Where to start listening

Stumped on where to start listening? Let me make some recommendations!

My favorite episode is On Mylar Balloons and Forgotten Futures, but I’ve arranged many other episodes by topic here.

You can listen to the podcast on all major podcatchers; the links below will take you to the show notes for each episode. (I wish I could link to the specific episode listening page for each episode on all major podcatchers, but . . . no one has that much time. So take a look at the list below, and then find the episode on your preferred podcatcher. 👻🎧)

Want to learn more about paranormal investigation techniques?

Stories about my own paranormal experiences

Love a deep dive?

Goatman’s Bridge series

The history and hauntings of Fordham University

Ouija Board series

Like haunted hotels?

Into NYC history?

Haunted Astoria

NYC Cemeteries

New York Crystal Palace

Haunted Churches

The Haunted Hell Gate and Roosevelt Island

The Smallpox Hospital, aka Renwick Ruin, on Roosevelt Island, NYC - Part 1

We take a look at the ruins of a forgotten Gothic hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York City

A crumbling ruin is all that’s left of the old Smallpox Hospital that used to operate on Roosevelt Island, an island that lies between Manhattan and Queens in New York City. Nowadays, the ruin lies in a park and is lit up by floodlights at night. It’s a picturesque shell of the old Gothic building, and is popular with urban explorers, but the story behind it is a fascinating one.

Originally built by James Renwick Jr, the superstar 19th century architect who built St. Patrick’s Catherdral in Manhattan, and often called “the Renwick Ruin” these days, the old Smallpox Hospital was built in the 1850s.

At the time, Roosevelt Island (then called Blackwell’s Island) was an isolated “haven” for the poor and sick–many wealthy Manhattanites wrote about the picturesque island, more garden than prison. But in reality, the island housed an infamous penitentiary (where William Macy Tweed, aka Boss Tweed, was once held), a workhouse and almshouse for the poor and sick, the infamous New York Lunatic Asylum (where muckraking journalist Nellie Bly got herself admitted to expose the horrific conditions), as well as a few hospitals, including the Smallpox Hospital.

In part one of our two-part look at the Blackwell’s Island Smallpox Hospital / Renwick Ruin, we talk about the history of Roosevelt Island and the hospital itself, as well as a bit of the history of smallpox in the world and in New York City. We’re coming to you from lockdown in Queens, New York, so we also talk a bit about how 19th century Blackwell’s Island relates to the world today, especially with the current coronavirus crisis. We also talk about about some paranormal investigations we want to do on Roosevelt Island once we’re cleared to hang out again.

Important Note: In the episode, we talk about wanting to do a paranormal investigation at the hospital. To be clear, we want to do an Estes session from outside the ruin’s fence. If you’re in the area, you definitely shouldn’t attempt to enter the hospital ruin itself–the floorboards are very unstable and crumbling, and breaking into the hospital could be extremely dangerous, even fatal. Like us, try to content yourself with looking at it from the outside and watching videos of the interiors from experienced urban explorers.

Roosevelt (Blackwell’s) Island in the 19th Century

“Smallpox Hospital, Black Wells Island, N.Y.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1850 – 1930.

“Blackwells Island, East River. From Eighty Sixth Street, New York” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1862.

“Penitentiary : Blackwells Island.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1840 – 1870.

“View of the lunatic asylum and mad house, on Blackwell’s Island, New York” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1853.

Episode Script for The Smallpox Hospital, aka Renwick Ruin, on Roosevelt Island, NYC – Part 1

DISCLAIMER: I’m providing this version of the script for accessibility purposes. It hasn’t been proofread, so please excuse typos. There are also some things that may differ between the final episode and this draft script. Please treat the episode audio as the final product.

“Located at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, this fine Gothic Revival structure was originally constructed for the treatment of that “loathsome malady,” smallpox, and for many years was New York City’s only such institution. It is now a picturesque ruin, one which could readily serve as the setting for a 19th century “Gothick” romance.
… The Smallpox Hospital could easily become the American equivalent of the great Gothic ruins of England, such as the late 13th century Tintern Abbey in Monmouthshire, which has been admired and cherished since the 18th century as a romantic ruin. Plans have been made to transform the southern tip of Roosevelt Island into a park; ruins in park settings were so much enjoyed in Europe in the 18th century that small “garden fabrics,” which were purely ornamental structures, were actually built “in ruins” on various estates. The Smallpox Hospital in park surroundings would be of comparable picturesque interest. Paul Zucker in Fascination of Decay (1968) stated that ruins can be “…an expression of an eerie romantic mood… a palpable documentation of a period in the past… something which recalls a specific concept of architectural space and proportion.” The Smallpox Hospital possesses all these evocative qualities.”
-1976 Landmark Preservation Commission Report on the Renwick Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island, New York
- Renwick Smallpox Hospital, aka The Smallpox Hospital, later the Maternity and Charity Hospital Training School, and now generally known as The Renwick Ruin
- It’s located on what’s now called Roosevelt Island, but what at the time was called Blackwell’s Island.
- Roosevelt Island is an island that lies on the East River, between Manhattan and Queens. If you’ve seen the Toby Macguire Spider-man movie, then you’ve seen the tram that goes from Manhattan and Roosevelt Island. It’s also reachable via subway (the F train), and by a drawbridge from Queens.
- I’m interested in Roosevelt Island because I spend a lot of time looking at it from the Queens waterfront, especially these days. I’ve walked across the drawbridge from Queens countless times, and been on the tram a handful of times.
- We visited the Renwick Ruin twice last year, and that’s how I became interested in it
- Right now, it’s literally a crumbling ruin. It sits behind a chain-link fence right outside a park, and at night, it’s lit by spotlights. It’s very creepy and fascinating/beautiful.
- I really want to do some ghost-hunting nearby, like an estes session etc, but I think that’s gonna have to wait till things settle down.
What is smallpox?
- It was a highly infectious disease spread by airborne inhalation of the virus (so from droplets from infected people.)
- So usually it was spread by face to face contact with someone. It didn’t spread as fast as it might have, since you had to be interacting with an infected person for a decent amount of time, and b/c it wasn’t infectious until after the infected person already had the rash.
- As far as they knew, there wasn’t such a thing as an asymptomatic carrier stage.
- The first smallpox inoculations were used in India, Africa, and China.
- There are some ancient Sanskrit texts that describe the inoculation, and there are records of it being used in 10th century China, and by the Ming dynasty (the 16th century), it was in common use.
- Basically, the inoculations introduced a less deadly strain of the virus into the patient, and the idea was that they’d get immunity. However, one in five people got full blown smallpox and died or spread it to others.
- In the 1700s, the practice was brought to Europe and America.
- The English used smallpox as biological warfare during their genocide of the indigenous people of what’s now the United States. It’s confirmed that the leadership in the British military all condoned and approved the practice.
- There’s also some records indicating that smallpox was used as a biological warfare agent by the British in Australia, in New South Wales, though some people said it was chickenpox. Either disease would have been equally deadly to the aboriginal population.
- Then, in 1796, an English doctor figured out that people could be vaccinated more safely using cowpox.
- That’s actually where the word vaccine comes from: vacca is Latin for cow.
- Then, in the 19th century, a different strain of the virus started to be used.
- Over the years, as more and more people were vaccinated, smallpox was eventually eradicated.
- The last case of smallpox was in 1973, and nowadays the only people who get the vaccine are laboratory workers who may be exposed to smallpox in the course of their work.
- Some famous people who contracted smallpox include (not all of these people died of it):
  - Lakota Chief Sitting Bull (who’s famous for leading resistance against the US government’s horrific policies. he didn’t die from smallpox; he was killed by police at Standing Rock in 1890)
  - the 10th ruler of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan (who led the resistance against the Spanish invasion, and died of smallpox in 1520, shortly after it was introduced to the Americas)
  - Ramses V (who lived in the 1100s, BC)
  - three emperors of China, (one in the 1700s, one in the 1600s, and one in the 19th century)
  - one emperor of Japan (19th century)
  - a king of Spain, an Emperor of Russia, a king of France, a prince-elector of the Holy Roman Empire, some British royalty including Elizabeth I, American presidents including George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln. Also, Joseph Stalin
  - one interesting anecdote: Catherine the Great of Russia didn’t get it, but her husband had a really bad case, and she worried about her son getting it so much that she socially isolated him and kept him away from large crowds. Eventually, she and her son got the vaccination, and then tried to vaccinate as many people as possible in the Russian Empire: 2 million people were vaccinated because of her efforts
- And that’s all I’m gonna say about it! Not talking about symptoms or anything, because everyone’s freaked out enough about coronavirus rn.
So, now that you know a little bit about the impact of smallpox, let’s talk about the hospital:
- Designed by James Renwick, Jr.
  - he was kind of a kid-genius. He entered Columbia University at the age of 12 and studied engineering. (Note: his dad, who was also an engineer, graduated from Columbia in 1807 and was later a professor of natural philosophy at Columbia.) Apparently he graduated 3 years later and started work as an engineer on the Eerie Railroad, and then worked on the Croton Reservoir and Croton Aqueduct.
  - The Croton Aqueduct supplied water to NYC (it stretched 41 miles and used gravity to bring the water to the city.) It was a project that they undertook to bring water from upstate because the city supply was no good. In the late 1840s or early 1850s, the Croton Aqueduct actually started supplying water to Blackwell’s Island, where the Smallpox Hospital was built. (They had to lay lead pipe down below the East River to get it there.)
  - He didn’t have any formal architecture training.
  - His first commission as an architect was Grace Church, in Manhattan, which was built in 1843. It’s on 10th and Broadway and is done in the English Gothic style. He was just 25 years old.
  - He did a lot of Gothic Revival stuff, including his most famous work, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a famous cathedral in Manhattan, near Rockefeller Center. It’s one of the top tourist attractions in the city.
  - He designed a number of college buildings, including a building for City College in NYC and some buildings for Vassar, in Poughkeepsie, including the Main Building. He also designed the first chapter house of St. Anthony Hall/Delta Psi, a secret fraternity that was started at Columbia (that building’s on 28th street).
  - He designed the Charity (aka City) Hospital and Smallpox Hospital on Roosevelt Island; the main building of the Children’s Hospital on Randall’s Island; the Inebriate and Lunatic Asylums on Wards Island. He was also the supervising architect for the Blackwell Island Light, the lighthouse that still stands on the north tip of the island today.
  - Renwick was buried in Green-wood Cemetery
Roosevelt Island History:
- In the 19th century, Roosevelt Island was called Blackwell’s Island. (Named after Robert Blackwell, who owned it.)
- New York City purchased it in 1828.
- The island is in the east river, situated about equidistant from both Manhattan and Queens (which in the 19th century was called Long Island.) And it’s just south of an extremely dangerous part of the East River called Hellgate, which was the site of the greatest loss of life in New York City until 9/11 when a ship caught fire and more than a thousand people drowned. Hellgate is said to be very haunted.
- originally there was a little wooded area on the East side (I think where the Insane Asylum ended up being built.) And it was said that there was a lot of fertile land for growing vegetable gardens.
- Blackwell’s Island was made of a lot of blue stone, which was suitable for quarrying and building buildings.
  - According to the Roosevelt Island Historical Society, the stone that was quarried on the island was a billion-year-old type of stone called Fordham gneiss (pronounced nice.) It’s one of the three types of stones that Manhattan was made from, and it’s called Fordham gneiss because the stone’s above the surface in the Bronx. (And the Bronx was the home of Fordham manor, which is now my alma mater, Fordham University.)
- A lot of the buildings on the island, including the prison, were made from rubble masonry, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s rough-hewn stone set in mortar, rather than equally-sized and shaped stones set in neat rows.
- The first city building built on the island was the prison, in 1832.
- All travel to the island went through the department of public charities and corrections.
- It was home to several sanatarium/isolation style hospitals, an insane asylum, a prison, a workhouse, and an alms house.
- A workhouse, or alms house, is basically a prison for poor people, where they’re put to work. Supposedly, there was a workhouse for “lazy” poor people who apparently needed hard labor to fix them (they’d committed small crimes like robbery, drunkenness, etc.) The way I read it described was that the workhouse was for people who were police prisoners, and the prison was for people who had gone to court.
- The alms house was supposed to be gentler, for people whose crime was being poor. But I don’t see much of a distinction between the two when reading the historical accounts, except that the almshouse what where old, sick people were sent, and the workhouse was where able-bodied people were sent. One article from the 1850s mentions that one of the things the people in the workhouse did was a lot of the “grading” or landscaping of the lsland. Apparently in 1850, workhouse laborers were paid for their work (between 50 and 35 cents per day) but payment was abolished a few years later, supposedly because the administrators thought they’d just spend all the money on alcohol.
- In 1847, the alms house housed 902 people (760 of them were immigrants, 142 of them were born in the US.) They worked as nurses and housekeepers, at the bakehouse that supplied bread for all of the institutions on Blackwell’s Island and nearby Randall’s Island, washers and ironers, carpenters, tailors, blacksmith, boatmen, cartmen, and wool pickers. 435 of them weren’t able to work.
- Many of the original buildings on the island were built from stone quarried on the island, including the prison. The manual labor used in building the prison was done by prisoners (135 of them, some of them in chains.)
- Much like today, prisoners were used for anything the powers that be wanted to save money on: For a while, until around 1855, prisoners also worked for the Insane Asylum, doing indoor and outdoor work, attending patients, etc. Then they decided that maybe that wasn’t such a good idea and hired “responsible persons” instead.
- Some prisoners worked as boatmen, and some of the female prisoners worked in the sewing shop. Many prisoners did landscaping and gardening (from Harper’s Weekly in 1859):
- I read a really interesting article in a newspaper called Liberator, from 1842, about the prison at Blackwell’s Island that really rang true to me:
- It seems like in NYC, if we don’t want to have to think about something, we put it one an island. Examples:
  - Riker’s
  - Hart Island
  - North Brother Island (sanitarium/rehab center)
  - Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island
Now, onto the hospital
- We talked about how smallpox inoculation had been around for hundreds of years, and the vaccine came about at the end of the 18th century. So why did people in 19th-century NYC still have smallpox?
  - One reason was that people didn’t get the vaccines because they didn’t trust the government.
  - To be fair, there wasn’t clean water, the streets were full of rotting animals, and the city government was extremely corrupt, so it’s not that surprising that people didn’t trust them.
- Cases of smallpox actually went up in the 1850s in NYC, and smallpox killed 25-30% of the people who got it.
- Rich people were usually treated at home (which contributed to the spread of smallpox) and poor people were treated in wooden shacks along the East River called “deadhouses.”
- Medical professionals realized that people with smallpox should be isolated to prevent the spread of the disease.
- Since it was isolated–literally an island–Blackwell’s Island was an ideal place to keep contagious patients
- Opened in 1856
- It was built in the Gothic Revival style, out of blue stone quarried on the island. It was built for $38,000, which was very cheap at the time. It was really beautiful on the outside, with a crenellated roof, a grand entrance portico, unusual triangle-shaped windows on the 3rd floor, and a huge tower on top.
- Contemporary accounts said that the interior furnishing were excellent, but didn’t elaborate much. I watched some videos of urban explorers going through the ruins, and saw some ornate wrought-iron stair bannisters, and some tile-lined rooms.
- There was room for 100 patients, and it was the only hospital in New York dedicated to just smallpox patients. (It was also the only hospital that treated smallpox patients. By law, all smallpox patients in NYC had to be taken there to be quarantined.)
- The Smallpox Hospital admitted paying patients and charity cases (non-paying patients)
- Charity cases were put in the lower floors, and paying patients had private rooms in upper floors. If you were able to pay, you were required to pay. You could pay $5-10 per week for better food.
- Visitors were forbidden, but people were paid to carry letters from the dock to the hospital.
- There were also a few smaller hospitals:
  - At some point, in addition to the Smallpox Hospital, there was a Fever Hospital, and Epileptic and Paralytic Hospital, a Scarlet Fever Hospital, a Relapsing Fever Hospital. Many of these smaller hospitals were housed in tents.
  - Some of them were housed in wooden buildings around it, just by the water’s edge, dedicated to patients with typhus and ship fever (also known as typhoid fever). Those buildings could also hold 100 people, but apparently there were often more.
  - Though conditions were bad, there were few other places where people with contagious diseases could go for treatment.
- About 10,000 patients were treated there in the 1850s and 60s. The hospital got mixed reviews.
- According to the Roosevelt Island Historical Society, which had some great details on their website, the NYT decried the terrible conditions in the hospital, saying it was poorly ventilated, killing many patients, and that it was little better than a shanty. Seven or eight patients might be stuck in a room with only one bed, and infected linens and clothes were reused without washing.
- However, apparently the NYT also praised the care that patients received there, saying the doctors and nurses were excellent.
- The Commission of Charities and Correction ran it at first.
  - Talking about treatments at the Smallpox Hospital:
  - An article from 1875 talked about treatments at the hospital: they mostly treated symptoms (like fever, insomnia, etc), and strongly recommended that everyone get vaccinated. You could get smallpox multiple times, so they recommended getting vaccinated multiple times.
  - From Harper’s Weekly, in 1869:
- Then in 1875, the Board of Health took it over.
- The hospital was only 20 years old, but was starting to get run down, and patients were reluctant to go there.
- So they tried to rebrand it, calling it “Riverside Hospital”
- They also replaced the open-air “sick wagon” that brought patients to the dock to go to the island with a closed carriage.
- They also brought in the Sisters of Mercy from the St. Vincent Hospital to clean up the hospital.
- The city report said:
  - “Since the change in management…the hospital has been steadily gaining in popularity, and it is not at all unusual for us to be gratified with the sincere thanks of returned patients for the kindness and tender care which they received during the period of exclusion from their homes and from society….”
- However, in the late 1870s or early 1880s, they moved the smallpox patients to North Brother Island, a smaller and more isolated island off the coast of the Bronx. Some sources said that they did that because the patients could be more isolated and so the growing population of Blackwell’s Island didn’t have to risk infection. Some said that fewer people were getting smallpox, and there was a new-and-improved cowpox farm in Manhattan that was providing tons of vaccines for everyone.
- To give you a quick overview of the future of smallpox in NYC after that:
  - In the 1870s, there was another smallpox epidemic that killed 1,200 people.
  - In 1900, it came back and killed 700 people.
  - By 1902, the Health Department was vaccinating 10,000 New Yorkers every day.
  - Smallpox didn’t return to NYC until 1947, but the city acted quickly, and within 2 weeks, 5 million people were vaccinated. Only 12 people got smallpox that time, and only 2 people died.
  - In 1967, there was a movement to end smallpox for good, and they were successful.
- So around the 1880s, the Smallpox Hospital became nurses’ housing and a training school affiliated with the much larger Charity Hospital, which was just north of the Smallpox Hospital, and which Renwick also designed (after an earlier version of the building burnt down).
  - Having professional, trained nurses was still a rarity at the time, so this was a game-changer.
  - The program was for 2 years, and women between 20-25 years old could join, as long as they had certificates attesting to their moral character and health.
  - They did basic things to help the patients, like change sheets, take temperatures, etc. And they also took classes. a few of them were called: “Poisons and Antidotes,” “Pulse, Respirations, Temperature, Bandaging,” and “the Application of Leeches and Subsequent Treatment.”
- In 1903, a south wing was added, and in 1904, a north wing was added.
- Want to talk a bit about the Charity Hospital, because it actually relates a lot to current events today:
  - It was initially called Penitentiary Hospital, then Island Hospital, then Charity Hospital, then City Hospital.
  - The book Damnation Island talks about how in the mid-19th century, if you were poor and had syphilis , the only place you could be treated was at the penitentiary hospital. So if you went in for medical care and they found out that you had syphilis, they shipped you off to the police court. If you wanted treatment, you had to voluntarily commit yourself to the penitentiary for vagrancy, and then they’d send you to the hospital, which at the time was at the top floor. The police would decide how long your sentence was, and you were treated like the rest of the criminals.
  - From an 1866 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine article, it sounds like some people treated at “the Island Hospital” had to serve in the penitentiary as payment for medical care.
  - Even children had to go to jail to get care for syphilis. There was a story about a 12-year-old girl in treatment at the penitentiary hospital. By the way, since antibiotics hadn’t been invented yet, people were treated with mercury, which is obviously deadly.
  - In 1846, Dr. William W. Sanger was put in charge of the hospital, and said that not everyone with syphilis was a criminal. (He gave the example of how a poor woman could catch it from an unfaithful husband, or a drunken laborer could catch it from a sex worker.) Sanger also lead a survey of 2,000 sex workers and ended up calling to decriminalize sex work and to have a medical bureau in the police department monitor sex workers for health issues and hospitalize them when they were infected.
  - Sanger was able to do a little bit of reform in the hospital before he resigned in 1847. But he returned in 1853.
    - While he was gone, a new hospital building–which he had advocated–had been built. But it was so badly constructed that it was considered unsafe for people to enter. However, since Sanger was gone, patients were put in the hospital anyway.
    - During his second stint, he was able to change the rules so people could get treatment without first needing to be convicted of a crime. He also got the name changed to Island Hospital.
    - On February 13,1858, during a terrible snowstorm, the unsafe Island Hospital building burned down. There were fire hydrants on the island, but they weren’t working, and there wasn’t a fire department on the island. So people–mostly convicts–just had to throw buckets of water from the river on the fire.
    - Shockingly, no one died during the fire, even though everyone had been locked inside. The walls of the hospital collapsed.
  - Everyone was pretty happy that they had a chance to build a new hospital.
    - When the Renwick version of Charity Hospital was built, convicts from the island quarried the stone that was used in the walls.
    - When the cornerstone of the Renwick version of Charity Hospital was laid, the president of the almshouse board of governors, called Blackwell’s Island “this New York Garden of Charity.” And he described the patients “victims of pollution, brought on by shame and crime.” Not much has changed.
    - The cornerstone has a copper box “with coins, hospital documents, newspapers and drawings of the hospital and other memorabilia.”
    - A New York Times article from 1994, right before the new hospital’s ruins were torn down, described the ruins of the hospital as “a rough, dark gneiss that might have been used on a Dickensian prison.” However, an article from the Episcopal Recorder 1858, when the cornerstone was laid, described it as consisting of “pearl-colored stone quarried on the island.”
    - The hospital was supposed to cost $400,000 to build ($300,000 more than the original hospital that burned down.) But it ended up being estimated to cost $150,000 since they used prison labor.
    - From Harper’s Weekly in 1859:
    - (missing words are “prepared to in case of insubordination, to shoot down, half”
  - The hospital was the largest hospital in New York. It was built in the Second Empire style, and it had a mansard roof. (It was a similar style to the one Renwick used for the Vassar Main building.) It was three and a half stories tall, and was almost as wide as the island.
  - It had 29 wards, ranging from 13-39 beds each.
  - Though the hospital was finished being built in 1861, people started using it in 1860, which was also the year that Sanger left.
  - Once he left, prison wardens once again took control of the hospital, instead of doctors. All of the medical departments were run by recent med school graduates who didn’t know how to do anything, and real doctors only visited once a week.
  - During and after the Civil War, injured veterans were treated at the hospital.
  - In 1866, they changed the name of the hospital to Charity Hospital.
    - It’s pretty gruesome: recovering patients were made to work, and in 1867, patients made 504 shrouds. Reports from the time don’t say that the shrouds were for other patients, but 505 people died at the hospital that year.
    - In 1869, a patient from Charity Hospital was the first person buried in the new potter’s field on Hart Island.
      - Hart Island has been in the news a lot lately, because it’s still an operating potter’s field, with labor done by prisoners. It’s where unclaimed bodies in NYC are buried nowadays, and it’s the place where the city’s pandemic plan says that bodies will be buried if there’s a large number of coronavirus victims.
    - Conditions were bad; the chief of staff reduced the amount of food that patients were given, several patients killed themselves and at least one staff member murdered a patient.
    - But soon after, doctors were put back in charge of the hospital, and heating and ventilation was installed.
    - Also, as soon as enough nurses were trained at the nearby nurses school, in what used to be the smallpox hospital, the nurses started tending to the patients. They were really nice and kind to patients, and reported abuse from any other workers immediately.
    - There were also some good doctors. The chief of staff, Dr. Curtis Estabrook, who was from Canarsie, in Brooklyn, was so beloved that the people of Canarsie tried to have the neighborhood’s name changed to “Estabrook.”
    - Also, a couple years after the nurses’ school was established, the British surgeon Joseph Lister, who’s known for introducing and advocating for antiseptic surgery, visited Blackwell’s Island and trained the medical staff on how to sterilize everything used in surgery.
    - Charity Hospital became known for their adherence to sterilization; they even had a special room for sterilizing items.
  - In 1892, Charity Hospital was renamed City Hospital.
  - In 1957, City Hospital was relocated to Queens. Apparently, Charity Hospital was actually moved to Elmhurst Hospital Center, which is now the a big symbol of the coronavirus pandemic.
    - One thing that inspired me to start doing this research is everything I’ve been reading about Elmhurst; I’ve been thinking a lot about how we live right in between the ruins of the smallpox hospital, and the bustling center of our current pandemic. City Hospital was the second-oldest charity hospital in the city, and it served the poor. Elmhurst Hospital Center also serves a lower-income, immigrant population.
    - Even in the late 1970s, Elmhurst hospital has a shortage of nurses and ICU beds, and three patients who were on respirators died. There was a murder investigation to look into it, but doctors said it was just the lack of staff and beds.
- In 1921, Blackwell’s Island was renamed to Welfare Island as part of an effort to rehabilitate the island’s image.
- In the 1930s, there were a number of scandals related to the terrible conditions in the prison on the island, and eventually a raid exposed the conditions in the prison.
  - The prison and the workhouse were torn down in 1936, and the prisoners were moved to a new prison on Riker’s Island, where they remain today.
  - Rikers is famous for being one of the worst prisons in the US. By 1939, it was so overcrowded, dangerous, and unsanitary that a court in the Bronx called it “nearly unlivable.” And as early as 1941, the number of incarcerated black people started to skyrocket, creating the system of mass incarceration of black folks that continues today.
  - There are so many horrific stories about what happens in Rikers. For example, in 2010, a sixteen-year-old kid named Kalief Browder was arrested for stealing a backpack and was put in Rikers for 3 years without a trial, two of those in solitary confinement, and he was also subject to abuse from guards and inmates. His case was dismissed in 2013, but he was deeply traumatized, and he died by suicide in 2015.
- In the 1950s, many of the hospitals were closed down and a lot of the island was abandoned.
- In the 1960s, plans were made for housing to be made there, and in 1969, residential development began. Most of the 19th century buildings were torn down so they could build new construction.
- In 1973, Welfare Island was renamed to Roosevelt Island.
- One of the hospitals that remained on the island was built on the former site of the penitentiary. That hospital, Goldwater Memorial Hospital, started out being really beautiful and modern. But because of budget cuts, it became so bleak that part of The Exorcist was filmed there. It was torn down in 2015, and now there’s a Cornell Tech campus there.
The Ruin
- In 1972, the architect who oversaw the shoring up of the Smallpox Hospital inspected the old City Hospital building and said it was in good condition. It sounds like they planned to turn it into apartments. But the building wasn’t guarded, and vandals set fires that basically destroyed the building, leaving the building just a shell, much like the Smallpox Hospital.
- Apparently, in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, people considered making it a landmark. Eventually, in 1994, the ruins of City Hospital were torn down, because they felt that the large building would be too difficult to repurpose.
- After tearing down they hospital, they saved the stones and use them when building the park at the tip of the island, Southpoint Park. It also said that they had found out about the copper box in the cornerstone after demolition had already started, and it was unclear if they were ever able to save it.
- During the 1970s, the Smallpox Hospital fell into severe disrepair. In 1975, there was a preservation effort to save the exterior walls, though there wasn’t any attempt to prevent collapse or decay in the rest of the building.
- It’s been designated a national historic landmark.
- Now, all you can see are the exterior walls, which are made of gray gneiss, and the brick foundation. On the inside, the wooden floors have almost rotted through, and several stories collapsed.
- It sits behind a chain link fence.
- There’s no roof left
- It’s propped up by lumber struts
- Part of the remaining ruins, the north wall, collapsed in 2007
- It’s lit up at night.
- From a 2008 NYT article: “There’s not much holding up the cornice right now,” said Judith Berdy, president of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society. She said she feared the effects of freezing and thawing on the already weakened masonry.
- In 2009, a new park, Four Freedoms Park, was built on the southern end of Roosevelt Island, just south of the Ruin. Supposedly, there’s a $4.5 restoration project planned for the Ruin.
- For a while, a few years ago, there was talk of tearing down the ruins of the Small-Pox hospital; I’d even heard it was torn down at one point, and was sad that I hadn’t seen it beforehand. But they thankfully decided against it.

Sources

These sources were used for parts 1 and 2 of the episode on the Renwick Ruin.

Books

Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th Century New York by Stacy Horn

Websites

Articles

National Philanthropist, Date: January 9, 1829, “Blackwell’s Island”
Peabody’s Parlour Journal, 2/1/1834, Vol. 1 Issue 5, p2-2, 2/5p, 1 IllustrationIllustration; found on p2
Blackwell’s Island Prison. Youth’s Cabinet. 6/27/1839, Vol. 2 Issue 26, p101-102. 2p.
Blackwell’s Island. New-York Organ & Temperance Safeguard, Date: August 26, 1848
Drunkenness at Blackwell’s Island. New-York Organ & Temperance Safeguard. September 9, 1848
“Penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island, New York.” Journal of Humanity & Herald of the American Temperance Society. 07/08/1829, Vol. 1 Issue 7, p28-28. 1/5p.
“HOSPITALS ON BLACKWELL’S ISLAND, NEW YORK.” Boston Medical & Surgical Journal. 11/10/1847, Vol. 37 Issue 15, p300-302. 3p.
“The Prison at Blackwell’s Island” By: L. M. C. Liberator. 10/28/1842, Vol. 10 Issue 43, p172-172. 1/5p. , Database: Slavery and Abolition, 1789-1887
“CASES AT THE PENITENTIARY HOSPITAL ON BLACKWELL’S ISLAND.” CLAUDIAN (AUTHOR). Boston Medical & Surgical Journal. 8/16/1848, Vol. 37 Issue 2, p57-60. 4p.
“STATE OF PRISONERS ON BLACKWELL’S ISLAND.” ERBEN, HENRY. New York Municipal Gazette. 03/02/1846, Vol. 1 Issue 38, p527-527. 1/6p. , Database: American Literary Periodicals, 1835-1858
“Blackwell’s Island.” American Statesman. 07/31/1847, Vol. 1 Issue 26, p408-409. 2p. , Database: American Political Periodicals, 1715-1891
“Doings at Blackwell’s Island.” New-York Organ & Temperance Safeguard. 12/02/1848, Vol. 8 Issue 23, p180-180. 1/9p.
“The New Work-House on Blackwell’s Island.” Friend: A Religious & Literary Journal. 12/7/1850, Vol. 24 Issue 12, p90-90. 1/3p.
“No. 12.–NEW YORK. Criminal and Humane Institutions.–Police.–Workhouse on Blackwell’s Island.” Pennsylvania Journal of Prison Discipline & Philanthropy. 1851 1st Quarter, Vol. 6 Issue 1, p59-60. 2p.
“CROTON AQUEDUCT SUPPLY OF WATER TO BLACKWELL’S ISLAND BY MEANS OF GUTTA PERCHA PIPE.” C. (AUTHOR). Appleton’s Mechanics’ Magazine & Engineers’ Journal. Dec1851, Vol. 1 Issue 12, p738-741. 4p.
“SUPPLY OF WATER TO BLACKWELL’S ISLAND.” Friend: A Religious & Literary Journal. 11/27/1852, Vol. 26 Issue 11, p82-83. 2p.
“ALM HOUSE, BLACKWELL’S ISLAND.” Gleason’s Pictorial. 10/09/1852, Vol. 3 Issue 15, p225-225. 1p. 1 Illustration, 1 Graphic, Symbol or Logo.
“PENITENTIARY, BLACKWELL’S ISLAND, NEW YORK.” Gleason’s Pictorial (Boston, MA – 1853-1854). 05/28/1853, Vol. 4 Issue 100, preceding p338-338. 1p. 1 Illustration, 1 Graphic, Symbol or Logo.
“LUNATIC ASYLUM, BLACKWELL’S ISLAND.” National Magazine. Oct1855, Vol. 7 Issue 4, p314-315. 2p. 1 Illustration.
“Randall’s and Blackwell’s Islands.” Independent (New York, NY 1848-1876). 09/27/1849, p172-172. 1/9p.
“BURNING OF BLACKWELL’S ISLAND HOSPITAL.” Brother Jonathan (New York, NY). 2/20/1858, Vol. 17 Issue 327, p003-003. 1/9p.
“BLACKWELL’S ISLAND HOSPITAL.” Episcopal Recorder. 8/7/1858, Vol. 26 Issue 19, p74-74. 1/9p.
“A VISIT TO THE LUNATIC ASYLUM ON BLACKWELL’S ISLAND.” Harper’s Weekly. 03/19/1859, Vol. 3 Issue 116, p184-186. 3p. 10 Illustrations.
“THE WORK-HOUSE–BLACKWELL’S ISLAND.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Nov1866, Vol. 33 Issue 198, p683-702. 20p. 19 Illustrations.
“VISIT TO BLACKWELL’S ISLAND.” FOSDICK. American Odd Fellow: A Monthly Magazine. Apr1869, Vol. 8 Issue 4, p208-211. 4p. , Database: Masons, Odd-Fellows and Other Societal Periodicals, 1794-1877
“SMALL-POX HOSPITAL, BLACKWELL’S ISLAND, F. Y.” New York Medical Journal: A Monthly Record of Medicine & the Collateral Sciences. Feb1875, Vol. 21 Issue 2, p173-176. 4p.
“PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS ON BLACKWELL’S ISLAND.” Harper’s Weekly. 2/6/1869, Vol. 13 Issue 632, p91-91. 1/6p.
“SMALL-POX HOSPITAL.” Life Illustrated. 01/24/1857, Vol. 3 Issue 13, p101-101. 1/9p. , Database: Periodicals of the American West, 1779-1881

Images Used in this Post

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. “Blackwells Island, East River. From Eighty Sixth Street, New York” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1862. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5e66b3e8-e879-d471-e040-e00a180654d7
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “Penitentiary : Blackwells Island.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1840 – 1870. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-2793-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “Smallpox Hospital, Black Wells Island, N.Y.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1850 – 1930. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-208e-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. “View of the lunatic asylum and mad house, on Blackwell’s Island, New York” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1853. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/5e66b3e8-d3cf-d471-e040-e00a180654d7

The Renwick Ruin and Charity Hospital, Roosevelt Island, NYC - Part 2

We return to Blackwell’s Island to look at the now-destroyed Charity Hospital and the Renwick Ruin as it stands on today’s Roosevelt Island.

In part two of our two-part look at the Smallpox Hospital / Renwick Ruin, we talk about the Gothic ruin of the Smallpox Hospital that remains on Roosevelt Island, as well as the much larger ruin of the 19th century Charity Hospital (also FKA Penitentiary Hospital, City Hospital, and Island Hospital) that’s since been torn down.

We also discuss the connection between Charity Hospital on Blackwell’s Island and the Elmhurst Hospital Center, which is now famous as the epicenter of the current coronavirus crisis here in Queens, New York.

Note: This episode is a little darker than part 1, with a few mentions of suicide and some conversation about COVID-19. (Chris did leave out the parts about the awful medical experiments that happened at Charity Hospital, though.)

Don’t miss part 1 of our series, for more background on the island and some historical images of the island in the 1800s. (See part 1 for the episode script.)

The Renwick Ruin Today

Renwick Ruin in 2019 (photo taken by Chris)

The Charity Hospital in the 19th Century

“Charity Hospital [Blackwell’s Island]” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1801 – 1886.

“Hospital at Black Wells Island, N.Y.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1850 – 1930.

Sources

Check out all the sources used for this episode in the shownotes for part 1.

Images Used in this Post

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. “Charity Hospital [Blackwell’s Island]” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1801 – 1886. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-2356-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “Hospital at Black Wells Island, N.Y.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1850 – 1930. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-2090-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Playing the Ghost in 19th Century Australia

Did you know that in late 19th century Australia, ordinary people would dip sheets in toxic glowing paint and run around at night pretending to be ghosts?

Neither did we, but Chris dug up this oddball story from Jen’s home state of Victoria and was excited to tell Jen all about it! The story involves a angry mob chasing a preacher; a protective mom siccing her dog on a creepy dude; calls for vigilante justice; hallucinogenic moonshine and a “very fine” draper’s dummy; a lady dressed up in a glow-in-the-dark wedding dress and playing guitar on a rooftop, and more.

Example of an article with illustration about a ghost hoaxer being thrashed in Connington near Perth, Western Australia, Sunday Times, 27 November 1898, p. 9. (from https://prov.vic.gov.au/ )

Episode Script for Playing the Ghost in 19th Century Australia

The year is 1882. The place: Victoria, Australia.
In the late 19th century, Australia didn’t have professional police, so there was a lot of shenanigans and “lawlessness”
There were a lot of ghost stories in 19th century Australia, particularly in central Victoria.
Particularly in places like Ballarat, which was considered a “haunted” city from its early days, and in the late 19th century became a hotbed of spiritualism and “ghost hoaxing”
In the 1850s, a lot of immigrants moved to the area to do gold mining, which brought a lot of new folklore and beliefs to the area,
In the 1860s there were a number of lectures given about how it’s so sad that science has vanquished the idea of ghosts, and we’re the weaker for it, having lost a sense of the sublime, etc.
- One of them, ‘A Plea for Ghosts’, was given by David Blair of Melbourne, and it caused a stir–there were tons of letters to the editor and newspaper articles about it.
- it seemed to really hit home b/c it resonated with concerns about the spiritual health of the area; there were tons of ghost sightings, exorcisms, and hoaxes at the time
- there was a lot of tension between ideas of the church and spiritual world and the ideas of science
- people wanted to know more about what happens after you die, etc
by the 1870s, Ballarat, Bendigo and Melbourne had become a flourishing centre for spiritualism
- An editorial in the Argus said:
  - [i]t is a noticeable symptom of the reactionary movement against the materialistic philosophy so much in vogue at the present day that ghosts, after having been objects of contempt to the educated and intelligent classes for some generations, are beginning to grow again into favour. We are not now alluding to the phenomena of spiritualism, which some years ago threatened to make the spirits of the dead quite as common as, and a great deal more commonplace than, the persons of the living. But outside the obscure regions tenanted by this creed, there are distinct signs that ghosts, which we thought were laughed out of existence by the robust common sense of the eighteenth century, are creeping back into the world, revisiting again the glimpses of the moon, in these rather sickly times of the moribund nineteenth century.
- In 1881, 400 people gathered at the the Galloway monument in Ballarat to listen to speakers discuss ghosts and spiritualism. However, when a preacher said that spiritualism was bad and ghosts were agents of the devil, an angry mob chased him down the street
- There were tons of stories about headless horsemen, women in white, headless animals, and ghosts of murdered victims, and there was also more fiction written about those things as well.
- By the 1890s, there were so many stories that ppl called it the ‘ghost nuisance’, b/c panics could waste public time and money, a use up police resources
  - some editorials suggested that armed constables and vigilantes patrol ruined buildings and cemeteries with orders to shoot any ghosts on sight with buckshot. they said that real ghosts wouldn’t be hurt, and pranksters would learn a lesson
- Most of the articles about ghosts were tongue in cheek and sceptical
  - the story of a headless ghost animal revealed to be a cat with its head trapped in a lobster tin.
  - Another similar story was that of a Castlemaine stockman terrified of a female headless horsewoman ‘with a fine body’ that was later revealed to be a misidentification of an abandoned drapers dummy lying next to an old log
  - a lot of stories framed ghosts as hoaxers who were just trying to rob people and cause mayhem
- And remember, this is a time where fast-growing cities like Ballarat wouldn’t have had street lighting everywhere, and flashlights weren’t a thing.
- David Waldron is a folklorist and historian at Federation University in Ballarat, and this topic is his specialty
- Playing the Ghost by David Waldron:
  - colonialism = evil, life in Australia = hard
  - Even in the Australian climate with its scarcity of water and blistering heat, people attempted to create a British environment. They wore formal suits, even in summer; they created English dinners; they imported English animals; and the Acclimatization Society of Victoria was formally established in 1861 to make the environment more familiar, more English (Gillibank 1986; Dunlap 1997). English building styles were used, even though totally inappropriate for the Australian climate, and British farming practices were introduced with disregard for the alien landscape, often with disastrous consequences (Tunbridge 1991, 20–21). Displacement was endemic, which made nineteenth-century Victoria a fertile environment for the advent of ghostly experiences and ghostly conjuring.
  - . . . Ghostly encounters serve to destabilize any neat compartmentalization of the past and present as secure and fixed entities; they call the dominant narrative into question and they defy any presumption of the future. Ghosts can therefore be seen as serving a displacement function (Wolfreys 2002, 5) and this happened in an environment (the nineteenth-century goldfields) where displacement was an integral part of the fabric of existence. The dark was being made visible and the unseen was being made seen, but it was a shadowy manifestation and often emerged in ways which expressed in a physical form the injury that was psychically present.
  - . . . The people who participated in colonial goldfields ghost hoaxing were often the representatives of the rational, respectable, and safe community: school-teachers, housewives, and public servants, even though they were described as riff-raff and working-class ‘larrikins’ in the print media. (‘Larrikin’ is a popular term used to describe mischievous working-class pranksters and troublemakers.)
- the article compares the Australian ghost hoaxers to a group of young aristocratic men in England in the early 1700s, who prowled around London and attacked people (both men and women.) They were such a problem that in 1712, the royal court put a 100 pound bounty on their heads
  - This appears quite distinct from the populist perception of the ‘prowling ghosts’ of England from the same era, who in the public imagination were primarily young aristocrats. These perceptions had their origin in earlier panics surrounding the ‘Mohocks’—well-dressed, affluent, aristocratic young men with too much time, wealth, and boredom on their hands—who had been terrorizing the inhabitants of the cities in the gloom of England’s poorly lit urban streets (Middleton 2014, 91–92). The grievances which arose against the activities of these Mohocks went further than just an attack upon their actions. They were also entangled in popular critiques of the political and social system in which a disproportionate amount of power and wealth was vested in the aristocracy. The perceived irresponsibility of the Mohocks was used to fuel the contention that they did not deserve the influence they held. The apparent impunity they seemed to enjoy was exploited as an argument that electoral reform was urgently required (Middleton 2014, 91–92):
  - Australia was a world turned upside down. This was in part due to the gold rushes, but also because it was a country where emancipated convicts could rise in the ranks of government and become landowners, and where aristocrats could be found working the gold mines alongside emancipated convicts and commoners. It was also a collection of colonies dealing with the consequences of the challenge to British authority represented by the Eureka Stockade Rebellion, and massive multi-ethnic immigration and economic upheaval wrought by the gold rush. This was a situation which was viewed with considerable concern by colonial authorities.
- Apparently ghost hoaxing became so common that it happened several times per week in Ballarat during its heigh
  - Violence and public disturbances were common over differences of belief regarding the fate of the dead. In one such event a local Ballarat preacher was chased up the street by a group of angry young men after opining that spiritualism and apparitions of the dead were no more than agents of the devil. While the details of the dispute were unreported beyond the anger displayed towards an attack on spiritualism, it nonetheless demonstrated significant public interest and anxiety over religious belief and the afterlife
  - . . . In such a climate, tales of hauntings and strange apparitions generated a great deal of energy and flourished in the popular culture and folklore of colonial Australia. Many of these stories were about apparitions and spirits, the nature of which would be very familiar to the people of British and European extraction precisely because they had migrated with these stories: headless horsemen, apparitions of women in white, animal spirits, and the ghosts of murdered victims. This ghostly mix of folklore and local legends also proliferated alongside an increased popularity of Gothic and ghostly fiction in popular culture.
  - . . . In many cases the reports were clearly presented with an eye for humour at the expense of the gullibility of believers. One example featured the story of a headless hound, revealed to be a cat with its head trapped in a lobster tin (Bendigo Advertiser, 24 August 1861, 3).
  - Another told the story of a Castlemaine farmer who returned to town in hysterics after an encounter with a terrifying headless horsewoman. The article repeated his claim of how the ghost was seen ‘with a fine body’ and then revealed it to be a misidentification of an abandoned draper’s dummy lying next to an old log (Ballarat Star, 27 September 1861, 3).
- The draper’s dummy story turned out to maybe have to do with the witness having drank adulterated alcohol. Apparently at the time in the area, a lot of alcohol was poor quality and laced with opiates and toxic substances that could cause hallunciations. So some ghost sightings in the area were maybe people just tripping out
  - Other reports were treated in a more serious, although no less sensationalist, light, such as the ghost of a young man believed to be a Castlemaine murder victim (Singleton Argus and Upper Hunter General Advocate, 20 January 1877, 4). Similarly, the often-discussed tale of ‘Fisher’s Ghost’—in which a ghostly apparition was believed to have revealed the site of a horrific murder—has become an iconic piece of Australian folklore (Wagga Wagga Advertiser, 21 August 1875, 4). In Ballarat, the story of the ‘Burnt Bridge Ghost’ (Bendigo Advertiser, 8 July 1871, 3) was reported on relatively seriously as the case of a haunted house; the ‘Warrenheip Brewery Ghost’ was reported with ridicule in the Ballarat Star, but taken more seriously in reports by other newspapers (Ballarat Star, 17 August 1877, 2).
  - . . . There was another major feature of newspaper reportage of ghosts: the stories were often reported as examples of hoaxing or ‘playing the ghost’. These cases described the many occurrences of supposed hauntings as examples of larrikinism and using superstition as a vehicle to conceal incidents of robbery, battery, and sexual assault while disguising oneself as a ghost or monster. Stories of ‘playing the ghost’ were common in newspaper reports on south-eastern Australian goldfields in the late nineteenth century. Men, and to a lesser extent women, dressed in what could be quite elaborate costumes would make ghostly appearances with dramatic screams, sometimes assailing passers-by and even, in extreme cases, assaulting people. Many of these individuals displayed quite a theatrical flourish in their costuming and activities, leading to the characters receiving fanciful nicknames from the local press. One man was arrested by local police and fined two hundred pounds for damages after assaulting a police officer’s daughter while dressed as a ghost (Kerang Times and Swan Hill Gazette, 14 June 1878, 4). Another young man received the nickname of ‘Wizard Bombardier’ due to his costume of white robes with a tall sugar-loaf hat. He would scare workers and passers-by between Ballarat and Kilmore with eerie screams and rock-throwing, and seemed to enjoy the cat-and-mouse game with local vigilantes and authorities as they set off in pursuit (Kilmore Free Press, 22 June 1882, 3; Camperdown Chronicle, 24 June 1882, 4). He was, in the end, discovered annd beaten by two local residents in an act of vigilantism . . .
  - Many of the costumes of these ghost hoaxers made use of phosphorescent paint, which had only recently become available in Australia (Balmain 1882, 1). Its luminous appearance caught the imagination of the public and served as an ideal way to create the required ghostly effect. Sometimes the activity could be as simple as painting a skull and cross-bones around the town as a practical joke. There were similar occurrences with people painting angels and tombstones in Ballarat Old Cemetery. Perhaps the simplest trick was to soak a sheet in phosphorescent paint to create an eerie, glowing, green ghost, but there were also many examples of more elaborate regalia (Barrier Miner, 12 July 1895, 1; Adelaide Advertiser, 10 June 1889, 7; Bendigo Advertiser, 12 September 1903, 4). One man dressed himself in a knight’s costume with a glowing breastplate featuring the words ‘Prepare to meet thy doom’ (Horsham Times, 26 July 1895, 3). There were also examples of costumes that copied outfits from antiquity, with skins and claws being quite common accessories, although luminous paint was still a prominent feature (Register, 28 June 1904, 4; Adelaide Advertiser, 3 October 1895, 5; Australian Town and Country Journal, 4 March 1899, 22).
  - Phosphorescent paint is highly toxic, and poisoning can cause a myriad of severe symptoms including cardiovascular and respiratory disease, gastrointestinal dysfunction, diarrhoea, incontinence, blurred vision, hypertension, anxiety, tremors, seizures, ataxia, coma, and death. Ironically, by using phosphorescent paint to portray themselves as images of death, ghost hoaxers were courting the very thing they portrayed. They were unconsciously enacting their depiction.
- B/c the paint could cause brain damage, some ppl may have actually had brain damage as a result of ghost hoaxing (and a number of them did get sent to asylums).
- Later, they used radium paint instead, which of course was radioactive and caused cancer.
  - Quite often it seems that these pranks had a more sinister purpose—protecting the identity of criminals engaged in violence, robbery, and sexual assault. Most often these attacks were directed at young women. In one example, a former inmate of Ararat Lunatic Asylum stalked the streets of Ballarat in a costume consisting of black robes and smears of phosphorescent paint. His regular harassment of young women in the late evening inspired local vigilantism until he was arrested by police (Bendigo Advertiser, 27 May 1895, 3 and 29 May 1895, 2).3 In another case, a man described as having a skull and cross-bones painted on his bare chest above the word ‘Death’ was accused of exposing himself to passers-by at the Ballarat cemetery (Bendigo Advertiser, 26 May 1904, 5). In Bendigo, a man in a white overcoat with a glowing phosphorescent-soaked suit was accused of harassing young women late at night (Bendigo Advertiser, 23 July 1903, 3). In a more dangerous example, retired miner Frederick Parks was stabbed by a ghostly assailant who was attacking a young woman in Eureka Street, Ballarat. His costume consisted of white clothes with a coffin lid strapped to his back, his face and limbs covered in glowing phosphorescent paint (Barrier Miner, 10 June 1895, 3).
  - . . . One of the most famous of these ‘ghosts’ was Herbert Patrick McLennan, who was charged with indecent exposure and assaulting women in Ballarat in 1904 (Bendigo Advertiser, 14 July 1904, 5). Wearing a costume of high India-rubber boots with a long white coat and carrying a cat-o’-nine-tails, he regularly harassed women at night on Mair Street and Lydiard Street in Ballarat, often exposing himself and physically assaulting them (Adelaide Advertiser, 24 May 1904, 4; see Figure 2). Despite a reward of five pounds for information leading to his arrest, plus the use of police dressed as women, he eluded his pursuers for some time. A letter was also sent to taunt the mayor of Ballarat:
    - Dear Sir,
    - I see that you and your bally councillors have fixed a reward of £5 on my head, but you didn’t say whether dead or alive; and, furthermore, you said you would have me plugged with a lead on sight.
    - Mr. Mayor, I give you warning that the first man I see with his hand in his pocket, or otherwise looking suspicious, I will plug a bullet through him. I hope you will caution the ‘Rakebite’ portion of your council of my intentions.
    - Yours truly,
    - The Ghost.
  - McLennan was a well-known and respected elocutionist and senior clerk, and his arrest was discussed with considerable shock and taste for scandal in local newspapers. However, despite his well-respected social status the local police had long suspected him, but had felt compelled to wait until they had gathered sufficient evidence. Upon his arrest they also seized a number of theatrical props and costumes from his Drummond Street residence. In court he was convicted of assaulting young women by ‘wilfully and obscenely exposing his person and is therefore deemed to be a rogue and vagabond’.4
  - The act of ghost hoaxing, however, was not solely confined to men. While most of the hoaxes were conducted by men, there were nonetheless women who engaged in ‘playing the ghost’ as examples of larrikinism, but also to hide petty larceny. One woman wore ghostly attire to conceal the theft of poultry and eggs (Examiner, 3 January 1903, 6).
- One woman used to dress as a man and visit bars and chat with men before exposing herself as a woman. (she was charged with indecent exposure)
  - After spending time at the Ararat Lunatic Asylum, she began dressing as a monster in a hideous papier-mache mask and a white sheet soaked in glow-in-the-dark paint.
  - She would hide under the Peel Street bridge and jump out and scare people.
  - Dr Waldron says the woman would have been told she was a monster and a deviant in the lunatic asylum and by dressing as a ghost she was “in a sense, becoming this thing she was told she was”.
- There was one woman who’d wear a glow in the dark wedding dress, paint her face an arms white, and then play guitar on the roof of a building
  - Another aspect of the ghost hoaxing phenomenon was the act of ‘laying the ghost’. This typically referred to vigilantism, debunking ghost claims, and active scepticism, although the term had its origins in older practices of rituals and exorcisms against spiritual activity. A retired soldier named Charles Horman, while patrolling the Ballarat cemetery, fired a rock-salt-loaded shotgun at the legs and buttocks of a man ‘playing the ghost’. On another occasion he went to the rescue of a young woman being assaulted by a man dressed as a ghost, attacking the ‘ghost’ with a cane (Argus, 18 June 1896, 4). A lady by the name of Mrs Date, after her daughter had been assaulted by a man dressed as a ghost, went after the man with her bull terrier. In one incident, a man in white phosphorescent robes was flogged by vigilantes after causing an elderly gentleman to suffer a heart attack in Buninyong (Colac Herald, 12 May 1913, 2). These stories were typically reported on favourably by Australian newspapers, and the practice of ‘laying the ghost’ was strongly encouraged in editorials.
- Though the newspaper articles often depicted women as being helpless and passive in the face of ghost hoaxers, there were actually plenty of stories of women fighting back. For example, there was one story where a woman was being attacked by a ghost hoaxer, she fainted and played dead, and then when he came up to her she slashed him across the face so he could be identified and arrested.
  - . . . From a Jungian perspective there is a correlation between the phenomenon of ghost hoaxing and unbidden experiences of the paranormal. Both arouse the same feelings of weird strangeness and mystery. They also both rely on the sense of crossing boundaries and the freedom of breaching taboos, as was very obviously displayed in the case of McLennan. Ghost hoaxing creates psychic disturbance, a term which in Jungian parlance means that the psyche of the individual is troubled by that which it cannot fully comprehend. The experience of the uncanny involves a crisis of uncertainty with particular regard to the reality of who one is and what is being experienced (Royle 2003, 1). It also transgresses cultural taboos and integrates sexuality, death, and fear within the one grotesque display. . . .
  - While criminal motives in many of these cases were undoubtedly an issue, the act of ‘playing the ghost’ and the thrill of subversive success challenged intellectual certainty regarding contemporary attacks on superstition and ghost beliefs. It challenged the claim that the superstitious past was something dead, buried and supplanted by the values of Enlightenment reason. It offered a vehicle to challenge Victorian morality and respectability and served as a site of rebellion. By cloaking oneself in the symbols of a superstitious and Gothic past, one could gain a sense of empowerment and anonymity. Hoaxing occupied a liminal space in which a person could break taboos and engage in a carnivalesque inversion of morals, beliefs, and behaviours. It symbolically expressed the sense of displacement experienced in this world of strangeness and suppressed realities.
  - It is therefore unsurprising that many of these hoaxers inverted traditional gender roles and broke sexual taboos through dress, public exposure, sexual assault or harassment, and foul language. The care often taken in making costumes and the sense of theatre in their displays shows how much this sense of transgression meant to hoaxers who routinely risked arrest, exposure to highly toxic paint, disgrace, and vigilantism to ‘become’ ghosts. What better way to express displacement and challenge social and gender roles and condescending attacks on superstition than to become a symbol of death which could terrify people enough to shake their faith in scientific rationality. . .

Sources

Images Used in this Post

Example of an article with illustration about a ghost hoaxer being thrashed in Connington near Perth, Western Australia, Sunday Times, 27 November 1898, p. 9. (from https://prov.vic.gov.au/ )

Don’t miss our past episodes, like The Smallpox Hospital, aka Renwick Ruin, on Roosevelt Island, NYC – Part 1 and The Renwick Ruin and Charity Hospital, Roosevelt Island, NYC – Part 2.

Investigating the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, Part 1

We share our strange encounters at Salem’s famously haunted Hawthorne Hotel, including audio from an Estes session where we spoke to some of the hotel’s spirits.

In part 1 of our look at the Hawthorne Hotel, we look at some of our experiences at the Hawthorne, and share audio from our (we believe successful) attempt to speak to some of the hotel’s entities.

Highlights include: a possible sleep paralysis episode, a (briefly) missing wedding ring, a conversation with a squid fisherman, a not-so-friendly entity named Justin, and our first attempt at a Estes session.

Resources and things we mentioned:

Pictures

Chandelier in our room at the Hawthorne Hotel

Hallway at the Hawthorne Hotel

Our room at the Hawthorne Hotel, Room 403

Jen piled pillows in front of the closet in an attempt to keep the spirits inside

One of the Hawthorne Hotel’s “No Access” rooms

Hawthorne Hotel exterior

Hawthorne Hotel exterior (Witch Museum seen in the distance)

Hawthorne Hotel exterior seen from Essex Street

The Hawthorne Hotels’ Grand Ballroom

Jen’s selfie in the ballroom (Chris’ ring seen on the floor)

Chris’ ring on the floor (we think)

Chandelier in the Hawthorne Hotels’ Grand Ballroom

Lobby of the Hawthorne Hotel

Episode Script for Investigating the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, Part 1

This episode is a bit more conversational, so I have less of a script than usual. But here’s what I got:

Stayed at the Hawthorne Hotel, Room 403

Around 5:30: explored the lobby, CB lost and re-found ring. It wasn’t cold, I wasn’t taking gloves off or doing anything else
~7:30 played Wildnesgeist by Stone Breath. 8:09 turned it off (50:40 mins in.) While listening, Amy and Jen ate sundaes.
Set SB-7 spirit box to 200ms, AM. Scanning forward I think.
~8:13 started
8:18-lights flickered after we talked about Bridget Bishop
8:22-lights flickered again
ended around 8:49
The lights over Amy kept flickering during the session, and they stopped after the session. The lights over us didn’t flicker.
Overnight, had left on a snore recorder. Got an EVP that said “someone’s here.”
During the night, Jen had a nightmare (and maybe a sleep paralysis experience–at first Jen thought it was real, and she couldn’t move.) Jen felt someone crawl out of the closet, get into bed and lay beside her and stare at her. The dream kept happening again and again, and in the dream, Jen screamed and we had to pull her out of the bed. She woke up and propped pillows against the door. It was a male ghost, and not a nice one.
In another dream, Jen heard knocks. At one point, there was a fire and everyone had to leave their rooms.
Note: there were some noisy partiers in the room down the hotel.

Sources

Books

Ghosts of Salem: Haunts of the Witch City by Sam Baltrusis
Haunted Salem & Beyond by Lynda Lee Macken

Articles

Don’t miss our past episodes, like The Smallpox Hospital, aka Renwick Ruin, on Roosevelt Island, NYC – Part 1, The Renwick Ruin and Charity Hospital, Roosevelt Island, NYC – Part 2, and Playing the Ghost in 19th Century Australia .

Investigating the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, Part 2

We deep dive into the stories of other guests who’ve stayed at the haunted Hawthorne Hotel in Salem and seen ghosts and other phenomena, as well as the hotel’s history.

After sifting through all of the haunting-related reviews of the Hawthorne Hotel on Trip Advisor, we talk about the most interesting ones (including reviews from some guests who don’t believe the hotel is haunted.)

Highlights include: ghostly cats, Ouija boards, the ghost of a sailor, glitchy phone calls, disembodied voices, cold spots

Episode Script for Investigating the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, Part 2

Trip advisor (27 pages of reviews come up when you search “haunted”):

” Room 504 isn’t known to be haunted, but my sister woke up in the night to what felt like the comforter moving slightly around her. Being a cat owner, she described it as feeling like a cat walked across her and then settled for a nap on her feet. This only occurred on one of our three nights in the hotel. No one we spoke to knew of an animal ghost in the hotel, but told her not to consider herself crazy either. They get a variety of reports from guests and the stories definitely add to the fun factor at this hotel. I would definitely choose this hotel again for a future stay and recommend it to others who don’t mind a few creaky doors and a possible ghostly guest in their room”

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g60954-d115990-Reviews-or5-Hawthorne_Hotel-Salem_Massachusetts.html#REVIEWS

“The hotel is beautiful and the employees are very nice. Everything is clean and everything works fine. I would have thoroughly enjoyed my stay if not for one thing, which needs to be addressed: it’s haunted.

