances. He wants to get away from it, and he continues his pan and she just disappears out of the frame." Allen left New Orleans and returned to Wyoming with Linda and no one saw him again. Eventually, Linda's ex-husband contacted the Cheyenne Police and told them that Allen had been murdered. He even said that Allen was buried in the basement of his and Linda's home. The police didn't find anything and shortly thereafter, Linda faxed the police and Christian Bauer and accused her ex-husband of killing Allen. She wrote, "After Allen was shot, he was dragged perhaps downstairs. I saw Denis carry two sacks of concrete, which were by the back door, downstairs." 

Allen's body was finally discovered exactly where Denis said it was, buried under concrete in the basement of the home he shared with Linda. Investigators zeroed in on Linda and her devoted follower, Julia Williams, but Linda died of liver failure in 2002 before she could face justice. Julia was eventually arrested and convicted as an accessory to murder after the fact.

After the Samaritan Foundation left the building in 1995, it sat abandoned and has continued to deteriorate through the years. It is owned privately and unsafe to enter, so there are no tours there. There are tales of it being haunted and there are believed to be several ghosts that wander the empty spaces. 

Ghost Adventures investigated in April of 2017 during Season 14. The brought a Ouija Board with them and as it spelled out the first word, Aaron's camera kept going in and out of focus. The
Ouija Board spelled out: "JP", "No" (x2), "1119", "Yes" (x3), "1", "Kill", "Get out", "2", "Zozo", "Mama", "Kill one of you", "Jay", "Fami...", "Kidney." Of course, Zak ends up feeling like he is in a trance. Everybody felt a cold energy and a shifting in energy that got very heavy. They heard disembodied footsteps, a door slam and strange noises. The overhead night vision camera stopped working on its own. The Puck Device fed out the words "Paranormal", "Malevolent", "Holy" and "Assault." The X Camera caught a large piece of plywood falling to the ground after it allegedly levitated. 

Throughout the years, people would claim to hear weird noises in the jail. Imagine the sound of a cell door shutting during the pastor's sermon. Disembodied voices have been heard many times and people even claim to hear phantom singing when standing outside the jail. 

A group did an investigation of the jail and one of the members shared with Professor Caleb Lack, "When I was there it was rather dangerous. I was assigned to write about it from an author of the book "Ghostly Tales from America's Jails." I personally witnessed a few unexplainable moments. Walking up the main floor of the prison, I noticed a large hole in the floor. Peering into the basement, I stopped walking to observe and take some photos. Lightly behind me I heard a few dragging footsteps lingering. I was truly startled because I was wearing soft-soled shoes. Another experience that caught my attention was while I was in the basement photographing James Phillips cell, I noticed what appeared to me a man walking across the window. In hopes that it was one of the volunteer workers, I rushed up the stairs to speak to him. I ran to the front door and I stepped outside and looked up the street and around and there was no one in sight. While standing in the cellblock hallway of the basement, my associates and I were startled by the sound of metal hitting metal similar to the closing of a cell block door. There's only one metal door left in the prison and that door was about 3 ft in front of us within our view. We searched for another door and with no luck at all, we were not able to locate the origin of the noise or recreate the noise with any debris in the area. We had the sense of being followed and the strong sense of being watched. It was very uncomfortable." 

James Phillips was an inmate in the jail in 1907 and he was the first white man sentenced to be hanged there. As he watched the gallows being built, his fear grew and one day he collapsed and died with the coroner reporting that he had died of fright. His spirit continues to hang out in the old jail. His spirit is seen looking through the window across Second Street where the gallows would have been being built.

Stone Lion Inn

The Stone Lion Inn was built in 1907 by the Houghton family. They had begun their life in Guthrie in a home next to where they built this new home. This cost them around $12,000 to build, which made it the most expensive home in the town at the time. The mansion was 8,000 square feet and had four floors with bedrooms upstairs and a library and parlor on the first floor. The Houghtons had twelve children and unfortunately, one of their children died from whooping cough. This was seven-year-old Irene and the story goes that her nurse had given her the wrong medicine. The Houghtons eventually fell on hard times and they moved from the house in the 1920s. The mansion then became the Smith Funeral Home in 1929. The next owners would be the Walker family, who bought it in the 1950s. They owned it for more than thirty years and then a woman named Becky Luker bought it in 1986. The house had caught her eye when she saw it advertised in the window of a real estate business. She was inspired and believed that this house would make a perfect bed and breakfast. She recruited a bunch of people and they got it renovated and converted into the bed and breakfast. 