People are not lying about that. I too thought they were lying, until yesterday night. I had the full experience (in room 510), starting at 3am and ending near 4 am: physical contact (finger poking me), crying outside the door, knocking on the door (from the mid level of the door), whispering sounds, lights flickering when a presence would be felt and then stabilizing when it would leave, and changes in temperature.

If you don’t mind the risks of being awakened at night and to go though what I went though yesterday night, or if being in a haunted hotel is what you are looking for, I recommend it”

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g60954-d115990-Reviews-or10-Hawthorne_Hotel-Salem_Massachusetts.html#REVIEWS

“! I didn’t know it was haunted when we booked but it is, a man in an orange coat and a hat kept opening our curtains and sometimes we couldn’t open the closet… the handle kept jiggling in the middle of the night too and something kept touching my feet! I feel like too many people have played with spirit boards in this room ( never play with those things FYI) if you want a haunted room check into room 308 if not don’t lol.”

UnicornDreams

“We were not originally booked in the room. At check-in I asked for us not to Have that haunted room but the young man at the desk said we could have this 2 room suite as a free upgrade. Well, we fell for the bate and thought it would be an adventure. The back room is supposedly haunted, but nothing happened, except I slept like the dead! It was an adventure. The staff here goes out of its way to see you have everything you need. The restaurants were both excellent and not too pricey. You can walk everywhere from this hotel and I would highly recommend it.”

odonna56 RE: room 325

” From my experience on this floor so far, I have experienced a few un-easy experiences. For the first one, I went down in the elevator to go to the fourth floor and I went inside the elevator, the door shut, and then opened again and I felt like something walked into the elevator with me. My second experience was, walking to my room I felt very un-easy walking to it, so I ran in scarcement. “

Angis K RE: 6th floor

“The hotel has a charm about it but I’m sure somthing else lay beneath the surface.

The elevator, halls and room are just creepy. Like somthing out of a strange old horror movie but stunning.

When we got to our room it over looked the park and the Salem witch museum which was lit up in red! The bedroom lights were flickering then turning themself on and off this was un settling.

It was hot in the room then freezing cold the next. The first night I dreamed about an old lady witch who was flying around the room screaming and pulling off our blankets. It was frightening. The next day I took a photo of the hallway just for memory sake and what appears to be on our room door is the face of the old lady from my dream.

I did not report this to hotel staff as I only just seen it now after looking back at photos. I am grateful to have had this experience but beware if you stay here things DO go bump in the night.”

–Laura J from Melbourne, Aus

“Booked a trip to Salem and knew immediately we wanted to stay in the, what is believed to be haunted, Hawthorne Hotel. Checking in was a breeze and they even had the room available for us hours earlier. Had wanted a room on the 6th floor (for extra spooks) and what do you know we got it! Everything about the hotel was nice. A very old world class charm about it. Our room was one of the smallest ones, but that is what we had chose and was perfect for what we needed it for – to sleep in. Was still just as nice and clean as the larger rooms I am sure. It wasn’t until the day we were checking out that we did believe the hotel to be haunted. I was making a phone call from my cell phone when it did not ring and instead was staticy with a man’s voice chopping in and out. I did not even think “haunted” or “ghost” and had hung up. Had I thought quick enough I would have stayed on. I tried that same number literally 6 times after, each time ringing as normal and arriving to the female automated voice recorder. After that I got a little spooked and can honestly believe the others whom have had weird interactions at this hotel. It’s a great hotel for families and couples alike and seems like a terrific spot to host a party in the ballroom. Didn’t get to try the restaurant but there’s always next time!”

–Alyssa Lori

“One thing – rumor is the hotel is haunted. We didn’t have a second thought about that until we heard our door handle turning & clicking then silence…then the door just opened all the way by itself – no joke. A little scary as no one was there!!!”

–PDCornwell (“Beautiful Hotel for Romantic Getaway”)

“

My sister and I travel back to Salem Mass where we were born after 30 years in Canada just to travel down memory lane, we stayed in room 325 for two nights and on the second night my cousins brought over a Ouija board because we told them it was the most haunted room in the Hawthorne Hotel just for fun, my sister and one of my cousins started asking questions and to my surprise a spirit was speaking back saying he was a handyman for the Hawthorne Hotel many many many years ago and had committed suicide by jumping out the window of the room I was staying and he said he had two small daughters and a wife, that he left behind I did not believe any of this my sister at the board if he wanted me to leave it said yes and I said I was not leaving and the Ouija board piece that you put your fingers on literally jumped off the board and hit the ceiling I swear to God, this is the honest truth my sister has it on her iPhone as a video. So in cloSing the hotel waS abSolutely fabulouS and if you are into paranormal activity maybe you’ll experience Something in room 325

“

–paul m

“

Hotel beautiful. Service excellent. Bathroom beyond small, you can brush teeth shower and use toilet simultaneously. The reason I am deducting points is because my daughter and I stayed in room 525 and were haunted from 2 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. This was the scariest thing that either of us has ever encountered in our lives. We will never be able to forget the experience. I will be surprised if this rating is accepted but I must report the truth. The place has every ounce of historic charm but unfortunately, this for us included apparitions and supernatural occurrences.

“-kvanbec

negative review:

“

No bellhop service…you have to lug your luggage through the parking lot and around the corner to the door. Or take a chance with your life by double parking on the street. We stayed in the ‘haunted’ room #325. The bathrooms doors will randomly swing open if not fully latched…not a ‘haunted’ thing, probably a ‘structural’ thing. The bathrooms( shower has a separate room) in this room is extremely small…no countertop space at all…well, maybe just enough for a toothbrush. No privacy from the bathroom window because of sheer curtains. The view out the window was ghastly. Perfect for that ‘haunted’ effect! It was very noisy at night. We heard hallway doors slamming constantly. The food in the downstairs restaurant was delicious. And the staff was very pleasant. One star for the stall and one for the restaurant. I’m adding photos.

“-Lillian R

” The room had two chandeliers which flickered leaving us to believe that they may be “haunted”.”

–kymmywymmy

“

I heard that the 3rd and 6th floors are most haunted however I had a couple experiences in room 525. Nothing to make me pack up and leave in the middle of the night though.

“-sarahmcdee1

“

My mom & I recently stayed at the Hawthorne Hotel, specifically because it is listed as being haunted. After having stayed at the Stanley Hotel in Colorado just a few months prior, I can say that I experienced even more activity at the Hawthorne! My mom & I stayed on the 6th floor, which is supposed to be the floor with the most activity. While waiting to go on our paranormal investigation later that night, we experienced several different things in our room, which included the tv turning itself off & being on a different channel when we turned it back on, the curtains moving without any air or draft being present anywhere in the room, and ‘cold spots’ that moved throughout the room, which is said to be an indicator of a spirit. We were so excited to actually have had something happen, and it was not in any way scary or harmful. Aside from our ‘ghost adventure’, the hotel was beautiful, cozy, warm, and the staff was extremely nice and helpful. I would highly recommend this hotel to anyone, whether looking for a ghost adventure or not!

“WendyC7773

“

My grandmother, mother and myself stayed here for 3 nights and enjoyed everything immensely! We happened to stay in room 325 which happens to be haunted! We didn’t know this until after we stayed one night and was reading something about the hotel and we read that Ghost Hunters came a few years prior and didn’t find anything… Well, we did! On the last night of our stay my mother and grandmother both were woken by the sound of a baby crying, followed by sounds of little girls laughing. It was about 4 o’clock in the morning when it happened. That was the highlight of our stay! As for everything else, it was wonderful – service, cleanliness, location, everything! I would definitely stay here again.

“-orchid623

“

We did experience something odd immediately after turning off the lights around 11:00 p.m. There was a VERY loud sound in the room which made both of us sit straight up in bed. We thought someone had opened up the door, but no one was there. The door was closed and no one was in the hallway. We looked around the room to see if something had fallen, but nothing had. The only way we could recreate the sound was by swinging the metal safety lock open really hard against the doorframe (the kind that hotels use now in place of the chain locks). It kind of freaked me out, but I didn’t feel threatened. I guess they just wanted to get our attention??!

“-turnest1 / Convinced 6th floor is haunted

“

Now for the haunted part. It may have been the fact we were in Salem or exhaustion from two weeks on the road but I think our room was haunted. I kept hearing a scratching sound coming from the nightstand but there was nothing there and my husband could not hear it. Eventually it went away and I went to sleep. During the night my husband woke me to ask me what I wanted. Dazed and confused I asked what he was talking about. He had heard a women’s voice call out his name and thought it was me, it was not. Enjoy your stay at the Hawthorne and don’t worry the ghosts are friendly.

“-Dianne228

“Last but not least the GHOST. YES THIS HOTEL IS HAUNTED. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt. We had presence of man and women in our room. We could here music playing and faint talking. I walked downstairs and back up to the second floor area to see if there was a party going on. The party left around midnight I was told. Each night a women dressed in early turn of the century clothing, not 1920’s would sit in the chair and look out to the Commons. I would turn on the light and she was gone. Something sat on the end of my bed each night and on two nights this presence grabbed my finger really hard. Call me crazy…my 24 daughter saw all of this as well. The minute you walk into the Hotel you are taken back in time. Maybe the Grand Dames of the past or still lingering…. dare you to stay in room 526 and say your alone. “

–DallasDiva63

“Room 325 is supposedly haunted. We stayed in 326 … the minute we walked in we felt we were being watched, were even brushed up against. I left my camera in the room, only to find later that evening, the settings were changed. Very intriguing.

” –tomreilly

sounds fake to me:

“

we stayed in room 614 next to the most haunted room there we were fooling around with our cameras and we turned on the video camera and heard a voice growl get out we took some pics every pic had at least 10 orbs we were getting touched the spookiest thing was that my parents were praying and all of a sudden a blue cross appeared on the door we looked and took pics wasnt there only on the video camera we left at 1:00 in the morning so do not stay in that room

“-iminlove

“

who says that this place is not haunted. i have to differ. we stayed in a certain room called the bridal suite room.we heard small children crying and newspapers waving in the hallway. a certain employee at the hotel told us a story before we put this together. he told us that a bride and two of her children stayed there. the bride took her own life and her childrens. after we came back toour room small finger prints appeared on a back wall in the bedroom. this kinda spooked us. we left alittle bit earlier than expected.

“-Explorer24276

Sources

Trip Advisor

Check out our first episode about the Hawthorne Hotel for our full list of sources, as well as pictures of the hotel.

Investigating the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, Part 3, and the Salem Marine Society

Continuing our look at Salem’s most haunted hotel, we unearth a strange synchronicity in the history of the land that the Hawthorne Hotel stands on and take a look at the mysterious Salem Marine Society.

Following up on a lead that Chris found last time, we dive into what happened at the site of Salem’s famously haunted Hawthorne Hotel. We find a really strange set of circumstances that we can’t believe aren’t spelled out more in many of the sources we found online. We also correct a big inaccuracy perpetuated by many websites about the Hawthorne Hotel.

Highlights include: Arson, a man named Estes, two buildings with the same name burning down on the same weekend, a ship’s cabin located on the hotel’s rooftop, and more

Episode Script for Investigating the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, Part 3, and the Salem Marine Society

Oddly, fire may be the “psychic residue” visitors claim to sense when visiting the hotel. Lederhaus reiterated that the myth, perpetuated in several books, that the hotel marks the former site of the apple orchard owned by Bridget Bishop isn’t true.

Investigators with Ghost Hunters told the general manager that they went to the library and City Hall, and did research on the physical property and claimed “nothing happened at the hotel that would cause hauntings.” Seriously? The TV reearches completely overlooked the six fires that plagued the land’s previous occupant, the Franklin Building, during the 1800s. -Ghosts of Salem: Haunts of the Witch City by Sam Baltrusis

Before the Hawthorne, the Franklin Building was at the site.
It was a large, four-story brick building where people could rent out offices, and it was built in 1809.
It was located on Newbury Street, extending from Essex street to the Common.
(READ FROM ARTICLE)

I saw advertisements for different businesses there, like:

a penmanship instructor
a school that taught the classics
a natural history society
a headquarters for a Whig political party members
and of course the Salem Marine Society (who owned the building)
- The Marine Society was founded in 1766 to share navigation information and to help the families of sailors who had died. It was common for sailors to be lost at sea at the time, so the society used the rent earnings from the Franklin Building to help fund their donations for widows and their children.
- The Marine Society came to own it when a merchant named Thomas Perkins donated it to the society (sidenote: I read in one book that apparently Perkins participated in both the slave and opium trades, tho not sure if it’s true)
There were, in total, at least 4 fires in the Franklin Building. Though the book Ghosts of Salem by Sam Baltrusis says there were 6, but I couldn’t find articles about the other 2.
- The first fire I could find was on March 29, 1825 (see article below)
- There was another on January 29, 1845, which damaged a ton of the building, and which some people thought was caused by arson. (see article below)
- Another building had burned down, and a building across the street from the Franklin building had signs of a fire having been started, but then dying down itself.
- The city put out a $500 reward for finding the arsonist
- About a year and a half later, in June 1846, the building was struck by lightning, but it wasn’t damaged badly. (Sounds like the lighning went down a chimney and messed up the bricks a little.) The same night, though, several cottages in neighboring towns were severely damaged by the lightning.
- There was another fire on January 4, 1859 (see article)
- In October 1860, the building caught fire and completely burned down.
  - READ FROM ARTICLE
  - FIRE WAS NOTICED AROUND 1:20 AM
  - ESTES MENTION
  - MR CHASE’S LEG
  - Another building called the Franklin Building, located in Philly, burned down the same weekend: The Philly Franklin Building burned down on Friday night, and the Salem one burned down on Saturday night
  - Also, tragically, unbeknownst to the Marine Society, their insurance policy lapsed at noon on the day that the building burned down. Some sources say that the letter informing them that it was going to run out had been delivered but hadn’t been picked up by society members yet, while other sources say that they misremembered the date and thought it expired later that week.
  - Also, that same night, Captain Jonathan Porter Felt, the Marine Society member responsible for managing the building died from a “lingering disease” while the building was burning down.
    - (read from article)
- The Marine Society had the building rebuilt, and by the following November, tenants started moving in.
  - John C. Weber, a grocer, was the first to move in. He’d been in the old Franklin Building, but his new store was way nicer and bigger.
- On August 2, 1862, the new building’s flag pole was hit by lightning, but not damaged.
- In 1921, 1,100 Salem residents banded together in support of building a hotel on the land that the Franklin Building occupied.
  - They basically wanted a luxury hotel to lure wealthy visitors.
  - Though the fought it at first, the Marine Society eventually relented and allowed them to build the hotel there, as long as their meeting house could be on the rooftop. So they built a replica of the Taria Topan, a ship that they’d used in travels to India as part of the shipping trade.
- In October 1997, there was a fire in the basement of the Hawthorne. It caused about $10K of damage, and smoke got into all 6 floors of the hotel, and there was a lot of smoke damage in the ballroom.
- RE: Bridget Bishop’s orchard, it sounds like that was an incorrect legend started by Ghost Hunters when they came to investigate the hotel in 2007. Her orchard was where the Lyceum is.
- Supposedly, members of the Marine Society have found objects in their quarters missing, misplaced, or scattered around. (Stuff like maps, charts, and other antiques)
More about the Marine Society from Yankee Magazine, “Ship’s Cabin | The Most Unusual Room in New England”:
https://newengland.com/yankee-magazine/travel/massachusetts/ships-cabin-most-unusual-room/
- “Captain Edward B. Trumbull designed this unique room—a replica of the deckhouse aboard the Taria Topan, his last command—in 1925 as a meeting place for the Society, founded as a charitable and scholarly organization in 1766.”
- “John leads me through the Hawthorne’s luxurious lobby to a guests’ elevator, where he hits the number 6 for the hotel’s top floor. From there it’s a long walk to the opposite end of an Oriental-carpeted corridor, through an unmarked door with frosted-glass panes, and up a steel-railed stairwell to a concrete landing. John waves a magnetized card in front of an armed reader. The door opens.
- I’d heard whispers about this room for years. But I was unprepared for the time-travel jolt of walking out of a hotel stairwell and into an actual ship’s cabin. The room is lit with hurricane lanterns and paneled in teak. Cypress “hanging knees” brace overhead timbers; brass instrument dials and solemn portraits stud the walls. The dark-wood ceiling is cambered, or arched, as if a water-shedding weather deck lay directly above. A massive deck-stepped mast rises centrally. The detail is so authentic—the 1925 collaborative effort of Captain Edward Trumbull and hotel architect Philip Horton Smith—that Society members were recently informed that if they wanted an appraisal they’d better find a marine insurer.
- . . .
- John shows me one of the room’s most beloved possessions: an 18th-century wooden voting box holding white marbles and black cubes. During new-member votes, a chosen white marble affirms; a “blackballing” black cube opposes. Those who’ve heard it swear that the black cube makes a chillingly hollow sound when dropped into the box’s secret compartment. The “master” at those meetings—the Society’s chief officer—wears a silver anchor around his neck and keeps order with a “fid” gavel (a tapered wooden club ordinarily used to splice rope). Current master Ben Shreves says he could do without a literal anchor around his neck but dutifully abides by the custom.
- . . .
- The . . . routes to membership . . . are maritime achievement and legacy. Originally the only people allowed into the Society were “deepwater” sea captains who had completed a full voyage. Those days are gone, of course, and to survive, the Society has periodically amended its restrictive bylaws. In 1790 it allowed in ships’ owners; by 1994 it had from time to time begun inviting sons, grandsons, great-grandsons, and eventually female descendants of members, as well as past and present ship owners and masters.
I went through the society’s recordbooks, everything I could find online, and looked for a 132.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015031486262&view=1up&seq=7
One thing I noticed is that members are numbered.
According to a book detailing the rules of the Marine Society and listing the members, the 132nd member of the Salem Marine Society was Francis Roach, who joined on February 28, 1792, and died in November 1798, when he was 43. He died in Salem, and served in the Revolutionary War. It looks like during the war, he like many of the other members of the society, spent time in Mill Prison in Plymouth in the UK. That was an overflow prison during the Revolutionary War (and then later during the French Revolutionary wars and the War of 1812.) From 1777-1783, 10,000 prisoners passed through Plymouth, and only 179 died, so hygiene and food was prob pretty good for the time.

Sources

Books

Ghosts of Salem: Haunts of the Witch City by Sam Baltrusis

Websites

Interesting article about Marine Society headquarters: https://newengland.com/yankee-magazine/travel/massachusetts/ships-cabin-most-unusual-room/
Salem Marine Society book: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015031486262&view=1up&seq=7
https://www.historybythesea.com/2016/07/hawthorne-hotel-salem-massachusettes.html

Articles

The Franklin Building. Salem Register (Salem, Massachusetts)October 25, 1860
Alarm of Fire. Salem Gazette (Salem, Massachusetts)March 29, 1825
Advertisement. Salem Observer (published as SALEM OBSERVER.) (Salem, Massachusetts)June 19, 1824
Advertisement. Salem Observer (Salem, Massachusetts)April 7, 1827
[Mr. Editor; Marine; Society; Franklin; Building] Salem Gazette (Salem, Massachusetts)June 14, 1833
Advertisement.Salem Gazette (Salem, Massachusetts)July 19, 1836
Advertisement. Salem Gazette (Salem, Massachusetts)November 8, 1836
Fire. Boston Courier (Boston, Massachusetts)January 30, 1845
News Article. Boston Daily Times (published as BOSTON TIMES.) (Boston, Massachusetts)January 30, 1845
Another Serious Fire. Salem Register (Salem, Massachusetts)January 30, 1845
Incendiarism. Salem Register (Salem, Massachusetts) January 30, 1845
News Article. Boston Traveler (published as AMERICAN TRAVELLER.) (Boston, Massachusetts)January 31, 1845
$500 reward. Salem Register (Salem, Massachusetts)February 6, 1845
News Article. Boston Semi-weekly Atlas (published as The Boston Semi-Weekly Atlas.) (Boston, Massachusetts)June 24, 1846
Events in Salem and Vicinity during the Year 1846. Salem Observer (published as The Salem Observer.) (Salem, Massachusetts)January 2, 1847
News Article. Boston Evening Transcript (published as Boston Evening Transcript.) (Boston, Massachusetts)January 4, 1859
News Article. Boston Traveler (published as Boston Daily Traveller.) (Boston, Massachusetts)January 5, 1859
News Article. Boston Traveler (published as Boston Daily Traveller.) (Boston, Massachusetts)January 5, 1859
Fire In Franklin Building. Salem Register (Salem, Massachusetts)January 6, 1859
Re Opened. Salem Register (Salem, Massachusetts)November 19, 1860
News Article. Boston Evening Transcript (published as Boston Evening Transcript.) (Boston, Massachusetts)October 23, 1860
The Franklin Building Fire. Salem Register (Salem, Massachusetts)October 25, 1860
Franklin Building Destroyed. Salem Observer (published as The Salem Observer) (Salem, Massachusetts)October 27, 1860
Salem And Vicinity. Salem Observer (published as The Salem Observer) (Salem, Massachusetts)March 9, 1861
Salem And Vicinity. Salem Observer (published as The Salem Observer) (Salem, Massachusetts)May 4, 1861
Salem And Vicinity. Supreme Judicial Court. Salem Observer (published as The Salem Observer.) (Salem, Massachusetts)November 16, 1861
Removals. Salem Register (Salem, Massachusetts)November 18, 1861
The New Armory Of The Cadets. Salem Register (Salem, Massachusetts)February 20, 1862
Freaks Of Lightning. Salem Observer (published as The Salem Observer.) (Salem, Massachusetts)August 2, 1862
Salem Marine Society Centennial. Address By The Master, Capt. Nathaniel Brown. Salem Register (Salem, Massachusetts)June 12, 1871

Also see sources used for Investigating the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, Part 1 and Investigating the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, Part 2.

Planchette and Automatic Writing (Ouija Boards Part 1)

Starting with the automatic writing method planchette, we begin a series about Ouija boards. We’ll dig into the strange history of the much admired and maligned method of communicating with spirits and/or having fun at parties.

Before Ouija, there was planchette. Invented in Paris in the 1850s, planchette was a method of automatic writing. Much like the planchette we recognize from today’s Ouija boards, it was a heart-shaped plank of wood. But it was much larger than today’s planchettes, rested on wheels or casters, and had a slot to put a pencil through. One or several people would rest their hands on the planchette, and see what messages come through.

Highlights include: The Spiritualist movement, weird personifications of “Planchette,” plenty of alarmist rhetoric about this popular parlor game/occult technique, and the story of a young woman in New Orleans who supposedly died as a result of her obsession with planchette

This is the first of ?? episodes about Ouija boards. We’ll be back next week to talk about the invention of Ouija boards and spirit boards!

Episode Script for Planchette and Automatic Writing (Ouija Boards Part 1)

Planchette is the name of a curious machine, whose ability, without any voluntary action on one’s part, to write down on paper an answer, not necessarily the proper answer, to any question, has during the past week excited the amusement and astonishment of those who have witnessed its performance. -from an article in the Burlington Times (Burlington, Vermont) · Sat, Apr 4, 1868

Spiritualism

In 1848, three sisters in Upstate NY, the Fox sisters, kicked off the spiritualism movement. The two younger sisters claimed that they could communicate with the dead and interpret knocks as messages from the dead. Even though one of the sisters confessed that it had all been a hoax–the rappings had come from their toe joints. A lot has been written abut how spiritualism was also a movement that gave women more power in a society where very few occupations were allowed, etc. More on that another time.
In a nutshell, spiritualism is the idea that the living and the dead can communicate, an idea that was especially attractive in the years after the American Civil War, which ended in 1865. People wanted to talk to their deceased loved ones and to feel like life had meaning, etc.

Before Ouija, there was Planchette

Planchette was a sort of automatic writing device.
- Automatic writing, also known as psychography, is when someone writes something without consciously writing.
- Sceptics have written automatic writing off as being an example of the ideomotor phenomenon, which is basically involuntary muscle movements, kind of like reflexes, which can move whatever object you’re touching.
  - This comes up a lot when talking about ouija boards, planchette, dowsing, etc.
  - I don’t want to get sidetracked and get into this now, but I don’t see the ideomotor phenomenon as something that proves that all automatic writing, or spirit board communication, etc, are wrong. Like–who’s to say that whatever entity you’re communicating with isn’t causing those involuntary movements, etc.
- Automatic writing has been around a long time.
- There was a Daoist method of spirit writing called Fuji (fu-chi), that was used during the Ming Dynasty in China, which was during 1368-1644 CE, which involved suspending a sieve or tray to guide a stick writing in sand or incense ashes. But even before that, spirit writing was popular in China, as long ago as the 400s CE.
  - I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here because I’m trying to stay focused on the history of Ouija boards in the United States, but I wanted to mention it so people don’t think that white people invented this stuff.
  - I don’t think it became a thing in Europe until the 1600s, when it was used by practitioners of Enochian magic.
It was shaped like a rounded triangle or heart, with two wheels on the broad side and a hole on the pointy side. You put a pencil through the hole. Then you put the device on a piece of paper, everyone put their hands on it like they would the planchette of a Ouija board today, and then they asked a question and saw what the planchette wrote.
- The planchette used here was much larger than the planchette of a modern Ouija board: it was about 7-1/2 inches long and 5-1/2 inches wide on the broad side and 2 inches wide on the pointy side.
- According to a 1904 pamphlet I read called Crystal Gazing, Astrology, Palmistry, Planchette & Spiritualism, it could be used by 1, 2, or 3 people. The pamphlet recommended that you start off asking yes or no questions, and then only after you’ve gained some experience, you can ask questions that would have longer answers. The pamphlet described using the planchette like this:
  - Very soon it will be found that by some mysterious power, which the operators are quite sure they do not themselves exert, the Planchette will begin to move about, up and down the paper for some little time, and then, generally, an answer will be found written to the question asked. The most mysterious part is, while the operators are lightly touching the Planchette with the ends of their fingers, and are quite unconscious of in any way influencing its movement, it will move about with more or less rapidity, and will write words and sentences with more or less distinctness
The planchette may have been inspired by telegraph, because apparently an early prototype by Morse involved attaching a pencil to something.
Most of the following info about the history of the planchette come from mysteriousplanchette.com, which has a ton of awesome info:
- Apparently planchettes were popular in Paris at the time.
- Planchette is french for “little plank”
- It’s a little unclear to me who originally invented the planchette–several people claim credit, and it sounds like it was invented in France during a séance on June 10, 1853. Someone tied a pencil to an upside down basket, which seemed to work really well, and which was less exhausting than calling out all the letters of the alphabet and waiting for rappings in response.
- But because it was somewhat similar to “table-tipping” devices used in seances, it makes sense that a bunch of different people sort of had similar ideas for the device around the same time.
- But in 1853, a German composer and music teacher filed a patent for a psychograph in London, which he called “Apparatus for Indicating Person’s Thoughts by the Agency of Nervous Electricty.” It involved putting your hands on plates that were attached to a pointer, which would point at letters.
- Planchettes became so popular in Europe that in 1853, that same year, the Bishop of Viviers wrote a pastoral letter against them.
- Also, apparently mediums started saying that people shouldn’t use planchettes and similar devices. They had an obvious ulterior motive: it threatened their monopoly on spirit communication and seances.
- But to talk about how planchette came to America:
  - In 1858 or 1859, two spiritualists, Robert Dale Owen and Dr. H.F. Gardner, saw planchettes while overseas and brought some home with them.
  - Robert Dale Owen supposedly communicated with his father using the device. His father gave him advice on a book he was writing.
  - one of Robert Dale Owen and Dr. H.F. Gardner’s acquaintances, a bookseller in Boston named G.W. Cottrell, started manufacturing them by around 1859.
  - Around 1868, Planchette became extremely popular.
  - At the time, Cottrell was selling planchettes for between $1-$3, depending on what sort of wood it was made of. (You could get a plain black walnut one for $1, or a “beautifully painted” hollywood one for $3. As far as we know, none of the hollywood ones have survived to the present day, tho there are examples of his cheaper models.)
  - By 1868, Cottrell said he was shipping thousands of planchettes to all parts of the country.
- In a lot of sources, the New York bookseller and toy manufacturer Kirby and Company are credited as the first American planchette manufacturer. It sounds like they started selling them around 1868.
  - The company catered to the wealthy, particularly wealthy women, and sold things like expensive soaps, custom embroidered pocketbooks (which they called port-monnaies to be fancy), and other trinkets and games for the wealthy.
  - So because their clientele was so wealthy, that could be why planchette became so trendy.
  - By December 1868, Kirby claimed that he’d already sold 200,000 of them.
  - They sold numbered models, with Number 1, which was made of ash wood, cost $1.50, number 2 made of highly polished wood priced at $3.00.
    - There’s a picture of their “Number 3 India Rubber Planchette”; it’s basically made of plastic, which was pretty ahead of its time, and it looks super cool and goth. It’s shaped like a heart and is jet-black. That was priced at $4.
    - No. 4 was made of plate glass and cost $8. The idea was that the user could see what they were writing.
    - Later, they introduced a cheaper No. 0 version which was made of mahogany and cost $1.
    - $1 in 1868 is about $15 today, and $8 is about $144.
- I also found an ad from 1868 selling instructions on how to make a planchette for 3 cents, calling it:
  - The new Parlor Mystery. The wonderful little Automaton that answers questions, “tells fortunes,” and can even disclose one’s secret thoughts. Any boy can make it.
- That brings up one thing–part of the planchette’s popularity could also have to do with how easy it was to make them.
- Looking through different models and manufacturers, I’m seeing a lot of interesting variations on the theme. One fun variety is in the 1920s, there were planchettes shaped like hands.
There were other spirit communication devices that became a thing during the late 19th century, including clock-like devices that look really cool, but I got really interested in the planchette 1) because of its direct link to the ouija board and 2) because of the way people talked about them, which is similar to how ouija boards are still discussed today. Like as if they’re either a game or a weird occult instrument of the devil.
So I pored through a bunch of different books and articles for some interesting accounts of people’s experiences with planchettes.
One weird thing that I’ve noticed in writing from the 19th century is that they often refer to Planchette as Planchette, capitalized and without an article, as if they’re an actual person who they’re talking to.

I read a bit of an 1886 book called The Salem Witchcraft The Planchette Mystery and Modern Spiritualism.

I can’t really tell who wrote it, but it was edited by the editor of a phrenology journal. And the book’s introduction is preceded by webster’s dictionary definitions of bigotry, prejudice, and superstition. Which is kinda ironic, because phrenology is a extremely debunked pseudoscience that was used to justify all sorts of racism and bigotry.
- The introduction begins with:
  - The object in reprinting this most interesting review is simply to show tlie progress made in moral, intellecnial, and physical science. The reader will go back with us to a time—not very remote—when nothing was known of Phrenology and Psychology; when men and women were persecuted, and even put to death, through the baldest ignorance and the most pitiable superstition.
- From the planchette section:
  - For me alone, the instrument will not move; for myself and wife it moves slightly, but its writing is mostly in monosyllables. With my daughter’s hands upon it, it writes more freely, frequently giving, correctly, the names of persons present whom she may not know, and also the names of their friends, living or dead, with other and similar tests. Its conversations with her are grave or gay, much according to the state of her own mind at the time ; and when frivolous questions are asked, it almost always returns answers either frivolous or, I am sorry to say it, a trifle wicked. For example, she on one occasion said to it : ” Planchette, where did you get your education ? ” To her horror, it instantly wrote: “In hell,”. . . On another occasion, after receiving from it responses to some trival questions, she said to it : ” Planchette, now write something of your own accord without our prompting.” But instead of writing words and sentences as was expected, it immediately traced out the rude figure of a man, such as chool children sometimes make upon their slates. After finishing the outlines—face, neck, arms, legs, etc., it swung around and brought the point of the pencil to the proper position for the eye, which it carefully marked in, and then proceeded to pencil out the hair. On finishing this operation, it wrote under the figure the name of a young man concerning whom my daughter’s companions are in the habit of teasing her.
- The book also sets forth some theories about what could be causing the planchette phenomena:
  - First theory: The people who’re touching the planchette are moving it and writing the words
    - He tries to refute this, saying:

How is it, for example, that Planchette, under the hands of my own daughter, has, in numerous cases, given correctly the names of persons whom she had never seen or heard of before, giving also the names of their absent relatives, the places of their residence, etc., all of which were absolutely

unknown by every person present except the questioner?

Second theory: It’s electricity or magnetism
- I find this kinda charming, because I feel like those are such 19th century things to be impressed by or just throw out as an explanation
- Apparently this was a pretty popular theory
- The author says (and I agree with this):
  - we are tempted to ask, Who is electricity ;’ what is his mental and moral status? and how and where did he get his education? Or if by ” electricity” is here simply meant the subtle, imponderable, and impersonal fluid commonly known by that name, then let us ask. Who is at the other end of the wire?—for there must evidently be a who as well as a what in the case.
- People argued that since magnets were used to fake some stuff in seances, then they could be used to fake planchette stuff too. Which of course is true, but most operators using the planchette as a parlor game aren’t going to be setting up a complex system of magnets under their tables just to impress their friends.
Third theory: It’s the devil
- Kinda self explanatory, a lot of religious figures condemned it as being the devil’s work, etc
Fourth theory: a floating, ambient mentality
- Sounds like thisis claiming that it’s the consciousness of the ppl in the room:
  - It is supposed by those who hold this theory, or rather hypothesis, that the assumed floating, ambient mentality is an aggregate emanation from the minds of those present in the circle ; that this mentality is clothed, by some mysterious process, with a force analogous to what it possesses in the living organism, by which force it is enabled, under certain conditions, to move physical bodies and write or otherwise express its thoughts ; and that in its expression of the combined intelligence of the circle, it generally follows the strongest mind, or the mind, that is otherwise best qualified or conditioned to give current to the thought.
Fifth theory: ” TO DATMONION ” (THE DEMON)
- This is the spiritus mundi, or basically like the collective unconcious
- Ppl appealled to a bunch of different philosophers and stuff in antiquity
Sixth theory: “some principle of nature as yet unknown”
Seventh theory: spirits of the dead
Eighth theory: “Planchette’s Own Theory”
- Planchette is intelligent ; she can answer questions, and often answer them correctly, too. On w^hat class of subjects, then, might she be expected to give answers more generally correct than those which relate to herself, especially if the questions be asked in a proper spirit, and under such conditions as are claimed to be requisite for correct responses?
- So then he asks Planchette if he can ask how she works:
  - That will depend much upon the spirit in which you may interrogate me, the pertinence of your questions, and your capacity to interpret the answers. If you propose a serious and careful consultation for really useful purposes, there is another thing which you should understand in the commencement. It is that, owing to conditions and laws which may yet be explained to you, I shall be compelled to use your own mind as a scaffolding, so to speak, on which to stand to pass you down the truths you may seek, and which are above the reach of your own mind alone. Keep your mind unperturbed, then, as well as intent upon your object, or I can do but little for you.
- He asks for more detail about what the intelligence is:
  - It is the reduplication of your own mental state ; it is a spirit; it is the whole spiritual world ; it is God—one or all, according to your condition and the form and aspect in which you are able to receive the communication.
- There’s then an extremely long (maybe 10-15 page?) q&a where they go into a lot of philosophy, talk about the bible, etc.
I found an article in an volume 38 of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, from 1896, called “The Confessions of a Reformed Planchettist.” It begins:
- I am not wicked; at the worst, I am but weak.
- And to read a bit more from it:
  - How did I become a Planchettist? How does a man become committed to any evil career? Insensibly and by degrees, of course. No man clothes himself at once with the full measure of guilt, as he would put on a ready-made garment. There are gentle gradations in all iniquity. . . [he then goes on to compare himself with Nero starting to learn the fiddle] . . . Certainly when I first laid confiding and caressing hands on the smooth and shining back of Planchette, I had no idea of the dark path of deception on which that three-legged monster would drag me, of the depths of turpitude into which I thereby pledged myself to plunge.
- [to recap some of the article, this guy was working o an astronomical invention, and dropped by the shop of a guy who made mathematical equipment, and found that he was really busy making “pentagraph wheels” for a newly invented writing machine so couldn’t make his item for a month at least. Curious, the author picked one up.)
- He also personified the planchette as soon as he saw it:
  - There I found Planchette lying in wait for whome he might devour. He was a brown-looking little familiar, made of wood, and mounted on two pentragraph wheels, a lead-pencil forming his third leg; he looked as if he might bite, and had an uncanny air about him generally. Inquiring, What is this mystery? I was informed that on two persons placing their hands upon the fellow’s back, and a question being asked, he would soon begin to wriggle about (like a crab in the sand) and write an intelligible if not an intelligent answer with his plumbaginous tail.
    - (FYI plumbaginous means containing graphite)
- He went on a date with a lady he didn’t really like, and used the board with her. Supposedly the board works the best when people are opposites (like in gender, complexion, temperment, etc) but the board didn’t work. He went to return it to the store the next day, and was given a refund but told to keep the board. After that, the board started working.
- He definitely wrote this article as a sort of money grab, it’s so dramatic and ridiculous:
  - I didn’t feel quite easy at having Planchette for a room-fellow that night. I started several times, expecting to find him scratching about and endeavoring to climb into bed with me. I would rather have taken up with a bug.
- Then he talks about how popular it got:
  - The mania spread, and the air became full of Planchettes. Wherever you went a board was brought out as soon as the lamps were lit; the soft blandishments of music gave place to its presence, and conversation ceased. The baleful dissipation became universal.
- The article goes on forever, but I want to read a bit of the end, which is his conclusion with info about how it doesn’t work, isn’t real, etc.
  - I have little more to say, and surely nothing further to confess. I have truthfully given my experience, and if it be of any use to any of my fellows, that knowledge is guerdon sufficient. . . A reformed Planchettist, I eat better, drink better, and sleep better than when pursuing my evil practices. . . . Let this encourage those who are still under the dominion of the Destroyer to emancipate themselves.
  - It is useless to tell me that there is any thing in Planchette, or that by its aid any man may become is own medium . . . It would only write when I moved it, and then it wrote precisely what I dictated. That persons write ‘ unconsciously,’ I do not believe. As well tell me a man might pick pockets without knowing it. Nor am I at all prepared to believe the assertions of those Avho declare that they do not move the board. I know what operators will do in such cases I know the distortion, the disregard of truth which association with this immoral board superinduces.

There was definitely a moral panic about planchettes, particularly RE: how women used them and how they supposedly worked better for women than men.

An 1868 article in New Orleans Republican tells the story of someone dying from planchette:

In the street in which I live a young lady who was unduly attached to this “uncannie” game came to her death in consequence. She had shut herself up with it, and regardless of the directions on the downwards side of the board that two persons are to operate simultaneously in placing their finger-tips upon the upper surface, had endeavored for hours at a time to get a response to certain questions she asked respecting a far-absent lover. Midnight came, and she still remained seated in company with Planchette, impatient and despairing, and ready to dash the mocking toy to pieces. AT length she felt a slight thrill along her arms, and a movement on the paper beneath the pencil AT this crisis her mother entered but she heeded her not. Bending low, she asked, “Where is Richard?” “In heaven” was the instant response, written out in characters as copper-plate-like as a writing master’s and the girl fell lifeless from the chair. Medical remedies, including shocks of electricity, were applied, but in vain.

When they were big, they were really big!

In 1868, a sheet music company published a piece called “Planchette” and dedicated it to Kirby, the planchette manufacturer. And there was another song written that year called “Planchette” as well. And another in 1870.
There were an unbelievable number of articles about them, as well

So what happened to planchettes?

While doing this research, I got really curious and wanted to experiement with a planchette. Thinking it would be easy to find one since spiritualist and occult stuff is so popular now, I went on etsy and could only find two vendors selling them.
Someone on Etsy who sells planchettes that are reproductions of 1920s models, which are really cool and come in boxes decorated like the old boxes were back then.
There’s another vendor from near New Orleans, who makes really beautiful handmade planchettes. I ordered one of those, which the cheapest planchette for automatic writing I could find online and it was still like $80.
So why is it so hard to find planchettes these days, even though ouija boards are so popular?
- It sounds like the introduction of the ouija board in 1890 was the beginning of the end for planchettes.
- Ouija boards are easier to use and simpler, and you get answers faster than writing.
- By the 1930s, a British toy company was the last company really making many planchettes.
- There was a revival of interest in ouija boards after WWII, but planchettes just weren’t really being made anymore, so they didn’t come back.

Planchette and Automatic Writing Sources

Books mentioning planchette

The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult by Tatiana Kontou
Planchette, or the Despair of Science by Epes Sargent
https://archive.org/details/planchetteordes00sarggoog
1886 book called The Salem witchcraft ; The planchette mystery ; and Modern spiritualism: on archive.org
https://archive.org/details/salemwitchcraftp00stow/page/n7/mode/2up

Where to buy planchette

Cool etsy store selling repros of 1920s planchettes:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/EsoterismoSimonMago
This is the only other etsy seller Chris could find selling planchettes (at least the automatic writing kind); Chris bought one of these:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/FringeWalkers

Websites

Historical Articles and advertisements about planchette

The Confessions of Reformed Planchettist from Harper’s Monthly Magazine
Planchette. The Buffalo Commercial (Buffalo, New York) · Sat, Jul 11, 1868 · Page 2
Planchette. Burlington Times (Burlington, Vermont) · Sat, Apr 4, 1868 · Page 2
Planchette. Daily Press and Herald (Knoxville, Tennessee) · Wed, Jul 29, 1868 · Page 4
Planchette. Gold Hill Daily News (Gold Hill, Nevada) · Tue, Jul 14, 1868 · Page 2
Planchette. New Orleans Republican (New Orleans, Louisiana) · Thu, Jul 2, 1868 · Page 2
Ad Planchette Quad City Times Sat Jul 25 1868
Ad Planchette The Daily Milwaukee News Wed Jul 15 1868
Ad Planchette The Buffalo Commercial Sat Jul 11 1868
Mr Home The Pall Mall Gazette Fri May 15 1868
My Acquaintance With Planchette The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer Sat Jul 25 1868
Planchette Star Tribune Fri Jul 3 1868
Planchette The Daily Evening Express Sat Jul 11 1868
Planchette The Native Virginian Fri Jul 24 1868
Planchette The Scranton Republican Sat Aug 8 1868
Planchette The Times Democrat Wed Jul 1 1868
Planchette The Times Picayune Tue Sep 15 1868
Planchette The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer Wed Jul 8 1868
Planchette Is Simply Nowhere. Herald and Tribune Thu Apr 29 1886

Don’t miss our past episodes:

Helen Peters and Ouida / Invention (Ouija Boards Part 2)

We take a look at the board’s invention, in particular two women behind it, Helen Peters and Ouida: a highly-educated, unconventional medium who later ended up denouncing Ouija, and the eccentric, dog-obsessed English writer whose name may have inspired the board’s.

In 1886, homemade talking boards became a new “Ohio craze” that newspapers reported widely around the country. Five years later, a man named Charles Kennard started a company to create his own talking board, which he claims he invented (though the prototype may have been made by his neighbor, a coffin maker turned undertaker.)

But what most people don’t know is that one woman’s involvement in the Ouija board’s creation had been totally written out of the history, until Ouija historian Robert Murch unearthed her story. We look at how a woman named Helen Peters was integral in ensuring the board got patented. She also was at the Ouija board session that the board’s name came from, and wore a locket around her neck with another woman’s name, Ouida, which is where the name “Ouija” may have emerged from.

Ouida was a real character–an extremely prolific, oddball author of somewhat scandalous 19th-century adventure novels–so we take a look at her life and wonder how we’d also never heard of her.

We’ll pick up again next week to talk about what happened to Kennard’s company, and what happened to Ouija as the 20th century dawned.

Pictures

The New Talking Board: The Mysterious Amusement Which is Fascinating Ohio People. The News, Frederick, Maryland, Sat, Apr 10 1886

Elijah Bond’s Patent for the Kennard Ouija Board

Episode Script for Helen Peters and Ouida / Invention (Ouija Boards Part 2)

Remember, planchette peaked around 1868

Talking Boards

In April 1886, there were a flurry of articles in different newspapers talking about how people were starting to get obsessed with “talking boards” in Ohio. It seems like AP or some similar news wire service may have written a story about it and it got published all across the country. I found three versions of stories about it (which were then repeated everywhere) and want to read a bit from them.

First article:

The New Talking Board: The Mysterious Amusement Which is Fascinating Ohio People. The News (Frederick, Maryland) · Sat, Apr 10, 1886 · Page 3:
- Many of our readers will still remember planchette, the strange little heart-shaped board with a pencil at its point which used to walk over yards of paper and write no end of sense and nonsense if the fingertips of two persons touched the upper surface of the board.
- Planchette had its day, and mostly died out. But the same mysterious force which used to impel it is moving now another kind of little board, and setting whole communities of eminently sober and respectable Ohio people on their heads.
  - It then describes how it is made: you write the alphabet on a board, as well as the words “yes,” “no,” “good evening” and “good night” in the corners.
    - Sidenote, I love how there’s the assumption that you’d only use it at night.
  - Then, the instructions vary a bit from what we’re used to:
- Then a tiny table is made with four legs. It is three or four inches high and very thin and light. Two persons sit opposite each other and take the board upon their knees . . . The little four-legged table is placed upon the board. The two persons grasp lightly with the thumb and forefinger the corners of the table that are next to them.
  - One note on that: there’s an illustration of a very proper Victorian woman and man, and it’s notable that their knees are touching–they have to be to keep the board balanced, especially with a table on top. I wonder if some of the early appeal of talking boards was that it was an excuse to touch someone in a way that wasn’t considered proper? Also, it would allow you to send a message to someone that maybe you weren’t supposed to say, and you had plausible deniability.
  - To continue reading from the article:
- The two sit down and become quiet, asking the question: “Are there any communications?” After a few minutes the little table begins to move over the board. It is an intelligent, or at least, a semi-intelligent force that guides the table, for it answers questions. Sometimes it talks utter nonsense and again it will write real information. . . . When a question is asked, the table moves toward the letters, and the foot steps upon the first one of the sentence to be written out. Then it passes to the next one and the next and so on, with more or less rapidity. A gentleman, who has experiemented with the thing, says: “Sometimes the table will cover two letters with its feet and then you hang on and ask that the foot be moved from the wrong letter, which will be done.”
  - The article does NOT explain which leg of the table you’re supposed to be paying attention to. If there are four legs, which is the “right” one?
  - Another story:
- One man who thought his family was spending too much time over the talking machine burned it up. Then he left home on a journey. When the talking board could not be found some one made another, and the amusement went on as before. To the queston what had become of the other board the answer was given “Jack burned it up,” which somewhat astonished Jack on his return.
  - The article closes with:
- The questions may be asked mentally, even by persons sitting in the room several feet away from the operators, and the answers are given just as readily.
  - I really want to try that, to try to eliminate bias etc.
- In some cases remarkable and truthful revelations are said to have been given about living persons. But it is not well to give too much heed to these revelations.
  - I like that it closes on a warning.

Second article:

An Ohio Craze: The Mysterious Talking Board and Table Over Which Ohioans Are Agitated. (Reprinted from the NY Tribute.) The Clay Democrat (Clay Center, Kansas) · Thu, Apr 22, 1886 · Page 2
- This article is interesting, because it seems to be what the last article was based on (without attribution.) This is a chattier and snappier article, written in a voice that feels very yellow-journalism-y to me. To give you a taste:
  - “Planchette is simply nowhere,” said a Western man at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, “compared with the new scheme for mysterious communication that is being used out in Ohio. I know of whole communities that are wild over the ‘talking board’ as some of them call it. . . . I have seen and heard some of the most remarkable things about its operations–things that seem to pass all human comprehension or explanation.”
- It’s conducted like an interview, with the writer asking questions like “what is the board like?” and the man from out west saying things like “give me a pencil and I will show you,” but the information is all in the same order, and mostly the same. (Though it doesn’t have a nice drawing of two Victorian people.)
- Here are a few extra tidbits that I found interesting:
  - “The ‘yes’ and no are to start and stop the conversation. The ‘good evening’ and ‘good night’ are for courtesy.”
    - That doesn’t . . . Really make much sense to me. But also I guess if you’re starting the convo by saying “are there any communications?” then yes is an okay start.
  - The guy from out west claims that “Any one can make the whole apparatus in fifteen minutes.”
    - I will say that it’d be easier to make than a planchette, since you don’t need wheels, and in theory you could just make it out of whatever scrap wood you have around.
  - Apparently when that guy, Jack, burned the talking board, the family got a servant to make a new one, which I found a bit funny.
  - He then talks a bit more about believability, etc:
    - There are, of course, any number of nonsensical and irrelevant answers spelled out, but the workers pay little heed to them. If the answers are relevant they talk them over with a superstitious awe. One gentleman of my acquaintance told me that he got a communication about a title to some property from his dead brother, which was of great value to him.
  - He talks about how it’s the new planchette, and lists some towns in Ohio that are obsessed And he talks about how “Its use and operation have taken the place of card parties.”

Third article:

It’s not just Ohio getting in on the fun; apparently it was a craze in Omaha, Nebraska, too.
- The Columbus Journal (Columbus, Nebraska) · Wed, Apr 21, 1886 · Page 2:
  - It tells the same story about “Jack,” but makes it sound like he was from Omaha instead. I doubt the existence of this Jack a little.
  - It called the talking board a “Spiritual Talking Board”
  - It’s a short article, but here’s my favorite quote from it, which are the closing lines:
    - It will disclose the whereabouts of absent members of families, who are in the habit of spending their evenings from home. It is said to reveal some terrible secrets in this line.
      - I LOVE this dig at adulterers.

Ouija Board

After the initial flurry of articles about home-made talking boards, the newspapers seemed pretty quiet on the topic for a while, until in 1891, ads for “Ouija, the Wonderful Talking Board” or “Ouija, The Egyptian Luck Board” started appearing in newspapers.
To read from an ad that a bookstore called Vickery and Company that sold Ouija boards placed in The Norfolk Landmark (Norfolk, Virginia) · Sat, Jan 31, 1891:
- The OUIJA is without doubt the most interesting, remarkable, and mysterious production of the nineteenth century. Its operations are always interesting and frequently invaluable, answering, as it does, questions concerning the past, present, and future with marvelous accuracy. It furnishes never-failing amusement and recreation for all classes, while for the scientific or thoughtful its mysterious movements invite the most careful research and investigation, apparently forming the link which unites the known with the unknown, the material with the immaterial. It forces upon us the conviction that a great truth was contained in the statement of the Danish Price: “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than were ever dreamed of in thy philosophy.”
  - I LOVE how flowery that ad copy is. A Hamlet quote!
  - However, I learned that this store didn’t write the copy themselves, because I found and ad for a store called Danzigers in the Pittsburg Dispatch in January 1891 with the same copy–I wonder if the manufacturer supplied it.
An ad in the Fall River Daily Evening News (Fall River, Massachusetts) · Sat, Oct 3, 1891 · Page 4
- OUI-JA. THE TALKING BOARD. THE LATEST PARLOR GAME. Will answer questions on Politics, Every Day Topics or Love Affairs. Call and see it at D. T. Johnson’s Paper Store, 5 North Main Street.
  - This one made me laugh because it felt really BS-y to me. Like I can imagine someone asking what you can use it for and a sales person saying, “oh you know, politics . . . Every Day topics . . . Love affairs”
  - Also notable that this ad spells Ouija Oui-ja hyphenated.
There was some funny copy in an 1892 ad in the St. Joseph Gazette-Herald (St. Joseph, Missouri):
- OUIJA. THE EGYPTIAN LUCK BOARD. WHAT IS IT? Ask for OUIJA, the most Wonderful Invention of the 19th Century. And you will soon find out. A TALKING BOARD, Silent and Mysterious. It works wonders.
  - NOTE: “you will soon find out” really reminded me of some of the Watcher letters.
An ad in the New York Sun from March 1891 Kennard Novelty Company, which was located on Canal Street:
- OUIJA. A WONDERFUL TALKING BOARD. Interesting and mysterious: surpasses in its results second sight, mind reading, or clairvoyance: will give an intelligent answer to any question. Proven at Patent Office before patent was allowed. Price, $1.50. All first class-toy stores.

Kennard Novelty Company

There’s a Ouija historian named Robert Murch who’s been researching Ouija boards since 1992. that’s the source for almost everything in this episode that doesn’t come from a primary source like a historical article. A few other modern secondary sources that I used are also listed in the shownotes, but to be honest, most of them are built upon Murch’s work.
- That last ad, for Kennard Novelty Company, is for the original manufacturer–though maybe not the inventor–of the Ouija board.
- The inventor may have been a Prussian immigrant named E. C. Reiche. Reiche may have sold the invention to Kennard, but apparently he later accused him to stealing the invention.
  - Kennard claimed that he thought of the idea of the Ouija board at home, in his kitchen. He said he used an overturned teacup on a breadboard, put his hand on it watched his it move as if on its own, and said it was a way to access his subconscious.
- Kennard was the son of a merchant, who moved to Baltimore in the late 1880s and claimed to have developed a “secret recipe” for bone-mix fertilizer. He was successful at first, but his business eventually failed because of competition and bad luck with the weather, and he had to auction it off.
  - However, Kennard had an office next to Reiche’s. Reiche had been a furniture maker, then a coffin maker, then an undertaker (which apparently was a pretty normal career path back then.
  - Reiche loved to tinker with things, and he’d started making prototypes of a talking board.
  - Kennard left town and moved to Baltimore, got into real estate, and started pitching investors on his new invention, a talking board.
  - In 1890, he gathered a group of investors including Elijah Bond, a local attorney, his law school friend Harry Rusk, Col. Washington Bowie, a surveyor, to start the novelty company and make ouija boards. They had $30,000 in capital.
    - Sidenote, Kennard became a Mason in 1880, and it’s been suggested that he met his fellow investors through that network.
  - None of them were spiritualists, they were just businessmen
  - The company was incorporated the day before Halloween.
  - So, first they had to come up with a name.
  - It sounds like they called it a “witch board” at first.
  - A lot of people say that Ouija comes from the French word for “yes” (oui) and the German word for “yes” (ja), but Murch says that it was actually Bond’s sister in law, Helen Peters who came up with the name.
    - Helen Peters was a well-off, well educated, society woman, and Bond described her as “a strong medium”
    - Also, she was a total babe, based on a picture that her husband drew of her from the 1890s.
    - On April 25, 1890, Kennard was at a Baltimore boarding house with Elijah Bond and Helen Peters, and they decided to ask the board what they should call it. The board spelled out Ouija and when they asked what it meant, the board just said “good luck”
    - Kennard said that after that happened, Peters showed the two of them a locket with a picture of a woman in it, with “Ouija” written beneath the picture.
    - Kennard asked if Peters had been thinking about the locket during the session, but Peters said she hadn’t been.
    - According to Murch, the woman in the locket may have been Maria Louise Ramé, whose penname was “Ouida.” Kennard may have just misread the name.
    - Ouida’s story is too good not to go into, even though it’s a bit of a digression:
      - Who was Maria Louise Ramé? She was born in England in 1839, and was the bestselling author of romance and adventure novels, essays, animal stories, and children’s books. She published her first novel when she was 24, though she wrote a book when she was 16 that was later published.
      - Her work was known for being swashbuckling and kinda racy, sort of the opposite of what you think of when you think of Victorian literature.
      - She was so popular that even Queen Victoria was a fan of her work.
      - Jack London read one of her books when he was 8 and said that the book of hers that he read was one of the reasons for his success.
      - She wrote a book a year between 1863 and 1900.
      - Ouida’s penname came from the way she said “Louise” when she was a kid.
      - She was known for being very eccentric. She adored purple writing paper and Lord Byron.
      - The 1912 edition of the Dictionary of National Biography describes her as having an “artificial and affected manner, and although amiable to her friends was rude to strangers. Cynical, petulant, and prejudiced, she was quick at repartee”
      - When she was 28, she moved into the Langham Hotel in London, which was a traditional grand hotel, and which was also the largest and most modern hotel in the city (it had bathrooms and hydraulic elevators.)
        
        There, she wrote by candlelight, drawing the curtains during the day. She would fill her room with purple flowers, and sometimes her hotel and florist bill would be 200 pounds per week (which is the equivalent of almost $28,000 in today’s money.)
        
        At the hotel, she hosted fancy soirees attended by soldiers, politicians, authors (including Oscar Wilde, Robert Browning and Wilkie Collins), and artists.
        
        She was once described as “sinister, clever face” and with a “voice like a carving knife.”
        
        Dictionary of National Biography says that she “dressed expensively but not tastefully”
      - When Ramée was older, she lived “an expensive and affected life with dogs and frequent hopeless infatuations” in Italy, according to The Bloomsbury Dictionary of English Literature. She lived with her mother in Italy.
      - She was also described in a Dictionary of Literary Biography as having “lived for most of her career and died in Italy . . . surrounded by the dogs whose company she came to enjoy more than that of many humans … Her main monument in England is a drinking fountain for dogs.”
      - She made a lot of money, but managed it very badly. At one point, she was just living in an Italian tenement full of stray dogs that she kept bringing in from the street.
      - At once point she owned 30 dogs.
      - In 1906, her friend was able to get her something called a “civil list pension” which is basically a government pension. So she was offered 150 pounds a year by the prime minister.
      - She died of pneumonia in 1908, and “An anonymous lady admirer erected over the grave a monument representing the recumbent figure of Ouida with a dog at her feet.”
    - But to get us back to the story of Ouija:
      - Male writers didn’t like Ramée, but she was beloved by her female fans, whose signature, according to Atlas Obscura, “become something of a talisman for forward-thinking women like Peters.”
      - Murch says that it makes sense that Peters, as a well-educated woman, might wear a locket with her name in it.
      - Peters was also unconventional: she married in 1891, when she was 40, and her husband was 13 years younger than her. Murch has said that her part in the history of Ouija has been mostly erased, and even Elijah Bond just calls her a “lady friend” in many of his letters.
      - But apparently Peters was integral in getting the board patented.
        
        The patent office said they wouldn’t award a patent unless they could demonstrate that it worked.
        
        It was rejected by several inspectors, until finally Peters showed the board’s effectiveness to the chief patent officer. The officer said that if the board could spell his name, which they didn’t know, he would grant the patent. The board successfully spelled out his name, and they got their patent.
      - There’s a nice quote from Murch, where he says “For 20 years, I researched the fathers of the Ouija board. Turns out, it had a mother.”
      - Murch’s organization, the Talking Board Historical Society, worked to add a marker to her grave talking about her involvement in the Ouija board.
      - Later in life, Peters rejected the Ouija board and spoke out about it.
        
        The reason is because her family’s beloved collection of Civil War-era buttons disappeared.
        
        Some family members asked the Ouija board what happened to it, and the board claimed that a family member had stolen it.
        
        That basically tore the family apart, with someone people believing the board, and other (including Peters) being skeptical and saying they shouldn’t believe it.
        
        So after that, Peters rejected Ouija and said it wasn’t trustworthy.
        
        And just my two cents, I think she was right to do so. I think it’s screwed up for people to believe a parlor game over their own family, even if Ouija does sometimes have accurate results.
    - But whatever the reason for the name, Ouija also sounded really Egyptian–or at least it did to 19th century people, and Egyptian stuff was really popular back then.
    - The Kennard Ouija board was made from a few pieces of wood held together by wooden braces nailed to the back.
      - Its planchette was shaped like a paddle and had four legs.
      - It usually had a bright orange finish, with black letters stenciled on top.
    - So by the early 1890s, about 2,000 Ouija boards were being sold per week.
An early ouija board article in The Thayer News (Thayer, Kansas) · Fri, Apr 8, 1892:
- A great many of the people have become quite interested as well as amused at the life like actions and extreme truthfulness of a little instrument owned by one of the young ladies of this city.
- The Ouija board . . . Has only been invented about a year. We did not learn who it was invented by, but probably by some prominent electrician, for the instrument is worked by the electricity in the human body.
  - It then describes the Ouija board, and describes a something that sounds almost like today’s planchette:
- There is a little odd shaped table about 3 inches long and 2-1/2 inches wide, that comes nearly to a point at one end.
  - It describes the operation as being similar to the talking board’s–two people prop it across their knees. It said that the legs of the little table can be taken out; before using the board, you take out the legs, dampen them, and then put them back in, presumably so they slide better on the slick surface of the board.
  - It closes in a funny way, like many of these articles do:
- It is what might be called a little fortune teller. We understand that some of the boys borrowed it to find out whether their best girls thought of them or of the other fellow, and brought it back in a very dejected manner. They say that it is the best thing in the world to tell the age of old maids.
So, whoever actually invented the Ouija board, it was patented and owned by Kennard’s company.
But Kennard was not the last person to claim to have invented the Ouija board.
One of Kennard’s employees and investors, a man named William Fuld, would come to say that he had invented it.
But more on that next week, when we pick back up and talk about what became of Kennard’s company, and we look at William Fuld, the man whose name was attached to Ouija boards for much of the 20th century.

Planchette and Automatic Writing Sources

Websites about the Ouija board

Historical articles and advertisements about the Ouija Board and its invention

The New Talking Board: The Mysterious Amusement Which is Fascinating Ohio People. The News (Frederick, Maryland) · Sat, Apr 10, 1886 · Page 3
An Ohio Craze: The Mysterious Talking Board and Table Over Which
Ohioans Are Agitated. (Reprinted from the NY Tribute.) The Clay Democrat (Clay Center, Kansas) · Thu, Apr 22, 1886 · Page 2
The Columbus Journal (Columbus, Nebraska) · Wed, Apr 21, 1886 · Page 2
Ad. The Norfolk Landmark (Norfolk, Virginia) · Sat, Jan 31, 1891 · Page 2
Ad. The Norfolk Landmark (Norfolk, Virginia) · Fri, Apr 3, 1891 · Page 3
Ad. The Sun (New York, New York) · Sat, Mar 14, 1891 · Page 9
Ad. Fall River Daily Evening News (Fall River, Massachusetts) · Sat, Oct 3, 1891 · Page 4
Ad. Pittsburg dispatch. [volume] (Pittsburg [Pa.]) 1880-1923, February 01, 1891, SECOND PART, Page 12, Image 12
Ad. St. Joseph Gazette-Herald (St. Joseph, Missouri) · Sat, Apr 16, 1892 · Page 1
The Indianapolis Journal (Indianapolis, Indiana) · Sun, Dec 6, 1891 · Page 14
Ouija Board. The Thayer News (Thayer, Kansas) · Fri, Apr 8, 1892 · Page 4

Check out the shownotes for the rest of the series to see all of the sources used.

Listen to the rest of the Ouija board series:

Ouija Boards Part 1 – Planchette and Automatic Writing

Don’t miss our past episodes:

William Fuld (Ouija Boards Part 3)

In the 20th century, William Fuld’s name became synonymous with Ouija boards. We look at how William Fuld got into the Ouija game, the feud with his brother that split the family for nearly a century, his mysterious death that resulted from some advice that the board gave him, and more.

We also talk about how the official Ouija board evolved throughout the 20th century, look at some of his competitors, and talk about what he did to shut them down and make his Ouija board the Ouija board.

We also give an update on the planchette that Chris ordered and had an unsettling experience trying for the first time, getting a message that may have a connection to the hostile entity we spoke to in Salem.

Episode Script for William Fuld (Ouija Boards Part 3)

“At the moment that the ouija board, which some years ago excited the country and then virtually disappeared, has again come into the limelight throughout the world, two brothers are engaged in litigation here over the ownership of the patent.” –from an article in The Economist, April 6, 1920

The main source for this episode is WilliamFuld.com.

It’s truly encyclopedic, and if you have any interest in ouija boards, I strongly recommend you check it out. They have tons of information, including pictures of different iterations of the board, etc.
It’s created by Robert Murch
Last week, we ended with the creation of the Kennard Novelty Company, which was founded by onetime-fertilizer manufacturer Charles Kennard and a group of investors who he likely met at the local Masonic lodge.
But the truth is, most people who know a little bit about Ouija generally don’t know that Kennard ever existed as part of the Ouija story. That’s because, for much of the 20th century, a man named William Fuld became known as the famous creator of Ouija boards.
Remember that the Kennard Novelty Company was founded in 1891. There was a bit of a reorganization of the company in 1892, Kennard left the company and started a new company in Chicago. I don’t totally understand what precipitated the change, or really how Kennard felt about it, though I assume, based on what he did next, that he wasn’t pleased with being cut out of the company.
- The Kennard Novelty Company, now owned by Col. Bowie and Harry Rusk, two of the original investors, was restructured and renamed the Ouija Novelty Company.
- The put an employee and stockholder, William Fuld, in charge of its operations. Fuld was also a close friend of the new owners.
After being booted out of the company, Kennard started manufacturing something he called a Volo board
- Volo comes from Latin, meaning “to fly about (especially applied to the imagined movement of disembodied souls).”
- it looked a lot like a Ouija board in construction, but the design was different: the letters were arranged in an inverted triangle, flanked by two rows of numbers, it replaced the moons with anchors, good bye with farewell, and added some weather-related text, “clear” and “rain”.
- Col. Bowie sued Kennard over the Volo board, since it infringed on the patent. The Volo board was only produced for 3 months.
- There was another competitor, in Massachusetts, that manufactured a product called the Espirito board. Four months after they registered their trademark, the Ouija Novelty Company shut them down with a lawsuit. The company even ended up giving their Espirito trademark to Ouija Novelty Company, so for a while, the company tried printing the Espirito board on one side and the Ouija board on another-giving customers two talking boards for the price of one.
- Kennard did try to create another talking board, called Igili The Marvelous Talking Board, in the late 1890s. Instead of moons and starts, it featured the words “Who, Which, Where, Because, and Rest” in addition to the alphabet and numbers. That board also didn’t last long.
On July 18, 1898, the Ouija Novelty Company agreed to allow William Fuld and his brother, Isaac Fuld, to manufacture the board for three years.
- It sounds like the company’s owners had had enough of the operational side of manufacturing the boards, and would rather just collect royalties from someone else manufacturing them.
- Plus, William Fuld was a friend, and had been in charge of the Ouija Novelty Company for about six years, anyway.
- Fuld had already patented his own talking board, but of course the Ouija name was way more valuable.
So now Isaac Fuld and Brother was the company manufacturing Ouija boards.
- Just as the three year period came to an end, the brothers had a big falling out.
- And then the license came up for renewal, and in 1901, the new license was given exclusively to William Fuld, cutting Isaac out of the deal.
This began a split that would keep the two sides of the family from talking to each other for 96 years. Its unclear if their disagreement was related to the Ouija board or not.
- The two sides of the familiy didn’t reconcile until Stuart Fuld, the grandson of Isaac Fuld, reached out to Robert Murch, wanting to learn more about his family. Around the same time, Kathleen Fuld, William Fuld, was also talking to Murch for the same reason. Eventually, Kathy asked for Stuart’s number and the two sides of the family reconciled now get together regularly.

I know this is a digression, but I read this story in Baltimore Magazine and I thought it was so funny. Kathleen Fuld told the reporter:

“I’ll tell you a funny story. We went up to the Poconos for a golfing trip one year and there was a conference of priests taking place at the hotel where we stayed. I don’t remember why or how it came up, but Stuart ends up telling

a group of priests we’re talking with that his family once made the Ouija board.

All the priests immediately started making little crosses with their fingers. They started asking Stuart all kinds of questions. They wanted to know the whole story and got the biggest kick out of that.

Even better, the priests invited the couple to take advantage of the conference’s complimentary evening cocktail parties for the weekend—which they did.

But it didn’t matter. Every time we saw those priests, in the elevator, or wherever, they’d start making those crosses with their fingers.

Back to 1901:
- After the brothers split, William Fuld formed a new company called William Fuld Manufacturing Company.
- Isaac Fuld continued making Ouija boards, so William Fuld took him to court, forcing Isaac Fuld to stop.
- After he’d won in court, William Fuld wrote to all of their customers telling them that now he was the only person allowed to sell Ouija boards, freezing his brother out completely and ensuring that he couldn’t go selling them behind his back anymore.
- So then Isaac created a talking board called the Oriole, which looked exactly like a Ouija board down to using the same stencils–he literally cut out the name “Ouija” and replaced it with “Oriole” in the template.
  - It sounds like the company was fairly successful
  - The brothers fought in court for twenty years, until 1920, when Isaac lost the case once and for all. The court judged that the Oriole board was exactly the same as the Ouija board.
  - Even though Isaac had to stop selling Ouija boards, his company continued selling other toys until his brother William died. The year after William’s death, Isaac became an insurance salesman. Which leads me to wonder if he stayed in the toy business out of stubbornness or something.
Ouija kept getting more and more popular, and William Fuld moved his company to ever-larger showrooms and factories.
In 1917, the Ouija board told Fuld “prepare for big business”
- He bought a big block of land and began to build a huge new factory, which opened in 1918.
  - The factory was really huge by the day’s standard’s, especially for Baltimore. It was three stories high, 36,000 square feet, and it cost $175,000 to build (which is more than $3 million in today’s dollars.)
- Sidenote, I wonder why he would ask the Ouija board something? He once told a reporter who asked if he believed in Ouija boards: “I should say not. I’m no spiritualist. I’m a Presbyterian.”
  - I wonder if he was lying then, or if the story of the board telling him to “prepare for big business” is fake? Or maybe he was just idly playing with the board?
On February 24, 1927, Fuld was on the roof of the his huge, 3-story warehouse, watching the installation of a new flagpole.
- He leaned on an iron railing, which in a freak accident, collapsed.
- He off the roof, backwards. After managing for a moment to grab one of the factory’s windows, he fell to the ground.
- He got a concussion, five fractured ribs, a broken arm, a fractured leg, plus some cuts and bruises
- He was rushed to the hospital, and they thought he was going to survive, but a bump in the road jostled him and made one of his ribs pierce his heart.
- As he lay dying, he made his children promise that they would never sell the Ouija board

Let’s talk about how the Ouija board evolved over time:

We talked last time about the paddle-shaped planchette with four legs, that the Kennard boards had.
The first Fuld boards looked about the same: similar stencil, put over veneered pine wood.
- The box that it came in showed a Victorian family and says “Mysterious and Entertaining!” “Amusing, scientific, and instructive”
- The planchette was still shaped like a little paddle, but it had three legs now.
By 1898, the planchette became heart shaped. I’m actually surprised it took so long to get there, since planchettes were typically heart shaped.
Some Ouija boards began having octagonal shapes (so like a rectangle with its corners cut off.)
By the early 1920s, they’d streamlined production on the Ouija board, and totally changed the stencils that were used.
- Instead of having letters that were very clearly stencils, this introduced the fancier type we’re used to today–that type that looks almost old west, or circus-y.
Also around this time, windowed planchettes started being introduced. So for example, instead of a planchette being one solid heart-shaped piece of wood that pointed at the correct letters, it had a hole in the middle with a piece of glass in it so it could hover over the right letter and you could look through and see it.
Fuld started to become obsessed with the idea of people creating knockoff Ouija boards, so starting printing his name in huge red letters on the back of the board, etc. We’ll talk more about that in a bit.
In 1902, William Fuld trademarked the name “Oracle.” He was worried about competitors undercutting the Ouija board by pricing their versions lower than the Ouija board, so went ahead and made a cheaper version himself, dubbing it the Oracle.
- It’s funny, this is very similar to what people say now with tech startups and stuff, like if you don’t disrupt your own product, someone else will.
- At any rate, people liked the Oracle, and it did well.
- It looked a lot like a regular Ouija board, was built out of the same veneered pine wood. It also had the moon and sun at the corners, like the Ouija board.
- It differed in that it had a big circle in the middle, with the name of the board, and then the numbers surrounded the circle. The letters were in four curved rows across the board.
- It also had a black planchette shaped like a diamond, with a hole in the middle.
- It became the second most popular talking board on the market, after Ouija.
- Casually, it was called the Mystifying Oracle, and in 1915, that became its official name.
- One thing I have to note: if you look at pictures of the board, EVERYWHERE there are mentions of patents, etc.
  - The circle in the center says “Mystifying Oracle” in the middle, with “Registered trade-mark” around the edges in a font almost as large.
  - Then at the bottom of the board, it lists the US patent number and date, the Canadian patent number and date, and William Fuld’s name and the company’s location.
  - On the back of the board, it says in huge all caps at top: TO OBTAIN THE ORIGINAL GENUINE OUIJA BOARD AND GET BEST RESULTS, then it has the instructions in small print with a block of text at the end advertising Fuld’s company, listing his name, and listing the copyright date, and then at the bottom in even bigger all caps, it says SEE THAT THE NAME WILLIAM FULD, BALTIMORE, MD, IS PRINTED ACROSS THE BOTTOM OF EACH BOARD. WE HAVE NO BRANCH FACTORIES OR OFFICES.
  - The planchette is a diamond with the Name MYSTIFYING ORACLE on it, then the patent date and trademark registration info again, and then the words “Made by Wm Fuld, Baltimore, MD.”
  - So . . . I guess he was very concerned with people ripping off his own rip off of the Ouija board.
- Eventually, in the 1930s, they basically turned the Mystifying Oracle into a Ouija board, adding the word Ouija to the name and redesigning the board so it looked like a traditional Ouija board.
  - They did this for two reasons:
    - They wanted ppl to know that the Mystifying Oracle was made by the people who also made Ouija boards.
    - They wanted Mystifying Oracle to have better brand recognition–since Ouija had become a name for basically any kind of talking board, they were worried they might lose their trademark.
- In 1933, William Fuld’s son, William Andrew Fuld, patented something called the Electric Mystifying Oracle.
  - The letters had kinda a weird, zigzag layout.
  - The boards were metal, and had raised buttons that would turn on the light bulb in the planchette–which contained a battery–as it was moved across them, so it could be played it in dark and look cool.
  - Unfortunately, the board was short-lived. It was the middle of the Great Depression, and the board was expensive at $3.50 (about $68 in today’s dollars).
    - One thing I wanted to note, tho: Even during the Great Depression, people were buying the cheaper Ouija boards (which cost about half of what the Electric Mystifying Oracle cost.) People were buying so many that Fuld’s company had to build a new factory.
  - The product was discontinued and the boards were melted down for scrap metal for World War II (that was a big thing back then)
  - So they basically pulled an Atari/ET on it. (do you know this story? Back in the early 80s, a ET video game was rushed out and didn’t really work, so Atari took the extra cartridges and buried them in the desert in New Mexico. There’s a cool documentary called Atari: Game Over.)
  - One innovation that did stick around, tho, was the board replaced the stars at the lower right and left hand corners of the board with figures of people, like we’re used to seeing today. Apparently it’s supposed to show people playing Ouija, which I never realized. And apparently the illustrations were done by William Andrew Fuld.
- By 1938, they stopped printing both the Ouija and the Mystifying Oracle boards directly on wood, and instead moved to printing on paper over board–which is how we’re used to board games looking today.
  - Apparently they had issues with the wood warping, plus it was cheaper to print on paper.
  - The last wooden Mystifying Oracle board was made in 1940, and by 1950, they had switched from using paper over hardboard (which was thicker) to paper over masonite (which was thinner.)
    - In general, at this point, we start seeing all kinds of cost-cutting changes, which I think really starts to underscore how American manufacturing declined and the idea of consuming more and more cheap products emerged:
      - The hardboard version of the boards were kind of octagonal shaped, like a rectangle with all of its corners cut off.
      - Masonite boards were rectangles with sharp corners–eventually they figured out how to round the corners a little bit so they didn’t hurt people.
      - In fact, in addition to the change in board material, they also started putting the printed paper on one side of the board.
      - They made the planchette out of plastic instead of wood and glass, though they kept the little window in the middle.
      - Whereas once the office and factory were in the same place, they moved the factory further and further away from the main office within Maryland, then finally moved it to Pennsylvania.
  - The Ouija board had big surges in popularity in the 1910s and 20s (after World War I).
    - Ouija boards were so popular that there’s even a Normal Rockwell illustration showing a man and woman playing Ouija–and Normal Rockwell is supposed to be the avatar of 20th century domesticity
  - Apparently Fuld was kind of a marketing genius. He got the Ouija board into the Sears catalog, which really helped it take off.
    - But he didn’t miss a chance to advertise the board. For example, Murch has found old envelopes from Fuld’s company that had a little picture of the Ouija board on them, so literally all of their correspondence was Ouija branded.
    - The Fuld family also basically encouraged product placement for the Ouija board. So the Ouija board was featured in a number of different TV shows and movies, as well as sheet music, plays and vaudeville shows. Some of the songs it inspired have pretty funny titles, such as “Ouija Mine” and “Weegee Weegee Tell Me Do.”
  - I guess there was an article from 1920, where a New York Times article compared Ouija boards to bubble gum.
    - In 1920, 3 million Ouija boards were sold.
    - Apparently, at one point, almost every household in the US had a Ouija board.
  - In 1927, the year Fuld died, the Baltimore Sun reported that he, personally, had made over $1 million from Ouija boards. (More than $14 million today.) For reference, it looks like from the 1890s through the 1920s, Ouija boards were priced at $1.
  - The board was also popular during and after World War II.
    - There was a five-month period in 1944 where a department store in NYC sold 50,000 boards
  - By 1950, the company only made Ouija boards.
In 1966, after 65 years of making Ouija boards, William Fuld’s company was sold to Parker brothers, along with the Ouija board.
- Sidenote, in case you were wondering: William Fuld’s son, William Andrew Fuld, died in the 1970s, so he didn’t exactly keep his deathbed promise to his father. But he had a number of strokes in the mid-60s, and it sounded kind of like the family just didn’t want to manage the company anymore.
- The first thing Parker Brothers did was to move the company to Salem
- In 1967, one million Ouija boards were sold, more than Monopoly
In 1991, Parker Brothers was sold to Hasbro
- Since taking it over, they’ve made glow in the dark boards (which were a thing in the 90s) as well as some more vintage-inspired boards lately.
  - I was reading amazon reviews of the current kinda creepy/vintage inspired Hasbro board, and a lot of people said it was extremely flimsy and the seams in the board kept the planchette from moving
    - I’ve ordered a couple wooden ones from Etsy which I’m excited to experiment with (one’s a reproduction of a Fuld board, and the other’s a more modern, witchy one

Sources

Things mentioned

Books Chris mentioned:
The Ouija boards that Chris ordered:
- 1920s reproduction
- Moth Board

Websites about William Fuld

Historical articles and advertisements about William Fuld

Ouija Board is Worth Million. The Daily Times (Davenport, Iowa) · Tue, Aug 17, 1920 · Page 8
Who Invented Ouija? The Economist (Clay Center, Kansas) · Tue, Apr 6, 1920 · Page 3
“Ouija Board Has Chance Now to Pick Inventor” The Topeka Daily Capital (Topeka, Kansas) · Sun, Mar 14, 1920 · Page 11

Check out the shownotes for the rest of the series to see all of the sources used.

Listen to the rest of the Ouija board series:

Don’t miss our past episodes:

19th Century Ouija Board Stories / Early Ouijamania (Ouija Boards Part 4)

19th century Ouija board stories: Chris digs up some early stories of people getting waaay too obsessed with their Ouija boards.

Highlights include:
• a rare story of a 19th century black woman’s experience with Ouija
• a couple destroying their home to (supposedly) convert the world to Masonic principles
• Presidential talking boards
• petty society columns
• Ouija wrecking havoc on a wealthy Brooklyn family
• a man finding spiritual fulfillment through Ouija

Most of these stories take place during the Victorian era, but we also look at a few in the early 20th century, going up to the start of WWI, which is when Ouijamania really kicked off.

Picture from the article “Ouija’s Seance.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Sun, Oct 11, 1896 · Page 23

Episode Script for 19th Century Ouija Board Stories / Early Ouijamania (Ouija Boards Part 4)

“People want to believe. The need to believe that something else is out there is powerful. This thing is one of those things that allows them to express that belief.” -Ouija Expert Robert Murch, quoted in Smithsonian Magazine

First, something I wanted to add RE: the invention of the Ouija board. I happened to do a newspaper search of “witch board” because I realized I hadn’t searched that term, and I uncovered a pretty interesting story.

On June 2, 1886, President Grover Cleveland got married–he was the first president to marry while in office, and his new bride was the youngest first lady, at 21 years old.
- Sidenote: both of them seemed like pretty bad people. Cleveland has some sexual assaults to his name, pretty predictably, and later on, during the 19teens, Frances Cleveland was a pro-war, anti-immigrant, anti-womens suffrage activist who once said “women aren’t intelligent enough to vote.”
So they sound like a charming couple.
Among their wedding gifts were a “witch board” sent by the Reed Toy Company, who was the company who manufactured the Espirito board that we talked about last week, which Fuld’s company ended up suing and then taking over the trademark for.
So, this does prove that the Reed Toy Company was making talking boards before Fuld’s company was, though I guess they must not have patented it.
- I wanted to read a little bit from a Boston Globe article about the gift:
  - Should the president desire to settle any problematical questions, he can do so by calling upon his “witch board” for aid from the spirits. Should any of the giddy boys in the cabinet endeavor to flirt with the nation’s bride, it could not be done with impunity, as the tell-tale board would waft back the intelligence from the land beyond the portals to an unsuspecting public. No well-regulated family will now lack one of the articles which can glean information from a realm which even the telephone monopoly can’t reach . . . The following letter accompanied the piece of spiritualized lumber:
    - To the president of the United States, Grover Cleveland:
      - Honored Sir–we talk the liberty to send you by express today an article of our own manufacture, which is attracting a great deal of attention, called the “Witch Board.” When two persons of proper magnetism sit opposite each other, and place one finger of each hand on the edge of the small table, it will move around and answer questions asked by spelling out the word. The “Witch Board” discloses the past and foretells the future. Trusting that it may be of service to, I am very respecfully yours, Charles E. Dresser, Treasurer
- There were some follow-up articles that showed Cleveland’s responses:
  - Dear Sir–I acknowledge with thanks the receipt of the witch board. I shall admire it, but I shall not at present test its power of disclosing the past or foretelling the future. Yours very truly, Grover Cleveland

Also, I was reading Occult America by Mitch Horowitz, and it gave a few extra details about some of the stuff we discussed last week that I hadn’t see written elsewhere:

So apparently there was at least one version of the Ouija box that said “It draws the two people using it into close companionship and weaves around them a feeling of mysterious isolation.” which really emphasizes what we were talking about RE: it being an excuse to be intimate with someone.
Then it had a little more info about William Fuld: apparently he started working as a at the Kennard Novelty Company when he was a teenager–he worked as a varnisher and he did operational work.
- It says that Kennard was removed from the company b/c of a financial dispute.

So let’s talk Ouijamania, or really what I’m calling pre-Ouijamania, the period from 1891-1914! In this episode, I want to focus on the period ranging from 1891 (when the Ouija board was first manufactured) to the start of World War I.

Ouijamania really started in earnest during WWI.
As far as I can tell, the term “Ouijamania” wasn’t actually coined until 1920, but I wanted to touch on some of the stories that came out of the early Ouija craze.
We talked a little bit about Spiritualism in an earlier episode; by 1893, two years after the official invention of the Ouija board, spiritualism became its own religious denomination. (Which, by the way, technically still exists.)
- The reason why I bring up Spiritualists again is that if they didn’t exist, I really doubt the Ouija board would.
- Spiritualists sound little like Unitarians? There was one famous Spiritualist writer, Andrew Jackson Davis, who said that he didn’t believe hell existed, and that instead all spirits go somewhere peaceful called “Summerland.” It sounds like Spiritualists were generally progressive, advocating for womens rights and abolition.
The earliest case of someone getting extremely obsessed with Ouija that I know of was reported in a Boston Daily Globe article called “CRAZED THROUGH OUIJA: Neglected by Her Lover She Seeks Comfort of a Fortune-Telling Device” from November 21, 1891.
- 28-year old Eugenie Carpenter, “a fine looking woman” was found wandering around in public nearly naked. They couldn’t reason with her, and she kept saying “Ouija said so and I knew it was true.”
  - It turns out that her husband had left her, and for the past year, she’d had a new boyfriend. They’d argued over some small thing and split up.
  - When she heard that the Ouija board had magic powers, she got one and asked it if her husband would return. The board said no. Then she asked if her boyfriend would return, and the board said: “He has ceased to love you. He will never return.”
  - She grew pale when she got that message but soon regained her composure and seemed fine–until a few days later, her neighbor found her staggering around nearly naked, saying “Ouija said so and I knew it was so.”
- Another article about this, published in the Buffalo Evening News on the same day, described her as a young divorced woman, and ends with the line “Catholic clergymen are waging a war upon Ouija boards as dangerous to the young.”
The Indianapolis Journal (Indianapolis, Indiana) · Sun, Dec 6, 1891 · Page 14
- There’s a short column in the society section that talks about ladies who consult ouija boards and schedule or cancel parties based on what they say. (And it casts it as a bad and foolish thing)

In April 1892, the society pages in the The Memphis Appeal-Avalanche reported:

The society folks of Little Rock are infatuated with the “Ouija” board. It must be so when the leading minister in the city preaches against it. When he uttered the words . . . There was a general shifting of positions in the pews and briefly whispered conversations which clearly showed the majority of the congregatation was personally affected by the remarks.
- I guess some church members insisted the sermon wasn’t directed at them; they said it was RE: a formerly Christian family that had recently gotten into spiritualism, trying to communicate with their dead son. But the author of this article said that wasn’t the case; the sermon was obviously anti-Ouija.
- The article then describes how Ouija became popular among society people; a well-connected woman who worked in the fire insurance business got into Ouija when her business partner was run over by a fire department truck and killed a few weeks before the article was written. She tried to communicate with him through the board, and the board told her about some business he’d been working on the day he died (there was a policy where the premium hadn’t been paid yet) and told her exactly where the papers were, etc. So then she located those papers and told everyone about it, said she couldn’t have gotten that info any other way, etc.
- The article then goes through and calls ppl out by name; it’s a pretty funny list of people and what they’re using the board for. But my favorite bit is this:
Frank Paoli has become a victim of the craze and spends two hours every day and the entire afternoons and evenings on Sundays consulting friendly spooks. Nearly all the spirits with whom he holds communion are in hell.

Article in The National Tribune (Washington, District of Columbia) · Thu, Jul 28, 1892 · Page 5

The Ouija was simply meant to be a toy, and was gotten out for the last Christmas holidays. It was a surprise that it took as well as it did and that the demand for them kept up so long. However it finally did seem to die out, but then the spiritualists discovered that it was just what is needed for the spiritual communications, and that it is better for them plan the planchet, as the opportunities for fraud are less with the Ouija.
The article goes on to describe what a Ouija board looks like, then:
- This is the toy that amuses the young folks and serves to express the thoughts of the friends of the spiritualists.

There was an interesting story in an article from the Sun on September 14, 1892:

It tells the tale of a party in England where they were playing with the Ouija board. One of the attendees was a skeptic, and someone suggested that the skeptic ask a question mentally and see if the board answered.
The skeptic did, and the board said “A French joke.”
The skeptic said that was no answer, but someone said they should ask the board to explain. The board replied “What is ‘joke’ in French?”
They looked up the french word for joke, which is “plaisanterie”
At that, the skeptic leapt up in surprise, saying: “I asked this question in my mind, and not a soul in the room could possibly know what it was.” The question had been “What horse will win the Cambridgeshire?”
Plaisanterie was one of the horses favored to win that race.
Later, Plaisanterie did win the race. The article said that it’s unclear if anyone at the party won any money based on the prediction.
“SPIRIT MECHANISM. THE CRAZE FOR HAVING MESSAGES INDICATED BY THE OUIJA: Minds Upset by a Toy of Wonderful Possibilities if All Stories be True—The Ouija and the Planchette Compared—The Espirito Board.” June 28th 1892. Manitoba Daily Free Press, Winnipeg, Canada:
- This article talks about how Ouija started as a fad toy for the 1891 holiday season but by 1892, it’d been adopted by spiritualists.
- “According to some of the enthusiasts, the spirits have taken to the ouija with marvelous zeal. The planchette was utterly discarded.”
- It talks about the differences between Ouija and planchette, and says:
  - “The planchette created a great furor, but the exposers of the unscrupulous operators destroyed the popular interest in it, although Spiritualists generally yet give it credence. . . .
  - Some say that there is less chance of fraud with the ouija than with the planchette, while others maintain the opposite. Those who have faith in it tell marvelous stories of the operations of the ouija. They say that intricate questions, prepared by strangers to the operators, and known only to the former, have been answered correctly and rapidly.
  - The intense excitement that accompanies many of the ouija demonstrations has resulted seriously in a number of instances. Reports from various parts of the country where the ouija has been taken up how that a number of believers have had their minds upset by the nervous excitement. A recent dispatch from Liberty, Ind., said that John Chapman and his wife, a prosperous couple of that town, had gone stark mad because the ouija demonstrations had overexcited them.”

I found this story on the museum of talking boards website:

Two Liberty residents, a Mr. John Chapman and his wife became “over excited” while participating in neighborhood Ouija demonstrations according to 1892 Indiana newspaper reports. Panicked, they locked the children in their rooms and destroyed nearly all the furniture in the house. Concerned police found Mrs. Chapman, a minister’s daughter, cutting circles on the walls of her room. Mr. Chapman was doing the same with a scythe. Carpets in the home had all been slashed into small strips and knives, hatchets and other “deadly weapons” were found lying about. Mrs. Chapman explained that Horace Greeley had contacted her during a Ouija session and commanded her to convert the world to Masonic principles. It was unclear how their actions were going to accomplish this.
From The Marion Times-Standard (Marion, Alabama) · Fri, Aug 17, 1894:
- This is just nice:
  - One of the most enjoyable entertainments it has been our pleassure to attend was the moon “lit” picnic at the residence of Mrs. West’s on last Wednesday night. Ice cream and cake were served in the dining room at any hour you wished it, and altogether it was a most pleasant affair. One of the most prominent amusements of the evening was the Ouija board. It afforded much pleasure to young folks, especially your correspondent answering questions and most of them correct. It was a late hour when one and all began to seek refuge under the shelter of their own roofs with the thought lingering in their minds of the evening just past being one of the most pleasant ever spent in the annals of West Perry.
From a story The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Sun, Oct 11, 1896 · Page 23:
- This is from a feature called “Ouija’s Séance”
  - The Ouija board is an innocent looking thing in itself, but the members of a certain Brooklyn family have reason to believe that, like many other innocent appearing things, it is an instrument of Mephistophelian ingenuity and consequence. Of course, the craze for this creaking three legged stool, with its alphabetical habit . . . Has almost died out, yet the particular board in question had only recently been bought before it was burned with appropriate ceremonies.
- - There are several references to Faust in this article.
  - The article’s about a well-off Brooklyn family who play with a Ouija board for the first time. It gives them some predictions about the upcoming presidential election, saying McKinley will win, and then their session’s interrupted by the doorbell.
  - They get a servant to get the door, and in the meantime, they ask the board who the visitor was. The board spelled out “WAJ”
  - The guest was a Mr. Johnson, and it turns out his initials were WAJ.
  - Though the family was impressed by the board, Mr Johnson declared the Ouija was a fraud.
  - The Ouija board spelled out “Mr. Johnson is an ass.”
  - Then, the board said that Mr. Johnson was in love with one of the daughters in the family.
  - There’s a great quote from this:
    - Now, as a matter of fact, any one who has ever possessed one of these boards will know as a love makrer it is irrepressible. A full moon, a babbling brook and all the other accessories of a short story writer are simply nothing compared to the Ouija as matchmaker.
  - The article reports that Mr. Johnson left the house muttering “Rot, superstition, fool board, etc.”
  - Then they went back to the board.
  - Two of the daughters were at the board, which said that one of them was sweet but too conceited. Then it said that the father drank too much, and the mother, who was watching but not at the board, got mad and accused the daughters of pushing the planchette.
  - So then the mother went and put her hands on the planchette, and the board quickly spelled out:
    - You are a gibbering old woman. It is you who drive your husband to drink. You are–“
  - Then, before it could finish the sentence, the table fell over, almost causing a fire when the lamp toppled off, but luckily the father caught it just in time.
  - The mother started yelling at the daughter and at the board. When she finally sat back down, as soon as she put her hand on the planchette, it zoomed to “Goodbye”–the article claimed that the mother’s hand was almost dislocated.
  - They kept trying to use it, but every time, it went straight to goodbye. They’d insulted the board.
  - So they went to bed, leaving the board out on the parlor table.
  - The daughters snuck out of bed a little before midnight and had what the article called “a sentimental séance” where they learned that basically all of their friends were in love with them and wanted to propose. The board even claimed that one young man, who’d disappeared, had killed himself because he couldn’t decide which of the two girls he loved more
  - Then, right at midnight, the board sped up and things got weird.
  - The board said “Shakespeare” and then the girls quoted a sililoquy from Hamlet about “graveyards yawning and graves doing queer things”
  - The girls asked if the board had anything important to tell them, and the board said yet.
  - Then the board gave a specific date when their mother would die. The girls both fainted, and their father heard the noise (I guess from them falling over?) and came down angrily.
  - The next morning, the decided to burn the board.
  - As the date that the board gave them approached, the mother fell ill, but didn’t die.
  - The girls thought that maybe they’d remembered the wrong date, so they bought another board and tried it again at midnight.
  - It turns out they had misremembered the date–they’d been a week off.
  - Their mother got sick again, but still didn’t die.
  - The article ends wondering if the prediction that McKinley would win was right, but notes that the neighbors’ board said that he wouldn’t win, so it was a draw for now.
A Singular Case of Dementia. St. Louis Globe-Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri) · Thu, Apr 14, 1898 · Page 13
- This article is subtitled: Miss Bella C. Thomas a Victim of Christian Science Study
  - It’s about a schoolteacher named Bella C. Thomas. The tone of this article is a little different to me, but I can’t quite figure out why. The tone is pretty reasonable, talks a lot about Bella C. Thomas’ family and past, etc. It might be that the woman is a devout Christian Scientist and has been studying it a lot?
  - One reason why I wanted to bring up this article is that it’s about a black woman–I really feel like I haven’t found many articles about anyone aside from (presumed) white people using the board (usually “silly white women.”) I wonder if there was a racial or class element to people who were into Ouija boards, or if black folks and POC were just totally erased and/or not covered? It could be that a lot of Ouija related articles are society columns and writeups of rich people’s parties, so that could be part of it.
    - I will say that the article is obviously racist, and says stuff like:
      - Miss Thomas belongs to the most exclusive set of her race in the city, and was distinguished for her refinement of manner and her interest in physical studies.
    - Yikes.
    - But also, would she have gotten any kind of writeup, and such a . . . Relatively charitable one, by the standards of the time . . . If she hadn’t been a respectable schoolteacher?
  - So the article starts:
    - A singular case of dementia attributed to a too intense study of Christian Science in connection with the revelations of a “talking table” or Ouija board, has just come to light.
  - It continues, talking about how she’d started studying Christian Science a few years before, and believed in it very much. She has two sisters, one who lives in Chicago and is also a Christian Scientist, and another who lives nearby and is also a teacher.
  - A year before, their mother died, and a little after that, a beloved aunt died. Bella C. Thomas had taken care of her aunt during her illness.
  - So after the two deaths, Bella C. Thomas became even more interested in Christian Science, and apparently bought a Ouija board “to aid her studies.”
  - There isn’t really much of an explanation of how that would help her learn about Christian Science, but the article goes on to say that she got some really impressive answers from the board, which really made her believe in it.
  - The article said she was getting messages from the spirit world, and she got some bad news. To read a bit more:
    - One message . . . Brought much sadness to her, and that was that she would not live long, and must prepare for her entry into the spirit world. Miss Thomas was never very robust at any time, and brooding over the thought of her early demise, given to her by the Ouija board, caused her to beocme still more delicate . . . And spoke of her early death as a certainty.
  - So the previous Monday, she taught her classes as usual and seemed fine, but started feeling realy bad when she got home.
    - A short time after getting home she was taken with delirium and talked of the Ouija’s message in a flighty way, which alarmed her friends.
  - Her sister who lived nearby took her to their other sister’s place in Chicago “for a change of scenery” and the article concludes:
    - It is not thought her trouble is more than a temporary indisposition, caused by study and overwork, and that a few week’s rest will restore her to her usual health and spirits.
  - So this article feels way more thoughtful than a lot of the others–despite its obvious issues. I also like that it gives you a slice of this woman’s life, and you get to see her family and friends supporting her. And she isn’t labeled a hysteric or anything, they’re basically just saying she’s burnt out and needs to recover.
- As a sidenote, I did try to figure out what Ouija had to do with Christian Science, and I wasn’t super successful. I did find an essay called Psychoanalysis: Its Value and Its Dangers that was published by the Episcopal Church in 1922 that says:
  - Freud is the author of a new gospel, and all psuchologists before him but children in the science; and its bitter opponents, who indignantly renounce Freud and all his works, and regard psychoanalysis as a fad to be classed with Christian Science, ouija board reading, and spiritism.
- - So it seems like Christian Science and Ouija were thrown together often.
    - I also learned that Christian Science came out about the same time as spiritualism and the Ouija board. Christian Science was founded in 1879, and for a while it was the fastest growing religion in the US: it went from 9,000 members in 1890, to 60,000 in 1906, and then to 260,000 at its height in the 1930s. But especially around the beginning of Christian Science, its founder was sometimes accused of spiritualism.

Kennebec Journal — Maine, October 2nd 1903–this seems kinda tongue in cheek to me:

“A young couple in Portland are about to be married as the result of the work of the wonderful ouija board. At least, the Advertiser figures it out that they may get married for the ouija board gave her his name as that of her future husband. At that time she had never heard of him. Since then she has inspected him from a distance, and the flutter of her heart tells her that the ouija board is a glorious institution. He has heard the story and is deeply interested. Mutual friends are now plotting to bring them together and Cupid may be trusted to arrange the minor details that will remain. Great is the ouija board.”

One fun detail: apparently President Woodrow Wilson used the Ouija board, or at least said he did. Someone asked him in 1914 if he would be reelected, and he said “The Ouija board says yes.”

Customer letter from 1914 to William Fuld:
- Dear Sir:
- About a year ago I was given one of your Ouija boards by an old lady who had it for many years. I became very much interested in it. At first it required two persons to get any writing then I could get it alone. Now for a long time I have let no one touch it but myself. I simply lay it on a table and with one hand. It begins writing at once and and very rapidly just as fast as I can read it. To me it is a marvelous thing most wonderful. It has gone back over my life as the film of a moving picture would be unrolled and has explained so many things to me to me that I did not understand that have happened in my life. It tells me nothing of the future only that I must be patient, and all will come as I wish.
- I am writing this to ask you if you could tell me any more about it confidentially of course. Does “Ouija” mean Jesus?
- It seems to me that I went from plane to plane, each time I seemed to know was a better spirit writing until now I feel there is a most high one. I have had many friends buy them. But tell them to go to them in love and veneration as one would go in the presence of something most high and good. They all have found it most wonderful. Please pardon this long letter from a stranger and allow me to thank you for many hours of great peace and happiness brought to me though this Ouija.
- Louise W. Ingram

And I thought that was a nice note to end it on. Next time, we’ll be talking Egyptomania, and then we’ll go onto actual Ouijamania, which started in earnest during World War I.

19th Century Ouija Board Sources

Websites about 19th Century Ouija Board Stories

Historical articles and advertisements about 19th Century Ouija Board Stories

Read the Witch Board. The Boston Globe (Boston, Massachusetts) · Sat, Jun 5, 1886 · Page 5
Cleveland’s Witch Board. The Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) · Wed, Jun 16, 1886 · Page 1
The Memphis Appeal-Avalanche (Memphis, Tennessee) · 3 Apr 1892, Sun · Page 10
A Novel Party. The Glen Elder Sentinel (Glen Elder, Kansas) · Sat, Mar 27, 1897 · Page 3
Communicating With The Dead. New-York tribune. [volume], November 03, 1907, Page 12, Image 36
County News. The Marion Times-Standard (Marion, Alabama) · Fri, Aug 17, 1894 · Page 1
Ouija’s Predictions. The sun. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1833-1916, September 14, 1892, Page 5, Image 5
Ouija’s Seance. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Sun, Oct 11, 1896 · Page 23
The National Tribune (Washington, District of Columbia) · Thu, Jul 28, 1892 · Page 5
A Singular Case of Dementia. St. Louis Globe-Democrat (St. Louis, Missouri) · Thu, Apr 14, 1898 · Page 13
Florence Bulletin (Florence, Kansas) · Fri, Jan 27, 1893 · Page 3
“SPIRIT MECHANISM. THE CRAZE FOR HAVING MESSAGES INDICATED BY THE OUIJA: Minds Upset by a Toy of Wonderful Possibilities if All Stories be True—The Ouija and the Planchette Compared—The Espirito Board.” June 28th 1892. Manitoba Daily Free Press, Winnipeg, Canada: https://www.williamfuld.com/ouija_articles_06281892.html
Fortune Telling Made Her Crazy. Buffalo Evening News (Buffalo, New York) · Sat, Nov 21, 1891 · Page 1
CRAZED THROUGH “OUIJA”: Neglected by Her Lover She Seeks Comfort of a Fortune-Telling Device. November 21st 1891. Boston Daily Globe: https://www.williamfuld.com/ouija_articles_11211891.html
Kennebec Journal — Maine, October 2nd 1903: https://www.williamfuld.com/ouija_articles_10-02-1903.html

Books consulted RE: 19th Century Ouija Board Stories

“Psychoanalysis: Its Value and Its Dangers” by Jared S. Moore. The Influence of the Church on Modern Problems. Episcopal Church. Church Congress. Macmillan, 1922.
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin (for some info on Christian Science and Ouija)

Check out the shownotes for the rest of the series to see all of the sources used.

Listen to the rest of the Ouija board series:

Don’t miss our past episodes:

Victorian Egyptomania (Ouija Boards Part 5)

We take a detour in our look at the Ouija board and dive into Victorian Egyptomania.

In the Victorian Era, people were really into death and the supernatural. Americans and Europeans also started traveling to Egypt and bringing back mummies and other pieces of Egyptian culture. We talk about some of the weird stuff that Victorians did with Egyptian artifacts, some now-destroyed Egyptian Revival buildings in NYC, and more, as well as what all of this has to do with Ouija.

Highlights include:
• An Egyptian Revival prison built on quicksand in New York City
• Mummy unwrappings
• Creepy automatons and mad scientists
• Mummies as medicine
• Jewelry made from real scarab beetles
• Imperialism and stealing Ancient Egyptian artifacts
• Indiana Jones-style hijinks
• A giant Egyptian-influenced reservoir that used to sit in the middle of midtown Manhattan

Photo of the Croton Reservoir covered in ivy (from Ephemeral New York: https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/when-the-citys-water-supply-came-from-42nd-street/ )

Image from A History of Egyptian Mummies
By Thomas Joseph Pettigrew

Episode Script for Victorian Egyptomania (Ouija Boards Part 5)

“This obelisk may ask us, ‘Can you expect to flourish forever? Can you expect wealth to accumulate and man not decay? . . . Can it creep over you and yet the nation know no decrepitude?’ These are questions that may be answered in the time of the obelisk but not in ours.”“

-US Secretary of State William Maxwell Evarts’s remarks when Cleopatra’s Needle, an obelisk in New York City’s Central Park, was raised

Today, we’re talking about the Victorian obsession with all things Egyptian.
I think that a big part of Victorian Egyptomania is tied in with Victorian ideas about death and interest in the supernatural.
However, I did want to talk some about the racial component to Egyptomania–beyond the obvious imperialism involved in Europeans and Americans stealing artifacts from Egypt.
- But there’s been scholarly work done that unpacks the racial implications of of Egyptomania in the US–the US definitely seemed to see America as a powerful empire like the Egyptian one. And there’re parallels between Egypt and the US in that they’re empires built on slavery, and that the conflict about the freedom of slaves (the Civil War and beyond in the US, and Exodus in Egypt) were defining moments.
- I wanted to read a bit from the summary of a book on the topic, Egypt Land by Scott Trafton:
  - “The American mania for Egypt was directly related to anxieties over race and race-based slavery. . . . the fascination with ancient Egypt among both black and white Americans was manifest in a range of often contradictory ways. Both groups likened the power of the United States to that of the ancient Egyptian empire, yet both also identified with ancient Egypt’s victims. As the land which represented the origins of races and nations, the power and folly of empires, despots holding people in bondage, and the exodus of the saved from the land of slavery, ancient Egypt was a uniquely useful trope for representing America’s own conflicts and anxious aspirations.”
- And people were very aware of this parallel during the 19th century. A black 19th century doctor, writer, spiritualist, and Rosicrucian occultist named Paschal Beverly Randolph, said, in 1863: “For America, read Africa; for the United States, Egypt”
- A lot of black thinkers in the 19th century sought to show that Egyptians were black Africans–that would counter the racist and degrading history that the United States had imposed on African Americans.
  - And I think pretty much everyone knows about how enslaved African Americans identified with Exodus, singing spirituals like “Go Down, Moses” where Israel stood for the enslaved African Americans, whereas the Pharaoh represented the slave master.
  - And I guess it goes without saying that leading white scientists like Thomas Pettigrew, who we’ll talk about later, were meanwhile measuring mummy skulls and claiming that they were Caucasian rather than African.
- This is a huge topic and I’m not doing it justice, but I didn’t want to launch into the topic of Egyptomania without touching on that, since it’s such an important part of it.
So the whole reason why I got the idea to do this episode as part of our Ouija series is that I came across and interesting tidbit about the naming of the Ouija board
Someone on stackexchange posited that it may have come from a type of charm called the “oudja”–they found an article from November 1885 about it, saying it was an “Egyptian good luck charm.” Articles about the charm persisted through 1891–to quote from an 1891 article that they posted:
- The latest craze to strike Philadelphia is the wearing of the “Oudja,” a pretty little Egyptian charm, supposed to ward off all forms of evil. The charm is thin, and about an inch long and half an inch wide. A conspicuous figure is the eye of “Horus” which represents the sun, and a teardrop hanging oendant from the eyes that represents the river Nile. The little charm, which has been worn in England for a couple of years, has been indispensable to the superstitous Egyptians for many centuries.
- A pretty storey explains the Egyptian craze. A young officier in the English army sent one home to his bride, with an explanation of its origin. After a battle in the Soudan the young officier was reported dead, but his wife refused to believe it. Later on the official dispatches confirmed the death, but still the bride had faith in the little charm. Several months later the missing husband turned up alive and well, and the “Oudja” became a fad of great proportions.
Also, note: there’s a large city in Morocco called Oujda or Wejda, so I wonder if that could have also influenced the name of the board
So, the other reason why I think this is relevant–aside from the theory that the Ouija board’s name could have had a North African influenced origin is that I feel like Egyptomania is tied in with the obsession with death and the spirit world that caused Ouijamania. I also think it has some bearing on the Ouija board’s popularity, since it was marketed as an Egyptian luck board, and seemed exotic and magical.
So to set the state, I wanted to define the Victorian period of history, since we’ve mentioned it some without really talking about exactly when it was and what it was like.
- So just a quick reminder: The Victorian Era stretches the length of Queen Victoria’s reign, which went from 1837 until 1901. It might be my favorite historical period because it’s so weird.
- The Georgian era, the period right before the Victorian era, was all about rationality and science, etc. (That spanned from 1714-1837, and was during the reign of 4 kings named George.) Jane Austen wrote during the Georgian Era, so that’s always my reference point for it. But of course the Georgian era was also the time of the Enlightenment, and other kinda boring sciency advancements.
- So the Victorian era followed that, and really kinda went off the rails. The Victorian era is prob best known for being this really buttoned up, repressed, religious time, but there was also a new interest in mysticism and the occult.
- As the 19th century wore on, things got weird.
- Gothic literature became popular again. Frankenstein was written during the Georgian period, but in the Victorian era we got awesome stuff like Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla, about a lesbian vampire. Also Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Grey, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In America, we had Edgar Allen Poe writing in the US in the mid-19th century. So it seems unavoidable that the morbid Victorians would get really into Egyptomania.
- Gothic Revival architecture, which began in the 1700s, began to really proliferate in the 19th and early 20th century.
- One important tidbit that I learned while doing this bit of research is that Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, got really interested in Egyptology in the 1880s, and he corresponded with Oscar Wilde’s father, Sir William Wilde, who was a noted cadaver collector.
One Egyptomania-related anecdote that really nicely illustrates the shift from the Georgian to the Victorian era is a building called the Egyptian Hall, which once stood in Piccadilly in London.
- Built in 1812, during the Georgian Period, Egyptian Hall is a byproduct of a new interest in Egypt. That interest began in part because in 1798, Lord Nelson–who was a huge British hero–won the Battle of the Nile, one of the battles in the Napoleonic Wars.
  - Also, Napoleon himself stole a bunch of Egyptian artifacts and brought them back to Europe.
  - These pieces quickly became popular among the European upper classes, and people became really interested in the “exotic” and “mysterious” Egyptian aesthetic.
- So when you walked into Egyptian Hall, the entry hall was a replica of the avenue at Karnak (which was a temple complex in the ancient city of Thebes, near Luxor–which fans of the Mummy Returns may recognize).
- The facade of the Egyptian Hall really exemplified the Egyptian revival style, looking almost like an Egyptian temple, complete with huge columns and sculptures of people on the front.
- For a while, Egyptian Hall held natural history specimens from Captain Cook’s voyages in the South Seas. Later, Napoleonic War relics were displayed there.
- Then a man named Giovanni Battista Belzoni took over the building. To read from georgianlondon.com:
  - An Italian strongman and performer, with an English wife, Sarah, Belzoni was a true adventurer: in 1817, he travelled to the Valley of the Kings and broke into the tomb of Seti I. From Seti’s tomb, Belzoni took a sarcophagus of white alabaster inlaid with blue copper sulphate of great beauty. The retrieval of the sarcophagus, however, was not without peril: the tomb was located in the catacombs, a maze of traps and dead ends, dug to confuse grave robbers. The French interpreter panicked and an Arab assistant broke his hip in a booby trap. Undeterred, Belzoni retrieved the sarcophagus and brought it to England along with the head of the ‘Younger Memnon’. Belzoni suffered constant vomiting and nosebleeds in Egypt, whilst Sarah was unaffected by so much as a case of sunburn – much to her husband’s chagrin.
- In 1846, things got weirder: there was a really creepy exhibit of a talking machine, which was an automaton of a lady’s head attached to a bit machine on top of a piano. She had dark hair, in ringlets, and eyes that didn’t blink. Her name was Euphonia.
  - She could say:
  - “Please excuse my slow pronunciation… Good morning, ladies and gentlemen… It is a warm day… It is a rainy day… Bongiorno, signori.”
  - The inventor was a sort of mad-scientist type who was described thusly by a man who knew him:
    - The Professor was not too clean, and his hair and beard sadly wanted the attention of a barber. I have no doubt that he slept in the same room as his figure—his scientific Frankenstein monster—and I felt the secret influence of an idea that the two were destined to live and die together… One keyboard, touched by the Professor, produced words which, slowly and deliberately in a hoarse sepulchral voice came from the mouth of the figure, as if from the depths of a tomb.
- By 1873–deep into the Victorian Era–the Egyptian Hall had become a bit less respectable:
  - The hall became known as the “England’s Home of Mystery”
  - John Nevil Maskelyne, a magician and inventor, performed there for 31 years.
    - His story is interesting: he got into stage magic when he saw some fradulent spiritualists perform, and realized that he could make all of the supposedly “magic” things happen without any actual magic.
    - He was the inventor of several illusions that are still used by magicians today, including some stuff to do with levitation.
    - He ended up running in the same circles as Harry Houdini, which makes since, since they were both magicians trying to disprove spiritualism as a fraud.
    - He wrote a book called “Modern Spiritualism” and later founded a group called the “Occult Committee” to investigate the paranormal and disprove it.
    - Fun fact: He also invented the pay toilet.
  - Even though they were trying to disprove Spiritualism, Maskelyne once said:
    - “…the Spiritualists had no alternative but to claim us as the most powerful spirit mediums who found it more profitable to deny the assistance of spirits.”
So basically, by the 1890s, the Egyptian Hall was strongly associated with spiritualism and the occult.
It was torn down in 1905, and a Starbucks stands in its place now.
Okay, enough of that digression–I want to get to the main digression: Egyptomania!
- One note: when we were talking about Egyptian stuff a few weeks ago, I mentioned that people ground up mummies and used them as medicine. I’d thought it was a victorian thing, but apparently it was an earlier thing. People started doing it as early as either 1100 or 1300.
  - Just a sidenote: I just want to take a moment to remind everyone that we’re talking about cannibalism, here. And all of Egyptomania is tied to something that I think’s even worse than cannibalism, which is plundering another culture and then taking its history–right down to the bodies of their ancestors–and commodifying them.
    - The stories we’re telling here are weird and dark, and it’s hard not to laugh at how absurd they are–and I’m sure we’re going to laugh, because this stuff is bizarre and the Europeans and Americans who partook in Egyptomania were foolish and ridiculous. But I just wanted to give us a moment to reflect on how we’re talking about basically white people plundering a Egyptian culture and history.
    - Okay, with that caveat aside, let’s talk about the use of powdered mummy as a medical remedy.
  - It sounds like powdered mummy was an item that was sold to Christians (particularly in Europe), and that it became very popular in the 16th and 17th centuries. Apparently pretty much every apothecary carried it as a treatment for cuts and bruises.
  - People broke into tombs and stole mummies.
  - Though people also made fake mummies using the bodies of executed criminals and slaves, or people who’d died from different diseases, and then sold that to people as if they were ancient mummies.
  - They also used the bodies of people who died while traveling in the desert, because the dry dessert air desiccated their bodies. The bodies of young women were supposed to work better for medicinal purposes, so they were more expensive.
  - King Francis I of France, who was a king in the 1500s, carried around a pouch of powdered mummy mixed with rhubarb, and then anytime he tripped or fell, he took some mummy. You know, for health.
  - So I got most of this information from a book from the 19th century called A History of Egyptian Mummies by Thomas Pettigrew. Based on what he wrote, it sounds like by the 19th century, this wasn’t as much of a thing anymore. But people were still obsessed with Egypt.
- But one thing that was big in the Victoria era was Egyptian themed mourning jewelry.
  - Women would wear jewelry with real dried scarabs, or with Egyptian imagery lke obelisks.
  - The Egyptian Revival style became popular in cemeteries:
    - Highgate Cemetery in London has a huge gate done in the Egyptian revival style, as does Mt Auburn Cemetery in Boston, and Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut.
    - In Brookyn’s Green-wood Cemetery, you can see an Egyptian revival mausoleum.
  - And of course non-cemetery Egyptian Revival structures were big:
    - The Washington Monument, which is the obelisk in Washington, DC, was erected during the Victorian period
    - There were also several large Egyptian Revival buildings in NYC that have since been torn down, including:
      - the original 1938 version of the Manhattan Detention Complex, more often referred to as “The Tombs,” where prisoners go to wait for hearings.
        
        This original Egyptian revival building is how the Tombs got their name.
        
        The Tombs’ architect was inspired by a recently published travelogue that had an etching of an Egyptian Tomb
        
        The prison’s construction hit a snag, because the location was a filled in pond that had quicksand just beneath the surface of the ground; they had to make the foundation out of basically a raft that would rise and fall with the quicksand, which moved with the tides
        
        It had very few windows, for exterior aesthetic reasons, so there was so little light that the interior had to be lit by gas lights, even during the day
        
        The building was gloomy and dark, and Charles Dickens said of it: “What is this dismal fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an enchanter’s palace in a melodrama? . . . Such indecent and disgusting dungeons as these cells, would bring disgrace upon the most despotic empire in the world!”
        
        Eventually, the building was declared unsafe, and in 1897, it was demolished.
        
        The New York Times called it “the finest specimen of purely Egyptian architecture to be found in the United States.”
        
        Though they considered relocating the building to Central Park and repurposing it, that plan was deemed too expensive.
        
        In the end, no part of the building (which had some winged scarabs, beautiful columns, and other unique details) was preserved.
      - Another now-forgotten Egyptian Revival structure in NYC was the Croton Reservoir, which stands where Bryant Park and the famous NYPL building are now
        
        When we talked about the Renwick Smallpox Hospital, we discussed how James Renwick, Jr., the architect of the Smallpox Hospital as well as more famous NYC buildings like St. Patrick’s Cathedral, worked on the Croton Acqueduct, which was constructed to bring clean water to the city. Specifically, he designed the Egyptian Revival Croton Reservoir.
        
        The Acqueduct brought water from Upstate New York, where it was stored in the reservoir and then distributed around the city. Before that, there had been some really horrific outbreaks of yellow fever and cholera because of a lack of safe drinking water.
        
        The Reservoir sat on four acres of land, held 20 million gallons of water, and built of huge granite blocks. It started distributing water in October 1842.
        
        Once it opened, people could visit the reservoir and go for walks around its edge–Renwick had designed a wide promenade, so people would go there on the weekend and walk around it. From the top of the reservoir, you had a clear view of both rivers and the NJ palisades.
        
        When the reservoir was first built, there weren’t many bildings around it, but by the 1850s, it was surrounded by brownstones. People were put off by its massive dark gray walls. It was a striking building, but not a very friendly one. They tried to soften it up by planting ivy on it.
        
        After a few decades of people complaining about the reservoir, it was demolished in 1898. They’d built more reservoirs in the meantime, and people seemed to really hate the reservoir aesthetically. It was estimated that it’d cost about $100,000 (more than $3 million) in today’s dollars.)
        