Dinner is served in the oak-paneled dining room and the cook can also be seen preparing meals in the 200-year-old French kitchen. There is seating for ten in the kitchen. The interior features six suites that can be booked and leaded glass bookshelves, Adam’s staircase, bathrooms with clawfooted tubs, 3 fireplaces and huge pockets-doors. The mansion’s grounds have pecan trees, flowers, and lilac bushes. A scrumptious breakfast is served in the mornings. And on weekends, the B & B hosts murder mystery parties. 

Becky shared the following story that probably goes back to its funeral home days. On the day Luker closed on the house, she did a tour of the house with Mrs. Walker, who at the time was an elderly woman with curly bright blue hair. The furniture had been auctioned off, but there was still one table in the house. Becky said, "I really didn’t know what it was at the time. I said, ‘Aren’t you going to take this table?’ She says, ‘No sugar, we don’t have room for that.’ I asked if it was a baker’s table, and she said, ‘Well no I’m not sure what it’s used for, but use it any way you see fit.’ She knew damn well it was an embalming table." That table is still in the bed and breakfast and guests will see it upon entering and it usually is holding a tray of Coke products and an ice bucket on top. But that isn't all that is left over from the house's past. There are spirits. Becky had no doubt there were ghosts when they started renovations. It seemed that the spirits didn't want their home changed. Luker told the Ocolly website in 2014, "I had no idea about the history of this place when I bought it. I’m a skeptic, but some things are hard to look past...Steps going up and down the stairs, doors opening and closing, but when you’re living with that many people, you’re thinking someone must be getting up to go to the bathroom or having a cigarette on the front porch. When everything was done and my mother and the workers went home, we still were hearing the noises. Then I began to think, ‘This house has issues.’"

Becky even found herself calling the police on occasion. She believes the third floor is the most haunted. Becky shared that her son would neatly put away his toys at night before going to bed, but in the mornings, he would find his toys scattered all over the room. Perhaps Irene is enjoying the toys. There are those who think that her father is in the house as well and his pipe tobacco can be smelled. 

Guests have seen child-size apparitions and claimed that these figures tucked them into bed or they have heard ghost children and complained the following day about noisy children in a bed and breakfast that had no overnight child guests. A wooden ball has also been seen rolling across the mansion floors. A staff member shared, "The first time, I was doing laundry down there, and the door locked on me. I sat down there for a while before someone came home and heard me. It happened a couple more times, but I remembered to use another exit I forgot about the first time whenever it happened again. I prop up things against the door so it won’t happen again." She also shared, "The doors will open and close in sequence. When you’ve been in this house as long as we have, you know which door is opening or closing from anywhere in the house. It’s always in the same order when it happens." And also, "Ebony, my daughter, was 5 at this time, but she would be the only one who went upstairs to play by herself. I asked her what she was doing once, and she said she was playing with that little girl. I said, ‘What little girl?’ She said, ‘The girl that plays upstairs.’"

When Becky bought the White Peacock Inn as a sister property, she had a strange experience. The Stone Lion Inn took on a severe, unexplainable rancid smell that spread over the entire first floor of the inn. Believing the main house was "jealous" of the new property, the owner sat on the stairs and verbally reassured the building that they weren't abandoning it for the White Peacock. The smell immediately vanished. 

Blue Belle Saloon 

The Blue Belle Saloon is located at 224 W. Harrison Ave. Yelp reports that it is permanently closed due to some property tax issues, but it last was a pizza parlor. The saloon started in a tent when the Land Run happened and then in 1899, it became the brick structure that still stands today. The ground floor was the saloon with silent film cowboy star Tom Mix working as bartender from 1902 to 1904. The upper level was a brothel run by a woman known as Miss Lizzie. Miss Lizzie was considered a great businesswoman and philanthropist in the town, but she came with a very dark side. She was a trafficker and several of the girls in her establishment weren't there by their choice. And when we say girls, we mean girls. As young as thirteen. What Miss Lizzie would do is approach a family in need and offer to help them out, but this came with a heavy price. A daughter would have to go with Miss Lizzie. At some point, one of the women at the brothel was murdered by a patron. There are claims this is the most haunted place in Oklahoma, so its unfortunate that it sits empty now.  

People claim to hear disembodied female voices and singing. Disembodied footsteps are heard coming from empty rooms. Staff and guests report objects moving on their own. There are several apparitions that have been seen. One is a cowboy attired man who sports a black hat. He likes to hang out at the bar. The madame Miss Lizzie has been seen in the rooms upstairs, as well as two of the working girls. People have named them Estelle and Claudia and Claudia is believed to be the one who was beaten to death by a client.