        If you go to the NYPL, though, there are some places where you can still see the stone granite of the old reservoir (I think it’s in the basement.)
    - Apparently Egyptian revival structures caught on in other cities, like Baltimore, a lot more than it did in NYC–for some reason NYers really found it aesthetically displeasing after the initial Egyptian Revival craze.
- Actual ancient Egyptian artifacts were also put in some major cities:
  - Obelisks called “Cleopatra’s Needle” stand in London, Paris, and New York City–all three were about 1,000 years old when Cleopatra was alive, so their name is a misnomer, but they are ancient Egyptian obelisks. All three were gifts from the Egyptian government during the 19th century.
    - I actually had only known about the NYC one, which is in Central Park by the Met, but when I looked it up, I realized the other two were also called Cleopatra’s Needle. I also hadn’t realized that the Central Park obelisk was a real, ancient obelisk–I’d assumed it was just inspired by ancient obelisks.
    - I wanted to talk a little bit about the history behind these obelisks, since it says a lot about the history of European relations with places like Egypt.
    - All three obelisks were gifts from Muhammad Ali Pasha, who was an Albanian Ottoman governor who basically ruled Egypt from 1805-1848. He was sent to take Egypt back from Napoleon, and once Napoleon’s troops left, he was able to maneuver into the position of Viceroy of Europe, and then ended up getting control of parts of Arabia, Upper and Lower Egypt, Sudan, and the Levant (the Levant is modern day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, a bunch of Turkey, Israel, and I think at some points parts of Greece?).
    - So, the obelisk in Paris is one of two 3,000 obelisks that once stood at Luxor Temple. (The other one is still at Luxor.)
      - The dynasty that Muhammad Ali Pasha set up ended up running Egypt until the revolution of 1952.
      - So the reason why I got into all that detail is because he was a conquerer who took over Egypt–so it’s not like the obelisk was a gift from the Egyptian people, or something.
      - In exchange for the obelisk, France was supposed to give him a French mechanical clock. However, after the obelisk had already been delivered to France, they discovered that the mechanical clock didn’t work. It may have been damaged in transit. Today, the clock sits in a clock tower in Cairo and still doesn’t work.
    - There are 21 ancient obelisks that still stand. Here’s where they all are:
      - Egypt has fewer than 5
      - Rome has 13 (all taken during the time of the Roman empire)
      - And the rest are scattered around between New York and Istambul
    - A little history about the NYC obelisk: I saw some differing accounts (wikipedia says one thing, I found a different thing on PBS’s website)
      - One story says that it was a gift after the Suez canal’s completion, and other places said that the US lobbied to get an obelisk after Paris and London got one.
In addition to an interest in genuine Egyptian obelisks, people were also interested in real Egyptian mummies. During the 19th century, mummy unwrappings became popular.
- In England, a surgeon named Thomas Pettigrew would host parties where people would come watch mummies be unraveled. He’d unwrap the mummy, then saw off part of their head, then prop up the mummy like they were still alive and try to scare people.
- These became really popular 19th century events–Pettigrew did 40 of them, for example.
  - I have zero respect for Pettigrew–I find him detestable. In addition to trying to prove that the ancient Egyptians were white and commodifying the bodies of dead Egyptians, he also did things like display the severed, mummified head of an indigneous Australian named Yagan.
  - Yagan had opposed colonial rule and was killed by bounty hunters. Pettigrew got the rights to use his head for 18 months. So he adorned Yagan’s head with cockatoo features and a headband. Then he’d display the head in front of a painting that showed the colonizers and indigenous people of Australia living together in hearmony.
- In the 19th century, Europeans started traveling to Egypt frequently
- In 1833, a French aristocrat and monk: “It would be hardly respectable, on one’s return from Egypt, to present oneself without a mummy in one hand and a crocodile in the other.”
- A few weeks after a traveler came back from Egypt, they’d invite people over for a mummy unwrapping. They’d have dinner and drinks, and then unwrap the mummy afterwards. Apparently the unwrapping would smell pretty bad, but maybe ppl were drink enough to not really care?
- This was generally a thing that rich people did–since they were the ones who had money to go to Egypt, or have friends who went to Egypt–but sometimes there were more public mummy unwrappings for the more general public to see.
- However, I will say that some experts say that mummy unwrappings weren’t actually as popular as people say they were, and that they were mostly done by scholars, etc.
  - And actually, as far as I’ve been able to confirm, that’s correct. I mostly found articles describing mummy unwrappings as scientific or academic events.
  - I found an 1850 article talking about how there were 8-10 million mummies in Thebes, and it talked about how anyone could travel to Egypt and then bring back a mummy. The article said: “The open doors of the tombs are seen in long ranges, and at different elevations, and on the plain, large pits have been opened, in which have been found 1000 mummies at a time.”
  - It sounds like the scientific community started to push to preserve mummies for research purposes.
  - I found an article from 1881 that described some American tourists finding an Egyptian princess’s tomb, and there’s just a throwaway line that says that the mummy “like most of the treasures of antequarian Egypt, was after a while carted away to the British Museum.” So it sounds like if tourists found mummies, at least around that time, they’d call experts to take a away the mummy, and then they might examine it.
- But I wanted to read a bit from one account I found, just as an example. This was originally printed in the New York Star in 1838 but seems to have been reprinted fairly widely:
  - Antiquities from Egypt–An interesting scene lately took place at the Anatomical Theatre of the Washington Medical College, at Baltimore. It was the unwrapping of an Egyptian Mummy, from Memphis, presented by Commodore Elliot, of the Navy. The usual transverse wrapping of coarse muslin externally, and longitudinal wrapping of fine next to the shrivelled embalmed body, were observed. A skull in great preservation, not embalmed, and dug up by the Commodore himself, was also presented.
- - The article then goes through a laundry list of other artifacts that were shown.
- I also read an August 1894 article in The Daily Morning Journal and Courier that mentions that as the century wore on, it was harder to get mummies to unwrap:
  - The headline is : “Hark, From the Tombs” A Relic from Egypt–Three Thousand Years Old–Unwrapping a Mummy by the Scientific Society–Recently Came from Egypt and Was the Gift of Mrs. P.T. Barnum
    - Of late years “the spoiling of the Egyptians” has been prevented by the government of that country as much as possible, and it has been constantly more and more difficult to procure for scientific purposes specimens of the ancient Egyptiam embalming art, and therefore the presentation to the scientific society of this city of a very fine mummy from Egypt, by Mrs. P. T. Barnum, was an event not to be lightly passed over. How Mrs. Barnum procured it is not known exactly but through some office of the American consul at Cairo or Alexandria, doubtless it was done.
  - It’s nice to hear that Egypt was trying to reduce the number of mummies that were leaving the country, though by then it was pretty late I guess.
The interest in Egyptian beliefs about death became so great that in 1852, the 10th Duke of Hamilton insisted on being buried in the Egyptian style; he was mummified, then placed in an actual ancient Egyptian sarcophagus–which had once housed a princess whose name has been forgotten. He’d bought the sarcophagus 30 years before and had had carved out on the inside to fit his body, which was larger than its original inhabitant’s. He was then put in a Roman-style tomb at his estate in Scotland.
In the 1840s, the Egyptian Book of the Dead was translated into English–that was the first modern translation. The book detailed different beliefs that the Ancient Egyptians had about death and the afterlife.
- Different occult groups, from the Masons to the Order of the Golden Dawn, ended up adopting different “Egyptian” practices. There’s a pretty funny looking picture of Aleister Crowley in like a pharaoh-type ritual headdress.
And there were stories of Egyptian stuff being cursed, like this story from a 1896 article in the Hampshire Telegraph:

The mummy was that of a priest of Thetis and it bore a mysterious inscription [….] which was long and blood-curdling. It set forth that whosoever disturbed the body of this priest should himself be deprived of decent burial; he would meet with a violent death, and his mangled remains would be ‘carried down by a rush of waters to the sea’

This mummy was purchased by an adventurer named Herbert Ingram from the British Consul in Luxor. Soon after, while hunting in Somalia, Ingram was trampled and attacked by an elephant. To read from an article from historyanswers.co.uk: “By the time his companions were able to reach his remains days later all but a handful of bones had been washed away by the rains.”
So that’s a bird’s-eye view of 19th century Egyptomania.
It’s by no means the only time that Americans and Europeans have been obsessed with Egypt–there was another huge resurgence in interest in Egypt in the 1920s, after Howard Carter discovered King Tut’s tomb in 1922.
Interestingly, the 1920s also saw a HUGE resurgence in interest in Ouija, which is actually where we’ll pick back up next week.

Victorian Egyptomania Sources

Websites about Victorian Egyptomania

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_I_of_France
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aida
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnakhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra’s_Needle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra%27s_Needle_(New_York_City)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ali_of_Egypt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxor_Obelisks
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/egypt/raising/world.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Revival_architecture
https://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2011/11/lost-egyptian-revival-croton-reservoir.html
https://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2011/07/lost-1838-egyptian-revival-tombs.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Revival_decorative_arts
https://archive.archaeology.org/online/features/egyptian_nyc/19thcentury.html
https://www.ancient.eu/Egyptian_Obelisk/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tombs
https://mountauburn.org/egyptian-revival-gate/
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Egypt-Land/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paschal_Beverly_Randolphhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Down_Moses
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/egyptian-building
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/victorian-party-people-unrolled-mummies-for-fun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oujda
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/355673/etymology-and-pronunciation-of-ouija
https://www.historyanswers.co.uk/people-politics/victorian-egyptomania-how-a-19th-century-fetish-for-pharaohs-turned-seriously-spooky/
https://allthatsinteresting.com/mummy-unwrapping-parties
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_era
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_era
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_Revival_architecture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmilla
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptomania
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Hall
https://georgianlondon.com/post/55869874064/lost-london-the-egyptian-hall
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nevil_Maskelyne
https://flashbak.com/joseph-fabers-freakish-talking-head-haunts-uncanny-valley-1846-57136/
https://archive.org/details/1876MaskelyneModernSpiritualism
https://allthatsinteresting.com/mummy-unwrapping-parties
https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/when-the-citys-water-supply-came-from-42nd-street/

Historical articles and advertisements about Victorian Egyptomania

A Mummy Unwrapped Alexandria gazette and advertiser. June 17 1824 Image 2
A Palace Tragedy Steuben Republican Wed Dec 8 1886
Antiquities from Egypt The native American. Washington City i.e. Washington, D.C. 1837-1840- December 22 1838- Image 4
Argus and Patriot Wed Dec 15 1897
Broad Views of a Woman. The Wichita daily eagle. September 30 1890- Page 6- Image 6
Great Find of Egyptian Relics The Lake Charles echo. October 22 1881. Image 2
Hark From The Tombs The Daily Morning Journal and Courier Mon Aug 20 1894
Monsters to Order The Roanoke daily times. February 20 1896 Page 2 Image 2
Mummies of Egyptian Kings. The County paper. September 09 1881- Image 3
Mummy Unwrapping The Knoxville Register Sat May 25 1850
Ramses the Great St. Landry democrat. January 07 1888 Image 2
Rarest of June Roses. The climax. Kentucky. July 18 1888- Image 1
Rather Ancient The Caldwell tribune. April 09 1898 Image 1
Some Ones Baby Once Buffalo Morning Express and Illustrated Buffalo Express Sat Jan 14 1893
Story of an Ancient Statue Wessington Springs herald. April 29 1887 Image 3
That Mummy The daily crescent. June 27 1850 -Morning- Image 3
The Obelisk Kings. Iron County register. September 15 1881- Image 6
The Presbyterian of the South – Southwestern Presbyterian, Central Presbyterian
Southern Presbyterian. Atlanta Ga. 1909-1931 March 03 1909 Page 4 Image 8
The Preserved Dead. The National tribune. April 02 1891-Page 3-Image 3
The Black Hills Weekly Journal Fri Feb 7 1890
Turner County herald. September 16 1886 Image 4
Unique And Cosy The Evening Express Sat Aug 5 1893
Unrolling A Mummy Sunbury American. Sunbury, Pa. 1848-1879- June 15 1850 Image 2
Unwrapping a Mummy Sunbury American. Sunbury, Pa. 1848-1879- June 15 1850- Image 2
Unwrapping an Egyptian Mummy Weekly expositor. Brockway Centre Mich. 1882-1894 April 21 1887 Image 3
Unwrapping Mummy Postponed for Year-Evening star. Washington D.C.- 1854-1972- January 23 1924- Page 15- Image 15
Unwrapping of Mummy Filmed Evening star.-Washington, D.C.-1854-1972 December 31 1935 Page B-9 Image 25
Unwrapping A Mummy The San Francisco Examiner Sun Sep 8 1895
Unwrapping A Mummy Vermont Journal Sat Sep 7 1867
X-Ray Photographs Used by Scientists-New Britain herald. New Britain Conn.- 1890-1976- December 17 1923 Page 11 Image 11
X-Ray Pictures of Mummies Taken Evening star.-Washington, D.C.- 1854-1972- December 14 1923 Page 61 Image 61

Books consulted RE: Victorian Egyptomania

A History of Egyptian Mummies By Thomas Joseph Pettigrew:
https://books.google.com/books?id=1VwzAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Check out the shownotes for the rest of the series to see all of the sources used.

Listen to the rest of the Ouija board series:

Don’t miss our past episodes:

Ouija after World War I (Ouija Boards Part 6)

Ouija after World War I: We tried talking about 1920s Ouijamania but there was too much good stuff in the late 19teens.

Highlights include:
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini playing with a Ouija board in an Atlantic City hotel room
• The pope hiring a former psychical researcher to denounce Ouija
• Possible connections between remote viewing and successful Ouija board use
• The solar plexus chakra and ouija
• Racism in 1920s America

“Can The Dead Talk To Us?” The San Francisco Examiner. Sun, May 26 , 1918.

Episode Script for Ouija after World War I (Ouija Boards Part 6)

“It is a most difficult and sometimes quite a hopeless task to reason with a mind under spirit-control and which, by reason of that control, has lost the power of judging fairly and squarely.”

–The New Black Magic and the Truth about the Ouija Board, published in 1919

So I thought this episode was going to be like our Australian Ghost Hoaxers episode, just a funny set of stories about some people doing and saying weird stuff, and journalists writing comical articles about it.

But when I really started digging in, I realized this was a way bigger topic, and that there’s a lot to talk about not just about people getting really into Ouija boards, but also about post-WWI society. Since you can’t really separate any story from the time period it’s set in.
I know there’s a tendency to think of the 1920s as a fun time of flappers and prohibition. But there’s a lot of ugliness there as well, especially when you look at the United States in the 1920s.
So this will be a two-part episode (I hope) this week we’ll talking about the years between the beginning of WWI and the end of the 19teens.
We’ll talk about one article from 1920, but aside from that, we’ll really be looking closely at stories from the 1920s–and in particular, the year 1920, when the majority of the articles that I found were from–next week.

The week before last, we talked about some weird 19th century Ouija stories. A new Ouija fervor started during WWI.

If you listeners remember from the 19th century Ouija stories episode, there were a lot of stories in the late 19th century, but things got quiet in the early 20th. But a combination of factors, including WWI , made Ouija popular again, though the craze didn’t really kick off until the 1920s.
I found one article in The Salina Evening Journal (Salina, Kansas) · Fri, Aug 18, 1916 that references how Ouija wasn’t so popular anymore:
- “The ouija board that several years ago was more popular than motor car riding, is presumed to be connected with the unseen world. . . During the ouija board craze the chap who couldn’t spell his sweetheart’s name not only felt like a pill himself, but the girl thought he did not care for her.”
- So as late as 1916, people really saw the Ouija board as a has-been. How wrong they were.
There’s a recent article on history.com that argues that the Spanish Flu, which hit the US between 1918 and 1920, caused a huge resurgence in Spiritualism. That’s interesting to me because in most places, I’ve read that WWI was responsible.
- But of course we’re all really focused on how pandemics influence society right now, so it make sense that people are now looking at the Spanish Flu and seeing how it changed the world. That’s the closest we can get to predicting the future right now, as far as I’m concerned.
- So to talk about that:
- 20 million people died in World War I (worldwide)
- The Spanish Flu killed 50 million people
  - though the first wave mostly killed people with prexisting conditions and older people, the much deadlier second wave hit relatively young people the hardest, with people between 20 and 40 dying most frequently
  - Just a sidenote about the Spanish flu, it didn’t really hit me till just now because I’m used to it being called the 1918 flu pandemic, etc, but the Spanish flu had four waves that went on through April 1920.
  - I never really consider how long that is, or how it ended it 1920, and then COVID-19 started making headlines in 2020, an even 100 years later.
So, two famous people who advocated for spiritualism around this time were Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and a respected physicist named Sir Oliver Lodge
- Both of them had been interested in the supernatural for a while, and both of them had sons who died in the war.
- Both of them wrote and spoke a lot about how they communicated with their sons via seances, automatic writing, etc.
- Lodge wrote a book in 1916 called Raymond, or Life and Death, all about it his many communications with his son. Doyle claims to have communicated with his son many times, and said that as of 1919, he knew of 24 mothers who had spoken to their dead sons.
  - I’ve already started gathering sources for an episode about the two of them, someday once we’re done talking about Ouija boards.
- Meanwhile, Harry Houdini saw all of the fake mediums springing up during and after the war, and started traveling around debunking spiritualism.
- As Ouija became more and more popular in the years from 1917-1922, Houdini called it “the first step towards insanity.” And he wasn’t the only one–a bit later we’ll get to more accounts of literal Ouija madness.
- I just wanted to tell one funny story about Houdini and Doyle, who seemed to be friendly at first, but then got understandably less friendly.
  - Doyle’s wife, Jean, was supposedly a medium.
  - In 1922, the three of them were at a hotel room in Atlantic City playing with a Ouija board, and Jean said that she’d made contact with Houdini’s mother, who said a few things to Houdini, including “Merry Christmas.”
  - The only problem is that Houdini’s mom was Jewish and she’d only spoken Yiddish, so there’s no way she’d say Merry Christmas to him.

As usual, I’ve pulled a bunch of stories, and we’ll go through them generally in chronological order so you can see how Ouijamania developed.

But looking at newspaper articles, it seemed like the craze started innocently enough. One article from The Weekly Tribune (Cape Girardeau, Missouri) published on Nov 23, 1917 said that a local man had consulted the Ouija board about WWI. The board claimed that the war would end in January 1919.
- It was wrong by 2 months; the war ended in November 1918
- The board also said that the Romanovs (the ruling family of Russia, of Anastasia fame), who had been exiled to Siberia in August 1917, would not be coming back. The board was right about that: The Romanovs were executed in summer 1918.
- So you could maybe say that the board was sorta right? (At least half right)
- But this is the kind of article that was getting printed about Ouija at the time–puff pieces about nice local dudes playing Ouija to learn about world events. But that was about to really change.
In May 1918, the San Francisco Examiner published a piece called “Can The Dead Talk To Us?”, which was a full page feature with a beautiful illustration of a couple playing with a Ouija board on a beautiful moonlit terrace, and a huge creepy ghost coming out of the board.
- The subject of the piece was a writer named Ella Wheeler Wilcox who claimed to communicate with her dead husband through a Ouija board.
- There was a poem from her, a letter to the editor describing her experience, and then an editorial from the newspaper saying that they don’t believe in Ouija but are glad that it gives people comfort.
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox had been publishing poems about communicating with the dead and had gotten so many questions about it that she felt that she had to write the letter about how she had definitive proof that you can communicate with the dead.
- She didn’t go into her proof, but I looked up her memoir, which was published in 1918, and it sounds like she got this message from her dead husband while at the Ouija board:
  - Brave one, keep up your courage. Love is all there is. I am with you always. I await your arrival.
  - She continued communicating with her husband via Ouija, and some of the proofs of it really being him are complicated. But for example, while using the board with her friend, there was an unprompted reference to the Quinnipiac Club when the friend’s husband walked in. It turns out that the last time the dead husband had gone to the club, he’d played a game at the club with the friend’s husband. So Ella Wheeler Wilcox said it couldn’t have been her subconcious acting, since she hadn’t known about the game.
- Her memoir, The Worlds and I, goes into a decent amount of detail, and I’ll link to it in the shownotes. But I wanted to read this little snippet of the letter she wrote for the San Francisco Examiner:
  - These experiences have changed the earth for me from a barren desert of appalling loneliness to a glorious anteroom to realms of glory. It has robbed death of its terror and the grave of its sting. Just as electricity came by patient research into God’s real of wonders, so will this great spiritual truth come to be known to the whole world in the next century. We are on the eve of the most glorious scientific discoveries of all time. Let us be expectant.
I found a letter to the editor of the Ottawa Citizen from January 1919, where the tone shifted:
- To people who know nothing of psychic phenomena and the laws governing it, especially persons of a nervous temperament, the Ouija board presents very real dangers, especially when it serves as a medium for seeking information regarding the future, as the person interested is not usually in possession of any facts which can be arrayed against the predictions obtained through the medium of the board. There is always a certain fascination in prying into the future and any satisfaction obtained in this direction is usually a menace to the peace of mind of the subject.
- The article also argues that science can explain the Ouija phenomenon, and that the board operates by tapping into the operators’ minds, or in instances where the operators don’t know something but someone else in the room does, it operates by the law of suggestion. It likens that to hypnotism. (Though I don’t totally understand that comparison.)
In January 1919, Teddy Roosevelt died, and by March there were multiple reports of people making contact with him via the Ouija board. Those articles were still pretty lighthearted, but not really interesting enough to go into here.
I found a letter to the editor in a Catholic publication in Brooklyn called The Tablet: “Ouija Board Devilry.”· Sat, Dec 13, 1919 · Page 7
- References a recent New York Tribune article saying that there’s been a big increase in Ouija board purchases.
- It calls Ouija boards evil, and it talks about how Christians, God, and his saints were on one side, and quote:
  - The evil nation not included in this holy alliance, Satan and his “legion,” the Bolsheviki of that other world, alone remains for the war dance on the Ouija board. . .
  - The shopping spirit is upon us and “the spirit” [by this, the letter writer means the spirit residing in the Ouija board] orders the sale of the Ouija board as a novelty. The command of “the spirit” has been heard, and his obedient servants hasten to obey. One store reports sales of the Ouija board at the rate of twenty a day. Others cannot supply the demand. Surely, the bottomless pit has opened into a dark age all its own.
- - Much of this article was totally incomprehensible to me, despite having been raised Catholic and having read the Bible several times–it was kinda a mishmash of bible verses and references to religious stuff that didn’t really make sense to me. But it’s clear that this person thought that Ouija was the tool of the devil, and that its popularity signaled something sinister.
In 1919, a former spiritualist and member of the British Society for Psychical Research turned devout Catholic, J. Godfrey Raupert, wrote a book called The new black magic and the truth about the ouija-board. Apparently Pope Pius X had actually specifically asked Raupert to warn Catholics against the Ouija board.
- In the book, he says that Ouija board use begins by borrowing from the user’s subconscious, but as they continue using it, it can go beyond that and take on supernatural, or as he calls it “preternatural” form. Suddenly, you might get real information.
  - From the book:
  - As these experiments are continued and as the mind becomes more passive and lethargic, the phenomenon begins to change its character and pass from the natural into the preternatural. . . . Disclosures are made respecting the character and doings and intimate personal affairs of persons not known to the experimenter. Messages are given, clearly and conclusively indicating knowledge and information wholly beyond the reach of the writer’s own mind. And they are conveyed in a form and manner suggesting the presence of a critical and observant mind and of a judgement quite at variance with that of the experimenter.
- That, to me, sounds an AWFUL lot like remote viewing.
  - Through remote viewing techniques, people have been able peer into classified documents that were very far away, locate secret NSA bases, and more.
  - There’s a documentary about remote viewing called Third Eye Spies, and there’s also a book by remote viewing pioneer (and the inventor of lasers) Russell Targ, called The Reality of ESP: A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities. To read a snippet of the book:
    - This ability is about learning how to quiet your mind and separate the visual images of the psychic signal from the uncontrolled chatter of the mind.
  - It wouldn’t surprise me if finding real information on the Ouija board and getting intel through remote viewing were basically the same technique. This is a big topic, but I wanted to flag the parallel there because it was so striking to me.
- To get back to the Ouija book we were talking about:
  - The tone grows increasingly alarmist:
    - After a while instruction is generally given how a greater degree of passivity can be attained and how this mode of intercourse between the world seen and unseen can be made much more perfect and profitable. The experimenter, fascinated by these communications, and convinced that he has come upon a great and valuable discovery, readily adopts the advice given and resorts to the ouija-board habitually and systematically.
  - He says that the person often believes that they’re talking to a deceased loved one. However, he warns that “it has never been found possible to conclusively identify the particular spirit communicating.”
    - Basically, if someone recognizes a detail about a loved one, then that means that detail could have come from the experimenter themself rather than from the spirit. (Because if they didn’t know the detail, how would they recognize it?)
    - It also said that:
      - There is abundant proof . . . To show that [the spirits] can, under given conditions, extract information from distant mind, with whom the experimenter is in some kind of rapport, and from books and letters and other extant sources of information.
    - Which again, sounds like remote viewing.
    - It said that it’s often obvious that the spirits aren’t the person they’re pretending to be, because they’ll get the details right but then some obvious stuff wrong (like confusing the life story of a wife for the experimenter’s mother’s life), or contradict themselves
    - Spirits have even admitted their trickery, and say that they’ve been able to “mind tap” people
    - He also said that the messages are often frivolous or pointless, and they don’t really say much about the afterlife. Often, the spirits speaking through the board insinuate bad things about friends and family, causing discord like divorces, major falling outs.
    - The spirits will also flatter the person consulting the board, pretending to be Catholic when talking to Catholics, Unitarian when talking to Unitarians, Anarchist when talking to Anarchists. And then, he claims, it’ll start undermining the faith of any Christians using the board.
    - He also describes how the Ouija board basically sucks the energy out of the person using it habitually:
      - “In order to obtain the movements of the board, vital or nerve-energy is withdrawn from he organism of the experimenter, often out of all proportion to the physical health and constitution.”
    - He talks about 3 cases he recently learned about where Ouija board users were sent to the asylum because the doctor claimed that “the use of the ouija-board has brought about a state of dementia”
    - He also cautions readers against any kind of automatic writing, including the planchette.
    - He warns that the Ouija board shouldn’t be in any Christian household, and that children should be kept away from it.
I read a really tongue in cheek article from February 1920 called “An Interview With Ouija” printed in the The Wilmington Morning Star (Wilmington, North Carolina)
- One interesting thing that the article mentioned was that when using the Ouija board, they consulted with a book about Ouija that said that “the solar plexus–that never sleeping brain of the individual–is the switchboard or receiving station for the messages . . . The great secret why some individuals can successfully use the board and some cannot is that the successful person must have, so to speak, a diseasedly sensitive solar plexus.”
  - The reason why I call this bit out is that it immediately made me think of the solar plexus chakra, which is the third chakra.
    - My chakra knowledge is limited to doing chakra meditations, so I’m always forgetting which chakra does what. But I looked it up and the solar plexus is associated with fire and transformation, and in the body it controls digestion and metabolism.
    - When the solar plexus is unbalanced–which I wonder if that’s what they mean by “diseasedly sensitive” solar plexus–then apparently it can cause a number of issues. Those include low self-esteem, trouble setting and maintaining boundaries, codependency, trouble with self-control and addiction, and depression and anxiety.
    - One of the symptoms of excessive Ouija board use that was mentioned in The New Black Magic and the Truth About the Ouija Board was “a particular condition of lassitude and exhaustion–in many instances accompanies by severe pain at the top of the spine and gradually spreading over the entire brain.”
    - Supposedly one physical symptom of solar plexus chakra issues can be nerve pain. I did look it up, and apparently the solar plexus is literally just a network of nerves.
    - I’m not really trying to put forth a strong argument about ouija and the solar plexus chakra, but the reference was too interesting for me not to mention, especially because I haven’t read anything mentioning the solar plexus and Ouija before this.
So I wanted to talk about the tidbit from that newspaper article, but I also need to talk about the newspaper this came from. I’m in North Carolina for most of the summer, and I’ve been reading up on North Carolina history. I guess that this is my first actual experience of spending an extended amount of time in the south, since Texas is kind of its own thing, and I’m Cajun but have never lived in Louisiana.
- So I’ve been working to understand more of the history of the south, and the legacy of racism here. For example, my sister was telling me the other day that it’s technically illegal to wear masks in North Carolina, and that was a law that had to be on the books because of the KKK. So they’ve had to temporarily suspend that law because of COVID.
- So while this digression doesn’t have to do with Ouija, it does have to do with forgotten history, and I definitely can’t reference this newspaper without telling this story:
- I’m currently reading a book called Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino
- It’s an extremely good book, and I recommend reading it. It’s also extremely upsetting. But it tells the story of white supremacy in the south in a way that I, hadn’t ever quite learned the details of.
- It turns out that there’s only been one successful coup in American history, and it happened in Wilmington, NC.
- During the Reconstruction, Wilmington was a relatively good place for black people to live. The population was majority black, and Wilmington was the largest city in North Carolina. Black people held many highly skilled jobs; many were craftsman, and there was even a black-owned newspaper called the Wilmington Daily Record. White supremicits basically spurred white people to become more and more racist, and that led to a coup overthrowing the duly elected government there, and the massacre of between 60 and more than 300 black people. After that, much of the black population had to leave Wilmington.
- As horrific as that was, it had a huge ripple effect beyond the people of Wilmington–it really ushered in racist Jim Crow laws, and this new southern system of white supremacy. It was kind of the beginning of the end of what was supposed to be a period of black people gaining equal rights in the US after the Civil War.
- Also, the massacre was depicted in the press as a “race riot” and the white killers were painted as innocent victims. That false narrative was perpetuated by newspapers of the time, just as much of the white supremacist sentiment that caused the riots was engineered by the white-owned newspapers in the area. One of those newspapers was the Wilmington Morning Star, which was run by a former confederate officer.
A little more context that has bearing on the actual topic of the episode: So one thing that I’m very mindful of when reading historic newspaper articles is that no newspaper is a truly reliable source. I find inconsistencies from article to article in basic facts, but there’re much larger issues and a context that may not be obvious from reading an article or two in a newspaper. I pulled this newspaper article in late May, but didn’t know the hateful story behind it until last weekend, when I started reading Wilmington’s Lie.
- The massacre and coup happened in 1898. The KKK had been started shortly after the civil war, but was shut down by federal agents. However, in 1915, filmmaker DW Griffith released his pioneering–and hateful–film The Birth of a Nation. If you’ve ever taken a film class, you’re familiar with The Birth of a Nation, because it was groundbreaking in a lot of technical ways.
  - However, the movie was a glorification of the KKK. It featured racist portrayals of black people (played by white people in blackface, in many case) and showed the KKK as heroes who were just protecting American values.
  - It was an enormous commercial success.
  - It also inspired a rebirth of the KKK, which had a major resurgence in the early 1920s.
So why am I going into all of this detail about the history of the KKK?
- It’s because as I’ve been going through all of these articles from the early 20s, I’m encountering a lot of references and things that I don’t really understand. (Like I’m less confused by articles from the mid-19th century.) Some of the stuff I’m seeing might be random 1920s slang, but I’ve also been seeing a lot of dialog written weirdly, as if it’s in a dialect (or like a fake dialect.) For example, in the article I quoted from in the Wilmington Morning Star, there’s a bit where it quotes a patent clerk. It’s extremely obvious that it’s a racist caricature of what white supremacists thought black people talked like. (It reminds me of the way that screenwriters wrote lines for black actors in early talkies.)
- During my Ouija board research, I’ve also come across huge newspaper ads for The Birth of a Nation, featuring quotes from educators saying that all southern children should see it, that if you’re a good southerner you’d see this film, etc.
- I know that I could pick through these accounts and just pull out the fun and weird occult stuff, and never mention racist things that came up–but I think that if we’re talking about America in the 1920s, we can’t not at least talk about what was happening in the country at the time. Because nothing happens in a vacuum.

Sources consulted in researched Ouija after World War I

Websites consulted about Ouija after World War I

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_the_Romanov_family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Romanov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Wheeler_Wilcox
https://www.history.com/news/flu-pandemic-wwi-ouija-boards-spiritualism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dangers_of_Spiritualism
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/conan-doyles-very-suspicious-seance-with-harry-houdini-1191847.html
https://www.williamfuld.com/ouija_letters.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manipura
https://www.chakras.info/solar-plexus-chakra/
https://www.chakras.info/solar-plexus-chakra-blockage/
https://lonerwolf.com/solar-plexus-chakra-healing/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celiac_plexus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klanhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star-News
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Manly

Historical articles and advertisements consulted about Ouija after World War I

“Dementia Ouija.” The Fort Wayne Sentinel (Fort Wayne, Indiana) · Thu, Oct 14, 1920 · Page 4
“War Will End in Jan. 1919, Says the Ouija Board.” The Weekly Tribune (Cape Girardeau, Missouri) · Fri, Nov 23, 1917 · Page 6
The Salina Evening Journal (Salina, Kansas) · Fri, Aug 18, 1916
“Can The Dead Talk To Us?” The San Francisco Examiner, Sun, May 26, 1918
“Are You Superstitious?” El Paso Herald (El Paso, Texas) · Sat, May 31, 1919 · Page 6
“Letter To The Editor: The Ouija Board.” The Ottawa Citizen, Wed, Jan 22, 1919
TR Sends A Message Via The Ouija Board. The Wichita Daily Eagle. Sun, Mar 23, 1919.
Oh Look What TR Said Ouija Board. Evansville Press. Mon, Apr 14, 1919.
“Ouija Board Devilry.” The Tablet (Brooklyn, New York) · Sat, Dec 13, 1919 · Page 7
“Among Us Mortals.” Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) · Sun, Feb 15, 1920 · Page 23
“Haskin’s Daily Letter: An Interview With Ouija.” The Wilmington Morning Star (Wilmington, North Carolina) · Thu, Feb 26, 1920 · Page 4

Books consulted about Ouija after World War I

The Worlds and I by Ella Wheeler Wilcox: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Worlds_and_I.html?id=BBJIU0v_gyUC
The new black magic and the truth about the ouija-board by J. Godfrey Raupert: https://archive.org/details/newblackmagictru00raup/page/214/mode/2up
The Reality of ESP: A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities by Russell Targ
THE PROBLEMS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH by Hereward Carrington (1921) : https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23660/23660-h/23660-h.htm#Page_247
Raymond, or Life After Death:
https://archive.org/details/raymondorlifeand032030mbp
Wilmington’s Lie by David Zucchino

Check out the shownotes for the rest of the series to see all of the sources used.

Listen to the rest of the Ouija board series:

Don’t miss our past episodes:

1920s Ouijamania (Ouija Boards Part 7)

We take a look at “Ouijamania” in the 1920s, relating the panic over Ouija boards to big movements in the year 1920, including womens suffrage, prohibition, and, unfortunately, eugenics.

Ouijamania is the phenomenon where people, usually women, supposedly went crazy because of their Ouija board use, usually resulting in their institutionalization.

Highlights include:
• Occult rituals
• 1920s insane asylums
• Burning money
• The dark side of 1920s feminism

Episode Script for 1920s Ouijamania (Ouija Boards Part 7)

“Idleness is the sole reason for the existence of this craze. Idle women are the devil’s own specialty. When he contrived the ouija board he certainly knew his business.”

-From an article called “Dementia Ouija,” written by a doctor and published in The Fort Wayne Sentinel, Oct 14, 1920

Sidenote, I’m now at the point where I’m mostly trying to draw from either primary sources, or resources created by experts like Robert Murch, because MANY articles written by non-expert journalists are riddled with errors. I’m not going to go into it, but I was reading an article from a publication that I don’t particularly like, and probably every few paragraphs there was a glaring error.
We’re finally at the Ouijamania episode!! Today, we’ll be looking at Ouijamania stories from 1920 only, with a focus on women and sexism and the Ouija board. There are an unbelievable number of articles about the Ouija board from 1920 alone, which is why we’re focusing on this year.
Also, I just want to note that this episode has some discussion of eugenics.
I’ve been talking about Ouijamania, but I wanted to actually define it. As far as I can tell, Ouijamania is the phenomenon where people, usually women, go crazy because of their Ouija board use, usually resulting in institutionalization.
I found a bunch of articles talking about ouija boards driving women insane.
One EXTREMELY OBVIOUS thing that I didn’t really think about until I was basically finishing up my research for this episode is that there was a big, major thing that happened in 1920 that I think informs everything we’re about to talk about here.
Do you have any guesses?
So we talked a lot about the impact of World War I on ouija. WWI also had some big societal impacts, including forcing women to step up and basically run things while the men were away at war.
So women’s suffrage became a huge issue in many countries, some of which allowed women to vote as a recognition of their sacrifices during the war. The US was one of those countries.
In May 1919, the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, which would grant women the right to vote, was passed by the house. And then it had to be ratified by 36 state legislatures before it would actually be law.
For the next year, the amendment went through a ratification process in individual states. By March 1920, 35 states had ratified the amendment, but it wasn’t until August 1920 that Tennessee ratified the amendment, officially making women’s suffrage the law of the land.
It was ratified just in time for women to vote for the first time in the 1920 presidential election.
So I can only imagine how heated this debate was for the year and change while the individual states were fighting over whether they should ratify.
I think you’re really going to see that underpinning these articles; I ended up reading so many that sympathize with husbands whose wives have just gone crazy because of ouija. But what does crazy mean in this context? They rarely go into detail, and I’m sure that the push for more rights for women must have changed some household interactions. So is it that people think their wives have been seduced by Satan through the Ouija board, or do they just think have anxiety about women becoming harder to control as the battle rages for their right to vote?

So I wanted to talk a little about what it was like to be in insane asylum in 1920, and a little bit about insane asylums and women:

I think that most people know that in the 19th century, unruly women–wives and daughters who weren’t obedient to their husbands and fathers–were often institutionalized. Women who violated gender norms were also often declared insane.
- I’ve also read that it as easier to get divorced if you had your wife declared insane.
With the prohibition of alcohol, speakeasies were popular in the 1920s, and alcoholism actually increased among women. Kinda ironic.
- Because people didn’t know what to do with female alcoholics, they institutionalized them. And apparently the State Lunacy Commission in California committed tons of women, whether or not their was any kind of solid evidence of them having actual mental health issues.
From what I’ve read, the 1920s were kinda the edge of a turning point for psychiatric care.
- Asylums were still very bad, but a lot of “scientific advances” started happening around the 1920s. So, you know doctors were finding new ways to torture and degrade their patients.
There’s a really good reddit thread mental health treatment in the 1920s that I’ve linked in the shownotes, and a lot of this info is coming from that.
- In the US in the 1920s, the state hospital system was still pretty new and there were no national standards for treatment.
  - In California, it sounds like care varied greatly between state hospitals; a redditor describes the hospitals as “fiefdoms” that were totally controlled by the director, which didn’t change until the 1950s.
  - Between 1909 and the early 1950s, the state of California sterilized over 20,000 people in government institutions. This was part of a huge eugenics movement that was popular in the early 20th century, which we’ll talk about later.
  - There was one hospital where people were sterilized because the director of the hospital though that sterilization cured mental illness. There was another hospital where people were sterilized because the director was a eugenicist. There was another state hospital where the director used hydrotherapy and psychoanalysis, because he was a fan of Freud.
- One popular 1920s psychiatric treatment was fever therapy.
  - Viennese psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg found that his patients had improved mental health after getting sick with things like tuberculosis.
  - He felt that high fevers were causing that recovery, so when a soldier who’d gotten malaria during WWI came into his care for shell shock, Dr. Wagner-Jauregg got access to malaria and started infecting his patients with it.
  - The first study was in 1917, and for some reason people seemed to think was a success. 9 patients were given malaria, and six of them recovered enough to get back to work, though four of the six later had relapses.
  - Throughout the 1920s, fever therapy gained a lot of popularity, and though fever therapy had been invented to treat a type of mental illness caused by advanced syphilis, doctors started using it for other mental health issues too.
  - Wagner-Jauregg got the Nobel Prize in 1927. However, by the 1930s, enough patients were dying of malaria (2-13%), that hospitals started to think of other options, like fever therapy machines to heat up patients. Fever therapy was used until around 1940.
- Some treatments that weren’t yet in use in the 1920s were electroshock, insulin shock, or lobotomy, though they were all used starting in the 1930s.
- I read that apparently conditions in asylums were especially brutal for schizophrenic patients, and we know that some of the people with “ouijamania” were sent to asylums for schizophrenia.

“Ouija Craze Has Struck Wichita. Mystic Boards and Works on Psychic World Are Much Sought in City.” The Wichita Daily Eagle (Wichita, Kansas) · Sun, Jan 4, 1920 · Page 32

The article begins:
- Ranging from the typical flapper to the most profound scientist are those persons who are quickening the interest in the psychic, which has been sweeping Wichita for several months. This information is revealed through the sale of ouija boards and books on spiritism. Sales have increased immeasurably.
They talk to the buyer for a local store who says that it was very popular in the Christmas season, and that sales had increased by several hundred percent in the last few months. So this is interesting to me, this idea that it was a fad during the 1919 Christmas season that continued on through the new year.
This reminds me a bit of an 1892 article that we looked at a few weeks ago, which bemoaned how Ouija was supposed to just be a Christmas craze in 1891, the first year it was released, but its popularity had continued through to when that article was published in July.
To read a bit more from this January 1920 article:
- The loss of relatives in the war has moved many to seek to get messages from them, another buyer says.
The article also mentions how both men and women have been turning to the Ouija board for information, which many people seemed to take as truth.

Ouija Boards All the Rage in Akron Thousands Bought. Akron Evening Times (Akron, Ohio) · Sun, Feb 15, 1920 · Page 35

This article begins:
- “You’d better be pretty careful,” gloomed the clerk, “what you say about ouija boards, because everybody buys them now, and they don’t all by them in order to poke fun at them either”
The article goes on to say that the clerk works at a store where thousands of ouija boards have been sold from. It references how one local store sold 288 boards in 2 weeks, and mentions that many stores in town are totally sold out. It also remarks that people buy the boards year round, not just at Christmas, which is something many articles mention.
The article is very scornful of people buying ouija boards, saying:
- Ouija is classed as a game for sick people to while away their time with as they would with solitaire. It is regarded by same as a real means of getting in touch with “spirits” and again as one of the laughable frauds to be tolerated until the fad dies away.

“Kiss Ouija Goodbye or Become a Moron: Dr. Hickson is Ready for All Who Trust in Board and Spirits, Are Primarily Praecox.” Ironwood Daily Globe (Ironwood, Michigan) · Thu, Feb 12, 1920 · Page 3

For anyone wondering, “praecox” refers to an old medical diagnosis called “dementia praecox.” The term’s since been replaced with “schizophrenia.”
I think a lot of people know this, but “moron” is an old medical term for people with “mild intellectual disabilities.”
- It’s a word that came from the eugenics movement, which happened to be a popular social movement in the 1920s.
- Most people probably know what eugenics mean, but I wanted to give a quick definition just in case: Basically, eugenics is a ideology that says that some people are inferior and should be removed from the genetics of the human population. And, of course, some people are considered superior. It’s strongly associated with white supremacy.
- And in 1927, a Supreme Court case called Buck v. Bell ruled that it was legal for states to permit compulsory sterilization of those who were deemed “unfit,” for the supposed protection and health of the state. Many states had eugenics laws, starting in the very beginning of the 20th century, and fading in popularity by the 1960s. The Supreme Court has never overturned this eugenicist ruling. So think about that, anyone worshipping the Supreme Court.
- The ruling kicked eugenics in the US into full gear. I don’t want to go into a lot of detail here, but basically, it was a racist and ableist movement that the Nazis used as inspiration for their own much more famous eugenics programs during WWII, such as their mass murder and mass sterilization programs. The Nazis specifically admired California’s eugenics program as a success story and an inspiration for them when they set up their own sterilization programs. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors cited Buck v. Bell in their defense. They said that there wasn’t much difference between the US eugenics program and the Nazi program.
- So just as we talked about the rise of the KKK in the 1920s, other racist ideas like eugenics were very popular, and in eugenics case, strongly advocated for by many scientists.
- I know that I probably come off as fairly anti-science at times, but I think that things like eugenics and other disproven sciences remind us that science is often tied to ideology, and the ideologies of people in power are often tied to hurting marginalized people and consolidating wealth and power among the elite.
- Also, one more thing I wanted to mention, eugenic feminism was a thing in the United States. As in, there was a movement of suffragists in the US (and Canada) who advocated for eugenics. The eugenic feminism movement lasted from around the 1890s-1930s.
  - To quote from wikipedia, eugenic feminists:
    - Argued that if women were provided with more rights and equality, the deteriorating characteristics of a race could be avoided. Feminists desired gender equality, and pushed for eugenic law and science to compromise and meet their views in order to breed a superior race.
  - You know, the idea was basically that women were too important to the reproductive process not to include in the fight for better . . . Racial hygiene, mental hygiene, etc.
  - This was a thing in the UK as well, where, a woman named Marie Stopes founded the first birth control center in 1921. Stopes was an ardent eugenicist who sent a book of her poetry called “Love Songs for Young Lovers” to Hitler in 1939, along with a fawning letter saying that she hopes he enjoys the poetry. Literally, the letter opens “Herr Hitler, love is the greatest thing in the world.”
  - And in the US, there was Margaret Sanger, a famous birth control advocate and sex educator who opened the first birth control center in the US, which went on to become Planned Parenthood.
    - She was also pro-eugenics, and she seemed to toe a line where she didn’t say a lot of racist stuff herself, but she looked the other way when the work of racists supported her goals.
    - She gave a speech in 1921 called “The Morality of Birth Control” where she said that there are “educated and informed people” and “irresponsible and reckless people.” Of the reckless group, she said, and this is unfortunately a quote: “There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped.”
    - So many of the articles about ouija from this period sound so much like how eugenicists talked about people, saying that those who are interested in ouija boards are weak-minded, mentally ill, not intelligent, etc. And sometimes the articles talk wonderingly about why the best sort of people seem to be into ouija boards too.
  - I guess that many white, feminist, female authors in the early twentieth century were strongly pro-eugenic. Those include Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of a famous short story called “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
    - She also wrote a number of eugenicist novels and said a lot of horrible things, some of which I considered quoting here, but decided against. But just know that she was extremely racist, in particular, she was very anti-black. Though she also didn’t like immigrants.
  - So I’m obviously pro-birth control and reproductive rights, and I want to be able to feel good about early women writers and early feminists.
    - But I’m bringing up eugenic feminism because it’s a fusion of so many of the things we’re looking at today: women can be both victims and villains, and bad people can sometimes create good legacies, like Sanger’s legacy of accessible birth control, etc.
    - What I don’t want to do today is paint some kind of story where women, especially white women–and let’s be honest, probably most if not all of the women these articles about ouijamania talk about are likely white–look like a group of uniformly flawless people.
    - History is complicated and thorny and at times, extremely unpleasant.
    - And to be honest, there’s been a big resurgence in eugenics over the last few decades years. I don’t really want to go into it, but I do think it’s important to be aware of the evils in history, especially so you can more easily recognize evil in our own time.
- And I know I’ve said this a few times, but I’m holding back a lot of information because of how unimaginably awful the history of eugenics in America is. But my sources are linked on buriedsecretspodcast.com so if you do want to know more, they’re a place to start.
So to get into the article about ouija making people into “morons.” It starts, like many other articles from the 1920s, with a sentence that makes no sense to me:
- “You’d better tie a can to your ouija board and kiss your favorite spirit control good-by–unless you want to end up in the psychopathic laboratory struggling desperately to pass the moron test.”
What does it mean to tie a can to your ouija board? Idk.
But the article features a Dr. Hickson, who’s supposedly the leading psychopatologist in the US. He tells the reporter:
- “We’ve been getting dozens of spiritualists in here, as well as ouija board fans and séance habitues. They are, of course, praecox cases to begin with before they go in for listening to the ghost rattle the tamboirine and watching him spell out the messages from the other world on the ouija board. If they weren’t they wouldn’t go in for such imbecilities.”
Sidenote, “imbecile” is another eugenicist term; it’s the word for someone with an IQ between a “moron” IQ and a “idiot” IQ.
The doctor goes on to say a lot of awful things about his patients. And the article closes with:
- According to the general estimate hundreds of Chicagoans are daily losing their rationality if not their reason over the ouija board and spook craze.
So to me, I feel like this article is about dehumanizing people with mental health problems, and demonizing and discrediting Spiritualists and everyone else who gets lumped into them (like housewives who play with Ouija boards, for examples).

I found an article called “Ouijamania stirs inhabitants of El Cerrito.” Pasadena Evening Post (Pasadena, California) · Fri, Mar 5, 1920 · Page 6

In March, things started to get a little weird in the Bay Area suburb of El Cerrito:
- “Ouijamania” has frightened the town of El Cerrito to the point where the finger of suspicion is being pointed at every one of its 1200 inhabitants.
- Following a meeting in the town hall last night, plans were laid whereby alienists will examine whether “ouijamania” has affected their minds.
- The ouija board will be barred as pernicious.
- These developments followed the arrest of seven persons and the finding of a sanity inquiriy that four of them were insane. It was established that the ouija board’s mystic influence had tainted the minds of four women. The men were released. The women were committed to insane asylums.
- At the hearing the mere mention of the Ouija board set the women to talking wildly.
This article just hints at what supposedly happened, but I found a report from May 1920 that elaborates more:

“Ouija Driving Women Mad: New Mania Due to Occult Overindulgence Claims Many Victims.” The Owensboro Messenger (Owensboro, Kentucky) · Sun, May 16, 1920 · Page 22

Quote:

○ Town authorities have given instructions for a general probe by specialists of what amounts to an epidemic of weird psychic parties.

According to the newspaper, four women were arrested and put into the state hospital. The article claims that “police had broken in barred doors, found the occupants in a state of trance and gibbering about dictates from the “unseen” which they had followed out through strange rites. Day and night the women had hovered over the Ouija board. On two occasions, at least, twenty-four hour sittings had been held.”
Apparently, five children were found in the home (the youngest were two years old); their heads had been shaved to “drive away evil spirits.” Neighbors claimed that their children had been lured into the house.
To read a little more from the article:

○ Adeline Battini, a handsome girl of 15, seemed to have acted as high priestess in the spiritual orgies. It was she who profressed to have received most of the messages after she had introduced the Ouija to her family and friends. When the officers arrived and sought entrance, they were told that a “passion play” was in progress, and that the dead husband of one of the women was present and would kill any intruder. . . . Over $700 in bills had been burned . . . To appease the malicious spirits, and for the same reason most of the women’s clothing has been destroyed.

So for reference, $700 in 1920 is almost $9,000 today.
So the article continues:

○ Following these arrests, other cases quickly came to light. The Ouija and Planchette boards, twin implements in the recently greatly accelerated movement to penetrate the beyond, have sold in great number in El Cerrito. As in other American communities so took its ‘messages’ in a spirit of fun, but an unusual number accepted them seriously. They featured the backyard and parlor gossip of the town, especially among Italians.

Then it talks about how a cop in Oakland had been sent to the hospital with Ouijamania.
It also had a quote from the California Lunacy commission:

○ “We have had many commitments to state asylums during the past few months on account of the Ouija board. These persons who have been adjudged insane by the commission might have shown insanity by other means, but the Ouija board at present occupies a prime place in demonstrating insanity.

○ “It is a fact that since the war the people generally have gone into spiritualistic things and certain individuals have become demented on this account.”

Hey, do we think that people became demented because of the Ouija board, or because of the extremely traumatic war and then the epidemic that had followed?
- I read in a different article that the husband and daughter of one of the women had been killed a few weeks before in a car accident, and they’d started using the ouija board because she wanted to talk to them
This case is really interesting to me, because it makes me think of the 1980s Satanic Panic, which also involved weird rituals with young children, but which of course was completely made up. It makes me wonder how much of this was made up.
An article in the San Francisco Examiner called “Ouija Board Burned; Victims in Asylums,” talks about the case of the women in El Cerrito. The San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California) · Sat, Mar 6, 1920 · Page 13
It says that the ouija board has been burned by a man named Carlo Soldavini. It turns out that the women involved in that case had been his wife, her mother and sister, and niece.
All of the women were committed to asylums, though the men who’d been involved–Carlo Soldavini and Luigi and Vico Ferraro–were all released.
Two of the women were committed to Stockton, one of the hospitals that apparently sterilized all people of childbearing age upon their release, and then two of the women were committed to Napa Hospital, which apparently sterilized about one patient per week.
To quote from the article:
- The State Hospital authorities diagnose their cases as hysteria and say they will eventually recover.

On Mar 16, 1920, the Santa Ana Register publishes an article called “Plans to Stop Ouija Board Sales Here” elaborates on the actions that the government is taking in response to this story.

It begins:
- Discovery of many cases of “ouijamania” in the town of EL Cerrito near here, may result in barring the ouija board from the entire state of California.
- State Senator Will R. Sharkey has announced he will sponsor a bill in the next session of the legislature to prohibit sale of ouija boards in the state, just as many states prohibit punch boards.
And I know you’re wondering: what’s a punch board?
- It’s basically a single-use game board that was used for gambling.
- They were kind of like lottery tickets. (They sound kinda like scratch-off lottery tickets to me.)
- Apparently between 1910 and 1915, about 30 million punchboards were sold, though during punchboards’ peak in 1939, 50 million were sold. So they were very popular, but their popularity declined after WWII.
So, back to the ouijamania article: Senator Sharkey said that the ouija board craze was “as bad as the drug habit. The state legislatures or congress should act before the craze becomes worse. The bets thing to do would be to step in and prohibit the sale of ouija boards altogether.”
This senator was the publisher of a local newspaper, the Martinez Standard, and had a lot to say about the extreme case in El Cerrito:
- “These women offered up $700 in currency as a sacrifice to the evil spirits of the ouija board. . . They burned this money, together with curls clipped from the heads of children who had been enticed into their house.”
There’s this part of me that wonders if he’s more offended by the burned money than the allegedly kidnapped children.

The Santa Ana Register ran another article called “Is Santa Ana a Devotee of the Ouija Board?”

This article appears above the fold on the front page.
It talks about how 500-600 ouija boards had been sold by local stores over the past 6-8 months, and one local store has been selling 3-4 boards a day for months.
And on top of that, the library, was getting tons of requests for books about spiritualism and psychic communication.
It mentions the previous Ouija board craze, which it claims was about 14 years before, though it seemed to me that it was a little earlier than that. But at any rate, it credits the war with starting
It mentions how some people buy the boards thinking they may be real ways to communicate with the departed, and others buy it as a fun game.
They quote a local merchant who says:
- “Nearly everybody who buys a ouija board . . . Says that it is ‘just for the fun of it,’ but most of them say it with just about the same air that a dad uses in saying he went to the circus to take the kids. Occasionally some one buys and says that it is for the purpose of investigation, and occasionally some one expressed great faith in it.”
But he also hastens to say:
- “The very best people in the country [are buying it] . . . The buyers are not the poorly educated people of the city at all.”
There was also a fun bit of the article that talked about how to say Ouija:
- The ouija board, according to the dictionary, is a form of the planchette, and the orthodox way to pronounce the word is “wee-ja.” There are experts in its use, however, who call it the weejer, and even the wee-jee.
The article continues on the next page, where it’s accompanied by the one about banning the board, which we talked about, and one called “Highly Dangerous as well as very interesting.” It’s a really weird article because it’s basically just a plagiarized reprint of an editorial in the SF chronicle. But to read the opening, which is my favorite bit.
- The study of radium is interesting, but highly dangerous to anyone not scientifically equipped for that pursuit. So, too, is the study of psychics. Fortunately, the cost of radium prevents the ignorant from fooling with it. But unfortunately anyone can buy a ouija board.

Sources consulted in researching 1920s Ouijamania

Websites consulted RE: 1920s Ouijamania

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Lady
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftermath_of_World_War_I#Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic
https://mashable.com/2016/07/27/german-hyperinflation/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dementia_praecox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moron_(psychology)
https://www.nature.com/scitable/forums/genetics-generation/america-s-hidden-history-the-eugenics-movement-123919444/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imbecile
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_of_Endor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punchboard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_United_States#Nineteenth_Amendment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States#Start_of_national_prohibition_(January_1920)
https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/arts-culture/471058-why-ouija-boards-creep-us-out
https://williamfuld.com/ouija_letters_05081920.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s3w3w/im_a_patient_at_a_psychiatric_institution_in_the/
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/19th-and-20th-century-psychiatry-22-rare-photos/21/
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2008.08081271
https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/from-fever-cure-to-coma-therapy-psychiatric-treatments-through-time/
http://alexwellerstein.com/publications/?pdf=wellerstein_statesofeugenics.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenic_feminism
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/rockhaven-sanitarium-womens-mental-health/417264/
https://www.ibtimes.com/marie-stopes-womens-rights-activist-or-nazi-eugenicist-848457
http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2017/02/28/eugenics-and-feminism/
https://www-jstor-org.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/stable/30041957?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger#Eugenics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sleep_therapy
https://www.bustle.com/p/women-who-defied-gender-roles-were-once-imprisoned-in-asylums-55320
https://comstockhousehistory.blogspot.com/2008/11/sonoma-county-and-eugenics.html
https://comstockhousehistory.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-asylums-next-door.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_culture_in_San_Francisco#20th_century
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_discharge
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/in-the-early-20th-century-america-was-awash-in-incredible-queer-nightlife

Historical articles and advertisements RE: 1920s Ouijamania

“Blames Ouija Board and Bridge for Insanity Among Women.” Santa Ana Register (Santa Ana, California) · Fri, Oct 29, 1920 · Page 12
“Committed to Warm Springs.” The Billings Gazette (Billings, Montana) · Sat, Apr 3, 1920 · Page 5
“Health Talks by William Brady, M.D., Noted Physician and Author. Dementia Ouija.” The Fort Wayne Sentinel (Fort Wayne, Indiana) · Thu, Oct 14, 1920 · Page 4
“Do the Dead Communicate With the Living?” The Journal (Logan, Utah) · Tue, Mar 30, 1920 · Page 6
“Doctor Tells Ouija Board Secret Works.” Escanaba Morning Press (Escanaba, Michigan) · Wed, Jun 23, 1920 · Page 2
“Give these Ghosts a Job.” The Salina Evening Journal (Salina, Kansas) · Tue, Mar 23, 1920 · Page 8
“Hats off to Ouija Board.” University Daily Kansan (Lawrence, Kansas) · Mon, Apr 26, 1920 · Page 2
“Kiss Ouija Goodbye or Become a Moron: Dr. Hickson is Ready for All Who Trust in Board and Spirits, Are Primarily Praecox.” Ironwood Daily Globe (Ironwood, Michigan) · Thu, Feb 12, 1920 · Page 3
“Madam Ouija is Declared Fraud by Dr O’Shea: Is Adventuress in World of Psychology and Makes People Self Deceived.” The Fort Collins Courier (Fort Collins, Colorado) · Fri, Jun 25, 1920 · Page 5
“Calls Ouija Board ‘Agency of Devil’: W. B. Fowler Also Assails the “Boarders”: Tells Bible Students Satan Is Still Working Largely Through Women.” The Boston Globe (Boston, Massachusetts) · Mon, Mar 8, 1920 · Page 8
“Ouija Is Servant Of Subconcious Mind of Operator.” The Oregon Daily Journal (Portland, Oregon) · Mon, May 31, 1920 · Page 1, Page 22
“Ouija Driving Women Mad: New Mania Due to Occult Overindulgence Claims Many Victims.” The Owensboro Messenger (Owensboro, Kentucky) · Sun, May 16, 1920 · Page 22
“Ouija Boards as Oracles.” Arizona Daily Star (Tucson, Arizona) · Tue, Jan 27, 1920 · Page 4
“Ouija Boards to Be In Equipment.” The Whittier News (Whittier, California) · Tue, Mar 23, 1920 · Page 1
“Ouija Craze Has Struck Wichita. Mystic Boards and WOrks on Psychic World Are Much Sought in City.” The Wichita Daily Eagle (Wichita, Kansas) · Sun, Jan 4, 1920 · Page 32
“Ouijamania stirs inhabitants of El Cerrito.” Pasadena Evening Post (Pasadena, California) · Fri, Mar 5, 1920 · Page 6
“Psychic Cults and Systems: Why Mediums Have Control.” Buffalo Courier (Buffalo, New York) · Sun, Jun 6, 1920 · Page 34
“Sir Oliver Lodge Talks Here With ‘Spirit’ Via Ouija Board: 20-year-old Winnipeg Girl is Medium Used for Unique Experiment.”The Winnipeg Tribune (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) · Thu, Apr 29, 1920 · Page 1
“Spook Stuff.” The Chattanooga News (Chattanooga, Tennessee) · Mon, Mar 15, 1920 · Page 4
“Sure, Ouija Board KNows a Lot, Says ALeko at Pantages.” The San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California) · Thu, Apr 22, 1920 · Page 9
“The Case Against Spiritualism.” Dayton Daily News (Dayton, Ohio) · Sun, Jan 18, 1920 · Page 18
“Weakness and Ouijas.” Hanford Morning Journal (Hanford, California) · Sat, Sep 11, 1920 · Page 2
“Whole California City Ouija Crazy to be Examined.” Press-Courier (Oxnard, California) · Fri, Mar 5, 1920 · Page 1
“Why ‘Ouija,’ Is Jastrow Query: ‘Yes, Yes,’ Board Doesn’t Prevent Spooks from Saying ‘No.” Wisconsin State Journal (Madison, Wisconsin) · Wed, Apr 7, 1920 · Page 8
“Would Stop Sale of Ouija Boards in California.” The Whittier News (Whittier, California) · Sat, Mar 20, 1920 · Page 7
Ouija Boards All the Rage in Akron Thousands Bought. Akron Evening Times (Akron, Ohio) · Sun, Feb 15, 1920 · Page 35
About that Ouija Board. The Stockton Review (Stockton, Kansas) · Thu, Jan 1, 1920 · Page 1
Is Santa Ana a Devotee of the Ouija Board? Santa Ana Register (Santa Ana, California) · Tue, Mar 16, 1920 · Page 7
“They don’t do it in the very best spirit circles.” The Winfield Daily Free Press (Winfield, Kansas) · Mon, Nov 15, 1920 · Page 6
“Weird Ouija Board Rites Are Fertile Source of Mania.” The Billings Gazette (Billings, Montana) · Mon, Mar 29, 1920 · Page 1
“Ouija to be Banned from Sacramento.” The San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California) · Tue, Mar 9, 1920 · Page 4
“Ouija Board Blamed for Mental Trouble.” The San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California) · Sat, Mar 20, 1920 · Page 7
“Ouija Board Drives Policeman to Street Naked.” The San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California) · Sat, Mar 6, 1920 · Page 13

Check out the shownotes for the rest of the series to see all of the sources used.