The Old Santa Fe Depot

The Guthrie Depot was the Old Santa Fe Train Depot. Today, it is a private wedding venue owned by Adam and Abigail Ropp. There was an original wooden structure built in 1887 that sat here until a flood destroyed it. The brick Santa Fe Depot was completed in 1903. Nine lines of railways were coming through in 1904 and the finest restaurant in town was opened named the Harvey House. Many Harvey Houses had hotels too, but not this location. It did have the famous Harvey Girls though. Their living quarters were on the second floor and they had a Harvey Matron. She monitored everyone coming and going on the stairs. The station closed to passenger rail service in October of 1979. The building was boarded up and sat empty until the late 1990s when it was restored. There are several spirits here. One is called the Upstairs Woman. People claim to see a spectral woman looking out from the second-floor windows. She is usually in a period dress, but other times she is wearing the Harvey Girls waitress uniform. So maybe there are two female apparitions here? Fred Harvey's wife loved the Guthrie Depot. Her name was Pearl and some people believe she may be one of the ghosts. Chairs pull out on their own and drinks mysteriously show up on tables. 

There is a basement apparition too. In 2008, the Mid America Paranormal Science Team investigated the tight basement area. Within minutes of setting up equipment, they captured video footage of a torso-up apparition that leaned over before moving directly into a wall. 

The Pollard Theater

Most theaters are haunted and this one claims to harbor five spirits, but there is a good reason for that that has nothing to do with theatrical productions. This started as a large wooden dry goods store, built shortly after the Land Run of 1989. The building was rebuilt with brick and native stone after a fire in 1901 and reopened as the Patterson Furniture Store. Now as a furniture store, it was responsible for building coffins and thus, it served as the local funeral parlor. ​In 1919, George A. Pollard purchased the building and converted it into a vaudeville house. He ran it for a year until he was elected mayor and he handed it off to other management. Silent films were also shown until 1929 when Talkies started and at the time, a man named Al R. Powell was leasing the theater and so he reconstructed the building, adding a large stage and orchestra pit, hand-painted wall murals, vita phone talking picture equipment, a grand marquee with room atop for an orchestra, and seating for 800. The theater was called The Melba at that time and was Oklahoma's first all-sound motion picture theater. During the depression, Powell would accept an egg as admission-eggs were in short supply then-and he made a business of boxing them for sale in the theater. The Powell family operated the theater until 1986. At that time, it was brought back to its roots as a theater for stage productions. Students from Guthrie High School did a lion's share of the work converting the 48'x18' movie stage to the current 50'x50' theater stage and adding the proscenium arch, installing new seats and ensuring handicapped access. Riggers from San Antonio built a 14-line counterweight system for hoisting scenery and the stage roof was raised 22 feet. 

Much of the old Melba was preserved, including the 1920's murals that adorn the auditorium and the original tin ceiling and wrought iron chandeliers in the lobby. The Pollard Company was the group that formed and consisted of performers, directors, designers, carpenters, costumers and painters. Today, they provide plays, musicals and concerts. 

Oklahoma Paranormal Research & Investigations investigated with Fox News 25 in 2003. The psychic in the group reported, "I noticed while in this area that part of the original wall between buildings abruptly stopped. I felt drawn to the area, but could not understand the connection with the partial wall other than to say it had some significance. I then walked into the small tool closet and saw an elderly gentleman sitting on one of the bar stools in the room.   He did not say anything, nor did he appear to try to communicate. I believe we may have frightened him as he immediately disappeared within seconds after I entered the small room. I walked through the halls of the dressing room area when a bit of movement caught my eye from within one of the rooms.  It was then that I saw a lady with dark hair sitting at one of the dressing tables.  She simply smiled at me and quickly disappeared." The Admin Area/Old Housing Rooms featured, "Several of us witnessed the bathroom door opening on its own (could not be re-created) and unfortunately, of the three video cameras present, not one captured it on film. A large crash was also heard in this area, and the source was not able to be located. Erik also heard an audible male's voice saying "hello" while in this area. It was in this area that I came across a small boy between the ages of four and five.  He was very shy at first and insisted on playing games with us. He showed me his red ball and showed me that at one time while he was playing, he had bounced his ball down the stairs and had gone running after it only to fall and injure himself. He did not specify to me if he was killed from the fall, but only that he was injured.  He later revealed his name as being Issac and said that his mother was there with him."  

Guthrie is a charming small town that also has a ghost tour. There do seem to be several haunted locations here. Are the Black Jail and these other locations haunted? That is for you to decide! 