Listen to the rest of the Ouija board series:

Don’t miss our past episodes:

Kill Daddy: The Turley Ouija Board Murder (Ouija Boards Part 9)

The Turley Ouija Board Murder: In 1933, a girl shot her father on the orders of a Ouija board. Or was it her former-beauty-queen mother who encouraged the violence?

When playing with a Ouija board with her mother, 14-year-old Mattie Turley receives the message that she must kill her father so her mother can be free to marry a handsome cowboy.

Her mother, Dorothea, who had won a beauty contest in 1916 and had attended the London Academy of Music, had married instead of following her dream of being an actress. Shortly after the family moved to an isolated cabin in the mountains of Arizona, Dorothea began consulting the Ouija board and making strange demands because of it. Was she just manipulating the people around her for her own purposes, or was something more mysterious afoot?

Highlights include:
• The “American Venus” beauty contest
• A manipulative mother
• A stereotypical cowboy
• A Ouija-ordered murder
• Scandal at a girls’ reform school
• America’s creepy salute
• Misandry vs. misogyny

From The Press Democrat, Sunday, Sep 2, 1934

From The Decatur Daily Review, Sun, Jul 22, 1934

From The Daily Republican. Thu, Jul 23, 1936

From The Evening Review. Wed, Sep 23, 1936

Episode Script for Kill Daddy: The Turley Ouija Board Murder (Ouija Boards Part 9)

BACK in the year 1917, Dorothea Irene Kelynack’s pretty little head contained no thoughts of Ouija boards – nor, possibly, of much else. But that didn’t matter, for Dorothea was only 22, and had just won, over 50,000 girls in a nation-wide contest, the title of “The American Venus.”

-Oakland Tribune, Nov. 14, 1937

There are a few Ouija board murders I want to talk about, but today I’d like to talk about the Turley murder case.
The story starts in March 1916, when Dorothea Irene Kelynack, from Astoria, New York, is declared “an exact flesh-and-blood replica of the marble Venus of the Louvre” by the New York Evening World.
- The article said that Dorothea had “springing, supple lines” and “arresting charm” and a “perfectly modeled, perfectly managed body.”
A writeup in the Washington post was accompanied by a photo of her wearing a floor-length, gauzy and very “ruched” strapless dress, and then a table comparing her measurements (height, weight, waist and ankle circumference, etc) to the Venus de Milo and Venuses at Wellesley and Swarthmore.
- Apparently colleges collected women’s measurements in their scoliosis screenings, so it I guess they found a woman with the “same” measurements of the Venus de Milo and announced her the Venus of that college.
Apparently she talked about how she wore a loose corset, and enjoyed drinking wine at dinner and eating candy. She said that it’s important for women to have a career to keep “mentally alert”
At the time, she was performing as a singer in NYC. She’d studied at the London Academy of Music, and wanted to be a stage or screen actor. She’d apparently also spent time at colleges in Dublin, Leipzig, Paris, and Berlin.
When she was a kid, she was a tomboy. She said:
- “I believe that the tomboy has a better chance of becoming a Venus than the affected, artificial, repressed child whose one duty in life is to be ‘be a little lady,’”
She apparently received hundreds of letters and marriage proposals.
In early 1918, she ended up eloping with Ernest Turley, who was in the Navy.
In December 1918, while they were living in Boston, they had a daughter, Mattie, and a year or two later, they had a son, David.
They moved to California, and then in August 1933 they relocated to Arizona, because Dorothea had asthma and the Arizona air was supposed to be good for her lungs.
It sounds like they lived in a fairly rural area, in the White Mountains, near Springerville, Arizona. Their home was a small house that I saw described as a “shack” or as an “ugly rented cabin.” Apparently their only neighbors were cattle ranchers.
We don’t have a ton of information about how she felt about it, but based on everything we know about her, I’d be surprised if she was happy. She went from being basically a refined beauty queen in NYC to living in a small house with a military man in Great Depression-era Arizona.
Contemporary newspapers said that her husband’s salary wasn’t in keeping with her desire for a lavish lifestyle, etc, but that may just be sexism talking.
So in 1933, Dorothea supposedly started doing two things:
- Around September, a month after they’d moved to Arizona, she started playing around with a ouija board.
  - While going for a walk, she saw some “picture rocks” or artifacts from prehistoric indigenous people.
  - She asked the Ouija board about the rocks, and it said that gold was buried underneath them.
  - Supposedly she convinced Ernest to do some digging and dynamiting to try to find the gold, but they didn’t find anything.
  - Both Mattie and David later said that while their father was blowing up rocks, their mother was hanging out with a “young cowboy.”
  - This whole episode caused some argument between them, and supposedly they got into a few arguments over the next few months. One article claimed that she screamed at him: “Every time I look at you I want to kill you!” However, it doesn’t say who reported that he’d said that, and I wonder if the reporter was embellishing for a better story.
- So the other thing that happened shortly after they moved to Arizona is that Dorothea met a 22-year-old, cowboy named Kent Pearce, the young cowboy who Dorothea had been spending time with.
  - According to contemporary newspaper accounts, he was a “movie-type cowpuncher, big hat, neckerchief, tight pants, bow legs.”
  - I want to read a bit of from an article by Lynn Peril, from 2016, which is linked in the shownotes:
    - Like Dorothea before him, Pearce dreamed of a movie career. Mattie testified that her mother and Pearce frequently drove out of town for late-night petting parties, with 14-year-old Mattie and a friend of Pearce’s in the backseat. Once the foursome stayed out until morning. “I have a hell of a good time on the Mesa,” Dorothea told a neighbor.
  - That’s . . . Really screwed up. And this is around the time when I lose all sympathy for Dorothea.
  - I read one article that almost made it sound like Pearce thought both Dorothea and Mattie were attractive, which was really creepy.
  - Also, just in general, there’s a lot of stuff written about how attractive both Dorothea and Mattie were. For example, here’s an excerpt of a 1937 article talking about the case and describing the mother and daughter using the Ouija board together:
    - Mother and daughter, both strikingly beautiful, they faced each other across a small table. . . .The girl was only fifteen – but in her smooth oval face, tilted upwards, and in the gracious mood of her form, a precocious maturity was evident. Her eyes remained closed, but the eyes of her striking mother were open. They rested sometimes on the board, sometimes on the girl, with a sombre, inscrutable gaze.
  - Also, correction, she was fourteen what that happened (she turned 15 in December 1933).
Dorothea supposedly started asking her husband about his life insurance policies (he had two policies worth $5,000 each, which is almost $100K in today’s dollars.)
She and Mattie also apparently started questioning Ernest about the range of Mattie’s gun, asking how far away they needed to be to kill a deer.
Also, at the same time, Dorothea and Mattie were playing with the Ouija board together, and supposedly the board started saying that Mattie needed to kill her father in order to free her mother. The board told her that she wouldn’t get in trouble if she did it, etc.
- To me, this is pretty obviously Dorothea manipulating the board and her daughter.
- The particular session where the board said that Mattie must kill her father was on November 8, 1933.
- Tthey also used cards to confirm the command. Mattie said:
  - The queen of hearts was to stand for mother, the king for the cowboy she wanted to marry, the ten spot diamond for father and the ace of spades for death. Time and again, the king and queen came up together, and the ten spot and ace were paired. That meant death for daddy.
On November 17, 1933, a skunk crawled under the family’s house and started making a lot of noise and stinking up the place. The family couldn’t sleep, and the next day, was David’s birthday. When Dorothea and David were out buying groceries for a special dinner that night, Mattie stayed home with her father to try to help him catch the skunk, at Dorothea’s suggestion.
According to a fairly lurid article, supposedly Dorothea and David left Mattie” holding her loaded shotgun and eating an apple.”
Ernest went to milk their cow, and she followed him, still holding her loaded gun. Then when he headed back home, Mattie hung behind. Suddenly two shots rang out, and Ernest had been hit. When Ernest turned around, he saw Mattie on her knees holding the gun.
Mattie was extremely upset about having hurt him, and rushed over.
He assumed it was an accident and admonished her, saying “You should be more careful. Let this be a lesson to you.” before sending her to get help.
Dorothea and David were just getting home as Mattie was leaving, and Mattie told them that she’d accidentally shot her father. She explained that she’d tripped, which had made the gun go off.
A few hours later, the doctor and some neighbors had come over.
Cowboy Kent Pearce supposedly held the lamp as Dorothea took care of Ernest.
Mattie was hysterical and people felt bad for her.
The cops came and seemed to believe Mattie’s story. But one cop was suspicious, because the bullets had traveled downward in Ernest’s body as if she’d been standing with the gun at her shoulder. If Mattie had been shooting from below, they would have gone upwards.
When he brought up his suspicious, Mattie confessed that she had intentionally shot her father because the Ouija board told her to.
She testified that:
- “ I remembered how important it was to Mother for her to marry her handsome cowboy, so I raised the gun quickly again and shot both barrels.”
When asked about the Ouija board session, she said she and her mother had used the board together, and the board had spelled out “Daddy must die” and when she asked who was going to kill him, it said “MT” which her mother said meant Mattie Turley.
Mattie also said:
- “I asked Mother if I had to do what the ouija board said, and she told me there was no escaping its command.”
- She also said: “Mother told me that the ouija board could not be denied and that I would not even be arrested for doing it.”
- This to me really feels like Dorothea was behind all of this, and her plan went awry as soon as Mattie confessed.
- Mattie later said that she almost lost her nerve and didn’t shoot, but then when she thought about “how much it would mean” to her mother, she did it.
When Dorothea heard about the confession, she flipped out. She said the cops had interrogated Mattie and browbeat her to the point that she would have confessed to anything.
Mattie said she wasn’t mistreated; she told the truth because she thought it was the right thing to do.
Dorothea maintained that the shooting was accidental.
Initially, it seemed like Ernest would survive.
It sounds like Mattie didn’t have much of a trial, if it even was a trial–I think it was just a court hearing? On December 22, 1933, she pleaded guilty to an attempted murder charge, and the county attorney reccomended that she be sent to the State School for Girls for 6 years. The attourney seemed somewhat sympathetic, and said that “she is very much broken up over the whole affair.”
- So that’s what happened. I tried to find out what I could about the state school for girls, which was opened in 1928, but there’s not a lot of information about it, probably because it was only around for about 8 years.
- The Arizona State School for Girls was in Randolph, Arizona, which is a historically black area that grew as black agricultural workers left Oklahoma and settled in Arizona. We have an image of “Okies” as white farmers, but many were black.
- It sounds like the school housed girls with mental health issues in addition to girls with criminal pasts.
- The school closed in 1936.
- Records from the attorney generals office claim that it was shut down by the state to save money, but I found a dissertation by an intern who worked at a county juvenile court, which was published in 1963, which told a different story:
  - The school was abolished by the legislature in 1935 due to scandal caused by alleged sexual relations between the girls and prisoners from the state prison in Florence who took care of the maintenance work for the school.
- The girls were moved to a privately run religious institution that I think was affiliated with a convent.
I wanted to read another little bit of Lynn Peril’s article:
- “They thought I wouldn’t take the rap,” [Mattie] said. “But I killed Daddy and I want to pay for it. That’s the only way I can show the world and him how sorry I am.” When she was taken away to begin serving her sentence at the grim-sounding State School for Girls, Dorothea told her, in what Mattie called and cold and sarcastic tone: “I thank you for your cooperation. Be a good girl.”
So meanwhile, back in December of 1933, Ernest’s conditioned worsened. He’d started out at a local hospital, but then he was was brought on a US Marines plane to a naval base hospital in San Diego. While in the hospital there, he said “When I’m able I’m going back to Arizona to prosecute my daughter to the full extent of the law for her attempt to murder me.”
He died in San Diego on December 26, 1933, a little over a month after he was shot, and four days after Mattie’s hearing.
This was a big problem for Dorothea, because suddenly this was a murder case, and Dorothea was held as an accomplice with $5000 bail.
As for Dorothea, her trial got tons of news coverage and was described as a “worldwide spectacle.” To read a bit from a 1937 Oakland Tribute article that described Dorothea’s trial:
- Mother and daughter faced each other across a crowded courtroom, and Mattie stuck to her story. Young Pollard Wiltbank, the “apprentice” cowboy, swore that Kent Pearce and Mrs. Turley spent most of their time together, on outings, in each other’s arms. A neighbor woman testified that the accused had said she loved Pearce and wanted to marry him. Pearce, on the stand, denied hopes of marriage – but Mrs. Turley was sent to prison for 20 years.
Another article I read said she got 25 years, but at any rate it was a long time.
As a reminder, her jury was made up of 12 men, since women weren’t allowed on juries at the time–it sounds like some states started letting them serve in the late 1930s. Supposedly the jury was made up of cowboys and ranchers, which doesn’t seem like a sympathetic audience for a rancher’s murder case.
It really sounds like the main evidence against Dorothea was Mattie’s testimony. Mattie said that she’d been directed by the Ouija board to shoot her father so “mother could marry a handsome cowboy.”
But to the end, Dorothea insisted that Mattie had shot Ernest accidentally.
Apparently Mattie’s brother, David, told her: “Now you’ve done what you wanted to do to her” (meaning his mother) “I hope you’re satisfied.”
- I haven’t been able to find much else that seemed to accuse Mattie of plotting her mother’s demise, though Lynn Peril’s article says:

Mattie was angry with [her mother and] her father because they “didn’t want her to use rouge or to run about at night with cowpunchers or to cross her legs the way she did or to wear such short dresses.” She tried to pin the blame on her mother, Dorothea said, “because some of the cowboys didn’t like me.”

I’m not sure if I understand that logic, but if she was trying to get her mom in trouble, this was kinda a weird way to do it, since she ended up locked up too and she was the one holding the murder weapon. My sense is that this is more a reflection of David’s sorrow at his family being broken up and wanting to not hate his mother. At this point, I think he would have been around 13 or 14.
In prison, Dorothea worked at the prison library, I guess because she was so well educated.
On May 20, 1935, Dorothea made a plea to the supreme court for her conviction to be overturned.
In June 1936, after she’d spent 2 years in prison, the State Supreme Court granted Dorothea was a new trial.
The judge dismissed the first degree assault charges because the attorney general said that there wasn’t enough evidence to have a second trial. The attorney general had taken on the case because the county attorney, who should have prosecuted, was one of Dorothea’s lawyers for the first trial.
So Dorothea was acquitted, and on September 12, 1936, Dorothea walked free.
She told reporters that she planned to secure her daughter’s release from the state school and bring her “back East.”
David had been sent to live with Dorothea’s mother in Ridgewood, NY (in Queens.) Dorothea said that she and Mattie would go live there with them.
But it turns that Mattie didn’t want to go live with her mother. I can’t imagine why . . .
- She initially refused to see Dorothea, but then saw her and told her that she never wanted to see her again.
So, in April 1938, Dorothea sued Thelma Branford Bailey, who’d been the superintendent of the reform school where Mattie had been for $7,500. She claimed that Mattie’s mind had been “poisoned” against her. She didn’t win the lawsuit.
Dorothea died in 1973, when she was 78 years old, and it’s unclear what happened to Mattie and David.
I want to talk a little about some of the gender stuff going on here. Most of my sources for this are historical newspaper sources from the 1930s, though I did look at 3-4 websites as well. While googling, I saw that this case is definitely not very well known, but it’s been used by small sites with gender-related focuses to back up their points.
So, first, there’s a “misandry” site that reprinted many of the historical articles, though it didn’t really have any commentary. I think this was just supposed to be a straight-up example of “misandry”
- What do you think of when you hear the word “misandry”?
- To me, it’s definitely a tongue-in-cheek term. It’s supposedly a counterpart to misogyny, but of course it’s not misogyny’s opposite, since misogyny has been a major societal force for a long time and it still drives and motivates many people and movements today.
- Whereas misandry is a term that I’ve heard mostly used by queer women in the context of jokes, but tbh I don’t think I’ve heard someone say it out loud since like 2014 or 2015. The “misandry” blog post that reprinted some of these articles was from 2011.
- While many homophobic people have called queer women men-haters, in my experience it’s actually straight women who hate men the most, because they have to be with them. Like how many murder cases are there of queer women killing men, and how many murders cases are there of wives murdering their husbands?
So then on the other side of things, I accidentally clicked into a mens rights activist site that had a write-up of the case as an example of how men have been historically marginalized, etc. I didn’t read it very closely because it’s just an example of someone trolling through history, finding one of the rarer cases of domestic violence driven by a wife rather than a husband, and trying to use it as an argument that white men are a traditionally marginalized group, which is ridiculous.
- Though to be clear, domestic violence can be perpetuated by people of any gender, toward partners of any gender, but if we’re looking at the wide view of history, I think we can probably agree that white men are generally not a marginalized group.
But my point in bringing up these two examples is that there’s a reason why people on both feminist and misogynist camps bring up this article: it’s because it’s really easy to profile Dorothea as a petty, materialistic woman who wasn’t being kept in the custom she was used to and who wanted luxury, adoration, and a hot young boyfriend. And she was willing to tear up her family to get it.
It’s extremely hard for me to sympathize with Dorothea, because I believe Mattie’s testimony over Dorothea’s, and it’s so screwed up to use your own 14-year-old child as a murder vicitim.
I think we can probably agree that Dorothea is a bully who just happened to underestimate her daughter’s conscience, and who maybe thought she’d used the Ouija board to scare her daughter into obeying her.
But while reading these articles, I couldn’t help wondering what her marriage was really like. The articles all depicted Ernest as a hard-working vicitim who was just trying to give his family, in particular his wife, a good life. And that may be true. Maybe Dorothea was just a scheming, evil wife. But they lived in a really remote location, and the press was really prejudiced back then, just like it is now, so who knows? Maybe Dorothea was driven into the arms of a younger man because her husband was cruel?
We’ll never know, but I think it’s important for us to remember that in this story, as in any story in history, we’re really only getting one side of the story. And in this case, the story is Mattie’s, which is the side that happens to match the story that the press and courts wanted to be true.
One of my sources, the December 22, 1933, edition of The Monroe News-Star from Monroe, Louisiana, printed a huge article that takes up the whole top part of the page, called Do Good Wives Go On Strike? on page 2, above the continuation of the Turley murder case story that had started on the front page.
- The article was a syndicated article, so it wasn’t written by someone in Monroe, it was acquired through a newspaper service like many historical articles that I see are.
- The author of the article was Kathleen Norris, a popular novelist and newspaper writer who was one of the highest-read and highest-paid female writers of her time. She wrote 93 novels, and a lot of them were bestsellers.
  - According to Wikipedia, “Norris used her fiction to promote family and moralistic values, such as the sanctity of marriage, the nobility of motherhood, and the importance of service to others.”
  - One digression RE: Kathleen Norris that is interesting enough to talk about is that there’s a picture of her in 1941 at an “America First Committee” rally at Madison Square Garden giving what looks like a Nazi salute (picture linked in the shownotes). She was one of the big four organizers of the America First Committee.
    - The America First Committee was formed in 1940 as an anti-interventionist group that opposed America’s entry into WWII.
    - From the beginning, it had pretty mixed messages. Initially it was just about not intervening, but pretty quickly, it attracted antisemetic and pro-fascist leaders. It dissolved in December 1921, after Pearl Harbor, but at its height, it had 800,000 members and was one of the largest anti-war groups in US history. Modern-day right-wing people like Pat Buchanan (and later on, the Trump administration) adopted the “America First” slogan from this group.
    - Famed aviator Charles Lindberg was a member, and a prominent anti-war activist, who was really admired in 1930s Germany, so much so that in 1937, he was invited to tour the German air force, or Luftwaffee, as it ramped up. Though he was still publicly anti-war, after his trip, he advised the US Army that the US had fallen far behind and needed to beef up its air corps. Lindberg was widely viewed of anti-Semitic because of some of the anti-war speeches he continued to give, even after his visit to Germany.
    - Children’s book author Dr. Seuss actually created about 400 political cartoons for a New York tabloid called PM, and many of those cartoons were focused on criticizing the America First movement and saying that the group was pro-Nazi. There’s one from October 1941 that shows a woman wearing a sweater that says “America First” reading a book called Adolf the Wolf to two upset-looking children. She says “. . . And the Wolf chewed up the children and spit out those bones . . . But those were Foreign Children and it really didn’t matter.” (Though to be clear, he also published some cartoons that advocated the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps so not all of his advocacy was good. I guess he later regret it and wrote Horton Hears a Who as a book about how Americans’ occupation of Japan, and it was supposed to be an allegory and apology.)
    - So anyway, back to Kathleen Norris: What was this salute that Kathleen Norris gave at the America First Committee Rally? It was supposedly something called the Bellamy salute, which was popularized in the United States in 1892, and to me at least, it’s practically indistinguishable from the Nazi salute.
    - Sidenote, the Bellamy salute was supposed to be a palm up salute, but all the pictures I found from the 19th century shows it as a palm-down salute.
    - In 1920, Italian fascists adopted a similar salute, calling it a Roman salute, and of course the Nazis followed suit in 1923.
    - The Bellamy salute became controversial, though groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution argued that America should keep its Bellamy salute.
    - People said that interventionists took pictures of anti-interventionists doing the Bellamy salute to make them look like Nazis, though I think it’s really fair to ask why they continued doing the Bellamy salute even in the early 1940s, 20 years after the Nazis had started using it, and when some Americans had started condemning it as being too close to the Nazi salute. It seems really pointed to me that they kept doing it, especially since they could have plausible deniability. The Bellamy salute was discontinued in 1942.
    - Much like eugenics, it kinda feels like the Bellamy salute was something Americans started, Germans adopted because they thought it was a good idea, and then after Americans joined WWII, Americans had to rewrite history a bit for optics reasons.
    - But you can take a look at the Wikipedia page for the Bellamy salute if you want to see a bunch of American schoolchildren looking like Hitler youth.
    - By the way, when I was reading about the Bellamy salute, I remembered something that I’d totally forgotten. So because I went to public school, every school day from kindergarten through 12th grade started with the American pledge and the Texas pledge, and every classroom had both flags hung up above the blackboard in the front of the room.
    - We were told that we had to stand for the pledge, and the normal way to salute was to put your right hand over your heart. But I remember that there was a second accepted way, where you could hold your right hand straight out, with your palm up and your elbow tucked against your waist.
    - It’s basically the configuration you get if you had your hand on your heart and dropped it. But I wonder if that was a revised version of the Bellamy salute, where they had to change it so it didn’t look like the Nazi salute.
- So back to the article that Kathleen Norris wrote: it’s a fairly conservative article, underscoring that divorce is bad and women should stand by their man, etc, but the main thrust of the article is that wives should be allowed to have fun things to look forward to, like trips and vacations with the family and with their female friends, to lighten the drudgery of the household work.
- To read a bit of it:
  - To know that in a few months she is going up to visit her sister in Canada, or that she and Betty are to have the car and ramble away toward the Lakes for three weeks, makes all the home drudgery light, and preserves her in the ridiculous delusion under which she descended years ago; that she got the best man in the world.
- And then later, the article closes with:
  - The children scramble for books, slam doors, are gone. A fly buzzes in the kitchen; another in the bedroom. The bathroom is all tumbled towels and spilled water; the breakfast table sticky with cups and melting butter; magazines and cigarette ashes are scattered about the sitting room; there is dust everywhere. This is mother’s daily situation. Any woman who has been married nineteen years has faced it alone almost seven thousand times.
- So even though this article has some a sort of almost feminist veneer if you squint at it, it’s no surprise that the Monroe News-Star was fine with printing it alongside and article about a supposedly evil and unhinged wife. And after all, it contains lines like “It is strange that so many fine men pick superficial, cold, little gold-diggers for wives and so many self-centered men get good women.”

Sources consulted RE: the Turley Ouija Board Murder

Websites RE: the Turley Ouija Board Murder

Kathleen Norris doing the Bellamy salute: https://twitter.com/MoviesSilently/status/1048320703194255360
Good picture of Dorothea Turley: https://www.flickr.com/photos/chain12/49670170433/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_United_States_juries
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-dr-seuss-satirized-america-first-decades-donald-trump-made-policy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Norris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_salute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_salute
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/17889624/dorothea-irene-kelynack-american-venus/
https://www.hilobrow.com/2016/08/25/planet-of-peril-7/
http://www.city-data.com/forum/phoenix-area/192459-how-do-you-remember-phoenix-stories-851.html
https://repository.arizona.edu/bitstream/handle/10150/551304/AZU_TD_BOX224_E9791_1957_88.pdf?sequence=1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randolph,_Arizona
https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/611636
https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/digital/api/collection/statepubs/id/33747/download
https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/digital/collection/agopinions/search/searchterm/state%20school%20for%20girls
https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/digital/collection/agopinions/id/12080
https://reallifeishorror.blogspot.com/2015/11/real-life-ouija-board-murders-dorothea.html
https://unknownmisandry.blogspot.com/2011/12/donna-turleys-clever-tactic-to-murder.html
https://knowledgenuts.com/2013/07/30/the-first-murder-by-ouija-board/
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/01/death-from-beyond-bizarre-cases-of-ouija-board-killings/

Historical articles and advertisements RE: the Turley Ouija Board Murder

The Monroe News-Star (Monroe, Louisiana) · Fri, Dec 22, 1933 · Page 1-2
The Decatur Daily Review (Decatur, Illinois) · Sun, Jul 22, 1934 · Page 32
Longview News-Journal (Longview, Texas) · Sun, Dec 24, 1933 · Page 22
Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, December 29, 1933, Page A-7, Image 7
The Coshocton Tribune (Coshocton, Ohio) · Wed, Dec 27, 1933 · Page 1
Corsicana Daily Sun (Corsicana, Texas) · Fri, Dec 22, 1933 · Page 2
Pampa Daily News (Pampa, Texas) · Fri, Dec 22, 1933 · Page 1
The Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City, Utah) · Sat, Dec 23, 1933 · Page 8
The Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City, Utah) · Thu, Dec 28, 1933 · Page 2
The Decatur Daily Review (Decatur, Illinois) · Sun, Jul 22, 1934 · Page 32
The Paris News (Paris, Texas) · Wed, Jan 31, 1934 · Page 8
The Wellington Leader (Wellington, Texas) · Thu, Feb 1, 1934 · Page 12
The Daily Capital News (Jefferson City, Missouri) · Thu, Jun 14, 1934 · Page 10
The Marshall News Messenger (Marshall, Texas) · Mon, Jun 11, 1934 · Page 8
Stockton Independent (Stockton, California) · Sun, Jun 10, 1934 · Page 13
The Pasadena Post (Pasadena, California) · Mon, Jun 11, 1934 · Page 2
Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, July 08, 1934,Page B-3, Image 19
The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, California) · Sun, Sep 2, 1934 · Page 7
The San Bernardino County Sun (San Bernardino, California) · Tue, Apr 30, 1935 · Page 13
The Nebraska State Journal (Lincoln, Nebraska) · Wed, Jul 1, 1936 · Page 10
The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, California) · Tue, Jun 30, 1936 · Page 1
The Daily Republican (Monongahela, Pennsylvania) · Thu, Jul 23, 1936 · Page 4
The Evening Review (East Liverpool, Ohio) · Wed, Sep 23, 1936 · Page 5
The Whittier News (Whittier, California) · Sat, Sep 12, 1936 · Page 1
The Anniston Star (Anniston, Alabama) · Sat, Feb 6, 1937 · Page 2
Mrs Turley Files Suit for 7500-Evening star., April 20, 1938, Page A-5, Image 5
The Whittier News (Whittier, California) · Sat, Apr 21, 1934 · Page 5
The Gallup Independent (Gallup, New Mexico) · Fri, Jun 1, 1934 · Page 6

Check out the shownotes for the rest of the series to see all of the sources used.

Listen to the rest of the Ouija board series:

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Quinta da Regaleira Symbolism: The Occult Mysteries of a Portuguese Palace and Garden

Quinta da Regaleira Symbolism: A deep dive into the mysteries and history of a strange palace and garden built by an eccentric millionaire in Sintra, Portugal.

Sometimes described as a playground for adults, Quinta da Regaleira is a mysterious estate built by a millionaire entomologist in the early 20th century, full of occult and masonic references. Chris talks about the history, symbolism, and some theories about the place.

Highlights include:
• A city named after a moon temple
• Freemason symbolism
• An Initiation Well
• A tree that’s the last of its kind
• Green men
• Pentagrams on church floors
• Secret tunnels
• A “floating” library

Photo by Chris

A goat head decorating a building / Photo by Chris

Photo by Chris

Tower / Photo by Chris

Leda’s Cave / Photo by Chris

The palace / Photo by Chris

The door to the church basement / Photo by Chris

The front of the church / Photo by Chris

The church interior (ground floor) / Photo by Chris

The church ceiling (ground floor) / Photo by Chris

Photo by Chris

The palace / Photo by Chris

Another castle, seen from Quinta da Regaleira / Photo by Chris

A green man adorns a decorative urn / Photo by Chris

The Initiation Well / Photo by Chris

The Portal of the Guardians–crocodiles or dragons? / Photo by Chris

The Unfinished Well / Photo by Chris

Episode Script for Quinta da Regaleira Symbolism: The Occult Mysteries of a Portuguese Palace and Garden

“Since the beginning of recorded time, Sintra has been regarded as a land cloaked in mysticism. It permeates its steep hillsides and even its air. It’s common to be surrounded in nevoeiro (fog) one moment and the next, bathed in sunlight. . . . You can feel a bigger, stranger power at work in those hills. Its legends have been passed orally through generations and have survived since the time of the Moors — and maybe even before then.”

-from an article in Atlas Lisboa about paranormal events in Sintra, Portugal

“Since the beginning of recorded time, Sintra has been regarded as a land cloaked in mysticism. . . . You can feel a bigger, stranger power at work in those hills. Its legends have been passed orally through generations and have survived since the time of the Moors — and maybe even before then.”

-from an article in Atlas Lisboa about paranormal events in Sintra, Portugal

Intro to topic:

I visited it by chance, while on my honeymoon in Portugal. My wife and I were headed to a castle higher up on the mountain and got tired right as we reached an ornate portal set against the side of what looked like a large, walled garden set into the side of a mountain.

The whole story:

About an hour’s train ride from Lisbon lies the town of Sintra. It’s a popular tourist destination, because it’s a charming, historic town complete with several palaces and castles set on the side of a group of mountains.
Even in the 19th century, it was a favorite haunt of Romantic poets like Byron. Apparently he once wrote a poem that alluded to hooking up with men in Sintra.
And there’s even a story about occultist Aleister Crowley visiting the area, which we’ll talk about on a later episode, because it’s fascinating and weird.
And part of the Roman Polanski movie The Ninth Gate, a thriller starring Johnny Depp who plays a rare books dealer, was filmed there. (Have you seen that?)
The area has a pretty creepy history.
In Roman times, the people of the area built a temple to Emperor Octavius Augustus II, but once they built it, Rome rejected it for some reason. So then the people of the area dedicated it to the moon, Cinthia [note: I think pronounced with the th], giving the area it’s name, Sintra.
One night, in October 1984, the residents of a farm in Sintra called the police, saying that rocks were being thrown at people.
- When the police came, they brought lights and saw that the stones were coming out of thin air.
- When they felt the stones, they were warm to the touch.
- One firefighter said loudly that he didn’t believe in witchcraft, and then a stone came flying at him and would have smashed his head if he hadn’t stepped back at the last minute.
- The activity seemed centered around the groundskeeper, but no one knew why, and after that night, it didn’t happen again.

On the side of a mountain in Sintra, Portugal, sits a strange, esoteric estate.

The buildings are full of symbolism related to Freemasonry, the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, and alchemy. Stylistically, the buildings are a combo of Roman, Gothic, Renaissance, and Manueline.
The Manueline style is a Portuguese architectural style that looks like if a Gothic church, a wedding cake, and an Indian palace were combined into an extravaganza of carved flowers, birds, and nautical elements.
The first named owner I could find of the property was the Baroness da Regaliera.
- She was the daughter of a wealthy merchant from Porto, the big port city in Portugal.
- She bought the land in 1840 and turned it into a summer home, complete with a huge house and a chapel.
In 1892, an eccentric millionaire entomologist named António Augusto Carvalho Monteiro bought the estate at a public auction.
- He was born in Rio, but his parents were Portuguese.
- His family was wealthy, and he became even richer by selling coffee and precious stones in Brazil. When he moved to Portugal, he studied law.
- The official guide to the estate calls him a “celebrated capitalist,” which seems about right.
- Apparently he was a bibliophile, collector, poet, and an occultist.
- One of the few concrete details I was able to find about him was that he was famous for owning what was at the time the most complicated watch in the world, called a Leroy 01.
After buying the estate, Monteiro purchased some other land around it. The official map says that the property is pentagonal, though other people have noted that it looks like an upside down pentagram.
Monteiro was originally going to build a French Neo-Gothic house on the property, but by chance while on a train ride, he met an Italian architect and opera set designer named Luigi Manini. They must have really hit it off, because he hired Manini to help design the estate, which they built over the course of 6 years, from 1904 to 1910.
The estate sprawls across 10 acres of land. It contains various grottos and ponds, which they had to built 5 miles of acqueducts to bring water to.
It was known as the “Palace of Monteiro the Millionaire”
There’s a weird dearth of good information in English about the site; almost everything I found was just a regurgitation of the information from wikipedia.
- There was one book that I found that looked good, but it was in Portugese, is out of print, cost 100 to buy used, and I couldn’t find it online.
- So instead, I read every article I could find about the estate.
A bunch of the articles about contradict each other.
- For example, I found one article that claimed that Monteiro wasn’t a Freemason, and that the Templar symbolism is just his homage to Portugal’s history, and that no initiation rites were held on the site.
- Based on the level of occult symbolism on the estate, that seems like BS, but I’m mentioning it just as an example of the kind of variation there is in what’s been written about the place.
- Also, based on the youtube videos I watched, a lot of the interest in the site is just because people are able to take good instagram pictures of the Initiation Well, so a lot of articles about it are basically just vehicles for those pictures.
Most of the stuff I read about the estate basically said, “It’s really weird and beautiful, it’s full of occult symbolism, it’s a mystery and we’ll NEVER KNOW WHAT IT MEANS.”
- But that seems really ridiculous to me, because it’s barely more than 100 years old, and I don’t think any of the occult symbolism is lost to time, or anything.
- When I was there, I was able to recognize a decent amount of the symbolism, just based on what I learned in my classics courses in college and the little bit of occult reading that I’ve done.
- But I felt sure I could find someone who could put a lot of the pieces together, and I did!
I found the website of a Finnish writer, musician, and filmmaker named Aki Cederberg. He visited the estate and had a lot to say about the occult symbolism, so as I talk about the estate, I’m going to summarize some of his points, especially about areas that were closed when we visited. If you want to read his full piece about it, I’ve linked it in the show notes, along with all of my other sources.
- First, Cederberg claims that the whole estate is an upside down, or inverted pentagram, based on the shape of the borders of the estate, and how everything in the estate is oriented. In the shownotes, I’ve included a link to a map of the grounds, so you can see for yourselves. I sort of see it?
- Cederberg got to see some parts of the palace that were closed when we were there, and pointed out that:
  - Monteiro once had a huge esoteric library. It sounds like the books are elsewhere these days, but the library apparently has a black floor with mirrors at the bottoms of the bookshelves, which makes the room look like it’s floating.
  - There’s an alchemical motto about internal purification written on the wall. In latin, it’s abbreviated as VITRIOL: Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Ocultum Lapidem (Veram Medicinam). (Sorry about my bad latin. The English is: Visit the Interior of the Earth, and Rectifying (Purifying), you will find the Hidden Stone (True Medicine)
  - There’s also a quote from Henrique José de Souza who was an occultist, though I couldn’t find any info about him in English. The quote translates as: “Lead me from illusion to reality, from darkness to light, from death to immortality.”
- The chapel was also closed when we were there–we were able to look in from the doorway, but not go inside. But Cederberg had some really interesting thoughts on that too:
- He notes that the chapel is built to represent the Axis Mundi, which is the cosmic pillar or world tree, because it has three floors (one underground, one on the ground level, and one above the ground.) So they represent the underworld, earth, and heaven.
  - To get into the chapel’s lowest level, the crypt, you have to go through a metal gate with a “spiral-horned animal creature along with a prominent pentagram and two sunwheels”
  - A sunwheel, by the way, is an equal-armed cross in a circle. It has a lot of pagan connotations and symbolism, and represents things like the four seasons, the cardinal directions, etc.
    - I guess there’s also a thing called a sunwheel or sonnenrad, which is a neo-nazi symbol. According to the anti-defamation league, those are usually circular symbols with a bunch of crooked rays going out toward the edge of the wheel.
    - The anti-defamation league calls the equal-armed cross with a circle a celtic cross, sun cross, or Odin’s cross, and apparently it’s one of the most well-known white supremacist symbols. It became popular among Norweigan Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, and now neo-nazis, the KKK, and even organizations like the white supremacist website stormfront use the symbol. I actually hadn’t realized that until I looked it up, though I knew the iron cross was a nazi symbol. But btw, the celtic cross is definitely used by non-nazis, but that’s the version with the elongated vertical part.
  - He notes that the floor’s black-and-white tiles are similar to ones that Freemasons use, and represent dark/light, masculine/feminine, and balance.
  - The altar is carved marble slate with black crosses above and below it. Apparently Monteiro was laid out there after he died in 1920.
  - Also, if you look at the map, it says that there’s a secret passageway that goes from the crypt to the palace. I don’t think it’s open to the public, but it’s pretty cool.
  - Then you go up a spiral staircase and reach the ground floor. On the ceiling above the main entrance is an all-seeing eye set on top of a templar cross (The all-seeing eye has links to Freemasonry, Egyptian and Hindu mythologies. And, sidenote, I saw other eyes in triangles in other churches around Portugal, especially in Porto, so it’s not so unusual.)
  - The area around the main entrance is full of other symbology, too, including a mystic rose, and ark, a grail-like chalice, and a Templar cross. A Templar Cross is just a cross with even arms, a symbol that was used by the Knights Templar.
  - The main floor of the chapel also has a templar cross, with pentagrams and sunwheels around it.
  - On the ground floor’s altar, is an image of Jesus crowning Mary. Mary’s wearing a dark blue cloak, a white head cloth, a red dress, and a gold shroud. All of those colors apparently represent the process of alchemy.
  - The outside wall of the chapel has a sculpture of an athanor, or an “alchemical oven”
    - I looked it up, and an alchemical oven or furnace was used in alchemical work related to creating a sorcerer’s stone.
    - It looks kinda like a tower, with a fire at the bottom.
    - It supposedly also symbolised the flame of feelings and great love
  - Then, on the upper floor, which you reach by spiral staircase, there’re more Templar crosses and sunwheels.
- Leaving the church:
  - Around the estate, there are these large urns or jugs carved from stone, featuring what look like green men (or satyr), surrounded by images of greenery and vines.
- Leda’s cave:
  - Do you know the story of Leda and the swan? Basically, Leda was the Queen of Sparta, Zeus wanted to sleep with her, she didn’t want to sleep with him, so he turned himself into a swan and raped her. Some sources, including Cederberg, say it was a seduction, but my understanding was always that it was a rape.
  - There’s a ton of classical art depicting this, and it’s pretty creepy/screwed up. I think that it was so popular as an art subject because it was more acceptable to show a lady having sex with a swan than with a man. You can google it.
  - So there’s a little cave or grotto with a sculpture depicting the story. When I visited, the cave was closed, but I found a hidden passage that overlooked it, so I saw the sculpture from above.
  - I thought it was just another creepy classical reference to the story, but Cederberg said that Monteiro was a monarchist, and this represented his views of divine kingship, and may also have represented the marriage of heaven and earth.
  - I think the symbolism there is apt–the leaders of countries often screw over the populace–but if Monteiro really thought that the story of Leda and the Swan represented the good and natural order of things, then that’s not great.
- Above that cave, if you go up some stairs, you end up at the Regaliera Tower, which is one of several towers that you can climb up into and see a view from the top.
  - Then, if you keep going up, you’ll see entrances to the cave system, including one that feels really magical and enchanted: there’s a pond called “The Lake of the Waterfall,” which has a series of stepping stones, and if you walk across the stepping stones, you can go behind a waterfall and enter the tunnel system.
  - There are also a few other entrances to the system, including The Grotto of the East and the Portal of the Guardians. The Portal of the Guardians is guarded by dragons, or maybe crocodiles, holding a seashell to their ear. Cederberg calls them crocodiles, and says that they’re symbolic because they’re dual water creatures, which appear elsewhere in the estate, as well.
- Cederberg notes that the bottom of the estate is more human (with the house, statues of gods, chapel, etc), while the top is way wilder (with grottos, wells, woods.)
- So this leads up to the main event of the estate, the Well of Initiation.
- Well of Initiation:
- It’s called a well, but it was never used for water.
  - It’s really more of an inverted tower, where you can walk up, or descend down, via a spiral staircase set into the walls and framed by arches. It’s 90 feet deep. Cederberg counted the steps: There are 139 steps, and 1+3+9 is 13, which he says is a sacred number that represents death and rebirth, or the end of a an initiatory journey. He also points out that there are 22 empty niches in the walls between the staircase and the open area in the middle, which is a sacred number and which recalls the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot.
  - The floor, at the very bottom, is an 8-point compass rose, made of blue, yellow, red, and white marble.
  - If the whole estate is a journey toward initiation, this is where the initiation happens.
  - At the very bottom, there’s a baptismal font. After that, now that you’re underground, you’re surrounded by dark passages that lead away from the well.
  - We only walked around underground a little, but they’re manmade but look more like caves than tunnels. Apparently they lead to a bunch of different locations around the estate, as well as to dead ends like the unfinished well.
    - You can’t go up into the Unfinished Well from below, but you can start to descend from above. It’s 33 feet, about a third as deep as the initiation well.
  - I went down from the ground level, and it’s extremely creepy. It’s much darker than the initiation well, and it’s much emptier (I didn’t see anyone else while I was descending.) I only went down a few levels, but it felt like a weird, broken twin of the initiation well. Instead of refined arches and columns, there were rough stone openings that I could look out from. Before long, I went back up.
- He notes that the Yew tree is planted right next to the Initiation well, which is “traditionally associated with both death and immortality” he also notes that “Yew is sacred to Hecate, “lady of the underworld”, who lives in a cave and presides over secret, illuminating rituals. In the Nordic tradition, Yew is sometimes thought of as the World Tree Yggdrasil and is connected to the runes eihwaz and yr.”
- Of the other trees on the estate, he notes: “Cypress, which has similarly deathly associations, stands by the cave entrance to the crypt of the chapel; while at the side of the upper level of the chapel is lofty Oak, standing for majesty, victory, immortality and fruitfulness, sacred in the various pantheons to the high gods Zeus, Jupiter and Thor. In the upper, rockier and wilder regions of the estate we find Pine, marking steadfastness and loyalty, and sacred to Neptune, Dionysus, Diana, and Cybele. As we see by these examples, the nature of the garden is alive with different personalities and powers, and serve a purpose in unfolding the narrative of the journey.”
- One thing that was interesting to me was that even though there were TONS of different types of plants in the gardens, the map calls out several varieties specifically, pointing them out the same way that they might point out a well or grotto. The ones they point out are (starting at the lowest part of the estate, and going up): Cypress, Norfolk Island Pine, Oak, Cedar, Magnolia, Camellia, Tree-Ferns, Chestnut, Lime Tree, Horse Chestnut, Cycad, Pine Tree, Sequoia, Yew, and Cork Oak.
- Here’s some symbolism related to some of those plants:
  - Camellia: this flower has a bunch of different meanings. For example, tea is sometimes made from Camellia flowers, so it can be used in Tasseography, which is divination using tea leaves. I guess it also has numerological meanings. It’s the number 11, which symbolizes mystical awareness, and has the numerological number of 2, which I think it taken from adding the 1 and 1 in 11. 2 is lunar and magical, and is tied to spiritual growth.
  - Sequoias, or redwoods, are some of the oldest living beings on the planet. They can live up to about 3,200 years, and they’re the world’s largest trees. So they have a lot of spiritual significance, and they’re also associated with the wands suit in tarot.
  - The lime tree, also called the Linden tree, is significant in many different mythologies. To list a few: They’re sacred trees in Slavic mythology, in Baltic mythology there’s a goddess of fate name Laima, who lived in a line tree and made her decisions as a cuckoo. So Lithuanian women spoke to lime trees as if they were humans, treated them with a lot of respect, prayed under them, etc. To pre-Christian Germanic peoples, the lime tree was holy, and they had judicial meetings beneath lime trees, believing the tree would help unearth the truth.
  - Cycads and Fern Trees are both really old, and appear in the fossil record, so they’re really ancient trees. I read an interesting article that called Cycads the loneliest plant in the world, and which talked about how in the Jurassic period, 20% of the world’s trees were Cycads.
    - You’ve probably seen pictures of these–they look kinda like short palm trees, with thick, kinda spiky trunks. They survived what killed the dinosaurs and lived through 5 ice ages, until in 1895, a British botanical garden director saw one in Africa, dug it up, and sent it back to England where it was put in the Royal Botanical Gardens in London. I guess the rest of them in Africa died, because later on, researchers looked for another one, and couldn’t find any others.
    - My guess is that British colonizers probably chopped them all down for firewood, or something. The Cycad in London was a male tree and needed a female tree in order to reproduce, but no one’s ever been able to find a female tree. So now there are other Cycads in other gardens, but they’re all clones of this one tree that was found in the 1895. The original is still alive, but no one knows how long it’ll live.
    - The reason why I’m telling this long story about trees is that I think there’s symbolic meaning there, in something being the last of its kind, and being shared and copied into other places. It feels to me almost like how knowledge, including occult knowledge, works. If you know something, and you die, then your knowledge dies with you. The only way you can keep that knowledge alive is by spreading it, or seeding it elsewhere, for other people to know. The purpose of this estate is initiation, which is the process of giving people secret knowledge. We can assume that when Monteiro was alive, ritual initiation happened there. But even now, going through the gardens is its own initiation. Whether you’re knowledgeable about the occult and classics, or not, it’s impossible to explore the gardens without a sense of wonder, and without questioning what occult purposes this estate was created for.
So that’s the estate.
The same architect, Manini also built Monteiro’s tomb, in Lisbon’s Prazeres Cemetery. The tomb’s door was opened with the same key that unlocked the palace of Quinta da Regaliera, as well as his palace in Lisbon. When you enter the cemetery grove, the tomb’s on the left, facing east, and it matches the placement, shape, and size of a Masonic temple. The door knocker bears an engraved bee carrying a skull. In Masonry, the diligent and hard-working bee represents the Mason. On the back of the tomb, there’s a gate that shows wine and bread (representing spirit and body), owls (symbolizing wisdom) and poppies (which stand for eternal sleep.)
But what happened to the estate in later years?
In 1942, the estate was sold to someone named Waldemar d’Orey and used as a private residence for his large family.
In 1987, it was sold to the Japanese Aoki Corporation, a construction company. It’s really unclear what the Aoki Corporation used the estate for. All I could find was that they purchased it, and it was closed to the public for the ten years that they owned it.
I was able to find out a bit about the company. They were founded i the 1940s after the war, and expanded a bunch in the 1980s, ending up with major bank debt. During this time, they branched out into the hotel industry, buying the Westin Hotels chain and selling the Plaza Hotel, which Westin owned, to Donald Trump in 1988.
The company was involved in some shady stuff, including being a member of a a price fixing cartel that was broken up by the Japanese FTC in 1989. As a result, they were banned from getting construction contracts in Osaka. They were also the cause of the second-deadliest construction accident in Hong Kong, when one of their elevators killed 12 workers. The company went bankrupt in 2001, after what sounds like years of decline when the Japanese recession hit
But why did they buy the estate? Did they want to make it into a hotel? If so, why hold onto it for 10 years and do nothing with it? Was it a place for execs to have wild parties? The whole time while I was there, I couldn’t stop thinking about the whole thing would have been a pretty good playground for a bunch of drunk, rich executives and their clients. It had a little bit of a Bohemian Grove vibe. (Sidenote: do you know what Bohemian Grove is? It’s a private campground owned by a “gentlemen’s club,” and a bunch of super rich and famous men have been members and partied there, including Newt Gingrich, William Randolph Hearst, Herbert Hoover, Henry Kissinger, Jack London, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt. There’s been a lot of pretty dark allegations about the place, which we won’t get into here. But basically it’s a big park for powerful men to play in, and there’s some occult symbology, like a huge rock that looks like an owl called the Owl Shrine, that they allegedly do rituals in front of. Allegedly.)
Though I guess we’ll never know what the Aoki Corporation used Quinta da Regaleira for.
In 1997, the company sold the estate to the Sintra town council, who opened it to the public in June 1998. It’s now one of the most popular tourist destinations in Sintra.

Sources consulted RE: Quinta da Regaleira Symbolism

Websites RE: Quinta da Regaleira Symbolism

map:
https://www.regaleira.pt/media/1004/folhetoen.pdf
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g189164-d484394-Reviews-Quinta_da_Regaleira-Sintra_Sintra_Municipality_Lisbon_District_Central_Portugal.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_Augusto_Carvalho_Monteiro
https://masterhorologer.com/2018/02/15/l-leroy-cie-leroy-01-other-important-historical-watches/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Manini
https://portugalvirtual.pt/sintra/quinta-da-regaleira.php
http://www.sintra-portugal.com/Attractions/Quinta-Regaleirais-Sintra.html
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/182187259/ant_nio-augusto-de_carvalho_monteiro
https://www.regaleira.pt/en/mapa
https://archive.org/details/AntonioAugustoCarvalhoMonteiro-UmNaturalistaPioneiro/mode/2up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manueline
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aoki_Corporation
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/10/06/quinta-da-regaleira-one-of-the-most-visited-residences-in-sintra-portugal/
http://www.barcroft.tv/portugal-initiation-wells-deep-tourist-attraction-lost-time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Grove
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bohemian_Club_members
https://wiccanrede.org/2019/05/strange-tales-of-aleister-crowley-the-mouth-of-hell-and-the-abbey-of-thelema-part-1/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ninth_Gate
https://www.atlaslisboa.com/sintras-myths-legends-and-paranormal-activity/
contains a lot of occult symbolism RE: the estate: http://www.akicederberg.com/new-page-1
https://www.atlaslisboa.com/monserrate/
Byron’s poem: https://www.romanticpoets.org/public_html/p5/poems/lb1812_childe_harold_01_portugal.htm
https://www.countrylife.co.uk/architecture/quinta-da-regaleira-portugal-mysterious-garden-designed-world-famous-set-designer-architect-173427
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leda_and_the_Swan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leda_(mythology)
https://www.buildingbeautifulsouls.com/symbols-meanings/flower-meanings-symbolism/camellia-meaning-symbolism
https://www.buildingbeautifulsouls.com/symbols-meanings/tree-symbolism-meanings/oak-tree-meaning-symbolism/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycad
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/10/136029423/the-loneliest-plant-in-the-world
https://www.newsgram.com/sequoia-trees-and-spirituality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoiadendron_giganteum
https://www.buildingbeautifulsouls.com/symbols-meanings/tree-symbolism-meanings/sequoia-tree-meaning-symbolism/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lime_tree_in_culture
https://visitsintra.travel/en/visit/monuments/palace-and-quinta-da-regaleira
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laima
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrique_Jos%C3%A9_de_Souza
https://www.ancient-symbols.com/symbols-directory/sun-wheel.html
https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/sonnenrad
https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/celtic-cross
https://www.ancientpages.com/2018/08/20/12-alchemy-symbols-explained/
https://viajeraymochilero.com/en/la-quinta-de-regaleira-sintra-portugal-2/
http://www.builtconstructions.in/OnlineMagazine/Bangalore/Pages/Quinta-Da-Regaleira,-Sintra,-Portugal-0076.aspx
https://www.flickr.com/photos/toyaguerrero/5661984523
https://surviveportugal.blogspot.com/2014/07/quinta-da-regaleira-sintra.html?m=1
https://www.ptraveler.com/2014/06/05/mystic-craze-at-quinta-da-regaleira/
https://wonderfulwanderings.com/palaces-in-sintra//
http://www.estorilportugal.com/features/quinta-da-regaleira/
https://allthatsinteresting.com/quinta-da-regaleira
http://www.wallswithstories.com/uncategorized/a-remarkable-estate-in-portugal-with-a-romantic-palace-chapel-underground-towers.html
https://www.edenflaherty.com/travel-1/2019/7/8/quinta-da-regaleira
https://www.spottinghistory.com/view/6098/quinta-da-regaleira/
https://www.gardendestinations.com/sintras-quinta-da-regaleira-invites-exploration/
http://www.backpacktourist.com/2012/03/quinta-da-regaleira/
https://www.castleholic.com/2017/01/quinta-da-regaleira.html?m=1
https://www.stolenhistory.org/threads/quinta-da-regaleira-palace-grounds-and-initiation-wells-sintra-portugal.2158/
https://paisajelibre.com/jardines-misterio-quinta-da-regaleira/
http://different-doors.com/quinta-da-regaleira/
https://madhouseheaven.com/mysteries-of-quinta-de-regaleira
https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-ancient-places-europe/masonic-initiation-wells-quinta-da-regaleira-002263
https://www.travelwithwinny.com/quinta-da-regaleira-sintra/
https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/local/blogs/2019/02/23/quinta-da-regaleira-travel-portugal-sintra/2962119002/
https://www.atlaslisboa.com/sintras-myths-legends-and-paranormal-activity/

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Thomas Edison’s Spirit Telegraph

A look at Thomas Edison’s Spirit Telegraph, an apparatus to contact the spirit world that he claimed to be working on, but which never surfaced.

In 1920, famed inventor Thomas Edison gave a series of interviews bragging about a device he was testing, a spirit telegraph, which spiritualists could use to give their seances a more scientific bent. Though he despised Ouija boards, table tipping, and other trappings of spiritualism, Edison believed that his new invention could determine whether the human personality persisted after death, once and for all. The only problem? The invention never materialized.

Highlights include:
• Creepy uses for the phonograph
• The “little people” or “life units” that make up our bodies
• Electrocuting an elephant in Coney Island
• The chapter of Edison’s diary that his family had removed
• Edison’s ghost

Episode Script for Thomas Edison’s Spirit Telegraph

“Edison–the man who has given us the electric light, the phonograph, the motion picture, the nickel-iron storage battery, the perfected dynamo and a vast collection of other devices entering into our everyday life–is about to devote himself to something which is infinitely more interesting than any invention can ever be.”