HGB Ep. 658 - Vortex 29

Moment in Oddity - The Venezuelan Poodle Moth (Suggested by: Ruth Dempsey)

Deep within the misty rainforests of the Gran Sabana region of Venezuela, a creature exists that blurs the line between insect and stuffed animal toy. It was discovered in 2009 by zoologist Dr. Arthur Anker. The scientist gave the moth the playful description of 'Venezuelan Poodle Moth'. The cute, captivating creature looks less like a typical insect, and more like a miniature, winged mammal covered in a dense coat of snowy, cotton-like fluff that you want to cuddle. Its large soulful black eyes and beautiful arched, feathered antennae give it an eerily endearing expression, capturing the imagination. Because scientists have yet to officially classify it or observe it extensively in the wild, this mysterious lepidopteran remains an enchanting biological enigma that certainly is adorably odd.

Vortex 29 

As we have found from our episodes featuring ghost towns and locations in the desert of California, Nevada and Arizona, the desert is a strange and mysterious place. There is a home in Desert Center, California that seems to be sitting on a vortex created by the convergence of three deserts. The owner of this home is a woman named Daphne Minks and from the moment she stepped inside of it, she knew she wasn't alone. As she set about repairing and renovating the house, she felt as though unseen entities were helping her. She named this home Vortex 29 and she joins us on this episode to share her experiences.

Interview with Daphne. We talk Satanic Panic, West Memphis Three, a vortex in the desert, having your home become a paranormal film location, having entities help you with renovations and how the house protected her against a couple of men who tried to bamboozle her.  

We have found the desert to be a strange place, so it isn't surprising that Desert City has some quirks and that this particular home seems to be quite active. Hopefully Season 2 goes better for Daphne and reveals even more about the entities at Vortx 29. Is Vortex 29 haunted? That is for you to decide. 

 

HGB Ep. 657 - Haunted County Durham

This Month in History - Emily Warren Roebling's Birth

In the month of September, on the 23rd, in 1843, Emily Warren Roebling was born in Cold Spring, New York. She grew up in a large, supportive family where her parents valued higher education for both their sons and daughters. Emily was encouraged to push against 19th century norms by obtaining a higher education studying science, mathematics and literature. She would grow up to play an indispensable role in the creation of one of America's greatest architectural marvels, the Brooklyn Bridge. In 1872, her husband Washington Roebling, became bedridden with decompression sickness. Washington was the chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge project and Emily stepped forward as his vital link to the construction site. She did not merely carry messages; she mastered complex higher mathematics, material science, stress analysis, and cable construction to effectively communicate with contractors, engineers, and day laborers. For more than a decade, Emily managed the project's daily operations, inspected materials, dealt with competing politicians, and defended her husband's position as chief engineer. Her profound dedication and engineering competence were so widely recognized that she was given the honor of being the first person to cross the completed bridge on horseback in 1883, carrying a rooster as a symbol of victory.

Haunted County Durham (Derr um)

County Durham has a deep mining and farming heritage and is located in the northeast part of England near Scotland. This is the only English county prefixed with the word "County." The history spans so many eras that are reflected in the architecture, from Roman conquest to the Anglo-Saxons to the powerful medieval palatinate ruled by Prince Bishops. And all along the way, spiritual residue was left behind. Join us for the history and hauntings of County Durham. 

Durham is a town of quaint cobbled streets lined with boutiques and restaurants. Towering above it are two of its most distinct buildings, Durham Castle and Durham Cathdedral. Both have stood for nearly 1,000 years. Winding through Durham is the River Wear (we're), which hugs the city on three sides. The Roman Empire occupied County Durham starting in 71 AD. After that, the Romans built strategic military roads and Fort Vinovium, known now as Binchester and Fort Longovicium, now known as Lanchester. These supported the infrastructure and garrisons of Hadrian’s Wall, which was built starting in 122 AD under Emperor Hadrian. The Romans withdrew in the 5th century and County Durham became part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Bernicia, which lasted for four centuries, eventually becoming the Kingdom of Northumbria. It was during this time that Christianity arrived, as did St. Cuthbert. He became one of England's most venerated saints. When the Vikings invaded Northumbria, Lindisfarne monks fled with the body of St. Cuthbert in 995 AD, and settled at a high peninsula called Dun Holm after a vision. This would be the beginning of Durham. And while we love stories of supernatural visions, historians poo poo this fanciful story by pointing out that the area was readily defensible and the Earl of Northumbria granted them the land. The Normans conquered in the 11th century and William the Conqueror built Durham Castle in 1072 AD to secure the northern border against Scottish invasions. After the Normans left, the county was governed by the Bishops of Durham as a county palantine (pal uh tine). Palantinates emerged in England after the Norman conquest and this arrangement gave Bishops or Earls the power that the King had, but just in one small area. County Durham was unique in that the power of this arrangement endured until 1654 when Durham got parliamentary representation. The county took part in northern uprisings against the English Reformation. The region transformed through coal mining, shipbuilding, and the opening of the pioneering Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825. Today, it's a great spot for tourism.