-from an article in the Boston Globe, October 31, 1920

“I have been at work for some time, building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this Earth to communicate with us.” –Thomas Edison, in an interview in The American Magazine in 1920

A little detour in our Ouija board convo–let’s talk about the Edison Spirit telegraph, or spirit phone.
A bit of background on Thomas Edison: he was maybe the most famous American inventor.
- He had over 1,000 patents to his name.
- He invented the phonograph, motion picture camera, early versions of the electric lightbulb.
- He also started the first film studio, called the Black Maria, in NJ.
He was born in Ohio in 1847, grew up in Michigan, and when he was a teenager, he worked as a telegraph operator on the railroad.
He had some hearing issues because of a childhood case of scarlet fever.
When he got older, he claimed that his hearing loss made him focus better and get distracted less often.
A lot of people these days think that he had ADHD, which makes sense to me, since it would have allowed him to really hyperfocus.
It’s really interesting to me that so many of his inventions had to do with communication, because of his hearing issues.
He also supposedly believed in nonviolence; for example, when he was asked to be a naval consultant during WWI, he said he’d only work on defensive weapons. He once said: “I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.”
- He was a vegetarian and didn’t believe in violence toward animals.
- However, you should take all of his pacifism with a huge grain of salt. Because when the State of New York offered Edison the opportunity to design NY’s first electric chair, he accepted. And on August 6, 1890, Edison and one of his assistants performed an execution via the electric chair. However, it was a disaster, and the person being executed was in pain for a long time before dying, and was subjected to increasingly intense shocks, until he finally died.
- It sounds like part of his interest in this gruesome method of execution is because of his feud with Nicola Tesla, and their argument over whether direct current or alternating current is better.
- So to try to prove his point, he had several public demonstrations where he executed animals using the electric chair
- And in 1903, he filmed the public electrocution of a female elephant named Topsy. The elephant may have killed some members of a circus troupe, so that’s why they killed her. I watched it, and it’s upsetting. It’s also really weird because it was filmed at Coney Island, and behind the elephant, there’s what looks like Luna Park being built or rebuilt.
He also opposed debt based money, and once said: “Gold is a relic of Julius Caesar, and interest is an invention of Satan.”
Edison was agnostic, and he joined the Theosophical Society in NJ in 1878, though he wasn’t a very active member.
He once said: “I do not believe in the God of the theologians; but that there is a Supreme Intelligence I do not doubt.”
The story of the spirit telegraph begins in 1920, a time that we know was really hot when it comes to Ouija boards.
In October 1920, Edison told American Magazine that he was building an apparatus that could open up lines of communication with the spirit world.
- He claimed that it would make the Ouija board seem old-fashioned.
- After that article was published, the magazine received 600 letters to the editor, written by readers who were fascinated by the device.
It’s not so weird that an inventor like Edison would be interested in spiritualism, since Sir Oliver Lodge was into it and he was a physicist.
In 1920, Edison would have been in his 70s, so I’d imagine death was weighing on his mind.
- Also, since Edison had invented the phonograph, he’d literally created a way for people to hear the voices of people who had died. We’re used to recordings, but that must have been mind-blowing at the time, and seemed just as outlandish as a machine that could talk to spirits.
  - Also, sidenote about the phonograph: sometimes, dying people used to record their memories and last words on the phonograph, so everyone who went to their “phonograph funeral” could hear them one last time.
  - And far from finding that weird, Edison had actually suggested that as a possible use for the phonograph. He was a morbid dude.
- Supposedly Edison had many spiritualist leanings, and I read that he was a fairly active spiritualist until he met his last wife, Mina, whose father was a Methodist minister. (They married in 1886.)
However, Edison didn’t seem to like being characterized in the press as a spiritualist.
Here’s what he had to say about spirits:
- In the first place, I cannot concieve such a thing as a spirit. Imagine something which has no weight, no material form, no mass; in a word, imagine nothing! I cannot be a party to the belief that spirits exist and can been seen under certain circumstances and can be made to tilt tables and rap and do other things of a similar unimportant nature. The whole thing is so absurd.”
The author of the Boston Globe article this quote is from said that the only reason that Edison granted the interview was because he wanted to correct the idea that people had of him as a spiritualist.
But here’s what he did say:
- I have been thinking for some time of a machine or apparatus which could be operated by personalities which have passed on to another existence or sphere. Now, follow me carefully: I don’t claim that our personalities pass on to another existence or sphere. I don’t claim anything because I don’t know anything about the subject. For that matter, no human being knows.
- But I do claim that it is possible to construct an apparatus which will be so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence or sphere who wish to get in touch with us in this existence or sphere, this apparatus will at least give them a better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and raps and ouija boards and mediums and the other crude methods now purported to be the only means of communication.
- In truth, it is the crudeness of the present methods that makes me doubt the authenticity of purported communications with deceased persons. Why should personalities in another existence or sphere waste their time working a little triangular piece of wood over a board with certain lettering on it? Why should such personalities play pranks with a table?
- The whole business seems so childish to me that I frankly cannot give it my serious consideration.
- I believe that if we are to make any real progress in psychic investigation, we must do it with scientific apparatus and in a scientific manner, just as we do in medicine, electricity, chemistry, and other fields.
- Now, what I propose to to is furnish psychic investigators with an apparatus which will give a scientific aspect to their work. This apparatus, let me explain, is in the nature of a valve, so to speak. That is to say, the slightest concievable effort is made to exert many times its initial power for indicative purposes.
- . . . If this apparatus fails to reveal anything of exceptional interest, I am afraid that I shall have lost all faith in the survival of personality as we know it in this existence.
He compared his proposed invention to a power plant, where a person can create a huge amount of power through a steam turbine with very little effort. His idea was that the apparatus would turn a “slight effort” into something that was magnified enough for investigation.
He said that he’d been working out the details of the spirit telegraph for a while, and said that one of his collaborators died the other day. He said that he felt his deceased collaborator should be the first spirit to use it, since he’d be familiar with the basic concept of the machine.
- I think this is a joke but I’m not 100% sure.
The article notes that Edison doesn’t really believe in widely accepted theories about life and death, though he said that he believes that “life, like matter, is indestructable”
He said:
- There had always been a certain amount of life on this world and there will always be the same amount. You cannot create life; you cannot destroy life; you cannot multiply life.
He also described how he thought our bodies were made up of “myriads and myriads of infinitesimal entities, each in itself a unit of life”
He talks about how if you took a print of your thumb, then burned off your thumbprint, when your thumb healed, your distinctive thumbprint would grow back. He said he thinks that the life entities that your body is made up of are what plan and supervise that new growth. Because it’s not your brain, since it’s not like you’ve memorized your thumbprint and can will it to grow back.
He also used the analogy of a Martian coming to Earth. This Martian might have less detailed eyesight than ours, so they might be able to see something large like the Brooklyn Bridge, but they couldn’t see us. They’d assume that the bridge was a natural growth like a plant or rock. Then the Martian might destroy the bridge, and be surprised to return a few years later and see that the bridge had been rebuilt in the same place? Then he asked whether it’d be logical for the Martian to assume that the bridge just regrew naturally, or if it’d be more logical for them to assume that something intelligent planned and rebuilt it?
He theorizes that “once conditions become unsatisfactory in the body, either through a fatal sickness, fatal accident, or old age, the entities simply depart from the body and leave little more than an empty structure behind.”
He says that the entities live forever and there are a fixed number of them, so they pass on to another person or start creating some other new life once they leave the dead person’s body.
I think that’s kinda an interesting theory to think about, because the obvious argument against it is that there’re more humans now than there have ever been, so how would that work? But then again, tons of animals have gone extinct, forests have been chopped down, etc, in the service of their being more humans. So maybe someone advocating for this theory could just say that the entities had left those animals and plants and gone into new human life.
So I think his machine was meant to measure the scattered entities that created life, though I read elsewhere that the machine would find a frequency that the dead could speak through. Which sounds an awful lot like a spirit box.
In 1926, he told the NYT that he never actually intended to create a spirit telegraph; he claimed that when a man interviewed him in 1920, “I really had nothing to tell him, but I hated to disappoint him so I thought up this story about communicating with spirits, but it was all a joke.”
- However, I don’t believe him. There’s too much that he’s said about the invention, both in his own writing and in interviews.
Edison died in 1931, and no one ever found a machine in his things that could have been a spirit phone or telegraph.
Even though there wasn’t a machine or blueprints, Gerald Fabris, Museum Curator of Sound Recordings at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park, said that Edison may have really been working on it. Fabris said:
- “Edison considered thinking about something to be serious work. He posted copies of the following quotation around his laboratory for his employees to see: ‘There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the true labor of thinking,’ by Sir Joshua Reynolds.”
Also, I read that Edison gave a demonstration of a device to contact the beyond to a group of scientists sometime in the 1920s. (It sounds like it was basically a motion sensor device.)
Supposedly during a séance in 1941, Edison’s ghost said that three of his assisstants had the plans to the spirit telegraph, but when the machine was built, it didn’t work.
At a later séance, Edison offered some advice to improve the machine, and an inventor named J. Gilbert Wright who was at the séance worked on thee machine until he died in 1959, but as far as we know, he wasn’t ever able to speak to spirits.
Several articles showed drawings of what was supposedy Edison’s invention, though they were published after his death, in 1933 and then in 1960.
In 1948, a book called The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison was published. It contained a chapter with Edison’s beliefs about the afterlife, and his surviving family was so mortified that they demanded that all unshipped copies of the book be destroyed, and that the shipped books be recalled. Later that year, the book was republished with 70 pages removed.
The two chapters that were taken out were Chapter 7, about Edison’s economic views, and Chapter 8, about spiritualism.
I did find a PDF of chapter 8, which is entitled The Realms Beyond, and I’ve linked that in the shownotes.
- I read it, and much of it is very similar to the Boston Globe article I quoted earlier, and some of it is verbatim from that interview.
- It does get a little sillier, calling the life entites “little people” and really personifying them a lot.
  - He said he thinks the “little people” didn’t come from earth, and that they came from “some other body elsewhere in the universe.”
  - He also said that these life units are sort of like swarms of bees that go elsewhere when someone dies, and that they’re so small that they could never be seen through any microscope, and that they could go through solid objects like stone or concrete walls almost as easily as through air.
- He does mention spiritualism and he calls it a harmful superstition
- He also says: I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us. If this is ever accomplished, it will be accomplished, not by any occult, mysterious, or weird means, such as are employed by so-called mediums, but by scientific methods.
- I liked the final lines of the book, talking about life after death:
  - I do hope that our personality survives. If it does, then my apparatus ought to be of some use. That is why I am now at work on the most sensitive apparatus I have ever undertaken to build, and I await the results with the keenest interest.
In 2015, the spirit telegraph made headlines again when a French journalist named Philippe Baudouin found a rare unexpurgated edition of the diary, which apparently detailed the plans for the spirit phone, and describes it as a high-powered phonograph that could pick up ghostly whispers.
- I’m gonna be honest, in skimming the chapter, I didn’t spot much info about the device, it was mostly just weird stuff about little people, but I probably missed that.
- The journalist wrote a book about the topic in french, and there’s also a 20-min documentary in French (with english subtitles) about it, which I’ve linked in the shownotes.
- It’s an interesting documentary that draws a lot of parallels between the idea of the spirit telegraph and the phonograph, and the ghostly aspect of communication technology, etc.

Sources consulted RE: Thomas Edison’s Spirit Telegraph

Websites RE: Thomas Edison’s Spirit Telegraph

THOMAS EDISON & THE REALMS BEYOND (SHORT DOCUMENTARY]: https://vimeo.com/126302369
The lost chapter of Edison’s book: http://itcvoices.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Edison-Lost-Diary-Chapter.pdf
Article in American Medicine
Scientific American article
Scientific Mythologies: How Science and Science Fiction Forge New Religious … By James A. Herrick
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dial-a-ghost-on-thomas-edisons-least-successful-invention-the-spirit-phone
https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/the-greatest-turn-of-the-century-inventors-really-wanted-to-talk-to-ghosts/221925/
https://hauntedpalaceblog.wordpress.com/tag/edisons-diary/
https://hauntedpalaceblog.wordpress.com/tag/edisons-diary/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edisonhttps://archive.is/7cmBb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison%27s_Black_Maria
https://science.howstuffworks.com/10-inventions-thomas-edison10.htm
https://www.reliableplant.com/Read/27212/Edison-invention-calls-dead
https://lisaandherworld-lisah.blogspot.com/2019/02/edisons-forgotten-invention-phone-that.html
https://www.nps.gov/edis/learn/historyculture/mina-miller-edison.htm
https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/how-thomas-edison-used-a-fake-electric-chair-execution-1829652181
http://itcvoices.org/thomas-edison-the-lost-chapter/

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The Haunted Grove Park Inn, Asheville, North Carolina

A look at the strange history of the haunted Grove Park Inn, and the famous people (and ghost) who’ve stayed there.

Built by a quinine medicine mogul based on plans drawn up by his son-in-law (who was not an architect), the Grove Park Inn is has hosted many famous guests. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived there for two years, 10 presidents have stayed there, as did Thomas Edison and John D. Rockefeller. And then there’s the Pink Lady, a mysterious female ghost who employees and guests have reported encountering.

Highlights include:
• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “beer cure”
• The Pink Lady ghost
• A scenic mountaintop grave
• A terrifying advertisement for quinine
• Zelda Fitzgerald’s last years and tragic death
• The US Supreme Court’s nuclear war plans
• Staying at an isolated cabin in the woods
• A place called “Bat Cave”
• Workers living in circus tents

Note: there are several mentions of suicide/attempted suicide throughout the episode, as well as details about dying in a fire.

Episode Script for The Haunted Grove Park Inn, Asheville, North Carolina

“It was 3:00 A.M. in front of the fireplace. A lady showed up, I took a picture. She was not there. The next picture, she was there. And then she disappeared.”

-Dave Bergam, an employee at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, NC

I’ve been asked if I was gonna do some North Carolina ghost stories, since I’m here for the summer, so I’m finally getting around to that.
Last weekend, we went to Asheville, which is a town in the mountains of western NC near Tennessee. Think blue ridge mountains, Mount Mitchell, etc.
In a perfect world, we would have wanted to stay in Asheville and see the sights there, but because of COVID, we kept to the surrounding smaller towns mostly.
We stayed in a very remote cabin in an unincorporated area called Bat Cave. We didn’t have internet or anything, and the cabin was in the mountains at the top of a bunch of winding roads, off an unpaved road that isn’t visible on google maps.
The area is very misty, strange, and creepy. It was surprisingly mild for summer, in the 60s and 70s.
It’s a really spooky area. For example, Mt Mitchell is named after a scientist who died while trying to prove that it’s the tallest mountain east of the Mississippi (it is.) He’s buried at the summit in a big stone tomb
Sadly, we didn’t get to do any ghost hunting, b/c the people I was traveling with are a little nervous about ghosts.
But even though I didn’t get to explore Asheville itself very much, or ghost hunt, I still did some research about the area, so I figured I’d share that with yall.
There are so many cool Asheville ghost stories and the history of the area is so interesting that I’m actually just going to talk about a single hotel which has a fun ghost story but an even better backstory.
I got a ton of this info from NorthCarolinaGhosts.com

Grove Park Inn

One of the big Asheville ghost stories is the Pink Lady, who fell from a balcony on the fifth floor (supposedly from room 545), in the center of the hotel above the main lobby. She landed in the Palm Court, which is an interior atrium that the guest rooms are arranged around.
She wasn’t a registered guest; she was staying with someone who was a guest.

○ She’s supposed to be a kind and beloved ghost.

○ She seems to like children, and appears to children more than she does to adults.

○ She sometimes appears near the beds of sick children, where she strokes their hands and speaks soothingly to them

○ Once, a doctor left the hotel a note requesting that the staff thank the woman in the pink ball gown, who his children had enjoyed playing with while they were there

○ She apparently like harmless pranks, like switching off a/cs and other devices. Sometimes she rearranges objects, or tickles a guest’s feet

○ The waiter at the hotel restaurant said she definitely existed, and had encountered several strange things during the night, like one time when a commercial lock unlocked itself.

○ She appears as either a pink mist, or as a full apparition of a young woman wearing a pink ball gown

○ Some people say she was a debutant who accidentally fell.

○ Other theories are that she may have been a sex worker or an insane woman.

○ Other people say that she was a servant sleeping with the married man in the house she worked in and she jumped when he tried to end their affair. Another theory is that she told the man she was pregnant, so he pushed her off.

○ Some people say that the woman is Zelda Fitzgerald, because in 1935-36, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived at the hotel for two years while his wife, Zelda, was in the insane asylum in Asheville.

I also read that F. Scott Fitzgerald had TB so was there to recover, though other places said he went there for anonymity and quiet. It sounds like he claimed he had a “mild case” of TB, but actually just had a bad flu and was an alcoholic.

□ He decided to move to Asheville, and moved Zelda from the institution where she was in Baltimore to Highland Hospital in Asheville

While he was there, he rented two rooms, one for sleeping and one for writing, according to an English professor at Western Carolina University named Brian Railsback. To quote this professor:

“He came to the Grove Park Inn and chose these rooms so that he could overlook the main entrance. He could see the cars that were pulling up and he could see if there were any interesting women who might appear to be single and what were they wearing.”

□ He did have an affair with a rich married woman who was staying at the inn. He called her Rosemary, after a character in his book tender is the night, which had been published in 1935 to bad reviews and bad sales

□ “Rosemary” had gone to Asheville with her sister, who had some sort of nervous condition

□ Rosemary’s husband had stayed home in Memphis

□ She wanted to leave him to be with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and she offered to pay all of his expenses for Zelda and their daughter

□ Eventually, he realized that the affair couldn’t continue, so it sounds like he had Rosemary’s sister break up with Rosemary for him. She had to threaten to tell Rosemary’s husband she didn’t end the affair

It sounds like F. Scott was in bad shape at the time. He had a serious drinking problem, and was trying to break his addiction to gin using “the beer cure” so he was drinking 50 ponies of beer per day.

□ A pony can apparently mean several different measurements, but it should be somewhere between 3 and either 12.5 pints, though my guess puts it in the higher range of that.

□ I also read elsewhere that he drank 30 bottles a beer a day some days, though sometimes he was able to substitute it with Coke or coffee, but it doesn’t sound like that was super often

This was 10 years after publishing the Great Gatsby, and his writing wasn’t going so well.

□ He was mostly writing stories for magazines to pay his considerable debts and Zelda’s medical bills

□ But many of his magazine articles were getting rejected

□ Going to the Grove Park Inn was supposed to help inspire him, since it was full of rich and interesting people

□ But this was the 1930s, during the great depression, and people weren’t very interested in reading what the wealthy were up to

□ An employee who worked at the Inn said that every day, a housekeeper emptied his trash, which was full of typewritten pages and empty beer bottles

□ One interesting thing that I read is that apparently F. Scott would take parts of Zelda’s journals and put them into his work, and some short stories that she wrote were published under his name for publicity reasons. So I do wonder if her institutionalization and their relative estrangement affected that

He turned 40 at the Grove Park Inn, and one time while drunk, he fell in the bathroom and was found the next morning on the floor with a broken shoulder

□ However, I also read this account of what happened, in an article on blueridgecountry.com:

Scott broke his shoulder in a failed swan dive that summer and had to miss a lunch date with Zelda on her 36th birthday. He was in a plaster cast that kept his arm raised, and he also developed arthritis in that shoulder, adding to his pain and depression. That same summer, a reporter for the New York Post wrote a critical account of Fitzgerald’s life at 40. It proved devastating for Scott to read and to realize how far his life had spiraled down. He drank a small bottle of morphine in a suicide attempt, but it only made him vomit.

He invited a New York Post reporter to visit him to help rehabilitate his reputation, but that didn’t work. The article described him as a:

□ “very broken man, who’s physically feeble and mentally very pathetic and reaching to the highboy to have a drink — with a nurse on hand to watch him constantly because he had fired off a gun here in the hotel that same summer in ’36.”

□ The rumor was that he fired the gun as a suicide attempt, though it sounds like that’s debated, though he considered suicide after the story was published

□ It’s said that this was one of the darkest points in his life

So meanwhile, Zelda was at Highland Hospital in Asheville, which was an expensive hospital for the wealthy

Scott rarely visited her; when they saw each other, they tended to get upset

□ Zelda was in and out of the hospital for 12 years, while meanwhile, F. Scott left Asheville in 1937 and went west to try to write movies. He got an offer to write movies for MGM; he was paid handsomely, but it sounds like he only wrote one movie himself, though he contributed to some other scripts but was uncredited

® The director Billy Wilder said that Fitzgerald in Hollywood was like: “a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job.”

□ The last time he and Zelda saw each other was on a trip to Cuba in 1939, where apparently F. Scott broke up a cockfight, got assaulted, and then had to be hospitalized when he returned to the US because he was so drunk and exhausted

□ He died of a heart attack in 1940.

□ At the time, it seems like Zelda was diagnosed as schizophrenic, though later medical staff at Highland Hospital it was more likely that she was bipolar

□ We talked about this during our Ouijamania in 1920 episode, but during this period, treatment for mental illness (especially schizophrenia) was very bad–people were often shackled or in straighjackets

□ Highland, I assume since it was for rich people, was different–it focused on diet, exercize, fresh air, etc.

□ Zelda died in the asylum when it burned down in March 1948

® She was actually about to be released, and the doctors cleared her to leave, but she decided to stay a few more weeks to make sure she was really doing okay

□ There are different rumors about why the hospital burned down; some the fire was set by an angry nurse. Apparently a night nurse actually turned herself in saying she may have caused the fire. Charges weren’t filed, but she was institutionalized

□ It’s unclear what actually caused it, but 9 people died and the building was destroyed.

□ Zelda had been heavily sedated, as had some other women who also died. They identified Zelda’s body because of a red leather slipper she was wearing

□ Nothing else was built on the site, and today it’s just a field

□ So some people think that Zelda Fitzgerald is the pink lady, and that her ghost returns to the inn so she could relive happier times. Given everything we know about their time in Asheville, I find that extremely unlikely. It sounds like they wouldn’t have any positive associations with the Inn.

® To quote Zelda’s biographer, Nancy Milford, who wrote about when Zelda would visit the inn:

◊ “When the Fitzgeralds met it was usually for lunch. They would sit in the dining room far away from the other guests. Scott did not introduce Zelda to anyone and frequently they would sit through an entire meal in silence. After lunch, they walked down the terraced gardens into meadows rimmed with pines and sat on white wicker settees overlooking the mountains, Scott smoking constantly, Zelda lost in silence.”

® That doesn’t sound like a happy memory

You can still stay in the rooms F. Scott Fitzgerald stayed in, and one of them is furnished like it was when he was there.
But the story of the hotel is really weird and interesting, moreso than the actual ghost story, I think, so I want to get into that history.
The inn was built by Edwin Wiley Grove, a man who sold medicines such as Grove’s Tastless Chill Tonic and Laxative Bromo Quinine tablets.

○ He started selling the Tasteless Chill Tonic in 1885 as a fever remedy (in particular, it was used for malaria). It was basically quinine in a sweet syrup that cut the bitter taste of quinine.

A lot of people said it wasn’t tasteless, but it beat drinking straight quinine.
Supposedly, by 1890, more bottles of Groves’ Tasteless Chill Tonic were sold that bottles of Coca-Cola.
Also, there’s a truly terrifying advertisement for it that you can find on northcarolinaghosts.com, which shows Grove’s face on a pig’s body. He’s wearing a lace collar with a little bow below his chin, and on the side of the pig, it says “MAKES CHILDREN AND ADULTS AS FAT AS BIGS” and it claims that 1.5 million bottles were sold the previous year.

○ The laxative rolled out in 1896. It was quinine mixed with a sedative and a laxative, and it was supposedly a cold treatment.

They say that advertising was the reason why his products were so popular, which is very funny to me, because he named the product Laxative Bromo Quinine tablets, which seems like terrible marketing to me.
But I guess his signature was on every package, so people knew it was the authentic, high-quality product.

○ I looked it up, and apparently there used to be a real malaria problem in the United States, the south in particular. In the 1940s, the government did a major public health push to get rid of malaria in the US, and by 1949, it was declared that malaria was no longer a major public health problem.

To be clear, that means it’s possible that malaria still exists in the US apparently?

○ Grove is described as a self-made man, though I don’t really believe that anyone is self-made, especially a white man in the south after the Civil War. His identity alone would have been a big boost up.

Also, I read that he “served in the Civil War” which I think we can assume means he was a confederate soldier.

○ He was from Tennesse, but when he visited Asheville in 1897, he decided to build a summer home there, but ended up moving there permanently.

One of the reasons why he moved to Asheville was because he believed the climate would be good for his health.
In particular, his doctors suggested he go there to see if the weather there would (quoting from wikipedia here): “reduce or cure his bouts with extreme hiccups, which would last several weeks at a time.”
Though elsewhere I read that he had bronchitis often, as well as what sounds like chronic fatigue

○ Starting in 1910, Grove started buying up farms in the area. He also bought and demolished some TB sanitariums.

He would use that land to start developing Asheville, and basically transform it into the place he wanted it to be.
He wanted to build an inn, and local architects just didn’t get his vision, so instead, he had his son in law design it, who wasn’t trained in building or architecture.
The Grove Park Inn was built over a little under 12 months; it was finished in 1913.
During construction, workers were housed in circus tents. It also sounds like he paid people more the more they worked.
400 men worked 6 days a week, in 10 hour shifts. The hotel was constructed from granite boulders, some of which weighed 10,000 pounds.
Grove insisted that no cut stone should be visible to guests. One brochure said that guests would see only “the time-worn face given to it by thousands of years’ sun and rain that had beaten upon it as part of the mountainside.”
The hotel was furnished with arts and crafts style furniture from upstate New York.
400 rugs were imported from france, as well as linen curtains and line
It has a huge lobby with an enormous granite fireplace and a scenic view from a large porch.
The lobby, or Great Hall, has huge fireplaces that burn 12-foot logs.
Advertisements said that the walls were five feet thick.
The roof is three feet thick and made from cement, steel rods, asphalt, and clay tiles–that apparently makes it fireproof.
When the hotel opened, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan gave a speech to what wikipedia called “400 of the most distinguished men in the south”
Seely , Grove’s brother-in-law, had a bunch of rules when he managed the hotel. No cars were allowed to enter the property between 10:30 pm and 9 am. Guests were asked not to turn on faucets late at night. Bring children was discouraged.

○ Tons of people visited the hotel. Some earlier visitors included Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Helen Keller, John D. Rockefeller, George Gershwin, Harry Houdini, and Al Jolson.

○ Once WWII started, the inn was used as a place to intern enemy diplomats. The diplomats were allowed to go to town as long as they were guarded, which supposedly helped the local economy.

Just reminder, 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent were put in concentration camps during the war (62% of those interned were citizens.)
This was just motivated by pure racism–anyone with 1/16th or more Japanese ancestry were put into the camps. It was also motivated by greed–for example, many white farmers wanted Japanese American farmers removed, to get rid of competition.
Conditions in these American concentration camps weren’t good. The idea was that they weren’t supposed to be worse than the worst kind of military housing.

□ The facilities were basically barracks out in the middle of nowhere, with no plumbing or places where people could cook. Often, 25 people would have to live in spaces built for 4 people.

□ One camp in Wyoming was fenced in by barbed wire, had cots instead of beds, and a $.45 budget for food per person. $.45 in 1942 is $7.46 today.

□ The camps were patrolled by armed guards, who at some points shot people for going beyond the barbed wire fences.

□ Food poisoning was common, and there were outbreaks of dysentery in some of the camps.

I could go on for a lot longer about this, but the point I’m trying to make here is that the US government put innocent people in concentration camps, while putting Axis diplomats in an extremely fancy hotel.

○ The Navy also used the inn as a R&R center for sailors who were coming home, and it was also used by the Army to house soldiers who needed R&R between assignments.

○ Also, the exiled Phillipine government supposedly operated from the Presidental Cottage on the grounds during the war.

I hadn’t known anything about this, but nine hours after Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, Japanese forces invaded the Philippines, where there’d been a large American military presence.
Though one note: I found this info on the wikipedia page for the Grove Park Inn but haven’t been able to confirm it elsewhere, so I’m not sure how true it is.

○ In 1955, the inn was bought by Sammons Enterprises. And Mrs. Sammons used to bring her dog to the inn in a baby carriage. It sounds like she did that to be discreet about having a dog there, though I have no idea why the owner would need to hide the fact that she has a dog with her–seems like she’d be able to do anything she wanted.

○ In 2013, Omni Hotels bought the hotel, so now it’s the Omni Grove Park Inn.

○ We talked about some older famous guests, but more recently famous people have stayed there, including Michael Jordan, Daniel Day-Lewis, Macaulay Culkin, Anthony Hopkins, Dan Akyrod, Seinfeld, John Waters, Jlo, John Denver

○ 10 presidents have stayed at the hotel: Taft, Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Eisenhower, Nixon, HW Bush, Clinton, and Obama

In the event of a nuclear attack on the US, apparently the US Supreme Court will relocate to the Grove Park Inn.

Sources consulted RE: the Haunted Grove Park Inn

Websites RE: the Haunted Grove Park Inn

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g60742-d93940-Reviews-The_Omni_Grove_Park_Inn-Asheville_North_Carolina.html#REVIEWS
https://northcarolinaghosts.com/mountains/
https://northcarolinaghosts.com/mountains/ghost-chicken-alley/
https://northcarolinaghosts.com/mountains/pink-lady-grove-park-inn/
https://northcarolinaghosts.com/mountains/naked-ghost-craven-street-bridge/
https://www.romanticasheville.com/brown_mountain_lights.htmhttp://brownmountainlights.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omni_Grove_Park_Inn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Wiley_Grove
https://traveltips.usatoday.com/history-grove-park-inn-asheville-22468.html
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.html
https://www.omnihotels.com/hotels/asheville-grove-park/property-details/history
https://www.hauntedrooms.com/north-carolina/asheville/haunted-places
https://www.hauntedrooms.com/north-carolina/haunted-places/haunted-hotels/grove-park-inn-asheville
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pony_glass
https://www.npr.org/2013/09/03/216164420/for-f-scott-and-zelda-fitzgerald-a-dark-chapter-in-asheville-n-c
https://blueridgecountry.com/archive/favorites/fitzgeralds-asheville-days/
https://blueridgecountry.com/newsstand/magazine/the-tragic-death-of-zelda-fitzgerald/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald
https://ashevilleterrors.com/grove-park-inn/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_the_Philippines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_in_exile_of_the_Commonwealth_of_the_Philippineshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_occupation_of_the_Philippines
https://northcarolinaghosts.com/mountains/pink-lady-grove-park-inn/
https://the-line-up.com/the-pink-lady
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pink-lady-grove-park-inn
https://ghosthuntersofasheville.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-pink-lady-of-ghost-park-inn.html
https://avltoday.6amcity.com/asheville-ghosts/
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/north-carolina/helens-bridge-asheville-nc/
https://mountainx.com/news/community-news/0703erwin-php/

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Haunted Asheville, North Carolina

A look at some popular ghost stories from haunted Asheville, North Carolina, along with a strange F. Scott Fitzgerald conspiracy theory.

Highlights include:
• Haunted bridges
• Gruesome disinterments at a potter’s field
• A haunted high school
• Two dead women named Helen
• A bookseller’s memories of hanging out with F. Scott Fitzgerald
• An old tombstone shop
• The Brown Mountain Lights

Note: This episode contains mentions of murder, police brutality, suicide, drowning, and disrespectful disinterment of corpses.

Episode Script for Haunted Asheville, North Carolina

“It is hard to see what Asheville is going to do. It seems that they did enough damage in two or three years to ruin the town for fifty years to come. Our people were flying too high and forgetting how to tell the truth — everything bluff and brag and blow — this is what the whole country was doing and we’re paying through the nose for it right now. They invested their whole lives in a toy balloon, and when the balloon burst there was nothing left …” -In 1933, Thomas Wolfe wrote to his mother about how Asheville fared during the depression

I have a bit more info about why Asheville was such a big place for health resorts from the 1880s-1930.

There are a few reasons for that:

Asheville has mild weather and barometric pressure of 2,216 feet above sea level, as well as clean mountain air, and people thought those were the ideal conditions for recovery from TB.
Also, in 1880, the Asheville-Spartanburg railway was completed

Before that, wealthy people had already started moving there, but the railroad really kicked it off

Jackson Building

The Jackson Building was Asheville’s first skyscraper. It was built in 1924.
Before it was built, author Thomas Wolfe’s father had a shop there. He made tombstones.

○ There’s now a few monuments to the tombstone shop outside, which displays tombstone carving tools and an excerpt of Look Homeward, Angel.

The building is crowned with gargoyles and has gothic tracery at the top.
So, part of what made Fitzgerald’s time in Asheville extra depressing is that the Great Depression was going on then, and it hit Asheville extra hard.
The depression hit Asheville so hard that the city’s debts weren’t paid off until 1976
Legend has it that several people killed themselves by jumping out of the Jackson Building after the stock market crashed.
And some people have reported that they see a man’s face in the top window of the building, and they believe that he was one of the people who killed himself there.

○ That being said, that seems like it could just be pareidolia, but it’s interesting.

Another strange thing, but not a paranormal thing, is that there’s a bullseye pattern at the base of the building, put into the brick next to the monuments to the tombstone shop.
Let’s start with the Battery Park Hotel, because it deals with several of the characters we talked about last week.
The original Grove Park Hotel was built in 1886 by a Col. Frank Coxe. It was built on the site of an old Civil War artillery battery, up on a hill. The hill was already a tourist attraction because it afforded beautiful views of the city
Built in the Queen Anne style, the hotel was a very modern, with a fireplace in every room, steam radiators, modern elevators (the first in the south) and bathrooms, and electric lights. It cost $100,000 to build.
It was a grand and beloved hotel. Supposedly, when George Vanderbilt visited the Battery Park Hotel, he looked out at the land around it and decided to purchase 125,000 acres and build his 250-room estate, the Biltmore, which we’ll get to later.
But by 1921, the building had gotten run down, and it was purchased by Edwin Grove, who we talked about at length last time. He was a wealthy patent medicine mogul who built the Grove Park Inn and did a bunch of other development in Asheville.
Grove had the old hotel torn down using steam shovels–a relatively new invention. The hotel had stood on a hill called Battery Porter Hill, and he had that torn down too. (The hill was reduced by 100 feet and he ended up removing 250,000 cubic yards of dirt.)
People weren’t happy about that.
- In his book You Can’t Go Home Again, Thomas Wolfe described the new version of the hotel:
  - It was being stamped out of the same mold, as if by some gigantic biscuit-cutter of hotels that had produced a thousand others like it all over the country.
- People felt like Asheville was losing its interesting buildings
Built in a Neoclassical style, the new Battery Park Hotel opened in 1924
- It had 220 rooms, 14 stories, a rooftop restaurant
- It was really nice, and had great views of the city. It attracted literary guests like O. Henry, eventually, Thomas Wolfe, as well as other famous guests including Babe Ruth, Grace Kelly, and Boris Karloff
- Grove died in the hotel in 1927
You’ll remember that F. Scott Fitzgerald lived at the Grove Park Inn for a couple years, including in 1936.
- Though he never stayed at the Battery Park Hotel, he was known to visit the hotel frequently.
In July 1936, a 19-year-old NYU student from Staten Island named Helen Clevenger stayed in the Battery Park Hotel with her uncle, William Clevenger, who was a professor
- They checked into the hotel on July 15, and then went to dinner with her uncle’s friends
- They returned home at 10:30 pm and returned to their separate rooms. Helen was in room 224.
- There was a terrible thunderstorm that night. During the storm, a guest in the room across from 224 thought he heard a gunshot.
- He called the front desk, and the house detective, Daniel Gaddy went to look
- He listened at a few doors and then declared it was just thunder
- The next morning at 7:30, William went to check on his niece. When she didn’t answer, he opened the door–which was unlocked–and found her on the floor, in her PJs, with blood all over and a fatal bullet wound in her chest. She’d also been pistol-whipped, and her face was all messed up. A .32 caliber bullet lay in the room.
- Aside from the bullet casing, the only other clue was that a lanky man had leapt 15 feet from a hotel stairway in the middle of the night. I read that the man was about 5’9″
- Initially, the police detained suspects including William, the house detective, and a German violinist named Mark Wollner who had been on a date at the Battery Park on the night of the murder
- All of the suspects were released, and police decided that a hotel employee must have committed the murder
- They interrogated 60 hotel employees and were most suspicious of two young black men who worked as bellhops, Joe Urey and L.D. Roddy.
- The NYPD sent two homicide detectives to Asheville
- A hotel cook told the NYPD that the janitor, Martin Moore, a 22-year-old Black man, had a .32 revolver
- The NYPD confronted Moore, who said he was innocent and gave the cops his gun. The NYPD flew the gun to a lab in Brooklyn and they decided that the gun had hairs similar to Helen’s
- The cops then claimed that Moore confessed and produced a 700-word transcript. They declared that the motive was that he wanted to rob her, though why someone would want to rob a college student is beyond me.
- Moore said the confession had been forced; he said “a fan man from new york” (meaning one of the NYPD detectives) had beaten him with a rubber hose until he confessed.
- Moore had an alibi that placed him at birthday party at the time of the murder
- Nevertheless, he was rushed to trial on August 19, 11 days after he gave the cops the gun
- Moore and his family testified that Moore had been at the birthday party that night
- But the judge declared the confession valid, and the all-white jury declared Moore guilty within an hour.
- He was given the death sentence.
- The NAACP campaigned to save Moore, and Moore’s attourneys tried to get an appeal but were denied; the court didn’t want to hear it
- So Moore was executed in North Carolina’s new gas chamber, in Raleigh, on December 11, 1936.
- He said he was innocent up to the day of his death
- One interesting thing: I’ve seen it implied that F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was about 5’9″ and was definitely lanky, may have been the murderer.
  - The logic is that F. Scott Fitzgerald was known to have been shooting a gun in the Grove Park Inn in July 1936, threatening to kill himself.
    - A secretary who Fitzgerald hired later recounted the story that a nurse told her:
      - She then went on to tell me the details of his getting his pistol and threatening to shoot himself. There was quite a commotion. In some way she got a bellboy, who got the pistol, and Scott, in pajamas and bathrobe, chased him over the hotel. After that, the hotel refused to let him stay there by himself.
So then a full-time nurse was hired so he could stay
He was obviously drunk all the time, and I could imagine him interacting with the young college student and things going wrong
I did read something that mentioned that while Fitzgerald was in Paris in 1930 and he and Thomas Wolfe met up, Fitzgerald was swarmed with “idolatrous college kids” so it does seem like young people knew who he was, etc.
There’s a book called Lost Summer, which is a memoir by Tony Buttitta, an Asheville bookseller who befriended Fitzgerald while he was in town in 1935. I’ve linked to the full text in the shownotes for anyone who’s interested in reading it.
- I skimmed through some parts of it and saw a bit where Fitzgerald was hanging out at the pool with Rosemary, the married woman he was having an affair with.
  - When Rosemary had to go inside to take a phone call, Fitzgerald went over to talk to a younger woman named Lottie, who was sitting by the pool with a copy of The Great Gatsby trying to get his attention.
  - Buttitta describes Lottie as “one of Asheville’s most exclusive harlots, her charms . . . Available only to guests of the luxury hotels.” Though when Fitzgerald first learns who Lottie is and seems shocked, Buttitta says “I like her better than most of the society women.”
  - I’m not sure exactly how old Lottie was, but she seemed pretty young. When she told Fitzgerald she’d never met a writer before, he tried to impress her. To read a bit of that:
    - “They’re a breed apart from the human race,” Fitzgerald said, with the bravura he summoned up on meeting an impressionable girl. “Never tangle with a writer. Some are vegetarians, some prefer the flesh of their brothers. Many are alcoholics or lonely eccentrics who sit and dream up excitement to compensate for a sedentary life. You can never truly know one. He’s too many people trying to be one person—if he’s worth a damn as a writer.”
Also, soon after that their affair ended, and Rosemary moved into the Battery Park Hotel. This was in 1935. Rosemary left Asheville soon after, and Fitzgerald moved into the Battery Park Hotel for a while, then moved back into the grove park inn.
Another thing worth noting is that Fitzgerald was drunk all the time, and hurt himself doing stupid things like the swan dive that screwed up his shoulder, so I could imagine him recklessly jumping down a flight of stairs.
Also, I should mention that in the book it’s pretty clear that Fitzgerald is racist, against black people at least. At one point, Buttitta tells him about a book he’s writing with a black protagonist, and he says that Fitzgerald “frowned on” the idea of a black hero. And then at the end of the memoir, they get into a fight when Fitzgerald says some nasty stuff about “race mixing” and yells at Buttitta for supporting black writers and black people in general.
- In addition to that, I think that the only thing Fitzgerald published between his summers in Asheville is an essay for Esquire called “The Crack-up,” which has a whole part about how he “can’t stand the sight of” black people, as well as some other groups of people. I’ve linked the full text to that in the shownotes if anyone wants to read that essay. It’s just basically about him falling into despair.
- So I think it’s safe to say that in the Battery Park Hotel murder case, if someone had questioned Fitzgerald about who he thought committed the murder, he definitely would have pointed a finger at black hotel employees.
All of this is extremely circumstantial, but the Fitzgerald part of all of this was fairly intriguing to me, especially since he was so unstable during the summers he spent in Asheville.
And of course the cops were very motivated to pin the blame for the murder on someone, and just like today, it would have been easiest to frame a young black man, whereas potentially leveling the blame on someone like F. Scott Fitzgerald, or a wealthy hotel guest, would be much more trouble for them and would, in their eyes at least, reflect poorly on them.
Many people say that the hotel is haunted because of how a Moore had been so obviously railroaded
- Apparently the elevator where Moore had worked as a bellhop behaves strangely, running through the night by itself and clattering, waking people up
- In the 70s and 80s, people claimed to see red light emanating from room 224
- Some claim that the second floor is freezing cold, and changing the thermostat doesn’t help
- It’s also been said that Helen haunts the hotel as well, though I haven’t heard specifics of that.
The Battery Park Hotel closed in 1972 and in 1980, it was made into an apartment building for senior citizens.

Helen’s Bridge, a bridge on Beaucatcher Mountain that was built in 1909 and was originally called Zealandia’s bridge. I assume it was named after Zealandia, a historic Tudor-style mansion in Asheville. It’s a pretty stone bridge with a road running under it.

A young mother named Helen lived on the mountain and lost her daughter in a fire. She was so devastated that she hanged herself from the bridge.
People now say that they have car trouble on the bridge, including having their batteries die while on the bridge. And some folks who’ve gone there for paranormal investigations have had car problems later on. In some cases, people have said they had car trouble a week after, and people have reported seeing a moving figure from the corner of their eye after leaving.
There have also been reports of Helen appearing and asking if they know where her child is. They say she wears a long dress
Apparently there’s a lot of paranormal activity around the bridge.
People have said they’ve also seen apparitions and figures that look like monsters in the underbrush nearby.
People have also been slapped, punched, and scratched while there

Erwin High School

In the 1970s, this high school was built on an old potters field called Country Home Cemetery. We’ve talked about potters fields before–Hart Island in NYC is one of them–but as a reminder, they’re cemeteries for people who can’t afford to be buried elsewhere. Many potters fields are for people who are indigent or whose bodies can’t be identified.
There had been an old folks’ home called Old County Home nearby, and many elderly people from there were buried in the potter’s field
There had been more than 1K graves, which were moved so they could build the school. But because most of the graves weren’t marked, some of the bodies couldn’t have been found and moved.
Contractors tried to field the bodies by shoving a T-handled rod into the ground and feeling for soft spots.
Many of the corpses didn’t have coffins; some were just wrapped in blankets.
The contractors put the decomposed remains into small wooden boxes, many of which were only 3 feet long.
According to research by paranormal researcher Joshua Warren, as reported in a 2002 article in Mountain Xpress, “a county commissioner, R. Curtis Ratcliff, reported that he saw workers punch a hole in a coffin, drag out a skull, and throw it on the ground; some of its false teeth fell out, and its hair fell off. An anonymous teacher claimed to have seen a coffin opened that contained the remains of a woman with flowing red hair, dressed in an old gown, and cradling in her arms a small corpse that appeared to be a stillborn baby.”
The bodies were moved to a hillside behind an elementary school, and the graves were marked with military-style white crosses
The school technically wasn’t built exactly on top of the cemetery–the cemetery was between the school and the football field
Strange phenomena supposedly started after students got ahold of some skulls and started using them in pranks
People have reported poltergeist activity like the elevator moving by itself, flying objects, slamming doors, and floating heads
Students and custodial staff have seen pictures fly off classroom walls, TVs turn themselves on and off
The reporter in 2002 claimed that if you walk around in the fields behind the school, there are shapes visible in the moonlit grass that look like human bodies
The football team is notoriously terrible, and in the 1990s during a really bad losing streak, the half-time show was a mock exorcism. (It didn’t work)
Custodial staff, who often work there late at night alone, have said that motion detectors go off when no one’s there, etc. But One former assistant principal claims that they’re being set off by animals who were abandoned at the Human Society, which is next door

Craven Street Bridge

The French Broad River is a river that runs through Asheville that people used to swim in back in the day. The Craven Street Bridge crosses the river, and there’s an odd ghost story associated with it.
Supposedly, in the early 20th century, some boys went for a swim in the river around sunset on a summer evening.
Not everyone owned bathing suits back then, so they swam naked.
Unfortunately, the river was flowing faster than usual that day because of some storms that had happened elsewhere a few days before.
When playing in the river, the boys were swept toward the Craven Street Bridge, where dangerous rapids had formed. So they went to go home, and then realized that someone in their party was missing.
They looked for the boy, and got other people to help him throughout the night, but they didn’t find him. The next day, boats dredged the river, but his body wasn’t found.
Soon after that, people started seeing a naked boy run across the bridge, but when they tried to get his attention, he didn’t respond. If they tried to catch up with him, he’d disappear.

Brown Mountain Lights

Orbs seem to rise off the mountain, hover 15 feet up, then vanish
Tons of people have seen them over the centuries
Cherokee legend says that they were the souls of the women searching for their men who’d died in a battle between the Cherokee and Catawba that happened on Brown Mountain
Some people say that they’re the lights from a search for a missing woman, echoing back from when the search happened in the 19th century
There’s one legend that romanticized slavery, saying that a slave-owner and an enslaved man were in the mountains together, and the slave-owned disappeared while the enslaved man continued looking for him. It became a popular mid-20th century song by Lulu Belle and Scotty called Brown Mountain Light.
Some scientific explanations that have been offered are swamp gas or reflected car headlights.
- But there’s no swamp on Brown Mountain.
- And the lights appeared before cars existed, and were still seen in 1916 when a flood shut down all train and car traffic in the area.
- Some people say instead that they’re some kind of electrical discharge from the nearby fault lines.
We didn’t get to see them, especially since they’re observed at night and the folks I’m traveling with are very scared of ghosts.
- And anyway, the best time to see them is October or November, once the trees have lost their leaves

Sources consulted RE: Haunted Asheville, North Carolina

Websites RE: Haunted Asheville, North Carolina

The Crack Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald: https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a4310/the-crack-up/
Tony Buttitta’s memoir of his time with F. Scott Fitzgerald: http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/bio/buttitta-lostsummer01.html
https://northcarolinaghosts.com/mountains/
https://northcarolinaghosts.com/mountains/ghost-chicken-alley/
https://northcarolinaghosts.com/mountains/pink-lady-grove-park-inn/
https://northcarolinaghosts.com/mountains/naked-ghost-craven-street-bridge/
https://www.romanticasheville.com/brown_mountain_lights.htm
http://brownmountainlights.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omni_Grove_Park_Inn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Wiley_Grove
https://traveltips.usatoday.com/history-grove-park-inn-asheville-22468.html
https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.html
https://www.omnihotels.com/hotels/asheville-grove-park/property-details/history
Haunted Asheville, NC
Grove Park Inn Resort & Spa, Asheville, North Carolina
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pony_glass
https://www.npr.org/2013/09/03/216164420/for-f-scott-and-zelda-fitzgerald-a-dark-chapter-in-asheville-n-c
https://blueridgecountry.com/archive/favorites/fitzgeralds-asheville-days/
https://blueridgecountry.com/newsstand/magazine/the-tragic-death-of-zelda-fitzgerald/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald
https://ashevilleterrors.com/grove-park-inn/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Americans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_the_Philippines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_in_exile_of_the_Commonwealth_of_the_Philippines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_occupation_of_the_Philippines
https://northcarolinaghosts.com/mountains/pink-lady-grove-park-inn/
https://the-line-up.com/the-pink-lady
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pink-lady-grove-park-inn
https://ghosthuntersofasheville.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-pink-lady-of-ghost-park-inn.html
https://avltoday.6amcity.com/asheville-ghosts/
The Story Behind This Haunted Bridge In North Carolina Is Truly Creepy
https://mountainx.com/news/community-news/0703erwin-php/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealandia_(Asheville,_North_Carolina)
Murder at the Battery Park
http://library.uncg.edu/dp/nclitmap/tours/details/Fitzgerald/index.aspx?pid=1683
Life, death and drama in the Battery Park Apartments
https://sites.google.com/a/clevelandcountyschools.org/asheville-intensive/battery-park-hotel
https://wcudigitalcollection.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16232coll3/id/76#_ga=1.199196139.531283170.1399304231
https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/asheville/bat.htm
https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/asheville/resort.htm
Episode 51 Murder At The Battery Park Hotel
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/nyu-student-killer-rushed-execution-5-months-1936-article-1.3368737
https://swords-pens.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-haunting-of-battery-park-hotel.html
https://wncmagazine.com/feature/queen_hill
Gatsby’s Asheville
http://library.uncg.edu/dp/nclitmap/tours/details/Fitzgerald/index.aspx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_Park_Hotel
Murder at the Battery Park
Historic (Haunted) Inns of Asheville
Let’s Be Honest about these Celebrated Asheville Writer’s
https://www.strangecarolinas.com/2016/09/the-jackson-building-ghost-asheville-nc.html

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New York City Potter’s Fields

A look at New York City potter’s fields, the forgotten cemeteries that lie beneath the most famous parks in NYC.Back in the 18th and 19th centuries, a number of potter’s fields (cemeteries for paupers) were scattered around Manhattan. Some of NYC’s most famous parks were built right on top of those forgotten cemeteries, including Madison Square Park, Washington Square Park, Union Square Park, Central Park, Bryant Park, and Sara D. Roosevelt Park.

Highlights include:
• Grave robbers
• The 20,000 bodies that lie beneath a famous park
• Yellow fever
• 18th century NIMBYs
• Construction workers finding tombstones

Episode Script for New York City Potter’s Fields

“Where now are asphalt walks, flowers, fountains, the Washington arch, and aristocratic homes, the poor were once buried by the thousands in nameless graves.”

-Kings Handbook of New York, 1893

“A skeleton was found in Madison Square Park yesterday morning by four plumers laying a water pipe for the city in a six-foot trench near 26th street and 6th avenue. Reginald Pelham Bolton, engineer and authority on the early history of New York, said that the ground from which it was taken once had been a Potter’s Field.”

-From an article published in the New York Times in 1930

I wanna talk about a topic that I’m really interested in, which is potter’s fields.
We’ve talked about them before, but as a reminder, potter’s field is a term that originates from the bible, meaning land that’s too bad to farm, but fine for using for clay for pottery.
Potters fields were places where the poor were buried, and they still exist today, in places like New York City’s Hart Island, which we talked about in our Renwick Ruin episodes.
Since there are countless forgotten cemeteries in NYC, I wanted to focus on the ones that famous parks have been built on top of, since maybe even for people outside of NYC might recognize some of these places.
Also, I used a number of sources, but wanted to acknowledge that a ton of this info comes from the NYC Cemetery Project, which you should absolutely check out if you want to know more; it’s an amazing resource. For some episodes I really do a deep dive and spend many hours going through newspaper archives, but for this episode, any primary sources that I quote or reference were dug up by someone else.

Madison Square Park

This was apparently the original potters field in Manhattan.
Madison Square Park is a smaller park on 23rd street in the Flatiron district.
I used to spent a ton of time there because I worked in the area for about 5 years, and it’s a popular tourist destination because it affords really great views of the famous Flatiron Building, NYC’s first skyscraper, which is shaped like a big triangle.
For a short time, from 1794-1797, Madison Square Park was used as a Potter’s Field because of a major yellow fever outbreak.
- Since this’ll come up a few times today, let’s talk a bit about what yellow fever is. I won’t talk about the symptoms, but I think the context is both necessary and interesting.
- Yellow fever is a virus spread by mosquito bites.
- Nowadays, there’s a vaccine, and if you travel somewhere prone to yellow fever, or live somewhere prone to it, you have to get the vaccine.
- Once you get it, there’s not a lot you can do about it, and even today, half of people who get severe yellow fever die.
- In 2013, 127,000 people got yellow fever, and 45,000 people died of it. 90% of those cases were in African countries, and about a billion people live in places where yellow fever is common. Over the last five years, there’ve been increases of yellow fever in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Nigeria, and Brazil, and apparently the vaccine supply has been somewhat strained and there are all kinds of measures that have had to be implemented to save doses–like for example, giving people partial doses, etc.
  - I also know that some countries have looked into yellow fever as a possible biological weapon.
- Apparently, since the 1980s, yellow fever cases have increased, because fewer people are immune than they used to be, more people live in cities, people move more often, and climate change is causing a better mosquito habitat. I know that in NYC nowadays, a lot of care is taken to try to reduce standing water for mosquitos, though I think that’s for West Nile.
- But in the 18th and 19th centuries, yellow fever was one of the most dangerous infectious diseases.
- The first outbreak in an english-speaking North American area was NYC in 1668, but from there the disease spread, apparently along steamboat routes, all the way down to New Orleans. In 1793, yellow fever killed 9% of Philadelphia’s population, and the US government, including George Washington, had to flee Philly.
- Interestingly, a canadian weather and earthquake predictor known as the Ottawa Prophet, aka Ezekiel Stone Wiggins, said that yellow fever was maybe caused by something astrological, which I find weirdly charming:
  - The planets were in the same line as the sun and earth and this produced, besides Cyclones, Earthquakes, etc., a denser atmosphere holding more carbon and creating microbes. Mars had an uncommonly dense atmosphere, but its inhabitants were probably protected from the fever by their newly discovered canals, which were perhaps made to absorb carbon and prevent the disease.
But by 1848, people began to suspect that it was spread by mosquitoes and by the 1930s, two vaccines were developed, one of which is still in use today.
In the late 1700s, yellow fever was a major problem in NYC.
Though the Potter’s Field at Madison Square Park was only open for about 3 years, hundreds of people were probably buried there, because it was used as a burial ground for people who died in a nearby Almshouse (which was a new, huge, almshouse that was built because NYC’s population was rapidly increasing) as well as those who died in Bellevue Hospital, which had opened a yellow fever hospital
In 1795, 750 people died of yellow fever, and while the disease was dangerous for everyone, poor people were the most likely to get it.
The burial ground was closed pretty quickly because people didn’t like how dead people were being transported on the busy roads that led up to it, and a new potter’s field was built where Washington Square Park is today (which we’ll talk about in a sec).
In 1806, the area was used as an arsenal, and later, it was a House of Refuge for juvenile delinquents.
In 1847, the site was leveled and turned into Madison Square Park.
Bodies were found during the construction of the arsenal, and more were found by construction workers digging sewer lines and water pipes in the early 20th century.
There are probably still bodies underneath the park today.

Washington Square Park

According to findagrave.com, from 1797-1823, the place where Washington Square Park is now was once a potter’s field.
It was a 6-acre cemetery that sat on the bank of a creek that ran through there called Minetta Creek. The cemetery lays under the eastern 2/3 of today’s Washington Square Park.
At the time, it was referred to as just “Potter’s Field”
The location was chosen because it was north of where most New Yorkers lived at the time, while still being, as the NYC Cemetery Project phrased it, “a convenient distance to the Almshouse in City Hall Park, to the public hospital at Bellevue on the East River, and to the new state prison just west on the Hudson River”
- Of course, rich people didn’t like the idea of having a cemetery there, because many of them had country homes in Greenwich Village, and not only did they not want to have a potter’s field next to their properties, but they were also annoyed that the wagons that carried bodies would be moving slowly along the main road, subjecting them to the annoyance of the additional traffic and, presumably, reminding them that poor people were dying in droves.
- So 57 homeowners in the area, including Alexander Hamilton, who I loathe, incidentally, wrote a letter protesting the Potter’s Field, saying:
  - “lie in the neighborhood of a number of Citizens who have at great expense erected dwellings on the adjacent lots for the health and accommodation of their families during the summer season, and who, if the above design be carried into execution, must either abandon their seats or submit to the disagreeable sensations arising from an unavoidable view of and close situation to a burial place of this description destined for the victims of contagion.”
- But the city went forward with it anyway, and stopped using the Madison Square Park burial ground.
- In November 1797, the cemetery opened. It had a sturdy fence around it, and trees were planted there. A keeper’s cottage stood at the northeast corner of the cemetery, where the keeper who maintained the grounds and dug graves lived. Part of the keeper’s job was also to protect against grave robbers.
  - At the time, in the 18th and 19th centuries, grave-robbing was a real issue, because doctors and medical students needed cadavers for research, but there wasn’t an infustructure to get fresh corpses to them, so they robbed graves.
  - At the time, most prominent doctors in the area admitted to body-snatching at least once.
  - Grave-robbing happened mostly at African burial grounds and potter’s fields, where it was rightly assumed that the public would care less if bodies were stolen from.
- In 1808, the Potter’s Field keeper was fired becase he admitted to helping grave robbers.
- A later keeper took his duties seriously, and in april 1824, at 3 am, he got an inkling that grave robbers had arrived, and he called for two watchmen and went out with his dog to confront them.
  - He found 10 coffins that had been dug up, and the man who’d dug them up was arrested and spent 6 months in prison.
  - A New York Evening Post article about the incident said: “the young gentlemen attending the medical school of this city, will take warning by this man’s fate. They may rest assured that the keeper of Pottersfield will do his duty and public justice will be executed upon any man, whatever may be his condition in life, who is found violating the law and the decency of Christian burial.”
20,000 were known to have been buried there and many if not all of their bodies are still there.
- In 1798, a Great Epidemic of yellow fever hit NYC hard, killing 2,000 New Yorkers, 660 of whom were buried in Potter’s Field.
- In later outbreaks, churches weren’t allowed to bury people who died of yellow fever, so they all went into Potter’s field.
But the area wasn’t just a potter’s field: the cemetery also held a few private church plots, including two African churches’ plots.
By 1824, the Village had become a major suburb of the city, and the Potters Field was full.
In 1825, the Potter’s field was leveled and turned into a parade ground. On the 4th of July, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it opened as the Washington Parade Ground.
In 1878, it was made a public park.
The idea behind not moving the bodies was that it was deemed disrespectful, especially because some wealthy people had been buried there alongside the paupers.
- But in 1890, when the triumphal arch in Washington Square Park was built, coffins, skeletons, and headstones were exhumed.
- In 1941, WPA workers found remains while excavating for a sewer on the north edge of the park.
- In 1965, workers from power company Con Edison found an underground burial vault that had had a domed roof and held several coffins and at least 25 skeletons–this was probably part of one of the church’s plots.
In October 2009, a few weeks before Halloween, construction workers found a tombstone in Washington Square Park.
- And before that, in early 2008, presumably as part of the preparation for the construction, a soil testing had led to the discovery of four bodies
- And between 2009 and 2013, during the construction, at least 31 skeletons, including 16 graves, were discovered by archaeologists during the part renovations.
Also, at some point, a gallows stood there, apparently near where the fountain at Washington Square Park is today.

Sara D. Roosevelt Park

This is a park in lower Manhattan, in kinda the lower east side/chinatown/little italy.
It’s not a super famous park, and isn’t one that tourists would try to go, but I used to spend a lot of time there in my early twenties.
- It was near a dumpling place where you could get a really good sesame pancake for like $1 that the health department has since shut down.
- There was also a bun place called Golden Steamer that I think is still around, where you could get a really good pumpkin or red bean paste bun for $.80.
- So you could get a pretty good meal for under $2, but there wasn’t seating at either of those places, of course, so I used to sit in the nearby park and eat dinner. Most dinners that I had with friends back in those days were enjoyed at that park.
But I’m not here to reminisce about that, I’m here to tell you about something that I had no idea of back then: before the land became Sara D. Roosevelt Park in 1934, it used to be a cemetery.
- And not just any cemetery: it was an African burial ground, called the Second African Burial Ground.
- I think most people know that NYC was once New Amsterdam, if only because of the They Might Be Giants song. Under Dutch rule, cemeteries weren’t necessarily racially segregated, but, predictably, as soon as the British took over, African Americans weren’t allowed to be buried in NYC.
- Though to be clear, Dutch farmers in the area that is new NYC did use enslaved people as agricultural workers.
  - For example, according to the 1820 census, 338 white people and 91 black people lived in New Lots, Brooklyn, and half of the town’s families were slave owners. New Lots is another area that had a burial ground for black people, though the colonial cemetery there seemed to contain white and black people, with a specific area of it designated for black people.
    - If you’re wondering, in the 1920s, a nearby school took over the cemetery and used it as a playground.
    - To read from the NYC Cemetery Project’s website:
      - at a 1908 meeting of the New Lots Board of Trade . . . President Jacob Hessel stated, “it matters not that these bones are but the remainder of slaves; slaves they were, but they were also part of New Lots’ history, and as such we owe them respect”—[but] there is no evidence removals occurred at the time the playground was established.
    - In the 1950s, that playground was turned into a public park called the Schenck Playground, and in 2019, in memory of the African burial ground that was once there, the playground was renamed to be called Snakofa Park.
- You’ll find that almost everywhere you turn in NYC, there either is or was a cemetery.
- There were a good number of African burial grounds in NYC, one of which I used to walk by every day, before the pandemic.
  - That cemetery, which I think was the first major African burial ground in NYC, was in lower Manhattan, in an area that’s now practically entirely made up of government buildings. One of those government buildings does now contain a museum and monument commemorating that burial ground.
  - For about 100 years, starting in the 1690s, both free and enslaved Black people in NYC were buried there. Possibly about 20,000 people were buried there. In the late 1700s, a number of bodies were stolen for medical experiments.
  - And for a very long time, the burial ground was forgotten, until a big construction project in 1991 unearthed bodies. 400 bodies were sent to Howard University to be studied.
  - So now there’s both a museum and monument to the burial ground, as well as the IRS’s offices, since it’s a big government building.
- Sara D. Roosevelt Park doesn’t have much commemorating the cemetery that used to be there: Instead of it’s full of basketball courts and benches.
  - There is a plaque, which reads:
    - In 1794, the African burial ground near City Hall was closed, and by October of that year, the Common Council of New York City received a “petition from the Sunday Black men of this City praying the aid of this board in purchasing a piece of ground for the internment of their dead.” By April, the land was granted in what was deemed “a proper place,” near the dilapidated ruin of James Delancey’s mansion. […] By the late 1700s, the growing population of the city forced northern expansion. The burial ground began to deteriorate, and in 1853, it closed forever. The human remains were disinterred, and the site was soon built over.
  - That being said, apparently not that many bodies were actually disinterred; as many of 5,000 people were buried in the Second African Burial Ground, and only about 485 interments appear on findagrave.com on the plot in Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills Cemetery where the remains were supposedly all moved.
    - When a local fancy modern art museum called the New Museum was built, around 2007 I believe, human remains were found.
    - Before the burial ground was closed, it was owned by St. Philip’s Church, who did a big study in 2003 because of a proposed subway extension that would go through the area.
      - The study said that there were likely human remains still there, especially under the west sidewalk on Christie street between Stanton and Rivington.
  - Aside from the plaque, the only other suggestion that an African Burial Ground was in the park is a small community garden that was created in the 1980s, called the M’Finda Kalunga Community Garden, which means “Garden at the Edge of the Other Side of the World” in Kikongo, or Kongo, which is a Bantu langage that’s spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, and Angola.
    - It was a language that was spoken by many people who were enslaved and taken to the Americas.
    - Because of that, forms of Kikong are apparently still spoken in rituals in Afro-American religions (especially in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the DR, and Haiti)
    - Though mostly Kikongo’s spoken in Africa, where seven million people speak it as a first language and an additional 2 million speak it as a second language

Bryant Park

In March 1823, NYC passed laws banning burials in lower Manhattan.
- Many cities in the US passed similar laws around this time, in the interest of public health.
- There was a lot of controversies about the laws, though, because some people felt that having churchyard cemeteries all over were hazardous to their health and unsightly. Apparently the smell was also quite bad.
- However, churches and people who’d bought plots in churchyards weren’t happy about it.
The city needed a new place to bury people, so they found a spot three miles north of City Hall, in the city’s common lands, surrounded by 5th and 6th Aves and 40th and 42 streets.
The city spent $10K prepping the land for the cemetery, including building 10 public burial vaults, surrounding the land with a 4-foot-high stone wall, and planting weeping willows and elms
And that is how, for 17 years, the land that became Bryant Park, which sits next to the main, big NYPL branch with the lions outside of it, was a potters field. If you’ve been to NYC, you’ve probably been to Bryant Park, especially since it’s near Times Square and the theater district.
Though the city tried to make it nice, the burial ground didn’t seem to appeal to middle-and-upper-class New Yorkers, and it doesn’t seem like churches or families acquired any of the vaults.
Supposedly the land was used as a potter’s field, though the city abandoned it by the late 1820s. But other sources have said that the land was too wet for burials and was just wasteland until 1837.
In 1840, the land was then used to make the Croton Distributing Reservoir, which we talked about in a lot more detail during our Egyptomania episode.