Durham Castle

Durham Castle sits atop a hill overlooking the medieval city of Durham. The River Wear (Wee-ar) circles around the castle. Construction of the castle began in 1072 and there are differing accounts on whether parts of it were originally made from wood or stone. 

As was the case with many castles built at this time, wood was an easily sourced material and many parts of a castle were built from it and then later replaced with the more durable stone. William the Conqueror ordered the building of the castle. He was William I, the first Norman king of England, and he had descended from Viking raiders and been the Duke of Normandy. He was the victor at the Battle of Hastings. This battle began the Norman conquest of England. The castle was built six years after that conquest was complete. William the Conquerer ushered in the medieval era and introduced modern building techniques for castles. A main characteristic of Norman castles was the use of a motte, which was a large man-made mound of dirt and stones, and a bailey, which were inner and outer fenced in areas. Many times, the outer bailey was at the bottom of the mound. The day to day activities took place in the bailey, while the castle keep was built atop the motte. William the Conquerer died in 1087 in an unusual way. He was sitting atop his horse watching a Norman village burn when his horse was suddenly startled and reared up. The horn of the saddle struck William in the abdomen with much force. It was hard enough to cause internal injuries and William bled to death  internally. It took several days for him to succumb to the injury. The coffin that was built for him was too small and he was stuffed inside. Legend says that his putrifying body split open. Many centuries later, in 1562, grave robbers stole what was buried in the coffin, leaving only a thigh bone.

Supervision of the construction of the castle was under the Earl of Northumberland (nawrthuhmberland), Watheof. His supervision ended in 1076 when he rebelled against William and was executed. Walcher (waw lchur), the Bishop of Durham, took over control of the castle  and was given the title of Prince-Bishop of Durham. This title remained until the 19th century. It was the only title of its sort and made Durham unique in England. 

Walcher was in charge when many of the buildings of the castle were constructed. The castle today has a gatehouse, two chapels, a Great Hall, kitchen, a courtyard, the Black Staircase and another large building known as the Northern Range with several rooms that was built in the 12th century by Bishop Le Puiset (Pwee zeh). He more than likely built it as two large halls that were later subdivided. One of the chapels and the bell-tower were built by Bishop Tunstall in the 16th century. The Tunstall Chapel is gorgeous with stain glassed windows and carved wood. Durham Castle was crucial to protecting the border with Scotland and quelling English rebellions. The Historia Regum states that the castle was needed "to keep the bishop and his household safe from the attacks of assailants." The Palace Green that runs between the cathedral and the castle was once the old marketplace and originally had several wooden houses built there. Bishop Flambard had the houses taken down during his time to prevent fires. In 1837, the castle was donated to the University of Durham. It was named University College and the castle was restored by architect Anthony Salvin who followed the plans of the original keep. The restoration was completed in 1840 and now provides accomodations for students. More than just students reside here though. It would seem they are joined by the Grey Lady. She is reputed to be the spirit of Isabella Van Mildert. She was the wife of one of the bishops who served during the 17th century. The story goes that she was coming down the Black Staircase when she suddenly fell and broke her neck. Witnesses, many of whom are college students, claim to see a ghostly woman that appears to be grey, floating down the staircase.

There also is reputed to be a ghost from more modern times. Frederick Copeman was one of the university's first students and he had big dreams and expectations. Unfortunately, he did not do well on his final exams. He flunked them all. He was devastated. He climbed to the top most part and threw himself off. He is now seen around the castle grounds and paces the upper rooms. The Grammar School that sits along the Palace Green is reportedly haunted by a young pupil that was killed when one of the school masters threw him from a balcony. 

Durham Cathedral

Durham Cathedral is directly opposite from Durham Castle. The Durham Cathedral started off as The White Church, which was a wooden structure built to house the relics of St. Cuthbert. Upon entering the Cathedral, there is a grotesque knocker that provides comfort and protection against evil to those who touch it. 

The Galilee Chapel is at the Western end of the Cathedral and was built in 1170 and looks different from the rest of the cathedral. This started as a Lady Chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. This has pointed arches and slender columns. This was renovated in the 15th century with a new roof and windows. St. Bede (Bead) has this as his final resting place as he was moved here in 1370. He was a Benedictine monk and scholar. The Nave is the main room of the cathedral and has these giant stone pillars measuring over 22 feet high, supporting the nave’s vaulted stone ceiling. The famous Rose Window is here. All the stained-glass windows had to be replaced after Cromwell ordered them smashed during the 17th century civil war. The Quire is where daily worship takes place. It is just behind the crossing of the Nave. In 1640, the Cathedral suffered significant damage when Scottish soldiers burnt much of the wood. Bishop John Cosin commissioned George Clement in 1665 to create new quire stalls that are gorgeous. They feature Gothic canopies with slender supporting columns adorned with elegant scrollwork. Behind this is the organ with red and gold coloring, built by Father Henry Willis and a staggering 5,746 pipes. The South side of the choir has the tomb of Prince Bishop Thomas Hatfield with the Bishop's throne above that. The Gilbert Scott Screen looks out of place since it clashes with the Romanesque design, but the construction from marble and alabaster is gorgeous. The building originally started to house and honor St. Cuthbert and he remains here in The Shrine of St. Cuthbert, buried beneath a stone slab. He wasn't always at peace here. 

In late 1539, King Henry VIII's commissioners were ordered to dismantle the shrine and they stripped it of the gold, silver, and jewels. But when they discovered Cuthbert's body in its priestly garments not rotted, they reinterred him. The Chapel of the Nine Altars was built between 1242 and 1280 and actually has three altars in it today. There is a wooden Pieta on display.

Lewis du Beaumont was a poorly viewed 'Prince Bishop' of Durham and was appointed because of his relation to the queen. He died in 1333. Some of the vergers in the Cathedral called him the Evil Bishop because he was so "rubbish" (illiterate, lazy, spent all of the cathedral's money.) Yet he was buried in a prime space in front of the high altar steps. His grave is marked by a large blue marble slab. Such was the disrespect for him, that they chipped away at the decoration of his tomb over time and now his tomb is hidden by a large wooden board and a large rug. 

An interesting piece of legend about the Durham Cathedral is that a secret passage runs from the Cathedral to Finchale Abbey and that the journey through that passage is a dangerous one. In fact, it is apparently so terrifying that no person is able to make the trek and live to tell about it. 

Durham Castle and Cathedral were awarded the status of World Heritage Site in 1986. And then there is the Sanctuary Knocker, which is a famous bronze knocker on the north door with a grotesque face that was designed to ward off evil spirits from the holy grounds. If criminals touched it, it allowed them 37 days of protection in medieval times. Spirits here include the Jumping Man with local folklore claiming that this was a man who jumped from the top of the cathedral and survived, but then he fell and died on a second attempt when his target was accidentally moved. His confused figure can sometimes be seen repeating the fatal leap in ghostly form. Another legend connected to the cathedral, and specifically to St. Cuthbert, is this story about a mist that showed up during World War II in May 1942. German bombers had targeted Durham. Witnesses claimed a miraculous, localized fog created by St. Cuthbert, rose from the river and completely hid the building, saving it from destruction.

Dun Cow Pub

The Dun Cow is a historic pub located at 37 Old Elvet and is said to be the oldest surviving pub in the town. The building dates back to the late 1500s. A story is told that when those Lindisfarne monks were searching for a resting place for the body of St Cuthbert, they came across a milkmaid looking for her lost cow. She directed them to Dun Holm or Durham and so the pub is named after the story, Dun Cow. 

This pub is said to be haunted by the notorious 17th century serial killer Mary Ann Cotton who killed 11 of her 13 children and three of her four husbands. Mary Ann grew up in Durham and became a nurse and a dressmaker. She married for the first time in 1852 and had eight or nine children with him. Everybody in the family, but one daughter, died from gastric fever, believed to be arsenic poisoning. She married one of her patients and he ended up dead. Mary Ann was collecting insurance money all along the way. She killed her mother and then the daughter who had survived. She found work for a widower named James Robinson and soon his children were succumbing to gastric fever. The two married and had two children and one of those children died. Robinson threw her out. Mary Ann married another widower and well, yeah, he died too. And two more children. This woman was poisoning everybody with arsenic. She was hanged for her crimes. The executioner went to the Dun Cow Pub afterward for a pint and apparently, Mary Ann Cotton followed him there. She also apparently haunts her former home in another town too. She's probably mad at the executioner cause he bumbled her hanging with the trap door not high enough to break her neck. He had to push down on her and it took 3 minutes for her to die. 

Barnard Castle

Barnard Castle is a market town named for a ruined medieval castle that it is built around. The castle was built in the 12th century and passed down through the Balliol family until Richard Neville became the owner. King Richard III inherited it and it fell into ruin after his death. 