Union Square Park

Today, Union Square Park is on 14th street in Manhattan.
It’s by NYU and the New School, and is a really bustling park and area.
At least before the pandemic, it was extremely crowded all the time, and there was a great greenmarket there I believe on Saturdays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. When I worked near there I used to buy a lot of muffins and houseplants there.
There are often protests at Union Square, as well as artists selling their wares and people holding free hugs signs.
It’s a little grimy and the kinda place where you’re likely to get catcalled a lot, but it’s also a place that’s very full of life–again, at least before the pandemic. God knows what it’s like now.
Before it was a bustling, fashionable area, it was a potter’s field. I haven’t been able to find a ton of info about it for some reason, but it seems to have existed.
The last burials there were in 1807, and it was designated as a public park in 1815, called Union Place, which was later renamed Union Square.

Central Park

I didn’t want to leave the topic of cemeteries beneath NYC’s parks without at least mentioning NYC’s most famous park, Central Park.
Central Park has a number of gates that you can enter through, and one of them, Mariner’s Gate, stands at the location where All Angels Church, a mixed-race congregation that opened in 1848, as well as its cemetery, once stood.
In 1857, the government took the land and built Central Park
As far as we know, the bodies weren’t moved.
In 1871, workers were pulling out a tree when they found a coffin that contained a 16-year-old who had been buried there in 1852.
A number of other graves have been discovered by gardeners in the area.
I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t dig into this one too much, because a lot of the google searches I was getting didn’t surface anything about Central Park, but instead were about coronavirus-related mass graves. So maybe I’ll dig a bit deeper into this another time, but I didn’t really want to sift through all of that this time.

Sources consulted RE: New York City Potter’s Fields

Websites RE: New York City Potter’s Fields

https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2561167/potter%E2%80%99s-field-(washington-square-park)
https://brooklynbased.com/2020/04/10/from-the-archives-the-past-lives-of-city-parks-as-potters-fields/
https://hyperallergic.com/75684/when-will-there-be-a-memorial-for-nycs-second-african-burial-ground/
https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/category/african-american-cemeteries/
https://www.nps.gov/afbg/planyourvisit/maps.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongo_language
https://gothamist.com/news/tombstone-unearthed-in-washington-square-park
https://brooklynbased.com/2012/08/24/the-bones-beneath-fort-greene-park/
https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/2019/05/15/public-burial-ground-madison-square-park-2/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_fever
https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/2019/05/09/public-burial-ground-madison-square-park/
https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/2019/05/30/public-burial-ground-bryant-park/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Square_and_Madison_Square_Park
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/manhattans-forgotten-graveyards_b_4171691
https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/new-york/articles/a-brief-history-of-union-square-new-york-city/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Square,_Manhattan
https://nypost.com/2014/10/25/the-hidden-cemeteries-of-nyc/
https://www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/before-they-were-parks/manhattan
https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2561849/potter’s-field-(madison-square-park)
https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2561167/memorial-search?page=1#sr-187815630
https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2561363
King’s Handbook of New York: https://books.google.com/books?id=MEEAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA505&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

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Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York (Part 1)

More people are buried at Calvary Cemetery, in Queens, New York, than in any other cemetery in the United States.

“Calvary Cemetery is by far the most important burial ground in the vicinity of New York, and, in fact, in the United States in point of interments, extent, and the number of monuments and headstones that go to make it a wilderness of rising tombstones.”

-The Leonard Manual of the Cemeteries of New York and Vicinity, 1901

This episode is focused on the history of the cemetery, what it’s like to visit it nowadays, and some of the most interesting people buried there.

Highlights include:
• The Cemetery Belt, a collection of NYC cemeteries that can be seen from space
• A rich man who died in a barn
• A Black, queer communist author and poet
• Rome’s ancient catacombs
• Some NYC mobsters
• A female author who grew up in a castle
• A NYC cop who was assassinated in Sicily

For more audio about Calvary Cemetery, check out our patreon.

Photos taken in and around Calvary Cemetery, Queens, in April and May 2020

Episode Script for Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York (Part 1)

“Calvary Cemetery is by far the most important burial ground in the vicinity of New York, and, in fact, in the United States in point of interments . . . and the number of monuments and headstones that go to make it a wilderness of rising tombstones.” –The Leonard Manual of the Cemeteries of New York and Vicinity, 1901

Did you know that there are more dead people in Queens than living people?
- Did you know that there are more people buried in a single cemetery in Queens than there are living ppl in Queens?
- 2.3 million people live in Queens
- 3 million ppl are buried in Calvary Cemetery–more people than at any cemetery in the US
I’ve gone to Calvary Cemetery a few times since the pandemic started–or at least I’ve looked in from outside the locked gates. I recorded some audio that’s on our patreon on one trip there in April I believe, though while we’ve been in NC, the cemetery has reopened. So I’m excited go actually go inside once I’m done quarantining.
So let’s talk about the cemetery’s history:
The Rural Cemetery Act, which was passed in NY in 1847, allowed commercial burial grounds in rural NYS.
- This had a few effects:
  1. Burials became a business (before, people were mostly buried at churches and privately owned land)
  2. “Rural” areas like Queens and Brooklyn started becoming popular places to build cemeteries.
  3. It also created what’s called The Cemetery Belt nowadays, which is a bunch of cemeteries that exist on the border of Queens and Brooklyn. Apparently it’s large enough to see from space.
The act was a good idea, since Manhattan’s churchyards were getting crowded, especially because of the outbreaks of cholera.
- Specifically, in 1832, 3,500 people in NYC died in a cholera outbreak, and tons of people left the city.
  - There was also concern that burying people in Manhattan was contaminating the drinking water.
- It led to the establishment of many beautiful garden cemeteries, like Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx and Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Queens.
  - People would flock to these cemeteries on the weekends to enjoy their rolling hills and beautiful trees and flowers.
- Calvary Cemetery was very much not a garden cemetery.
  - Even calling it a lawn cemetery feels charitable to me–it’s jam packed with tombstones that always make me think of a shark’s teeth. You know how shark’s teeth kinda grow in lots of uneven rows.
Calvary Cemetery is run by the Catholic church, specifically the trustees of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, who had started buying up land for Calvary Cemetery in 1846. As early as 1817, they’d realized that their cemetery in Manhattan was filling up.
- The land they purchased was in southern Queens, near the Newtown Creek that forms the border with Brooklyn. I’ve heard the area referred to as Maspeth, or Woodside, or Sunnyside, or an area of Long Island City called Blissville.
- They purchased 71 acres of land–or maybe 115?
- The land they purchased included the Alsop family farm and their family cemetery plot.
  - The Alsop family tombstones are still there; the oldest is from 1718
The new cemetery was named Calvary Cemetery, named after Mount Calvary, which was the hill where Jesus was crucified.
On July 31, 1848, the first person was buried in the cemetery. Her name was Esther Ennis, and she died at the age of 29, reportedly of a broken heart.
In August 1848, the cemetery was consecrated by Archbishop John Hughes
- So I just want to pause here two talk about a synchronicity that I enjoy: So I went to Fordham University, which is a Jesuit school in the Bronx, which was founded by Archbishop John Hughes (the school was even originally called St. John’s College, until it was later renamed). And coincidentally, the dorm I lived in freshman year, which started out as a residence for priests and seminarians, was built in 1848.
- When I found out that synchronicity in the spring it really tickled me, though of course it makes sense that the famous, or infamous, John Hughes had a hand in founding both.
- So we’ll be talking all about Archbishop John Hughes, aka Dagger John, next time.
But to get back to the cemetery itself:
Hughes consecrated it in 1848, and by 1852, 50 people were buried there every day.
- About half of the burials were poor Irish children younger than 7 years old
- In 1867, the cemetery was full. So they opened additional sections, calling the original section First Calvary or Old Calvary
- Between 1848 and 1898, almost 645K people were buried in Calvary cemetery
- And from 1898 to 1907, 200K people were buried there
- There are now 4 sections of Calvary, which also bear the names of roman catacombs. Some of the catacombs in Rome are as old as 2nd century AD; apparently they came about because there was a land shortage in Rome, so early Christians, as well as Jewish people, buried their dead in the underground catacombs.
  - So the 4 sections of Calvary are:
  - First Calvary, also called St. Calixtus, was established in 1848,
    - St. Calixtus was a pope from 217-222, who was martyred by being thrown down a well by the Roman Empire, who didn’t like Catholics
      - Before becoming Pope, his predecessor, Pope Zephyrinus, made him administrator of the preeminent church cemetery, where church leaders and martyrs were buried.
      - So he’s the patron saint of cemetery workers.
    - The Catacombs of St. Callixtus in Rome house a number of 3rd-century popes, as well as the crypt of St. Cecilia, who gained a cult following in the middle ages
  - Second Calvary, aka St. Agnes, acquired in 1888, is named after a catacomb where the young Roman martyr, St. Agnes, was buried.
    - To give the backstory of the Roman catacomb:
      - Agnes was 12 when she died, and was both burned and decapitated, though some people said the veins in her neck were just severed.
      - She became a popular figure right after she died. Many people began to venerate her and visit her tomb.
      - Emperor Constantine’s family got really into her, and the emperor’s daughter, Constantina, built a big church nearby because she wanted to be buried near St. Agnes. She built a fancy cylindrical mausoleum, which featured a dome decorated with mosaics featuring cupids gathering grapes. That church is pretty much gone today, aside from the ruins of some masonry.
      - Apparently the Catacombs of St. Agnes are badly preserved because they’ve been constantly visited basically from the time she died.
  - Third Calvary, aka St. Sebastian, established in 1879
    - The roman catacombs that it’s named after was somewhere where people would go to venerate the Apostles Peter and Paul
    - St. Sebastian is buried there, of course
    - And apparently in the middle ages, it was a popular destination for people to visit
  - Fourth Calvary, aka St. Domitilla, established in 1900
    - The roman catacombs of Domatilla, is built on the site of property owned by a noblewoman named Flavia Domitilla, who was exciled to the Pontine Islands because of her Christian sympathies. Before she left, she gave her possessions to the Christian community there, which led to the largest Christian underground cemetery in Rome being built there
Back to Calvary:
By the early 20th century, the flu and TB were major epidemics, so there was a shortage of gravediggers, and families had to dig graves for their deceased relatives themselves
Adults could be buried there in $7, children younger than 7 cost $3, and children aged 7-14 cost $5
As Manhattan’s East Village was developed more and more, many people were dug up from cemeteries there and moved to Calvary Cemetery so they could build more
People reached the cemetery by ferry
- The boat left from 23rd street in Manhattan, and later 10th street
Initially, there was a simple frame chapel in Calvary Cemetery, but in 1908, they built a chapel that was inspired by the Sacré-Cœur Basilica in Paris and looks a lot like it
- To read from a 1909 article in Popular Mechanics:
  - Calvary, the chief Catholic burial ground of Greater New York, has . . . A greater population than any other city of the dead in America, and its new chapel, the only one of the kind in this country, has several features which make it unique in construction and design.
The building took 3 years to build and cost $180,000 ($50,000 of which was just for the sculptures and furnishings)
It was designed by a brooklyn architect named Raymond F. Almirall, who studied a bunch of old Italian churches and mortuary chapels
The building has rubble masonry with Indiana limestone facing
The dome is 80 ft from the ground and topped with a statue of Jesus that’s carved from a single piece of limestone
Apparently the dome was very impressive from an arhitectural standpoint, because it was made of reinforced concrete and that took some inventiveness. It’s lined with “golden yellow brick and . . . Pink Minnesota sandstone trimmings” that are attached to the concrete.
The idea was that priests would be buried in the catacombs, and as of 1909, only one section of the catacombs, which had space for 24 people, was ready. Then the idea was that the section could extend underground in four directions, and they could make space for and additional 72 bodies.
The chapel has a lift that was set into the floor to lower bodies down to the cripts
At the time, there were about 70-120 burials a day, so the article noted that the chapel would be in “almost constant use”
To read a bit more of the article:
- The structure is consequently designed so that one funeral party can depart to the burial plot without interfering with the next cortege waiting in front of the chapel.
So I wanted to talk a bit about some of the people who’re buried in Calvary Cemetery:
- As far as I can tell, the most famous person buried there is Dom Deluise. But let’s look at some other folks:
- Rosemary Muscarella Ardolina wrote a book called Old Calvary Cemetery: New Yorkers Carved in Stone and examined 5,300 tombstones with legible places of birth listed
  - interestingly but not surprisingly 90% of the headstones cite Irish places of birth
  - though other common birthplaces were the United States, Italy, France, Scotland and Canada
- The largest personal mausoleum in the cemetery is the Johnson Mausoleum, which was built in the 19th century and cost $100,000 to build (or $2.5 million in today’s dollars). Though I’ve read elsewhere that it cost $300,000 to build
  - The Johnsons were a set of brothers–Charles, John, and Robert. John opened J.C. Johnson Department Stores on 22nd Street between Broadway and 5th Avenue (so near where the Flatiron is today) and Charles helped him run the buisiness.
  - They were Irish immigrants who ended up becoming millionaires. Silk fabrics were a bestselling item at their department store, which is notable because apparently other similar stores weren’t doing well back then.
  - John was really involved in St. Patrick’s church, and was known as a generous donor. When he died in 1887, 7 years after Charles did, he had a big funeral and was put into the mauseleum, where Charles was.
  - It’s unclear what exactly happened, but a year after John died, the store, under Robert’s management, went under.
    - He retreated to the family mansion on Mt. St Vincent, on the Hudson, and lived there until the house was foreclosed on.
    - Then there was a fire, which he apparently barely escaped.
    - He went to live in the barn, which was on the property.
    - In the winter, some friends came to visit and found him there. Apparently he had pneumonia, and seemed to have gone crazy.
    - Ten days later, he died and was buried in the mausleum, which luckily had been paid for already.
    - The mausoleum has 30 vaults, but only 6 of them are occupied
- So that’s the Johnson family. The cemetery also holds many Civil War Medal of Honor recipients, particularly soldiers of Irish heritage.
  - There’s actually a NYC park inside the cemetery–in 1863, NYC bought a bit of land in the middle of the cemetery from the Trustees of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
  - The city used it to bury Union soldiers who died while in NY hospitals after fighting in the war. 21 soldiers were buried there.
  - There’s a big monument featuring an obelisk and four life-sized bronze soldiers
- There are also a number of politicians buried there, including folks involved in Tammany Hall.
- A number of mobsters are buried in Calvary, though apparently many of their graves are unmarked.
  - The Terranova brothers, who were part of the Morello crime family around the turn of the 20th century, are there in unmarked graves
  - Many 20th century mobsters are buried there, including Johnny Dolan
    - I looked him up, and found this interesting tidbit on wikipedia
      - Dolan was known as a particularly inventive criminal, who perfected a variety of devices widely used for assault and murder throughout the underworld. According to Asbury, Dolan designed a copper eye gouger to be worn on the thumb and used it both in criminal activities and in battles with other gangs. Dolan himself allegedly owned a personally designed pair of boots with sections of a sharp axe blade embedded in the soles, which he used to stomp a downed victim.
    - I will say that the veracity of the descriptions of his violent nature is debated, since one biographer reported it but contemporary newspapers didn’t.
      - Instead, they described him as a petty thief.
      - He did serve a stint in Blackwell’s Island Penetentiary, which we talked about in the Renwick Smallpox Hospital episode
      - He ended up being executed for a murder commited during a robbery, and he was hanged in 1876, when he was 26, in the Tombs Prison, which we talked about in the Victorian Egyptomania episode. It was an ill-fated Egyptian revival building that was constructed on quicksand.
  - Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria who apparently was one of the mafia’s “Boss of All Bosses” lies in Calvary–he led the most powerful NYC organized crime family during prohibition.
    - Nowadays, he led the Morello crime family, which is now the Genovese family.
    - In 1930, a war between families started, called the Castellammarese War, and it ended with Joe the Boss being killed by his own lieutenant, who shot him in the back in a restaurant where he’d been playing cards in Coney Island, Brooklyn.
    - If you want to know more about him, there’s a good blog post on the Newtown Pentacle about him, which I’ll include in the shownotes
  - And this isn’t a real burial, but in the movie The Godfather, Don Corleone was buried at Calvary Cemetery
  - Though there are many mobsters buried in the cemetery, there’s also obviously a number of cops buried there. And I wanted to share this interesting story about one of them, a cop named Joseph Petrosino.
    - A disclaimer: I’m not a fan of the NYPD, but this story was too good not to share.
    - Like many of the people buried at Calvary, he was an immigrant. He was from Palermo, Sicily.
    - When he was a kid, he and his cousin came to the US to live with the grandfather, who ended up dying in a streetcar accident.
    - Since they had no other family in America, they ended up in orphans/surrogates court
    - But the judge took pity on them and instead of sending them to an orphanage, he took the boys home to live with his own family while their family was contacted in Italy.
    - Because of this, the boys ended up living with a politically connected Irish family for a while, which opened up educational and occupational opportunities that they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, as recent Italian immigrants
    - He joined the NYPD in 1883, and was the first person in the history of NYPD to speak Italian
    - He was 5’3″ and had to get a special waiver to get around the NYPD’s height requirement
    - He was considered a whiz at solving crimes in the Italian community, so he was sent out anytime a serious crime happened
    - He was friends with Teddy Roosevelt, who was part of the council of police commissioners that oversaw the NYPD
    - In 1908, Petrosino was made head of the “Italian Squad,” which wikipedia describes as “an elite corps of Italian-Ameriacn detectives assembled specifically to deal with the criminal activities of organizations like the Mafia, which Petrosino saw as a shame upon decent Italians and Italian Americans.”
    - As part of the Italian Squad, Petrosino helped out an Italian opera singer named Enrico Caruso, who performed at the Metropolitan Opera at the time. He was being extorted by Black Hang gangers; Black Hand was an Italian extortion racket. Petrosino was an opera lover, and he convinced Caruso to help him catch the blackmailers
    - Petrosino also infiltrated an Italian anarchist organization that was maybe connectcted to the assassination of the king of Italy, Umberto I, in 1900.
      - Petrosino discovered that the organization planned to assistant President William McKinley during his trip to Buffalo, NY
      - Petrosino warned the secret service, and Roosevelt, who was VP at the time, said that they should listen to him. However, McKinley went to Buffalo, NY, during the World’s Fair in September 1901, and was assassinated
      - Around 1909, new US law was passed, allowing the US government to deport anyone who’d been convicted of a crime in another country, if they’d been in the US for less than 3 years
      - So Petrosino went to Palermo, Sicily, on a secret mission to get evidence of criminals in NYC who’d committed crimes back in Sicily
      - It sounds like he shouldn’t have gone–even before he left, newspapers printed anyonymous sources who said why he was going to italy, and people said that he’d be recognized since he was so well known
      - In Rome, he saw a criminal he recognized from NYC following him, and it sounds like he’d given his associates in the Black Hand Society a heads up that Petrosino was in Italy
      - When he reached Palermo, Petrosino met up with an informant, who claimed to have info on mafia members, in the middle of the night. While waiting for the informant, Petrosino was shot in the face by two people.
      - He died there, and after funeral rites happened in Palermo, his body was sent to NYC, where more funeral rites were performed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. 200,000 people participated in the funeral procession, and NYC declared the day he was buried a city-wide holiday so people could pay their respects
      - He was buried in Calvary Cemetery, where a pillar with a bust mark his grave
- I wanted to talk about a couple writers who were buried there: The first is Mary Letitia Martin
  - She was an Irish writer who published three books
  - She was born into a wealthy family that was the main landowner in Connemara (which is a region of Galway)
  - She knew Irish, English, French and supposedly some other languages too
  - In 1834, she met a Polish Count, Count Adolphe de Werdinsky. She refused to marry him, and he faked a suicide attempt at her family’s castle
  - She published her first book in 1845, and married her cousin, in 1847. Her husband took on her last name, Martin.
  - Also in 1847, her father died of Typhus after catching it while visiting a workhouse–which I guess means that a ton of people in the workhouse were dying from it too
  - Martin inherited her family’s estate, which was 200,000 acres of land, but it sounds like there were a number of debts or expenses associated with it
  - Over the next two years, her fortune was lost in the potato famine, supposedly because he was using her money to help her tenants survive
  - She and her husband, now without any money, moved to Belgium, where she wrote for a few publications
  - In 1850, she published an autobiographical novel, and moved to NYC with her husband. However, she gave birth prematurely on the ship
  - She died 10 days after arriving in NYC, and her baby died too
  - Her husband left NYC and went back to England, where he had her next book posthumously published
  - Martin was buried in Calvary
- The second writer I wanted to talk about is Claude McKay, who was a Jamaican writer and poet, and a big figure in the Harlem Renaissance
  - He was born in Jamaica in 1889, to well-off farmers who apparently owned enough land to vote
  - He grew up Baptist, but his father often told stories about Ashanti customs, because he was of Ashanti descent
  - When he was four, he attended school at Mt. Zion Church, but when he was 9, he went to live with his brother, who was a teacher, to get a good education. His brother also did some journalism.
    - His brother encouraged him to read, and by the age of 10, he was writing poetry
  - As a teenager, he was apprenticed to a carriage and cabinet maker, but while he worked there, he met an English planter and writer named Walter Jekyll who encouraged him to write more, including in his native dialect.
    - In 1912, McKay published Songs of Jamaica, which were the first poems to be published in Jamaican Patois
  - Also in 1912, he went to the US to go to college, where he was surprised by the amount of racism he encountered there.
  - In 1914, he moved to NYC, where he continued to write and publish poems while working as a waiter on trains
  - In 1919, he published a poem called If I Must Die, about the Red Summer, which was the summer of 1919, when there was an especially vicious string of mobs of white people murdering black people.
    - I wanted to read that poem, which I think is his most famous one. The year it was written, the Senator from Massachusetts read it in congress, and which supposedly Winston Churchill quoted during WWII:
      - If we must die, let it be not like hogs
      - Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
      - While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
      - Making their mock at our accursed lot.
      - If we must die, O let us nobly die,
      - So that our precious blood may not be shed
      - In vain; then even the monsters we defy
      - Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
      - O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
      - Though far outnumbered let us show us brave
      - And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
      - What though before us lies the open grave?
      - Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
      - Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
In the 19teens, he also joined the IWW while working at a factory, and became involved in leftist politics
He helped found the African Blood Brotherhood, which was a propaganda organization that was modeled after secret societies
- It ended up getting folded into the Community Party of America and didn’t exist by the early 1920s
He went to London around this time; he later said that he’d gotten an all-expenses paid trip, but it sounds like there may have been some pressure from the Justice Department that made him leave
- In London, he grew more involved in socialist circles, and he read a lot of Marx and wrote for leftist papers
In 1922, his poetry collection, Harlem Shadows, was published–it was one of the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance
He was invited to go to Russia in 1922, where he said he got an “ecstatic welcome” and “rock-star treatment.”
- He returned to Russia a few years later, where he apparently was received very warmly again. According to wikipedia, “he was so well known in Russia that the brother of Nicolas the Second let him stay at his palace”
- Apparently he had many conversations with Russians who were curious what it was like to be a black person in the US
It seems that McKay was bisexual, because he dated men and women
- Apparently his poems have some queer themes, and there are times when gender is carefully omitted so you could interpret something several different ways
- Some people have said that he had a sexual relationship with his mentor in Jamaica, Walter Jekyll
- Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, he had an on-again, off-again, relationship with English labor activist and poet Charles Ashleigh
- His attraction to several other men has been documented, including his attraction to a Catholic Bishop, Henry Sheil
Like many people, he became disillusioned with communism under Stalin (remember, his nice trips to Russia happened under Lenin) and converted to Catholicism in the early 1940s
He died in Chicago in 1948
It seems like Claude McKay has become more popular in recent years, at least according to a Washington Post review of his book Romance in Marseille, which was just published earlier this year. Romance in Marseille wasn’t published during his lifetime because it sounds like it was ahead of its time, and his friends felt that it’d be too controversial. It sounds like it deals with a lot of themes of disability and queerness
So those are some interesting people buried at Calvary
You can still be buried in Calvary Cemetery today, but you can’t reserve a plot in advance–they only accept immediate interments. I will say that back in April and May, I went to the oldest section of the cemetery a bunch (it wasn’t open, but I walked around the edges and looked in) and I did notice some somewhat recent looking graves around the edges
If you want to be buried in Calvary Cemetery, that’ll run you about 6,600 for a lawn crypt,or 5,500 to be buried in the Upright Monument area. Grave openings for adults cost between $2,400-$3,000. Cremation niches cost under $1,000, and an adult disinterment will run you about $3,600. If you’re indigent, you’ll get a good discount; burial of an indigent adult is less than $500.

Sources consulted RE: Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York

Websites RE: Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York

More about Joe Masseria: https://newtownpentacle.com/2010/10/29/the-man-who-could-dodge-bullets/
Vistors guide of Calvary Cemetery in “brooklyn” (1876):
https://archive.org/stream/visitorsguidetoc02broo?ref=ol#page/14/mode/2up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Queens
http://www.nymoon.com/pubs/undertone/dead/
https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/64107/calvary-cemetery
https://hyperallergic.com/54404/there-are-more-people-who-are-dead-than-alive-in-queens/
https://hyperallergic.com/53757/from-da-bronx-to-eternity/
https://hyperallergic.com/54052/trinity-church-burial-grounds-manhattan/
https://www.6sqft.com/interview-meet-mary-french-the-woman-archiving-new-york-citys-140-cemeteries/
http://www.interment.net/data/us/ny/queens/calvary_cemetery.htm
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Petrosino
https://calvarycemeteryqueens.com/cemetery-map/
https://www.brownstoner.com/history/st-raphaels-r-c-church/
Atlas and directory to the plots and grounds of Calvary cemetery
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15372992W/Atlas_and_directory_to_the_plots_and_grounds_of_Calvary_cemetery
The Leonard manual of the cemeteries of New York and vicinity 1 edition
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL12735678W/The_Leonard_manual_of_the_cemeteries_of_New_York_and_vicinity
cemetery trees:
https://archive.org/stream/cu31924089529634?ref=ol#page/n21/mode/2up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Island_City#Blissville
https://hyperallergic.com/54404/there-are-more-people-who-are-dead-than-alive-in-queens/
Popular Mechanics: An Illustrated Weekly Review of the Mechanical …, Volume 12

https://books.google.com/books?id=qCbZAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA292&dq=%22Raymond+F.+Almirall%22+%22architect%22&hl=en&ei=85RUTdOXCoH6lweH8tCiBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAzgo#v=onepage&q=%22Raymond%20F.%20Almirall%22%20%22architect%22&f=false
https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20120325/maspeth-middle-village-ridgewood/man-found-dead-at-calvary-cemetery-queens/
https://www.spinlister.com/blog/beyond-calvary-cemetery-queens-cemetery-cycling-tour/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2011/12/calvary-cemetery/
https://untappedcities.com/2016/09/28/the-top-10-secrets-of-nycs-calvary-cemetery-in-queens-the-largest-in-the-us/?displayall=true
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Ascendancy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Order
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hughes_(archbishop)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbonism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favour_Royal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Ann_Seton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_of_Moscow_(1812)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_draft_riots
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Patrick%27s_Old_Cathedral
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Patrick%27s_Cathedral_(Manhattan)
http://sites.rootsweb.com/~nyqueen2/cemeteries/Calvary.htm
https://calvarycemeteryqueens.com/
https://calvarycemeteryqueens.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2019/09/CAL-price-list-9-26-19.pdf
https://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=870
https://untappedcities.com/2016/09/28/the-top-10-secrets-of-nycs-calvary-cemetery-in-queens-the-largest-in-the-us/?displayall=true
https://www.brownstoner.com/history/queenswalk-calvary-cemetery/
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_commissions/archeo/inglese/documents/rc_com_archeo_doc_20011010_catacroma_en.html#Roma
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Dolan
https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/calvary-monument/history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Masseria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castellammarese_War
https://newtownpentacle.com/?s=calvary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hand_(extortion)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Petrosinohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Letitia_Martin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connemara
https://sites.rootsweb.com/~nyqueen2/cemeteries/Calvary3.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Blood_Brotherhood
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_McKay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Eastman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_We_Must_Die
https://scalar.lehigh.edu/mckay/claude-mckays-queer-poetics-public-humanities-syllabus
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/claude-mckay-abandoned-romance-in-marseille-because-it-was-too-daring-he-was-just-ahead-of-his-time/2020/02/05/1c215cc4-46a1-11ea-ab15-b5df3261b710_story.html

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Archbishop John Hughes, aka Dagger John: Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York (Part 2)

Archbishop John Hughes, aka Dagger John, New York City’s most influential and vicious clergyman, had a huge impact, whether he was consecrating Calvary Cemetery and Fordham University, or peppering the mayor with threats to burn down the city.

” Are you afraid,” asked the mayor, “that some of your churches will be burned?”
“No, sir; but I am afraid that some of yours will be burned. We can protect our own. I come to warn you for your own good.”

-Life of the Most Reverend John Hughes by John R. G. Hassard

Highlights include:
• The “Black Coats,” aka America’s evil wizards, aka the Jesuit colonizers
• The Mohawks who built Manhattan
• Threats to burn down the city
• What happened on the land that became Calvary Cemetery
• The first saint born in the US, a Protestant society woman with eleven children who became a Catholic nun
• Secret societies in Ireland

Episode Script for Archbishop John Hughes, aka Dagger John: Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York

“As early as the year 1840 the late illustrious Archbishop Hughes . . . foresaw that in a few short years the only burying-ground then available to the faithful of New York . . . Situated in what was at that time the upper part of the city, would be entirely inadequate to the wants of the rapidly increasing Catholic population.” -The Visitor’s Guide to Calvary Cemetery, 1876

Welcome back! We’re talking more about Calvary Cemetery: this time, I wanted to focus on Archbishop John Hughes, who consecrated the cemetery, because he’s a real character. But we’ll also touch on some of the history of Catholicism in New York, the first saint to be born in the US, and the fascinating story about some of the workers who built some of NYC’s most famous skyscrapers, including the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and the World Trade Center. Plus there’s some secret societies andnd suspicions of dark wizardry thrown into this history as well.
- I’ll also talk a bit about the history of the Catholic church in New York.
I wanted to talk a bit first about the history of the land the cemetery was built on, I wanted to read a bit from The visitor’s guide to Calvary cemetery, which was published in 1876–one note, some of the language used here is out of date and racist :
- The locality of the cemetery, peaceful and quiet as it seems to-day, has had its share of stirring scenes. On February 25, 1643, just about the time of the arrival of the illustrious Father Jogues, the first priest who ever visited the Dutch Colony, the Governor at Fort Amsterdam, on the pretense of some injury received from the natives, dispatched two bodies of troops at midnight, one of which fell upon the Indians at Pavonia, on the Jersey shore, and the other upon those at Corlears Hook, Manhattan Island. Both expeditions were fearfully successful, resulting in a horrid butchery of the sleeping Indians. The natives at first thought it was their old enemies, the terrible Mohawks, but were soon undeceived, for, only about a week after, the settlers at Flatlands attacked those at Merrickawick (now Brooklyn), seized a large quantity of corn, and killed two of them who attempted to defend their property. . . . The dwellers along the shores of Mespat Kills . . . Or, as in later days, called the Newtown Creek, felt the vengeance of the savages with the rest, and the vicinity soon presented a fearful spectacle of smouldering ruins and slaughtered inhabitants.
The guide goes on to say that the colonists around the creek moved to an area called Furman’s Island, “a short distance east of the present cemetery, and built a fort for mutual protection. They appear then to have concluded a peace, for there is on record a deed, or release, from the Indians to the white inhabitants, of several miles of land, including the Wandell plantation (and part of which is now Calvary Cemetery), lying north of the Creek.”
I just want to pause for a sec here, since we’re looking at Catholicism in NYC, and there’s some important context to get into here about what happened with the Jesuits in New York when they first got here, including a figure who the cemetery guide mentioned, a Father Isaac Jogues.
So this is a history I’m familiar with because I went to Fordham University in the Bronx, which like I mentioned last week was founded by Hughes. And at Fordham, there’s a dorm called Martyr’s Court, which is named after a group of Jesuits known as “The North American Martyrs” or the “Canadian Martyrs.” Each wing of the hall is named after a martyr, so one’s called Goupil after St. Rene Goupil, one’s Jogues after St. Isaac Jogues, and one’s Lalande after St. Jean de Lalande. Also, in a building called Duane Library, there’s a large mural depicting the martyr’s–that’s where the Fordham admissions office is nowadays.
- I remember seeing that mural and getting extremely frustrated when I was a student, because if you know anything about American history, you can guess how much the martyrs “helped” the indigenous peoples they supposedly came here to save.
- Jogues, for example, said that he came to New France, as Canada and Northern NY were known as back then, to “devote himself to labor there for the conversion and welfare of the natives”
- So to follow Jogues through his time there: He arrived at a Jesuit mission on Lake Huron on September 11, 1636.
  - As soon as he got there, he became very sick.
  - Then, since the mission was near a Huron village, the sickness seemed to spread there, and people got very sick. This is unfortunately a pretty typical story of the interaction between colonists and indigenous peoples in the area that’s now the US.
  - It turns out that there had been repeated epidemics, which the Huron rightfully blamed on the Jesuits. The Hurons gave the Jesuits the appropriately ominous name the “Black Coats.”
  - So the Jesuits tried to convert people, and while many villages of indigenous people rejected them, they did succeed in converting some Huron people.
  - Eventually, Jogues, along with some other priests and some converted Hurons, were captured during a journey by Mohawks. It sounds like they weren’t great captors, and it was an unpleasant experience, though I actually don’t want to elaborate more than that, since we have so many accounts of gruesome things that happened to colonists, who were the victors who got to write history, and much fewer accounts of what happened to indigenous peoples (aside from vague stuff like “they died from diseases” or “died in conflicts with colonists” etc). There’s a reason for this discrepancy, which is that the indigenous peoples were destroyed through genocide and their ancestors are still suffering in America today, so their stories don’t get told the same way.
  - So anyway, Jogues ends up escaping, and he was brought down to New Amsterdam, where he stayed with a Protestant minister until he could get on a ship bound back to France.
  - That made him the first Catholic priest to set foot on the island of Manhattan.
  - Not only is he immortalized at Fordham, but he also appears on the doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, a church we’ll be talking about in a bit.
  - Jogues ended up returning to Iroquois territory and became an ambassador to the Mohawks.
  - The Mohawks viewed Jogues and the other priests as basically evil wizards, which I think is a very accurate way to look at them. Colonists had brought smallpox, measles, and other infectious diseases to the Mohawks, who had no immunity to them and saw huge fatalities.
    - And the Jesuits had come to preach their religion (which as someone who grew up Catholic, I can say is full of magic) and try to convince indigenous peoples to convert, while at the same time unwittingly bringing them disease and death.
  - After another major disease outbreak, and a crop failure, the Mohawks believed their misfortunes were the result of religious paraphernalia that the Jesuits had left behind in their village. Which, you know, that’s close enough to being true that I think that’s very fair to believe. Think about all the people who died because of the contact they had with European colonists.
  - So there was an anti-French faction of the Mohawk village, and they went and killed Jogue and the other Jesuit, LaLande, who was with them.
  - Then, indigenous people who were allies of the French (I’m not sure if they were Mohawk or Huron, but I assume they were Huron?), captured the man who killed Jogues. The man was condemned to death, but while waiting to be executed, he was baptized and then renamed Isaac Jogues. So then it’s like Jogues was martyred again.
  - One thing is that I would assume this conversion happened with the man’s consent, but I wonder if it wasn’t?
  - So then a bit later on, around 1666, a Mohawk village called Ossernenon (which is where the Jesuits were killed, and where Auriesville, NY, is now) was destroyed by forces led by a French aristocrat, in retribution for the killing of the Jesuits. They also destroyed 2 other Mohawk villages in the area. It’s unclear how many people were killed when those three villages were destroyed.
  - But after the destruction of their villages, the French forced the Mohawks to accept the missionaries, and the Jesuits established a Jesuit mission nearby, though that was destroyed by the Mohawks in the 1680s.
  - Jogues and the 7 other Canadian martyrs were made saints in 1930 and are clearly still well-regarded today, which I find pretty awful.
  - Before colonization, the Mohawks were one of the most populous tribes in the area, and they had a lot of influence in the Iroquois Confederacy, but disease took a terrible toll, and in the year 1635, their population went from 7,740 people to just 2,830 people. So many people died that they had to consolidate into three tribes, down from 4. During the Revolutionary War, the sided with the British, since the colonists had done so much harm to them, and after the war, their land was confiscated, and many of them moved to Canada.
    - The Mohawk people still exist: there are about 5,600 Mohawks living in New York, and about 23,600 living in Quebec and Ontario.
    - Also, one interesting fact is that Mohawk ironworkers were involved in building many of the skyscrapers in Manhattan, and has been for 6 generations. Mohawk ironworking teams worked on the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the UN, Madison Square Garden, plus bridges including the GW, the Triboro Bridge, and the Hellgate Bridge.
      - Hundreds of Mohawks a;sp worked on the World Trade Center, and the last girder was signed by Mohawk ironworkers, which is an ironworking tradition. And when the World Trade Center was destroyed, Mohawk volunteers helped with cleanup.
      - I’ll include a link to an interesting article I read about it in the shownotes
So let’s talk about John Joseph Hughes, aka “Dagger John.”
- Before we get into his biography, I wanted to read a quote from an 1866 biography called
Life of the Most Reverend John Hughes by John R. G. Hassard:
- Archbishop Hughes was neither the most learned theologian, the best scholar, the most eloquent preacher, nor the most active missionary among the bishops of this country ; but there was none of his episcopal brethren that possessed his influence, and none whose general reputation stood so high with the public at large.
So, in short, “Dagger John” loved power.
He was called Dagger John for 2 reasons:
- First, bishops draw a cross before signing their name, and crosses are dagger-like
- And second, he was famously aggressive
Born in County Tyrone, Ireland in 1797. County Tyrone is in Northern Ireland but my understanding is that even today, it’s a majority Catholic county.
- At the time that he was born, there were a bunch of anti-Catholic laws that the British had enforced.
- Hughes later talked about how for the first 5 days of his life, he had lived in “social and civil equality with the most favored subjects of the British Empire.” And then, when he was baptized Catholic, that changed.
- Life wasn’t so great for his family because of their faith: his sister was denied a Catholic burial, and when he was 15, Hughes was almost attacked by Orangemen
  - Orangemen are members of the Loyal Orange Institution, or the Orange Order, which is a Protestant fraternal order that’s based in Northern Ireland (though there are Orange Order lodges throughout the UK, the Commonwealth, and the US)
  - The order was founded in 1795, two years before Hughes was born, and the idea was that they’d be a Masonic-style society that was, according to Wikipedia, “sworn to maintain the Protestant Ascendancy”
    - The Protestant Ascendancy was basically the domination of Ireland by a minority of protestant landowners, clergy, and professionals
    - The idea was that Catholics, as well as other religions aside from the Church of England and Church of Ireland, including Presbyterians, other protestants, and Jewish people, would be excluded from politics
    - Basically, what happened was that the land owned by Irish people was taken by English people. (Like for example, whenever there were revolts against the English, England would confiscate Irish people’s lands and give them to “loyal” people, aka English Protestants.)
    - And through that, not only was Ireland under English rule, but within Ireland, the ruling class were English, or “Anglo-Irish,” and the actual Irish were excluded from politics in their own country
  - So the Orangemen were the rich, English, anti-Catholic group, and then there was another secret society called the Ribbonmen, who were poor, Irish tenant farmers. The Ribbonmen’s goal was to oppose evictions and bad conditions for tenant farmers. There were a number of conflicts between the groups.
    - It sounds like both groups had a number of Masonic-influenced practices, like being organized into lodges.
- So basically, things weren’t great for the Hughes family. John Hughes’ father was a poor tenant farmer, and John Hughes had to be taken out of school to help on the farm.
  - Wikipedia says that Hughes was “disinclined to farm life” which I assume means it didn’t go so well, so Hughes was sent to be a gardener’s apprentice at an estate called the Favour Royal Manor where he studied horticulture.
- His family moved to the US in 1816, where they lived in Pennsylvania, and Hughes joined them in 1817
- Hughes tried applying to college at Mount St. Mary’s College in Maryland, but they didn’t accept him. But the rector hired him to be a gardener
- While he worked there, he befriended a woman, Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton, who later became a saint.
  - (In fact, she was the first saint who was born in the US.)
  - Her story is kind of interesting, because her life probably isn’t what you’d imagine for a nun who became a saint: She was born an Episcopalian, married a wealthy businessman when she was 19, and lived on Wall Street where she and her husband were very big figures in NY society.
  - She was a really devout Episcopalian, who did a lot of charity work with her sister-in-law, Rebecca, who wikipedia describes as “her soul-friend and dearest confidant” which sounds pretty gay but okay.
  - She had five children, and when her father in law died, she took in 6 of her husband’s siblings who were under the age of 17.
  - Because of some conflicts with France and the UK, her husband lost several of his ships and the family went bankrupt and lost their home. She and the children moved in with her dad on Staten Island, and her husband, who’d had TB most of the time they’d been together, got even sicker from the stress and was sent to Italy, accompanied by Elizabeth and their oldest daughter.
  - Interestingly, they had to quarantine for a month upon reaching Italy, because Italians feared that they’d brought yellow fever with them from New York.
  - Unfortunately, the italian climate didn’t help enough, and her husband died in italy in December 1803.
  - Elizabeth and her daughter were taken in by her husband’s Italian business associates, who introduced her to Catholicism.
  - When she got back to NYC in 1805, she converted to Catholicsm. Interestingly, in 1805, there was only one Catholic church in all of New York City, St. Peter’s Church in the financial district.
  - To support her huge family, she started a school for girls, but when people found out that she’d converted to Catholicism, most of the parents pulled out their children.
  - She was prepared to move to Canada, but she ran into a priest (who had fled france during the reign of terror) and who was involved with St. Mary’s College, a seminary in Baltimore, and in 1809, she moved there to help start a Catholic girls’ school.
  - She also established a religious community dedicated to caring for poor children, and she founded a congregation of religious sisters–the first to be founded in the US–and started the first free Catholic school in the US, which started off parochial schools in the US.
  - She was made a saint in the 1960s, and is the patron saint of widows and seafarers
- So anyway, back to John Hughes: he impressed Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton, and she convinced the rector to admit him as a seminarian.
  - He started school there, though he kept working in the garden, and worked as a latin and math tutor, and he was a prefect which apparently was a thing at that school.
- John Hughes became a priest in 1826. He did a lot of work in Pennsylvania, where he founded:
  - St. John’s Orphan Asylum in 1829
  - St. John the Evangelist Church in 1832
We talked earlier about how he also founded St. John’s College—maybe you’re noticing a pattern in the naming conventions? Specifically, that he loved naming things after himself.
Around the same time, John Hughes got into a very public tiff with a Presbyterian clergyman, Rev. John A. Breckinridge, who claimed that Catholicism wasn’t compatible with American values like republicanism and liberty. People thought that John Hughes would be trounced by the better educated Breckinridge, since he was an immigrant, but he debated very well and made a name for himself as a very aggressive defender of Catholicism.
In 1837, Pope Gregory the XVI named Hughes the coadjutor bishop of the diocese of NY
So, back to Hughes, who’d just been made coadjutor bishop of the diocese of NY
- There was some drama there, because most priests in the dioceses had been rooting for another priest. So in protest, the priests didn’t go to the concecration
- He didn’t waste any time in getting into arguments:
  - he tried to get the government to support Catholic parochial schools off the ground, and that failed, so instead he set up a private parochial school system
  - He threw a fit because the KJB was used in public schools, and he claimed that Catholic kids were getting indoctrinated into Protestantism through the footnotes in the KJB. However, there are no footnotes in the KJB.
  - He campaigned in support of Irish immigrants, who were facing a lot of discrimination at the time
    - Though, important note: while it doesn’t sound that Hughes loved the idea of slavery, he said felt that labor conditions in the North were worse than the conditions of enslaved laborers in the South
    - Which, I understand that conditions were very bad in factories and stuff in the 19th century, but I think he’s missing the point. Comparing poor free workers and enslaved workers isn’t exactly apples to apples.
    - Plus, he spoke out against the abolitionist movement.
    - Remember, this is a guy with a ton of power, who isn’t afraid to say what he thinks. So he could have really spoken out against slavery, and supported the rights of black people in the US. But he didn’t, and instead used his platform to criticize abolitionists and say that slavery isn’t really as bad as working in a factory, so it’s not like he really had a problem with slavery.
    - It sounds sort of like he had an issue with slavery when he was younger, but then changed his mind as he got older. Apparently, after traveling to the South and Cuba, in 1853, he decided that emancipation would be a bad thing for both slave owners and enslaved people.
    - Also, supposedly President Lincoln consulted with Hughes, and selected him for a “special mission” to Europe in 1861, where he says that he went as a” friend of both north and south alike”
    - And remember, there was a huge amount of tension between the Irish community and the community of free Black people in NYC, so he could have literally saved lives if he’d tried to confront racism in the Irish Catholic community of NYC.
      - I’m talking, of course, about the NYC Draft Riots in July of 1863, in which poor white people, mostly Irish immigrants, attacked black people throughout the city.
      - During the riots, an orphanage that housed 233 Black children, was attacked by a mob of several thousand people, who looted and burned down the building.
      - The children were saved just in the nick of time, but during the riots around 120 people were killed, black businesses were burned, and many black people left Manhattan for good, moving to Brooklyn.
      - The book Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th Century NC by Stacy Horn talks more about this, if you want to learn more.
    - But anyway, I wanted to mention this because John Hughes could have done a lot of good, but he didn’t. As far as I can tell, he was a fierce defender of fellow Irish Catholic immigrants, but his compassion didn’t seem to extend any further than that.
    - Technically, Hughes did speak out against the draft riots, because the governor, seeing that the rioters were mostly Irish, asked him to, but I think that’s a case of too little, too late. He gave the speech after 3 or 4 days of rioting.
    - His health was poor, so he had this notice posted around the city:
      - ” I am not able, owing to rheumatism in my limbs, to visit you, but that is no reason why you should not pay me a visit in your whole strength. I shall have a speech prepared for you. There is abundant space for the meeting around my house. I can address you from the corner of the balcony. If I should be unable to stand during its delivery, you will permit me to address you sitting ; my voice is much stronger than my limbs.”
    - About 3000-4000 people showed up for his speech, which was well received even though apparently it was rambling, and it was clear his mental faculties weren’t so hot at the time. He was near death at the time, and this was his last public address.
    - So while he did technically speak out against the riots once they were already well underway, the truth was that one speech probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference, but he could have really changed people’s minds through his ministry, but he didn’t.
    - Also, even his biographer, Hassard, admits that the speech probably didn’t make any difference, because the people doing the rioting were still doing it, they hadn’t paused to hear a religious speech. The draft riots were eventually ended up military intervention.
    - When he spoke about the draft before the riots, he was pro-draft and encouraged people to join up out of patriotism, but didn’t mention anything about the human rights abuses of slavery.
In 1842, the bishop died, and John Hughes became bishop
He had a mess on his hands.
- There were about 200K catholics in NY and north Jersey, but only 40 priests
- Also, nativism created a major issue for Catholics in America.
  - Nativism was a big thing at the time, which, ironically, claimed that America should be for “Native Americans.” Which, let us be clear, did not mean indigenous Americans. In this context, “Native Americans” for some reason meant the descendants of colonizers from the 13 original colonies.
  - Nativism is just a fancy word for racism and bigotry.
    - Later on, in the 1880s, Nativism took the form of things like the Chinese exclusion act, which is exactly what it sounds like, and after the turn of the century, there was something called the “Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907” which resulted in Japan stopping emigration to the US.
  - In the mid-19th century, Nativists generally opposed Irish Catholics, who they said couldn’t be trusted since they were obviously loyal to the pope
  - In 1834, a nativist mob burned down a Catholic church in Boston (tho no one was injured)
  - There were a number of nativist riots. In 1844, riots in Phillly led to people being killed, and later, in 1855 in Louisville, Kentucky, on election day, rioters killed at least 22 German and Irish Catholics
  - So when, in NYC, an anti-Catholic protest was planned, Hughes told the mayor, who had nativist sympathies, that “if a single Catholic Church were burned in New York, the city would become a second Moscow”
    - That’s a reference to a fire in 1812 that basically destroyed the entire city of Moscow. 6,496 of 9,151 private houses, 8,251 retail shops and warehouses, 122 of 329 churches, were destroyed
- I wanted to read this great exchange between Hughes and the mayor, as recorded in Hassard’s 1866 biography:
  - ” Are you afraid,” asked the mayor, ” that some of your churches will be burned ? “
  - ” No, sir ; but I am afraid that some of yours will be burned. We can protect our own. I come to warn you for your own good.”
  - “Do you think, bishop, that yonr people would attack the procession ? “
  - ” I do not ; but the Native Americans want to provoke a Catholic riot, and if they can do it in no other way, I be lieve they would not scruple to attack the procession them selves, for the sake of making it appear that the Catholics had assailed them.”
  - ” What, then, would you have me do ? “
  - ” I did not come to tell you what to do. I am a church man, not the mayor of New York ; but if I were the mayor,I would examine the laws of the State, and see if there were not attached to the police force a battery of artillery, and a company or so of infantry, and a squadron of horse ; and I think I should find that there were ; and if so, I should call them out. Moreover, I should send to Mr. Harper, the mayor-elect, who has been chosen by the votes of this party. I should remind him that these men are his supporters ; I should warn him that if they carry out their design, there will be a riot ; and I should urge him to use his influence in preventing this public reception of the delegates.”
Because of how intense Hughes was as a person, the city backed down and didn’t allow the anti-Catholic protestors to have the rally
It also probably helped that he arranged to have 1000-2000 armed men guard each Catholic church in manhattan. He said the men were “resolved, after taking as many lives as they could in defence of their property, to give up, if necessary, their own lives for the same cause.”
Some Catholics in NYC even prepared to burn down their own houses in order to destroy the homes of their anti-Catholic neighbors
He was a guy with a lot to say, so he started a newspaper called the New York Freeman, and in it, he wrote:
- “to convert all Pagan nations, and all Protestant nations. . . . Our mission [is] to convert the world –including the inhabitants of the United States – the people of the cities, and the people of the country, . . . the Legislatures, the Senate, the Cabinet, the President, and all!”
- So, you know, not aggressive at all
In 1850, the pope declared the diocese an archdiocese, which made John Hughes an archbishop
Hughes was archbishop until he died, in 1864.
The book A history of St. John’s College, Fordham, N.Y., which was published in 1891, describes his death thusly:
- He laid his head back on the pillow, closed his eyes, breathed quickly and gently for a few minutes, and died with a smile about his lips.
At his funeral, more than 200K people viewed his remains. His body was laid out for 2 days.
His biographer, John R. G. Hassard described the funeral this way:
- It was perhaps the most imposing ceremony of the kind ever witnessed in New York. Eight bishops and nearly 200 priests took part in the services. . . The courts and other public offices were closed on the day of the funeral, and resolutions of sorrow and condolence were passed by the State Legislature
While he was a complicated and pretty unlikeable character, Hughes did have a lasting impact on NYC. In addition to consecrating Calvary Cemetery and founding the school that became Fordham, where I lived in a dorm named after him and walked by a statue of him every day, he also was behind a lot of northward development in Manhattan.
Back in the day, the city’s population was concentrated in lower Manhattan, like the Village and below.
But John Hughes felt that the city would grow northward, and he insisted on building St. Patrick’s Cathedral on 5th Avenue and 50th street.
- (We talked about the cathedral a bit in the Renwick Smallpox Hospital episodes, since it was designed by James Renwick, Jr., but just a reminder, it’s now one of the top tourist attractions in NYC.)
- He laid the cornerstone in 1858, and people mocked him for building a church in such a rural area.
- Newspapers called the church “Hughes Folly”
- But Hughes was right–eventually, the city grew up around the cathedral, and it ended up being a really great location
- Hughes had been buried in Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which is in Soho, but in 1882, his body was disinterred and put into the crypt in the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Sources consulted RE:

Check out the rest of the sources in the shownotes for Calvary Cemetery Part 1.

Books RE: Archbishop John Hughes and Calvary Cemetery

A History of St. John’s College, Fordham, NY (1891): https://archive.org/details/historyofstjohns00taafrich/page/46/mode/2up
Life of the Most Reverend John Hughes by John R. G. Hassard (1866):
https://archive.org/details/LifeOfTheMostRevJohnHughes
Atlas and directory to the plots and grounds of Calvary cemetery (1886):
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15372992W/Atlas_and_directory_to_the_plots_and_grounds_of_Calvary_cemetery
The Leonard manual of the cemeteries of New York and vicinity 1 edition (1901):
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL12735678W/The_Leonard_manual_of_the_cemeteries_of_New_York_and_vicinity
The visitor’s guide to Calvary cemetery, with map and illustrations (1876):
https://archive.org/stream/visitorsguidetoc02broo?ref=ol#page/14/mode/2up

Websites RE: Archbishop John Hughes and Calvary Cemetery

Story of Mohawk ironworkers: http://www.whitewolfpack.com/2012/09/the-mohawks-who-built-manhattan-photos.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternal_Order_of_Eagles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Jogues
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auriesville,_New_York#Ossernenon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Martyrs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manor_of_Rensselaerswyck
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohawk_people
http://www.mohawknation.org/
Mohawk Tribe Facts, History, and Culture
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Mohawk
https://mashable.com/2015/03/07/empire-state-building-vertigo/
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ironmen-mohawk-cousins-helped-lift-1-wtc-empire-state-building-article-1.1073615
NEWTOWN CREEK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Ascendancy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Order
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hughes_(archbishop)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbonism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favour_Royal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Ann_Seton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_of_Moscow_(1812)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_draft_riots
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Patrick%27s_Old_Cathedral
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Patrick%27s_Cathedral_(Manhattan)
http://sites.rootsweb.com/~nyqueen2/cemeteries/Calvary.htm
Home
https://calvarycemeteryqueens.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2019/09/CAL-price-list-9-26-19.pdf
https://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=870
The Top 10 Secrets of NYC’s Calvary Cemetery in Queens, the Largest in the US
Queenswalk: Calvary Cemetery
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_commissions/archeo/inglese/documents/rc_com_archeo_doc_20011010_catacroma_en.html#Roma
https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/calvary-monument/history
https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/64107/calvary-cemetery
There Are More People Who Are Dead Than Alive in Queens
From Da Bronx to Eternity
Manhattan’s Art of the Dead
INTERVIEW: Meet Mary French, the woman archiving New York City’s 140 cemeteries
http://www.interment.net/data/us/ny/queens/calvary_cemetery.htm
Cemetery Map
St. Raphael’s R.C. Church

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Ancient Egyptian Tomb Raider and Wizard Setne

A look at the magic-filled legends of Ancient Egyptian tomb raider and wizard Prince Setne, a character based on the son of Ramesses II, who goes on a tomb-raiding journey to acquire a magical book. And it’s the prequel to the stories about his 12-year-old boy wizard son, Se-Osiris.

Setne I, or Setne Khamwas and Naneferkaptah, is a story that’s survived on papyrus from Ptolemaic Egypt. It tells the story of a wizard who descends into a tomb to collect a book written by the god Thoth, only to find it guarded by ghosts. Indiana Jones-style hijinks ensue.