In the 18th century, the town was a center for hand-loom wool weaving and in the 19th century, the spinning and manufacturing of shoe thread. Visitors and locals report seeing the spectral figure of Lady Ann Day who was a 16th-century noblewoman. Legend says she either plunged to her death while fleeing soldiers or threw herself from the battlements after her lover was beheaded. Her body was swept away by the swift current of the River Tees and never recovered. People see her ghostly figure tumbling from the castle's high tower. Some people hear a heart-rending scream as she falls. Visitors to the medieval Round Tower often report a sudden, heavy feeling of inexplicable dread.

Lumley Castle

Lumley Castle is a 14th-century quadrangular fortress built in 1389 by Sir Ralph Lumley with Norman and Gothic elements. This became a family seat and a defensive stronghold. Sir Ralph plotted against King Henry IV and when he was found out, he was executed. 

The castle became a bishop's residence and then a university hall. In 1976, it opened as a four-star luxury hotel. The interior features rich wood-paneling, ornate tapestries , regal suites and grand fireplaces. The opulent Knights Restaurant serves up elegant dining, while the Library Bar is a cozier restaurant with an a la carte menu. The ghost here is Lily of Lumley. She was the wife of Sir Ralph Lumley who was murdered by two priests after she converted from Catholicism to Protestant. They threw her body down a well to hide it. Her spirit is rumored to float up from the well and wander the corridors, rooms, and grounds of the historic fortress.

Jimmy Allan - The Gypsy Piper

Under Durham Castle is Elvet Bridge, which is said to be haunted by Jimmy Allan, the Gypsy Piper. Jimmy Allan was known by many names; Jimmy, Jemmy, Jamie, James, The Duke’s Piper, the Piper of Northumberland, and The Gypsy Piper. Just as he went by many names, he was also known as a musician and a friend of the aristocracy, a thief, a bigamist, and a deserter. 

Jimmy’s parents were thought of around Northumberland as Gypsies, although they did not self identify with that label. Jimmy’s father Will was a tinkerer and he was also very good at playing the bagpipes. Jimmy’s mother Betty kept the home and looked after their six children. Jimmy was the youngest and he was born around 1734. Jimmy was taught to play the bagpipes by his father and quickly made a name for himself with his prodigious musical abilities. He began to travel Northumberland playing when he was a young man. He first played for the Duchess of Northumberland in 1746 or 1747 (exact date unknown). She was so impressed that she made him her official piper. In fact, the Duchess was so fond of Jimmy’s playing, she procured special pipes for him from Edinburgh that were made of ivory and decorated with silver chains. He played on these pipes at the coronation of King George III. The Chamberlain of Alnwick appointed Jimmy to the prestigious position of the town waits (musician). But he was soon fired from that post and from his job at King George’s castle when he committed theft. Jimmy Allan was married three times during his lifetime and two of those marriages were simultaneously, which made Jimmy a bigamist. Jimmy also enlisted in the army only to subsequently desert several times. In 1803, in Gateshead, he was convicted again of theft for stealing a horse and was sentenced to death. King George stayed his execution and remanded him to live on Botany Bay, which was a penal colony in Australia. But before he could be moved to Australia, he died in the Durham’s House of Corrections beneath the Elvet Bridge on November 13, 1810. His body was buried in St. Nicolas’s churchyard in Durham City. Nine months before he died, there was a petition for his release that was presented to King George. However, the King was too sick to sign it. His son, the Prince Regent, signed the document after the King’s death, but it arrived four days after Jimmy Allan had died. His famous pipes were given to two gentlemen in North Shields. 

That was not the end of Jimmy the Gypsy Piper though. He would continue to play his infamous bagpipes in the afterlife and the living would hear them. Jimmy favors the Elvet Bridge and many times people have reported hearing the haunting sounds of a bagpipe from underneath and around the Elvet Bridge.

Ceddesfeld (Seddes feld) Hall

Sedgefield is a historic market town and civil parish in County Durham. This was a hunting center during the 1800s. The first parsonage in Sedgefield was built in 1791. It was headed by Reverend John Gamage. One of the parsons of Sedgefield died unexpectedly one week before the Parson's tithe was due. This was a tax consisting of one tenth ‘tithe’ of a crop, a herd, or the harvest from a woodland. As time went on, cash payments replaced actual crops. His wife was dismayed because they really needed the money, so she hatched a morbid plan. She made a pickling solution from brine and brandy and she put his body in it to pickle him, thus preserving his body and delaying decomposition. Then she propped him up in the Parsonage window, so that passers-by would still think he was alive and bring their tithe. After she had collected all the tithes on his behalf, she announced that the parson had died. The pickled parson wasn't happy about his wife's deception and strange ghostly things started happening at the rectory. For almost 50 years the parson haunted the place until a major fire destroyed the building. Ceddesfeld Hall now sits on that spot. It was a new rectory for a time and is now a community center. 

The Pickled Parson's phantom is said to still haunt Sedgefield and roams the grounds between Ceddesfeld Hall and St. Edmunds Church.

Crook Hall & Gardens 

Crook Hall is the only open hall in County Durham. The main house is believed to have been built in 1217 and was known as the Manor of Sydgate. It is one of the oldest inhabited houses in the area. The house was granted to Peter del Croke not long after and the current name Crook Hall is in honor of him. John Copeland lived at the Hall from 1340 to 1372. From 1372 to 1657, it was owned by the Billingham family. Thomas Billingham piped water from a spring to the Hall in 1450. In 1615, Cuthbert Billingham cut off that water supply to the area and diverted it to his own mill but he was later forced to restore the pipes to the town. The current building mainly survives from the 14th century and represents three eras: The 14th century, the Jacobean Era and the Georgian Era. The Medieval Hall is the surviving section from the 14th century. The Mikletons built on an extension that is on the other side of the Screens Passage around 1657 during the Jacobean Era. The Hoppers built the main block in 1736 during the Georgian Era. The Manor House was built from sandstone and has a Welsh slate roof. The hall is 14th century sandstone and brick. The buildings on the property include two barns, a coach house, granary and farm house. There is the Main Hall and then the Great Hall that is sparsely furnished with just a table and chairs. Most doors to the hall have been closed in. The fireplace and minstrel's gallery remain. On one end of the table, there is a niche set into the wall. One opening from the Screens Passage leads to a narrow tunnel and the other side leads to a sitting room furnished with artifacts from the history of the Hall. A staircase leads to the minister’s gallery. An ancient set of stairs has been closed in so they appear to go up to the ceiling and stop. To get to the top floors there is a tower staircase. The gardens are constantly noted as being spectacular and contain a Secret Walled Garden, Shakespeare Gardens and maze. and sit across from the River Wear with a view of the Cathedral and encompass four acres. Reverend Hopper Williamson leased the property from 1834 to 1858 and the poet William Wordsworth visited the house often when Williamson lived there. 

The Fowler’s owned the house starting in 1859. They lost the property in the 1920s during the Great Depression. The halls fell into disrepair at this time, but in 1979, the Hawgood family moved to Crook Hall and restored the home and grounds. They lived there until 1995. 

At that time, Keith and Maggie Bell purchased Crook Hall  and they still own the property. They realized that it cost a lot of money to maintain the property and they opened it to the public creating special areas like the Tea Room. Crook Hall has been fully restored. The Hall is open all year from Sunday through Wednesday. They have tours, afternoon teas in the gardens and are available for private events and weddings. They also have special events ranging from theatrics, Halloween festivities and traditional English Christmas. The property plays host to more than just the living. Several spirits are here, the most famous is, of course, the Lady in White. The White Lady at Crook Castle is said to be the niece of the tempestuous Cuthbert Billingham (the same one who cut off the water supply to the town). No one quite knows why she haunts the house but she is said to glide down the stairs and then disappear on St. Thomas Eve, December 20th. Christmas seems to be a favorite time for hauntings. One year, a feast was set out in the hall and there was a loud crash. Everything had been overturned or broken and a glimpse of the White Lady was seen as the guests went to see what had happened.The stairway that rises to the ceiling is a spot where she is seen running up quickly and then disappearing into the ceiling as well. She seems to be a residual haunting because she is silent and never talks to anyone, nor acknowledges anyone.

As mentioned earlier, there is a nook in the corner of the Medieval Hall. This nook is rumored to be haunted. A soldier was murdered here and the means by which he was killed was unusual. He was bricked into this nook. People feel cold spots near here or the rush of a cool breeze that seems to slip past them. The soldier's ghost likes to tap people on the shoulder.

Another bizarre haunting experience is the sound of disembodied footsteps on a stairway and what makes this really creepy is that the stairway no longer exists. The Bells were skeptical when they heard stories about their new home being haunted. They became believers when they heard those very footsteps themselves. Maggie Bell wrote on This is Durham, "Many visitors have also had strange experiences at Crook Hall – including one who saw children playing on the gallery an hour after the last child had left the premises. Another visitor rang from the coach he was traveling home on to report that he had seen an old man in bedclothes asleep in a chair before he left. Other people on his coach had also seen the man."

Is Durham County truly one of the more haunted areas in the UK? These various locations and experiences make that premise seem to be true. Does the Gypsy Piper still play his bagpipes in death? Is Durham Castle haunted? Is the beautiful Crook Hall hosting spirits from the past? That is for you to decide!