Highlights include:
• An eternal snake (ouroboros)
• A magical glowing book hidden inside a series of boxes
• The ancient city of Memphis, Egypt
• The wrath of Thoth
• A look at different types of Ancient Egyptian writing systems

Note: This episode contains brief mentions of drowning, suicide, incest, soliciting sex for money, killing children, and disinterring corpses

Episode Script for Ancient Egyptian Tomb Raider and Wizard Setne

I’m excited to talk about the legends about the 12-year-old ancient Egyptian wizard Se-Osiris, who’s also referred to as Si-Osire. I’m not sure how well known he is, but I got really obsessed with him when I was 11 or 12, so I wanted to dig up the old stories that I was so interested in, and tell them.
I have such a clear memory of being up late at night reading the myths, and then printing them out and putting them in a binder or folder so I could read them in my room, since the family computer was downstairs, which is a very early 2000s thing to do and which feels so quaint now.
Also, a number of the websites I consulted for this were pretty old, and I kinda have the feeling they’re some of the same ones–I kinda recognize the design of egyptianmyths.net, for example. There’re a lot of very web 1.0-looking sites that mention him.
Today we’re going to talk about Se-Osiris’ father, Prince Setne, who was a skilled scribe and wizard, though he paled in comparison with his son.
- Prince Setne is based on a real, historical figure who we’ll look at in a later episode, but a lot of liberties are taken in the fictional stories about him.
So first, let’s talk about the fictional Setne, specifically, the first story about him, Setne I.
The story involves tons of ghosts, tomb raiding, ghosts, curses, magical books, and lots of creepy stuff that made me think of the Brendan Frasier Mummy movies, which I love.
So first, let’s lay some context for these legends.
- First, it’s unlikely that Se-Osiris actually ever existed.
- We’ll be talking about a boy wizard named Se-Osiris, who’s not to be confused with the Egyptian god Osiris.
- Also, I’ll be calling him Se-Osiris just because that’s how I’m used to thinking of him, but I actually think that’s a dated way to write and say his name. If you google him, many more results come up under “Si-Osire”, so I kinda think that’s a more common and modern way of referring to him.
- But I did want to talk a little about Osiris, since it seems possible that Se-Osiris was named after him.
  - Osiris was the god of agriculture, fertility, the afterlife, the dead, resurrection, and plants.
  - He was typically depicted as a green-skinned god with mumm-wrapped legs, a crown with feathers on it, and holding a crook and flail that stood for fertility and kingship.
  - As we’ll learn in next week’s episode, Osiris was in charge of judging the dead and allowing entry to the afterlife.
My two biggest sources for this story are a book called Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt by Lewis Spence, published in 1915, and a book called Ancient Egyptian Literature Volume 3 by Miriam Lichtheim. In reading the two accounts, I’ve found that the 1915 book yadda yadda yaddas over a bunch of pretty racy stuff, whereas the 1973 book really gets into it.
So, the story of Se-Osiris appears in a cycle of stories called Tales of Prince Setna.
- There are two parts of cycle:
  - Setna I, which was written during the Ptolemaic period, in a neat handwriting, and carefully numbered so it’s obvious that the first two pages are missing.
  - And then Setna II, which was written on the back of another papyrus from the Roman Period. The handwriting is messy, the pages aren’t numbered, it’s riddled with errors, and parts of it are missing, though we aren’t sure how much.
    - To read a bit from the 1915 book:
      - “This story was discovered written on some papyrus belonging to the British Museum. An English translation was published in 1900 by Mr. F. Ll. Griffiths, and one in French by Sir G. Maspero in 1901. It is written on the back of some official documents in Greek and dates from the seventh year of the Emperor Claudian. The papyrus is much dilapidated and pasted end to end; it is incomplete, and the beginning of the history has disappeared. By the writing one would judge the copy to belong to the latter half of the second century of our era.”
- Both parts of the story were written on papyrus in Demotic, which is an ancient Egyptian form of writing.
- So I wanted to pause and explain exactly what Demotic means, and talk a bit about writing and literature in ancient Egypt, as well as touch on some Egyptian history so we can place where in time all of this is happening.
- First, basically, everyone knows about hierogyphic writing.
- Hieroglyphs started being used around the early bronze age, so like the 32nd century BC, and it was used through the Late Period of Ancient Egypt, as well as the Persian and Ptolemaic periods in the 500s-300s BC.
  - For reference, if these periods are hard to place or visualize, since I for one didn’t learn much about Egyptian history in high school or in college and I figure most other listeners also didn’t:
    - the Persian period was when the King of Persia conquered Egypt and became Pharaoh. Darius I was one of these Pharaohs, as was his son Xerxes I, and you may have heard of them since they’re both mentioned in the bible.
    - And then the Ptolemaic dynasty was established after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in the 300s BC. Basically, Egypt was part of Alexander’s empire, and when Alexander died, a Macedonia Greek named Ptolemy got control of Egypt and said he was the Pharaoh.
      - The dynasty was actually the longest-ruling dynasty of Egypt, since they ruled for 300 years. It ended when the final Ptolemy ruler, Cleopatra, died, in 30 BC.
      - One random fact that I learned while researching was that apparently Cleopatra was the only Ptolemaic ruler who bothered to learn the Egyptian language; all the rest just spoke their native Greek.
- So anyway, hierogyphics were still being used during those periods, when the rulers weren’t even Egyptian and didn’t necessarily even speak the language.
- And there’re even examples of hieroglyphic writing being used even in the Roman Period, which began after Cleopatra died and lasted through 4th century AD.
- But the last pagan temples were closed in the 5th century AD, and everyone who knew and understood hieroglyphics died off.
- So anyway, if hieroglyphics were forgotten, what replaced them?
- First there was Hieratic, which was sort of like a cursive version of hieroglyphics.
  - While hieroglyphics were used in formal settings, and in religious texts like the Book of the Dead, once hieratic came along, it was more important that hieroglyphics, because it was the everyday style of writing. It was what students learned; it was just a select group of people who got the additional training needed to know hierogyphics.
  - So Hieratic was used for recordkeeping, legal documents, letters, and things like scientific, literary, and religious texts.
- Demotic was basically an even-more-cursive way of writing. It was called “cursive Coptic” by some 18th or 19th century scholars, though it wasn’t really coptic.
  - Once Demotic came around, hieratic was relegated to religious texts, and demotic was used for administrative documents and literature
- And then after that, the last Egyptian language that came about was Coptic, which began being used during Greco-Roman Egypt.
- Demotic was used from around 65 BC until the 5th century AD.
- Coptic was an adaptation of the Greek alphabet, with some Demotic characters added in for sounds that didn’t exist in Greek.
  - It was used in literature until the 13th century, and while Arabic ended up replacing it as a language, Coptic is still spoken by Coptic christians. I assume it’s similar to how there’s still some Latin spoken in the Catholic church (or at least there was in the early 20th century).
- As a sidenote, I’m vaguely aware of Coptic because in college, I had a roommate who was learning it. Because a lot of ancient literature was written in Coptic, it’s sill learned today, but at least in the states, it’s only a specific kind of academic or researcher who might learn it.
- But people didn’t know how to read any ancient Egyptian writing.
- Throughout the middle ages and beyond, people tried to decipher them, but it was unsuccessful until the 1820s, when the Rosetta stone was deciphered.
  - And the tl;dr on the Rosetta Stone is that it’s a stele, which is a big slab of rock with writing carved into it.
  - The Rosetta Stone bears a decree from 196 BC written in hieroglyphic script, Demotic script, and then Ancient Greek.
  - So when an officer in Napoleon’s army discovered it in 1799, scholars were able to compare Ancient Greek part, which they understood, to the different versions of the decree and figure out what the ancient Egyptian writing meant.
  - We talk a bit more about how Napoleon’s Egyptian campaigns inspired a huge interest in Egypt in the Victorian Egyptomania episode, and that’s a topic I want to return to later.
So anyway, while the story we’re talking about is set during an earlier period of Egyptian history, during the reign of Ramesses II, the papyrus that the story was written down on was from a much later period.
There are a few reasons why this story is probably just a legend, even though some of the characters in it were real, but the fact that the written record of it is from so much later than the time when the story occurred is definitely one of them.
So the very beginning of the story was lost and they haven’t been able to reconstruct it, but the story of Se-Osiris begins with his father, a scribe named Setne.
Setne was the son of the Pharaoh, which is why he was referred to as a prince.
- The first story about Setna is pretty explicit and has some weird incest stuff in it, but I’m gonna focus more on of the more magic-and-occult parts of that story. The translation that I read is from the 1973 book that I mentioned.
  - The book describes Setne as the son of Ramesses II, and a high priest of Ptah, the creator god, in Memphis, Egypt, which a major, important city of Egypt.
  - It was believed that Ptah protected Memphis, and in Memphis, there was a huge temple to Ptah that was one of the most prominent buildings in the city.
  - In fact, the Greek word for this temple was Ai-gy-ptos, which people think is where the word “Egypt” came from.
  - Basically, one day, someone tells Setne about a book of magic that the god Thoth wrote. Thoth was associated with magical arts, writing, science, and the judgement of the dead. You may be familiar with his name if you’re into tarot, because Aleister Crowley’s tarot deck, the Thoth tarot, is a popular and cool deck.
  - So anyway, Setne learned that the book was kept in the tomb of a long-dead prince who was buried somewhere in the huge necropolis of Memphis.
  - So he goes to the tomb, and sees the book, which is literally glowing, and tries to grab it.
  - But as if this is some kind of Indiana Jones movie, when he reaches for it, the prince and his wife rise up to confront him and protect the book.
  - The spirit of the wife, Ahwere, tells Prince Setne how her husband had gotten the book, and how it’d cost both of their lives.
    - The husband’s name is Naneferkaptah, so I’m just gonna call him the prince from here on out.
  - She starts out by telling about how she and her husband were both children of the Pharaoh, but were in love with each other so ended up being together.
  - When they got together, the husband was kind of at loose ends; the book says that he
    - “had no occupation on earth but walking the desert of Memphis, reading the writings that were in the tombs of the Pharaohs and on the stelae of the scribes of the House of Life and the writings that were on the other monuments, for his zeal concerning writings was very great.”
  - And then one time the husband followed a procession in honor of Ptah and went into the temple to worship him.
  - In the temple, a priest laughed at him, and told him that he was wasting his time reading unimportant writings, but if he followed this priest, he’d take him to a book written by Thoth. The priest said:
    - Two spells are written in it. When you recite the first spell you will charm the sky, the earth, the netherworld, the mountains, and the waters. You will discover what all the birds of the sky and all the reptiles are saying. You will see the finish of the deep . . . When you recite the second spell, it will happen that, whether you are in the netherworld or in your form on earth, you will see Pre appearing in the sky with his Ennead, and the Moon in its form of rising.
  - I had trouble figuring out who Pre was, but I think it might be another name for the sun god Ra? But the Ennead were a group of 9 really important egyptian gods, and included the sun god Atum, the god Osiris, the goddess Isis, the god of deserts, storms, disorder, and violence, Set, sometimes the god of the sky Horus, along with some other gods. It sounds like in Memphis, Ptah was seen as more important than the Ennead, but in the major city Heliopolis, the nine were seen as the most significant gods.
  - So anyway, after talking up this magical book, the priest said he’d tell Setne where it was if he paid him 100 pieces of silver, and waived the taxes on the payment. (The ancient egyptians were very practical, as far as I can tell.)
  - So then the priest described the box, and I really loved this description:
    - The book in question is in the middle of the water of Coptos in a box of iron. In the box of iron is a box of copper. In the box of copper is a box of juniper wood. In the box of juniper wood is a box of ivory and ebony. In the box of ivory and ebony is a box of silver. In the box of silver is a box of gold, and in it is the book. There are six miles of serpents, scorpions, and all kinds of reptiles around the box in which the book is, and there is an eternal serpent around this same box.
  - So the prince left the temple in a daze, and Ahwere cursed the priest for having told him about the book, which she could tell was going to destroy their lives. She tried to keep her husband from going to find the book, but instead he went to the Pharaoh, asked for equipment for the journey, and set off to find the book with Ahwere and kid in tow.
    - Apparently the prince didn’t want to endanger anyone on the trip, so he made a crew out of wax figures and brought them to life using magic, so that’s who was on the boat with them.
  - The prince left Ahwere and their son in Coptos and went on the rest of the way alone, with rowers to bring him to where the book was kept.
  - So here’s what the prince did when he found the book:
    - He recited a spell to the six miles of serpents, scorpions, and all kinds of reptiles that were around the box, and did not let him come up. He went to the place where the eternal serpent was. He fought it and killed it. It came to life again and resumed its shape. He fought it again, a third time, cut it in two pieces, and put sand between one piece and the other. It died and no longer resumed its shape.
  - Then he goes to where the book is and does all of the unboxing to get it out. He cast both spells and everything the priest said would happen, did.
  - He brings the book back to where Ahwere had been waiting for him for days, and she was weak from not eating or drinking because she was so worried. When she examined the book, she cast the spells as well, and they worked.
  - Then, the prince, who was a very good scribe, wrote down all of the words from the book on some papyrus. Then he soaked it in beer, dissolved it in water, and drank it, so he knew everything that had been written in it.
  - However, as anyone who’s ever played the worldbuilder game Pharaoh (which is an old game that’s like sim city except in egypt, I downloaded steam onto my computer just so I could play that)–as anyone who’s played Pharaoh would know, it’s easy to displease the gods, and that’s something that you really don’t want to do.
  - So Thoth was mad that the prince had stolen his book, and also unhappy that he’d killed the guardian of the box, the eternal snake. (Who I think is an ouroboros, the snake eating its tail, since the ouroboros originated in ancient Egypt.)
  - So Thoth complained to Pre, which I think might be another name for Ra, the sun god? And Pre said “He is yours, together with every person belonging to him.”
  - So then they sent an order from the heavens that the prince and his family wouldn’t return to Memphis safely.
  - So first, their son fell out of the ship and drowned.
  - But the prince cast one of the spells he’d learned and brought him back.
  - Weirdly, it sounds like the son was able to relate what Thoth had said, but he was still dead.
  - So then they went back to Coptos, and their son was embalmed as a prince and buried in a coffin in the desert.
  - They left again, and right at the spot where their son had drowned, Ahwere fell out of the boat and drowned.
  - So the prince brought her back, cast a spell so he could question her about Thoth’s accusations, and then brought her back to Coptos, where she was embalmed, also in the tradition of a prince or important person, and then buried her in the tomb alongside their son.
  - The prince left again, but when he reached the place where his wife and son had drowned, he was overcome with guilt, and wondered what he would say to his father, the Pharaoh. He didn’t know how he’d explain why he was alive when his wife, who was of course also the Pharaoh’s child, and son, were dead.
  - So then the prince took a fine linen scarf and used it to bind the book tightly to his body. Then he jumped overboard and drowned.
  - They couldn’t find his body, but the sailors returned to Memphis, where the Pharaoh and everyone was in mourning.
  - Then they say that the prince was, quote, “holding onto the rudders of Pharaoh’s ship through his craft of a good scribe” whatever that means. I think that maybe he used some sort of magic to keep himself hanging onto the rudder even though he was dead.
  - When they collected his body, they say the book, and the Pharaoh said that the book must be hidden.
  - So then Ahwere closes the story, telling Setne:
    - These are the evil things that befell us on account of this book of which you say, “Let it be given to me.” You have no claim to it, whereas our lives on earth were taken on account of it!
  - You’d think that Setne would have then steered clear of the book, but instead he demands the book, saying that he’d take it from them by force if he had to.
  - The prince agreed to allow Setne play a board game for the book.
  - It didn’t go well. They played three games, and Setne lost all of them. After each game, the prince cast a spell so that Setne sank further into the sand, until he was up to his ears in sand.
  - Not to be deterred, Setne called out to his foster brother Inaros, who was apparently hanging around through all of this, and he asked him to go tell the Pharaoh what happened, and to come back with all of his amulets and sorcery books.
  - When Inaros came back with the amulets, he threw them on Setne, who jumped up and grabbed the book.
  - Ahwere and the prince were upset, but the prince says to Ahwere “Let your heart not grieve. I will make him bring this book back here, with a forked stick in his hand and a lighted brazier on his head.”
  - When Setne returned to the Pharaoh with the book, the Pharaoh told him to bring it back to the tomb, or he’d regret it.
  - So that was my favorite part of the story, and I’m just going to briefly touch on what happened next.
  - Basically, Setne was hanging out at the temple of Ptah, and saw a really hot lady named Tabubu who he decides that he just has to sleep with.
  - He offers her money, and she’s offended, saying she’s of priestly rank–she’s the daughter of a prophet–but she says that he can come back to her place anyway.
  - Setne agrees, though everyone around him was indignant.
  - When he arrives at her mansion, she says that she’ll sleep with him if he draws up a deed that gives her the right to everything he owns.
  - He agrees, and does that.
  - Then she says that she wants his children to sign off on the deed too, so her children don’t have to have legal disputes with his children over the inheritance.
  - So then he does that, and then she says that actually, he needs to kill his children if he wants to sleep with her, because that way, his children won’t argue with her children over his property.
  - I’ll just read a bit of this:
    - Setne said: “Let the abomination that came into your head be done to them.” She had his children killed before him. She had them thrown down from the window to the dogs and cats. They ate their flesh, and he heard them as he drank with Tabubu.
  - So then they go to sleep together, and right before he touches her, Setne wakes up. It was all a dream.
  - But unfortunately, he’d woken up naked in public, and then a noble person on a litter approached, and that person was his father, the Pharaoh.
  - Setne explains to the Pharaoh that the cursed book has put him in that state, and says that he must return it. So Pharaoh, after reassuring him that his children are all alive and well, gives him some clothes and Setne returns to Memphis with him.
  - After greeting his children, Setne talks to Pharaoh and tells him everything that happened. And Pharaoh says: “Setne, I did what I could with you before, saying ‘They will kill you if you do not take this book back to the place you took it from.’ You have not listened to me until now. Take this book back to Naneferkaptah, with a forked stick in your hand and a lighted brazier on your head.”
  - So he returns to the tomb, where they all greet each other warmly. Ahwere tells him that the only reason why he got there safely was because of Ptah’s protection.
  - Setne returns the book and asks if there’s anything he can do for them, and the prince asked if he could bring Ahwere and their son’s bodies back from Coptos and put them in the tomb with him.
  - So Setne traveled to Coptos, where he made offerings to the god Isis, whose temple was there, and then went into the desert with the priests of Isis and searched the tombs for 3 days and 3 nights, but they couldn’t find the tomb.
  - When the prince saw that he couldn’t find the tomb, he used magic to rise from the grave as a very old man, and met Setne. He pretended to be an old priest who remembered where the tomb was, and told Setne that they were buried underneath the south corner of the chief of police’s house.
  - Setne’s suspicious and thinks that he has a grudge against the police chief and just wants his house to be torn down. So the prince in disguise tells him that they can hold him and if they don’t find the bodies, they can punish him.
  - So they dug up the area and found the bodies. Then he brought Ahwere and her son to be buried with her husband the prince, and the magical book, and had the tomb closed up with all of them together.
- So that’s Setne. Even though he behaves foolishly in this story, he was known for being the super smart, and he was the favored son of the Pharaoh. I think he’s set up as being skilled but not super wise so that in the next story, his son Se-Osiris is all the more impressive. The story we looked at today was called Setne I, and next week, we’ll look at Setne II, which is where the boy wizard appears.
- One thing to be aware of: tomb raiding was seen as a really awful thing to do back in ancient egypt, so to quote an analysis of the story from ancient.eu:
  - “Tombs were considered the eternal homes of the dead and tomb robbing was a very serious crime. Execration texts, better known today as ‘curses’ were often inscribed along with one’s autobiography on tomb walls, promising vengeance on any who would desecrate or steal from the deceased. The fact that Setna, identified as a prince, a scribe, and a magician, is punished for this sin would have made it clear that no one is exempt from eternal justice, and those of lesser status could expect even worse treatment.”
- The same article talks about how the story of the prince and his wife stealing the book originally is supposed to teach people about how it’s dangerous to steal from the gods. The ghost prince is a sort of mirror of Setne, and like Setne, he’s punished harshly for his crime.
- To quote a bit more of the article:

Setna I shows how even a skilled magician, learned in his craft, can make a terrible choice in desiring what he has no right to.

The article also talks about how Egyptologist Geraldine Pinch has said that the story of Setne and Tabubu can also be read as Setne being punished for lusting after a woman without seeing her as a person. He literally acts like he can buy her, and doesn’t see her as anything but a sex object.
- Also, Tabubu wasn’t just any woman–she was the daughter of a priest of Bastet, and Bastet was a goddess who protected women, children, and women’s secrets, so she would have punished a man who disrespected a woman, especially because women were highly respected in Ancient Egypt, and Bastet was one of the most popular dieties
- Also, throughout the story, Tabubu reminds Setne repeatedly that she should be treated with respect, and Setne keeps ignoring her and just keeps trying to sleep with her
- It’s also been suggested that Tabubu was actually Bastet herself, in disguise
And the 1973 book talks about how “The tale exemplifies the traditional Egyptian view that magic is a legitimate weapon for man, but the ultimate secrets of life and the world belong only to the gods and may not be acquired by man.”
If you want to learn more, I’ll include a link to the book where I found this story; the full text is available on archive.org. I wanted to keep this PG-13 so I left out some details of the story, but if you want the full thing, it’s all in that book, Ancient Egyptian Literature Book III, from 1973.
And in typical form, I found out so much cool stuff about Setne that of course I haven’t even gotten to the story of Se-Osiris, but we’ll get to that next week.
There are two big stories about Se Osiris: the first is the tale of a trip to the land of the dead, and the second is the story of a magical duel.

Sources consulted RE: Ancient Egyptian Tomb Raider and Wizard Setne

Books RE: Ancient Egyptian Tomb Raider and Wizard Setne

Ancient Egyptian Myths and Legends By Lewis Spence (1915):
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43662/43662-h/43662-h.htm
Ancient Egyptian Literature Vol III by Miriam Lichtheim (1973):
https://archive.org/details/MiriamLichtheimAncientEgyptianLiteratureVolIII/page/n67/mode/2up

Websites RE: Ancient Egyptian Tomb Raider and Wizard Setne

https://www.ancient.eu/article/1054/the-tales-of-prince-setna/https://www.ancient.eu/article/1056/setna-i-a-detailed-summary–commentary/
https://www.ancient.eu/Khaemweset/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Egyptian_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_hieroglyphs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratichttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_languagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_Catholic_Church
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stonehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Egypt#Greek_rule
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatrahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemaic_Kingdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Dynasty_of_Egypt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_the_Great
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerxes_I
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt_(Roman_province)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imhotep
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imhotep_(The_Mummy)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osiris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammit
http://www.egyptianmyths.net/mythsealletr.htm
http://www.perankhgroup.com/The%20Sealed%20Letter%20-%20Se%20osiris.htm
http://www.egyptianmyths.net/section-myths.htm
https://www.ancient.eu/article/1057/setna-ii-a-detailed-summary–commentary/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis,_Egypt
https://www.ancient.eu/article/885/egyptian-gods—the-complete-list/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thothhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboroshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osirishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crook_and_flail
http://ib205.tripod.com/setne_2.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osiris
https://www.ancient.eu/article/1054/the-tales-of-prince-setna/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Magical_Papyri
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tale_of_Setne_Khamwas_and_Si-Osire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaemweset
https://www.thetorah.com/article/yhwhs-war-against-the-egyptian-sun-god-ra
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/magic.htm
http://www.egyptsearch.com/forums/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=next_topic;f=15;t=002869;go=older
http://www.attalus.org/egypt/setne.html
http://vr.theatre.ntu.edu.tw/hlee/course/th6_520/sty_egy/minor/seallet.htm
https://amp.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dcpm06/in_the_story_of_se_osiris_we_discover_ancient/
https://www.ancient.eu/article/1054/the-tales-of-prince-setna/
https://books.google.com/books?id=5z3CAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PT336&ots=gonD6AeP9c&dq=se-osiris&pg=PT336#v=onepage&q=se-osiris&f=false
https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/mortuary-mask-khaemwaset
https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/bas-relief-prince-khaemwaset
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/3441
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah15225
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/46579
http://www.globalegyptianmuseum.org/detail.aspx?id=1096
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG54170
https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100035505
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/death_sakkara_gallery_04.shtml
http://www.joanannlansberry.com/fotoart/brklyn/khaemwaset.html
http://carlos.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/items/show/8035
https://egyptmanchester.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/prince-khaemwasets-signature-deposits-being-part-of-history/
https://www.academia.edu/1042964/_Khaemwaset_in_The_Encyclopedia_of_Ancient_History_Blackwell_2013_
http://www.ancient-egypt.co.uk/roscicrucian/pages/rosicrucian%20museum%2C%20San%20Jose%2C%20May-2005%2C%20259.htm
http://www.digitalsculpture.org/egypt/main/model/d5b9dfb529b94903974f748c2b315829
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Thoth

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Se-Osiris, Ancient Egyptian Wizard

A look at the magic-filled legends of Se-Osiris, Ancient Egyptian Wizard, who, as a pre-teen, traveled to the underworld and later dueled with a reincarnated sorcerer.

Setne II, an Ancient Egyptian story that’s survived on papyrus, tells the tale of a Dante’s inferno-like descent into the underworld, and a flurry of magical duels and reincarnation. Oh, and the person doing the magic is a 12-year-old kid.

Highlights include:
• A protective mother who turns into a goose to fly to save her sorcerer son
• The weighing of hearts
• The jackal-headed god Anubus
• Ammit, devourer of the dead
• A trip to the land of the dead

Episode Script for Se-Osiris, Ancient Egyptian Wizard

[When the] boy Si-Osire [reached] twelve years of age, it came to pass that there was no [scribe and learned man] in Memphis [who could compare] with him in reciting spells and performing magic.

–Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume 3, by Miriam Lichtheim

Last week we talked about Setne I, a story about an Ancient Egyptian prince who did some magic and stole a spell book called the Book of Thoth.

This week, we’ll get into the story of Se-Osiris, his son, which is a story that I was really interested in when I was a kid.
- It sounds like Setne II maybe begins much later, when his children were grown.
- But the story says that he and his wife, Mehusekhe, were sad because they didn’t have a son. (So I wonder if this was his second wife, maybe?)
- So Setne’s wife, whose name I’m not gonna try to say again, went to the temple of Imhetep to pray for a son.
  - Imhotep had been a chancellor to a pharaoh in the 27th century BC. He may have been the architect of a step pyramid that still stands in Egypt, and he was also the high priest of Ra, the sun god, in Heliopolis, which was the biggest city in Egypt at the time.
  - We don’t know a ton about him, but he was supposedly a great physician, and an author of wisdom texts. Interestingly, for the first 1200 years after his death, there’s no written mention of his name, but 2,000 years after his death he became more and more popular, especially among intellectuals, and eventually became a god. He’s notable for being one of the few non-royal Egyptians who became dieties after death, and there was a cult that grew up around him.
  - He ended up being kind of combined with the god Thoth, the god of math, medicine, and architecture, and the patron of scribes.
  - There are tons of legends about Imhotep, including stories about him ending a 7-year famine, having a god as a father, and fighting an Assyrian sorceress in a magical duel. He’s also credited with having been the one to start the tradition of burying pharaohs in pyramids made entirely out of stone.
  - Imhotep was an important god for a while; his popularity lasted into the Roman period. Also, the Greeks combined him with their god of medicine, Asklepios.
  - And I know you’re thinking: Wait, isn’t Imhotep the bad guy in The Mummy and The Mummy Returns? And the answer is, yes. The filmmakers of the 1932 version of The Mummy were very vaguely inspired by the historical figure of Imhotep when creating the bad guy, and of course that led to him to be an important figure in the Brendan Fraser remakes as well.
- So, anyway: Setne’s wife went to pray to Imhotep and asks for a son. That night, she slept in the temple, and in her dreams, she was shown how to prepare a magical remedy that would give her a son.
- The remedy worked, and Setne and his wife were thrilled. Setne felt that his wife needed extra protection, so he gave her an amulet and cast some spells around her.
- One night, Setne was told in a dream that his son would make wonders happen and that his name would be Se-Osiris.
- So when the son was born, that’s what he was named.
- When Se-Osiris started school, he was smarter that the other children and smarter than the tutor. So Se-Osiris started reading all of the magical papyri in the temple, and everyone was amazed.
- Setne made plans to bring his son to a festival where all of the Pharaoh’s magicians would try to defeat him.
- So one day, when Se-Osiris, who was still a little kid, was preparing for the contest with his father, they heard mourners crying.
- Setne looked down from the terrace they were standing on and saw a funeral procession for a rich man. He was being brought to the mountains to be buried.
- At the same time, he saw the body of a poor man, wrapped in a straw mat, being carried through the streets, with no one there to mourn him.
- Setne said that he hoped that he’d die like the rich man, honored and lamented, and not like the poor man, who was alone and forgotten.
- Se-Osiris replied (and I’m quoting from the 1915 book of Egyptian legends): “Nay, my father, rather may the fate of the poor man be thine, and not that of the rich one!”
- Setne was really upset by this, and said: “Are they the words of a son who loves his father?”
- Se-Osiris replied: “My father, I will show to thee each in his place, the peasant unwept and the rich man so lamented.”
- After Setne asked him how he planned to do this, Se-Osiris started chanting words of power from the magical books, and he led his father to an unknown part of the mountains near Memphis.
- There they found 7 great halls full of all sorts of people.
- They passed through 3 of them without incident, but when they reached the 4th, they came across, to quote from the book a bit more:
  - “a mass of men who rushed hither and thither, writing as creatures attacked them from behind; others, famished, were springing and jumping in their efforts to reach the food suspended above them, whilst some, again, dug holes at their feet to prevent them attaining their object.
- I also wanted to read a bit from a summary of the story from ancient.eu, which had some detail that the 1915 mythology book didn’t:
  - There they see people who had no luck in life, and blamed others instead of themselves, trying to plait ropes together, but before they can finish, donkeys chew through their work. Their efforts are as futile in the afterlife as they were on earth because they accepted no personal responsibility. . . . These people, Si-Osire explains, are those who were grasping in life, never content, and remain the same in death.
- And then to continue reading from the 1915 book:
  - “In the fifth hall were venerable shades who had each found their proper and fitting place, but those who were accused of crimes lingered kneeling at the door, which pivoted upon the eye of a man who ceaselessly prayed and groaned. In the sixth hall were the gods of Amenti, who sat in council, each in his place, whilst the keepers of the portals called out the causes. In the seventh hall was seated the great god Osiris on a golden throne, crowned with the plumed diadem. On his left was Anubis, and on his right the god Thoth. In the midst were the scales wherein were weighed the faults and virtues of the souls of the dead, while Thoth wrote down the judgment that Anubis pronounced.”
- So to explain a couple things here: we already talked about Thoth, the scribe god, and Osiris, the god of the afterlife, the dead, resurrection, and life.
- Amenti was the land of the dead in Egyptian mythology, also called Duat.
- Anubis, of course, is the jackal-headed god of death, mummification, embalming, the afterlife, cemeteries, tombs, and the Underworld.
  - And I guess I should say: I described him as jackal-headed because that’s generally how he’s described, in part because jackals were associated with cemeteries since they were scavengers who apparently could dig up human bodies and eat them. So the Ancient Egyptians decided that a jackal god should be the one to protect the dead.
  - But nowadays, it’s said that the animal that was sacred to him was’t actually a jackal, but was actually an African golden wolf, which until 2015 had been mistakenly classified as a jackal.
  - But despite having a golden wolf’s head, Anubis was usually depicted in black, because that color symbolized life, regeneration, the soil of the Nile River, and color of a corpse after embalming
  - In the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, Anubis was the most powerful god of the dead, before being supplanted by Osiris in the Middle Kingdom. And then by the late pharaonic era, Anubis was someone who would hold the dead person’s hand to lead them to Osiris, and the afterlife. So talk about a demotion.
  - But at any rate, in the Book of the Dead, Anubis weighted the heart of a dead person against truth, which was often symbolized by an ostrich feather. Anyone whose soul weighed more than the feather would be denied the afterlife and consumed by Ammit.
  - Ammit was a demon and goddess with a body that was part lion, part hippo, and part crocodile, because those were the three largest human-eating animals in Ancient Egypt. Some of her titles were “Devouerer of the Dead,” “Eater of Hearts,” and “Great of Death.”
  - Once Ammit ate the heart, the soul basically died a second death and became restless for eternity.
  - Ammit wasn’t a goddess who was worshipped, because she represented everything that the Ancient Egyptians feared. Because in their faith, unlike in Christianity, the worst fate wasn’t hell, but to be denied entry into the afterlife and immortality.
  - And apparently in some stories, Ammit stands next to a lake of fire. So it’s all very metal and terrifying.
- So, anyway, back to the story. Setne and Se-Osris are standing watching the souls being judged, and Setne sees someone who’s been dressed in fine linen and sitting in a place of honor.
- As Setne’s looking around, Se-Osiris says:
  - 1915:
  - “My father Setne, seest thou that great personage in fine robes and near to Osiris? That peasant whom thou didst see carried out of Memphis without a soul to accompany him, and his body wrapped in a mat, dost thou remember, my father? Well, that peasant is the one beside Osiris! When he had come to Amenti and they weighed his faults and virtues, lo! his virtues outweighed all. And by the judgment of the gods all the honours that had been the share of the rich man were given to the peasant, and by the law of Osiris he takes his place midst the honoured and exalted. But the rich man, when he had come to Hades and his merits were weighed, lo! his faults weighed heavier, and he is that man you have seen upon whose eye pivots the door of the fifth hall, the man who cries and prays aloud with great agony. By the life of Osiris, god of Amenti, if upon earth I said to thee, ‘Rather may the fate of the peasant be thine than that of the rich man,’ it was because I knew their fates, my father.”
  - The 1973 translation says that Thoth had written down the misdeeds of the rich man and the poor man, and compared their deeds to their luck while on earth. So then based on that information, Osiris ordered that the poor man be given the burial equipment that the rich man had been buried with, which is how the poor man came to be dressed in the rich man’s robes.
- This is interesting to me, because it feels really, really Christian to me. I’m not sure if the Christian bent was introduced by the author of this book in 1915, or if it was there in the original papyrus. But this whole tableau really reminds me of Dante’s inferno, and the new testament line when Jesus says “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
  - However, a study written by an H. Gressmann apparently makes a convincing case that this story, to quote the 1973 book, is made of “genuinely Egyptian motifs that formed the basis for the parable of Jesus in Luke 16:19-13 and the related Jewish legends”
- Also, I notice that in this translation, it calls the afterlife hades as often as it calls it Amenti, so that betrays a major greek mythological influence.
- The 1973 book mentions how this story is of course very much like the Greek tales of Tantalus and Sisyphus, as well as the tale of Orpheus descending into the underworld and Odysseus talking to ghosts.
  - The author talks about how this speaks to how Greek and Egyptian cultures mingled in Greco-Roman Egypt.
- In an analysis on ancient.eu, there’s an explanation that wealth wasn’t seen as an evil in ancient Egypt. (For example, the Pharaohs were wealthy, but they were going to have a good afterlife.) But there’s an Egyptian concept of truth, or ma’at, which is about balance and doing more good than bad. To read a bit:
  - What should be noted in this section of the story is what brings the two men to their respective fates: the poor man did “good works” while the rich man’s misdeeds were greater than his good ones. This would have been understood as the difference between keeping ma’at as one’s focus in life or putting one’s self first before the good of others. The rich man would not have been punished for his wealth but for his selfishness and lack of concern for ma’at.
- Setne then asks his son about the people who they saw being eaten by animals, and the others trying to grab food that was out of their reach.
- And Se-Osiris says:
  - “In truth, my father, they are under the curse of the gods; they are those who upon earth wasted their substance, and the creatures who devour them without ceasing are the women with whom they squandered both life and substance, and now they have naught, though they should work day and night. And so it is with all: as they have been on earth, so it is with them in Amenti, according to their good and bad deeds. That is the immutable law of the gods, the law that knows no change and under which all men must come when they enter Hades.”
In the 1973 translation, Se-Osiris ends their trip, saying:
- Take it to your heart, my father Setne: He who is beneficent on Earth, to him one is beneficent in the netherworld. And he who is evil, to him one is evil. It is so decreed [and will remain so] for ever.
So then they descended from the mountains. Setne was freaked out, but Se-Osiris was calm, and said some magic words that would exorcise the spirits of the dead. I wonder if that’s so they don’t follow them back out?
It said that Setne never spoke to anyone about what he’d been shown, but always remembered it. (Of course, if he never told anyone, then this story couldn’t be told–another indication that this is fictional.)
So then that story ends with “And when Se-Osiris was twelve years of age there was no scribe or magician in Memphis who was his equal in the reading of the magical books.”
So the next story that features Se-Osiris is the tale of Se-Osiris and the Sealed Letter.
Let’s talk about the other story, the tale of Se-Osiris and the Sealed letter.
In this story, a Nubian chieftan arrives at the Pharaoh’s court, and declares that if an Egyptian magician can read the contents of a sealed letter, he will admit that Egypt is greater than Nubia. And if no scribe or magician could read the letter, then he’ll spread tales of Egypt’s weakness in Nubia.
- The Pharaoh is distressed, and sends for his son, Setne.
- Setne’s pretty freaked out, and he asks Pharaoh for 10 days to figure out how to read the sealed letter. But in truth, he has no idea how to do it.
- To read from Lictheim’s translation, there’s a great description of his despair:
  - Setne went to his house without knowing where on earth he was going. He wrapped himself in his garments from head to foot and lay down without knowing where on earth he was.
- But then his son, Se-Osiris, comes in and asks him what’s wrong.
- Setne, sure that he’ll be the reason why Egypt is put to shame, tells Se-Osiris the story. To his surprise, Se-Osiris starts laughing.
- He tells Setne that this is no big deal, and Se-Osiris can read the letter easily.
- Se-Osiris tells Setne to go downstairs to a chest of books, and says that without going downstairs, Se-Osiris will be able to tell Setne what each book is.
- He’s as good as his word, and Setne is thrilled. He runs to tell Pharaoh, who puts on a banquet for them that night.
- Then, the next day, Pharaoh calls in the Nubian chieftan, and Se-Osiris reads the sealed letter.
- The letter tells the story of three Nubian sorcerers from long ago, who brag to each other about all the things they could do to Egypt, like make the sun stop shining there for three days, or magically kidnapping the Pharaoh and beating him with a stick, or making all of their land barren for three years, but they said they can’t do those things since they’d get in trouble with the god Amun and with the Pharaoh.
- The ruler of Nubian hears that the sorcerers have been bragging about these skills, and he asks for the sorcerer who said he could magically kidnap the Pharaoh, beat him 500 times with a stick, and then return him to Egypt within 6 hours, to do it.
- So the sorcerer makes a litter and figures to carry it out of wax, and gives them life using a magical spell. (This is similar to the prince’s magical boat and crew in Setne I.)
- And the sorcerer gives his creation their orders, and they go and kidnap the Pharaoh and bring him to be beaten before the Nubian ruler.
- Se-Osiris pauses in the story and asks the Nubian chieftan to say whether he’s reading the letter correctly, and the chieftan says he is.
- And then Se-Osiris continues reading the letter:
  - The next morning, the Pharaoh asks his staff what happened while he was away from Egypt, and people kinda wonder if he’s losing it.
  - The Pharaoh has to show them the marks on his back from being beaten, and tells them what happened to him.
  - They call in an Egyptian sorcerer, who realizes it was Nubian sorcerers who did this, and casts a spell over the Pharaoh and gives him amulets to protect him.
  - Then the sorcerer goes to the temple of Thoth and implores him for help, saying that since Thoth invented magic, he’s now calling on Thoth to help him save the Pharaoh from the Nubian sorcerers.
  - That night, Thoth comes to the sorcerer in a dream and tells him where he can find a book of magic that Thoth wrote himself, which will help him. He hurries to get the book and then follows Thoth’s instructions and creates a written amulet to protect the Pharaoh.
  - When the Nubian sorcerer’s creations come to kidnap the Pharaoh again, they’re unsuccessful because of this protective magic.
  - Then the Egyptian sorcerer creates his own wax figures with a litter, and has them capture the Nubian ruler so he can be beaten as the Pharaoh was.
  - The next day, the Nubian ruler is very angry with his sorcerer. He shows him the marks on his back and demands protective magic.
  - However, the protective magic doesn’t keep the Nubian ruler safe, and for three nights in a row, he’s kidnapped and beaten.
  - The Nubian sorcerer says that he must go to Egypt so he can confront the Egyptian sorcerer. Before going to Egypt, he visits his mom, who warns him to be careful, and says that the Egyptians’ magic is stronger than the Nubians’.
    - To read a bit from the story:
    - He said : “There is nothing to the words you have said . I cannot avoid going down to Egypt if I want to cast my sorceries into it.” The Nubian woman, his mother, said to him: ” If it is so that you will go down to Egypt, set some signs between me and you , so that if you are defeated, I shall come to you and see if I can save you.” He said to her : “If it happens that I am defeated , then when you are drinking [and eating], the water will take on the color of blood before you, the food before you the color of meat, and the sky will have the color of blood before you .”
  - So then the Nubian sorcerer goes to Memphis, to the Pharaoh’s court, and confronts the Egyptian sorcerer, who recognizes him as someone who he’d saved from drowning once.
  - The Nubian sorcerer starts casting spells: first, he makes a fire break out in the court, but the Egyptian sorcerer calls down clouds from the south and makes them rain to extinguish the fire.
  - Then the Nubian sorcerer made a thick cloud fill the air so no one could see each other. But then the Egyptian sorcerer casts a spell to the sky, which chases out the cloud.
  - Then the Nubian sorcerer created a stone vault that penned in the Pharaoh, intending to trap him there forever. But the Egyptian sorcerer “created a sky-boat of papyrus” which carried away the stone.
  - At this point, the Nubian sorcerer realizes he’s beat, so he turns himself into an invisible goose so he can escape, and fly away unseen. But the Egyptian sorcerer turns him visible again, and a hunter goes to hill the sorcerer-goose.
  - But at that moment, the Nubian sorcerer’s mother sees the signs that he’s in danger, and she turns herself into a goose and flies to save him.
  - The Egyptian sorcerer sees her and sets the hunter on her, but then the Nubian woman turns human again and begs for her life and the life of her son.
  - She says that if they’re given a sky-boat to fly away in, they’ll never come back to Egypt. The Egyptian sorcerer agrees, after the Nubian sorcerer promises not to return to Egypt in 1,500 years.
  - That’s everything the papyrus said. Se-Osiris then tells the Pharaoh that those 1,500 years are up, and now the Nubian sorcerer has returned.
  - The Se-Osiris reveals that he’s actually the Egyptian sorcerer from the story. After dying, he’d forseen that this would happen, so he begged Osiris, in the land of the dead, to let him return to the world of the living so he could save Egypt.
  - Osiris allowed it, which is why Se-Osiris was here now.
  - Then, Se-Osiris cast a spell and surrounded the Nubian sorcerer in flames, which consumed him.
  - Then, Se-Osiris vanished as a shadow.
  - Setne cried out, having missed his son disappearing.
  - He and his wife were devastated, but they were given another son soon after that.
  - But until he died, Setne would always make burnt offerings and give libations to the spirit of the sorcerer who has been his son Se-Osiris.
- It’s kind of a sad story, but a dramatic one.
- One thing I did want to mention, since this story pits the Egyptians against the Nubians–some versions of the story describes the Egyptians as white and calls the Nubian leader the “black dog of the south.” I read that that language isn’t in the original text at all, and that those versions should be considered spurious and inauthentic.
- One thing we talked about during the Victorian Egyptomania episode is how many Black activists during that time period sought to prove that the Egyptians were Black, and since they had such an advanced civilization, especially at a time when white people really didn’t, that could potentially go a long way toward changing racist peoples’ minds.
- I did a bit of reading, and this is a really complicated and hairy topic. But I think it’s safe to say that the ancient Egyptians were not white–a lot of modern scholars say that Ancient Egypt was ethnically diverse but not white–and that it’s clear that some people have tried to doctor this story to have some racist implications. Though one thing that’s worth noting is that ancient historians, including Herodotus, among others, described the Egyptians as being dark-skinned.
  - I’ll link to a really interesting article with more info in the shownotes, so you can check that out if you want to learn more.
- Next week, I want to talk about the real Prince Setne, as well as the book of Thoth, the magical book that appeared in both Setne I and Setne II.

Sources consulted RE: Se-Osiris, Ancient Egyptian Wizard

Books RE: Se-Osiris, Ancient Egyptian Wizard

Ancient Egyptian Myths and Legends By Lewis Spence (1915):
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43662/43662-h/43662-h.htm
Ancient Egyptian Literature Vol III by Miriam Lichtheim (1973):
https://archive.org/details/MiriamLichtheimAncientEgyptianLiteratureVolIII/page/n67/mode/2up

Websites RE: Se-Osiris, Ancient Egyptian Wizard

Article about race and Ancient Egypt: https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/04/23/were-the-ancient-egyptians-black/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_race_controversy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Egyptian_hypothesis
https://www.quora.com/Is-the-claim-that-the-ancient-Egyptians-were-black-had-dark-skin-supported-by-history-If-not-what-race-were-they-and-how-do-we-know?share=1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Thoth
https://www.ancient.eu/article/1054/the-tales-of-prince-setna/https://www.ancient.eu/article/1056/setna-i-a-detailed-summary–commentary/
https://www.ancient.eu/Khaemweset/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Egyptian_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_hieroglyphs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratichttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_languagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_Catholic_Church
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stonehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Egypt#Greek_rule
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatrahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemaic_Kingdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Dynasty_of_Egypt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_the_Great
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerxes_I
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt_(Roman_province)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imhotep
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imhotep_(The_Mummy)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osiris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammit
http://www.egyptianmyths.net/mythsealletr.htm
http://www.perankhgroup.com/The%20Sealed%20Letter%20-%20Se%20osiris.htm
http://www.egyptianmyths.net/section-myths.htm
https://www.ancient.eu/article/1057/setna-ii-a-detailed-summary–commentary/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis,_Egypt
https://www.ancient.eu/article/885/egyptian-gods—the-complete-list/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osiris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crook_and_flail
http://ib205.tripod.com/setne_2.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osiris
https://www.ancient.eu/article/1054/the-tales-of-prince-setna/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Magical_Papyri
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tale_of_Setne_Khamwas_and_Si-Osire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaemweset
https://www.thetorah.com/article/yhwhs-war-against-the-egyptian-sun-god-ra
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/magic.htm
http://www.egyptsearch.com/forums/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=next_topic;f=15;t=002869;go=older
http://www.attalus.org/egypt/setne.html
http://vr.theatre.ntu.edu.tw/hlee/course/th6_520/sty_egy/minor/seallet.htm
https://amp.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dcpm06/in_the_story_of_se_osiris_we_discover_ancient/
https://www.ancient.eu/article/1054/the-tales-of-prince-setna/
https://books.google.com/books?id=5z3CAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PT336&ots=gonD6AeP9c&dq=se-osiris&pg=PT336#v=onepage&q=se-osiris&f=false
https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/mortuary-mask-khaemwaset
https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/bas-relief-prince-khaemwaset
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/3441
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah15225
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/46579
http://www.globalegyptianmuseum.org/detail.aspx?id=1096
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG54170
https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100035505
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/death_sakkara_gallery_04.shtml
http://www.joanannlansberry.com/fotoart/brklyn/khaemwaset.html
http://carlos.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/items/show/8035
https://egyptmanchester.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/prince-khaemwasets-signature-deposits-being-part-of-history/
https://www.academia.edu/1042964/_Khaemwaset_in_The_Encyclopedia_of_Ancient_History_Blackwell_2013_
http://www.ancient-egypt.co.uk/roscicrucian/pages/rosicrucian%20museum%2C%20San%20Jose%2C%20May-2005%2C%20259.htm
http://www.digitalsculpture.org/egypt/main/model/d5b9dfb529b94903974f748c2b315829
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Thoth

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The Book of Thoth and the First Egyptologist

A look at the legendary Book of Thoth and the historical figure who inspired Ancient Egypt’s most famous fictional sorcerer and is considered the first Egyptologist.

Setne Khamwas, aka Prince Khaemweset, was the son of Ramesses the Great, as well as a high priest of Ptah, and a historian with a passion for preserving Ancient Egyptian history. He traveled around Egypt, restoring sites and monuments from the Old Kingdom, including the famous Pyramids at Giza. He’s a big factor in why so many famous Ancient Egyptian sites are in relatively good repair. He’s also behind some ancient alien theories.

The Book of Thoth, a book of magic that was featured in the fictional stories about Setne Khamwas, also has an interesting backstory, and links to ceremonial magic, Hermes Trismegistus, and hermeticism in general.

Highlights include:

• Ancient aliens
• A magical bull
• Field mice fighting battles
• The good and bad parts of being an ancient historian/tomb raider

Episode Script for The Book of Thoth and the First Egyptologist

“The archaeologists who first began professionally excavating Egyptian sites in the 19th century CE owe the existence of their records, and in many cases the structures themselves, to the efforts of the prince and high priest Khaemweset.” –from an article about Khaemweset in Ancient History Encyclopedia, Ancient.eu

“It seems that later Egyptians admired Khaemwaset because he was able to read old inscriptions but, at the same time, thought him reckless as he entered tombs” -Van de Mieroop

The real Setne:

https://www.ancient.eu/Khaemweset/

So let’s talk about what’s real
Some of the big sources for this episode are:
- Stories of the High Priests of Memphis by LL Griffith (1900)
The real historical figure who Setne was based on is Prince Khaemweset, whose name is translated a bunch of different ways, including as Setne Khamwas. Setne was basically a corruption of his title, which was “Sem” or “Setem” priest.
I’ll call him Khamwas since that was his actual name, and also to distinguish him from the literary Setne.
He was the fourth son of Pharaoh Ramses II, and while he never became Pharaoh, he was the best known son of Ramesses II, aka Ramesses the Great, who reigned for 67 years.
Khamwas was born near the end of his grandfather, Seti I’s, reign, so maybe in the 1270s BC
His name meant “manifestation in Thebes” so some historians think he was born in Thebes, which was a major city in southern Egypt, but he lived his life and died in Memphis, Egypt.
When he was young, he would have fought in wars, and there’re a bunch of inscriptions and reliefs that show him on the battlefield.
While he was fighting, he also would have been in school, studying to become a scribe, and then studying to become a priest, and then doing an apprenticeship with a priest. And through all of this, he also would have been working out a lot, because physical fitness was really important at the time if you were the child of the Pharaoh
He became a priest of Ptah, who was a very important god in Memphis, when he was 18 years old
And by the time he was 32, he was the high priest of Ptah
As high priest, he was at the top of the hierarchy and was very important
Part of the High Priest of Ptah’s job was to oversee the upkeep of temples, and Khamwas took this role very seriously.
When he was younger, he would have traveled around Egypt with his father and seen the state of different historic structures–some had been well maintained by priests, whereas others were in bad shape.
Then, once he became a priest, he would have had access to a huge amount of historical records, which were kept in the temple in a room called the Per-Ankh, or House of Life.
- And, as it turns out, Khamwas was obsessed with the past, especially with Ancient Egypt’s Old Kingdom
- All the major temples had a House of Life, which included libraries, classroom space, and areas that people used for writing.
- Using the records in the House of Life, Khamwas was able to identify and research structures that were in disrepair
In fact, he’s been called “the first Egyptologist” because of the research and restoration work that he did.
An article about him on ancient.eu quotes an Egyptologist named Kenneth Kitchen:
- He was no doubt impressed by the superb workmanship of the splendid monuments of a thousand years before – and perhaps also depressed by their state of neglect, mounded up in drifts of sand, temples fallen into ruin. Deeply affected by all that he had seen, Khaemweset resolved to clear these glories of antiquity of the encumbering sand, tidy the temples, and renew the memory (and perhaps the cults) of the ancient kings.
One thing that’s hard for us to fathom is that Egypt has such a long history, and even during the times of what’s called the “New Kingdom” of Ancient Egypt, there were things from the “Old Kingdom” that were already ancient, as in 600-1500 years old.
- I think that kind of history is really hard to picture, but for me, one way of looking at it is to compare it to famous historic structures in Europe: construction on Notre-Dame, in Paris, started in the 1,100s, so about 860 years ago. So imagine structures that were twice that age, and you can maybe imagine some of the historic structures that Khamwas was restoring.
- Another way to think of it is that Stonehenge was probably erected around the time of Egypt’s Old Kingdom (the Old Kingdom was around 2600-2180 BC, and carbon dating suggests that the first parts of Stonehenge were erected between 2400-2200 BC.) So, you know, while the Egyptians were building the pyramids at Giza, some people put up some big rocks in England.
He would find ruined tombs and restore them and make sure that the names of the dead were clearly inscribed on them. That’s an important detail, the fact that he preserved not just the past but the names of those who had built the structures. He’d also write what the structure was used for, and when it was restored. Basically he was creating historical plaques.
One inscription, for a king’s tomb, read:
- His Majesty instructed the High Priest of Ptah and Setem, Khaemwise, to inscribe the cartouche of king Shepsekaf, since his name could not be found on the face of his pyramid, inasmuch as the Setem Khaemwise loved to restore the monuments of the kings, making firm again what had fallen into ruin.
In addition to restoring structures, he’d fix up statues. The inscription for a statue that he restored of the son of the Pharaoh who built the great pyramid reads:
- It was the High Priest and Prince Khaemwise who delighted in this statue of the king’s son Kawab, which he discovered in the fill of a shaft in the area of the well of his father Khufu. He acted so as to place it in the favour of the gods, among the glorious spirits of the chapel of the necropolis because he loved the noble ones who dwelt in antiquity before him, and the excellence of everything they made, in very truth, a million times. (Ray, 87-88)
Apparently the pyramids at Giza were in terrible disrepair at the time, since they were a thousand years old and it was no longer an active burial site. So Khamwas restored the whole area, and now it’s one of the most popular tourist destinations in egypt.
In Ancient Egypt, he was remembered and respected for hundreds of years after his death because of the work he did to restore historic tombs, temples, and buildings.
And one reason why his father, Ramesses the Great, became so famous, is because Khamwas was going around fixing things up and mentioning his father on the inscriptions for everything.
- Ramesses the Great was even mistaken for the Pharaoh in Exodus, because his name was so well known that it sounds like it just kind of attached itself to the story in the popular imagination.
However, his work was sort of a double edged sword.
He did excellent restoration work, which was important since the afterlife was so important to the Ancient Egyptians. But for the same reason, there were many taboos against entering tombs, and people did not like that he was breaking that taboo. That’s probably part of why the literary character that’s based on him was so reckless and often looked foolish and unaware of consequences.
- To quote an article in ancient.eu, he “impulsively follows his heart instead of the precepts of tradition and cultural values.”
In addition to restoring old monuments, Khamwas also built new ones to commemorate important events during his own time.
In fact, some Egyptologists have criticized him, claiming that his restoration work was just about trying to use ancient sites as quarries–basically the idea is that he would steal stones from sites during restorations, and use them for his own building projects.
However, it sounds like most Egyptologists don’t think that was the case, though he may have reused some stones and other materials from structures that were too far gone to restore.
One of the things that he would have done as high priest was preside over the burial of something called an Apis bull, which was a type of bull that at the time, was a sort of sacred herald to Ptah, and who also had associations with kingship.
- Around Memphis, the cows were mostly black with white patterns, and an Apis bull had specific patterns: they’d have a white triangular spot on their forehead, a vulture wing outline on its back, a mark that looked like a scarab under its tongue, a crescent moon shape on its right flank, and double hairs on his tail.
- When they found a bull with these markings, they’d take him from the herd and worship him as a manifestation of Ptah. The story was that an Apis bull was conceived by a flash of lightning or a moonbeam, and the mother of the bull would get special treatment and burial when she died.
- The Apis bull would be used as an oracle in the temple–they made prophecies based on his movements.
- The bull’s breath was supposed to cure disease, and his presence brought strength
- People on the street could see the bull through a window in the temple, and for festivals, they’d festoon the bull with jewelry and flowers and parade him through the streets
- When the bull died in a ritual slaying, it would be mummified in a special way, and sometimes they’d affix the mummy to a wooden platform in the tomb so he’d be standing.
- Then, while the bull was prepared for burial, they’d search for the new Apis bull.
- They kept meticulous records of the lives of the Apis bulls, detailing when they were born, when they were enthroned, when they died, who their mothers were, etc.
- And it was extremely expensive to bury them–they were put in huge sarcarphagi, and they were embalmed and prepared for burial with the highest honors.
- Because Apis was a protector of the dead and had ties to the Pharaoh, some Pharaoh’s tombs had horn decorations, and some ordinary people would have depictions of the Apis bull on their coffins.
- In addition to presiding over the burials of the Apis bull, and searches for new Apis bulls, Khamwas also had a huge gallery excavated in an underground burial complex, and the bulls were buried there in his time.
  - The idea was that if all the bulls were buried together, it’d be easier for people to visit them and leave offerings
  - These tombs were used for 13 centuries, and were rediscovered in the 1850s
  - This tomb for the bulls is still around today, and it’s a popular tourist attraction
- There are also apparently a lot of conspiracy theories about this tomb, because the granite sarcophagi weigh between 70-100 tons
  - In the name of research, I did watch a youtube video about the conspiracy theory. Basically the idea is that the giant granite sarcophagi are extremely heavy, from stone that was quarried far away, and many of them are extremely precise, there are questions about how they could have created them, and people can’t imagine that anyone would go to so much trouble to bury a bull.
  - I don’t find this convincing, really, because if the bull is a god, then nothing’s too good for them, and also the Egyptians were amazing mathematicians and architects.
  - Some people think aliens created them, whereas other people think nephilim, or angels, made them. And you can google “Serapeum” if you want to learn more about that.
- In addition to creating the Serapeum, Khamwas also constructed a temple to Apis. Previously, there’s been a chapel at each bull’s tomb. And that became a hub for the cult of the Apis bull
There was one story that Herodotus tells about Khamwas, where he’d angered the military by treating them with contempt and not giving them land allotments, as they’d been given by kings in the past. For whatever reason, he thought he wouldn’t need the military’s help.
- So he was totally screwed when the king of Assyria and Arabia marched with his army to attack Egypt, because the Egyptian troops refused to help.
- So Khamwas went to the temple and bemoaned the terrible situation he’d gotten himself into, and then he fell asleep and Ptah gave him a vision where he comforted him and said not to worry, he’d help him.
- So Khamwas gathered up all the Egyptians who were willing to help him, which ended up being just artisans and merchants, basically.
- When they arrived at the battlefield, an enormous stream of field mice arrived, and scurried over to the enemy camp, where they ate all of the shields, bows, quivers, and other weapons. And then, having lost all of their weapons, which which was a major financial loss as well, the enemy army fled.
- Herodotus claimed that in his day, a statue of Khamwas stood before the temple with a mouse in his hand, and an inscription that said “Let any one looking upon me, (learn to) be pious!”
- It’s unclear to me how real this story is, but apparently it influenced the bible story in II Kings 19:35 where an angel destroys an Assyrian army, much like some of the fictional Setne stories we’ve looked at influenced the bible, which is really fascinating to me. (I did read, on ancient.eu, that the story of the rich man and poor man that we looked at last week is considered to have influenced the story of Lazarus in the bible, in Luke 16:19-31.)
We don’t know much about Khamwas’ personal life. We don’t know his wife’s name, but we think he maybe had three children, but even that’s fuzzy. We do know that his daughter’s tomb was discovered recently, I think around 2009?
Khamwas was named crown prince, but died when he was 55; so he could have been Pharaoh if he had lived longer, but the crown went to his brother, Merenptah, Ramses II’s 13th son
Today, Merenptah’s name is apparently better known, because he won an important victory against the Sea Peoples, who were a confederacy of naval raiders who attacked coastal cities on the Mediterranean.
- Not much is known about the Sea Peoples, and we don’t know who they were or where they were from. But they were apparently a contributing factor to something called the Bronze Age Collapse, which was when some major civilizations along the Mediterranean were destroyed.
- One ominous Egyptian inscription described them like this:
  - “They came from the sea in their war ships and none could stand against them.”
- Though Merenptah believed he had defeated the Sea People once and for all, he didn’t, and they continued to launch attacks against Egypt after his reign.
After his death, Khamwas was highly respected, and known as a wise man and magician who knew ancient languages and who could perform powerful spells.
We talked about Imhotep last week, who was a priest and polymath with knowledge of medicine, math, astronomy, architecture, and poetry. After his death, Imhotep eventually became deified and was worshipped as a god.
That didn’t happen to Khamwas, probably because he entered tombs.
It’s unclear where Khamwas was buried; in 1993, archeologists found a ruined tomb inscribed with his name, but the tomb was built in the style of the Old Kingdom, so they aren’t sure that it’s his. However, some people have suggested that even though Khamwas lived and died in the New Kingdom, he may have been so enamored of past styles that he had his tomb made up in an old fashioned way.
Some people say he may have been buried in the Serapeum alongside the Apis bulls.
Around 2000, a team of archaeologists found a funerary chapel to Khamwas 1.5 K from the Serapeum, on an outcropping of rock that overlooked all of the pyramids of the Memphis necropolis, which he loved so much
And of course he’s remembered through the fictional stories about him.
Though the Setne stories we looked at in past episodes were fictionalized, it does sound like a lot of Khamwas’ personality made it into the stories. He wasn’t afraid to enter tombs, no matter what magic or curses may lay in wait for him there, or what ghosts he might find there–so he was a pretty reckless and curious guy.
And in speaking of magic and ghosts, I did want to talk a bit about the Book of Thoth, which was so important in the Setne I story.
The Book of Thoth
- Something pretty weird happened while I was researching the Book of Thoth–I was watching a documentary-type video on ancient.eu, which seemed very credible, and then suddenly, about 6 minutes in, the audio quality changed, and instead of the gravelly male narrator, an Australian woman began narrating, and instead of cheesy historical reenactments and talking heads, there was a slideshow of images, and the video talked about how the ancient knowledge of the Book of Thoth was lost because of the Catholic Church, or as the video called it, “The Anti-Christ Catholic Church” who stole the knowledge to keep everyone enslaved.
- So I have NO idea what happened here, or why this weird anti-Catholic screed was on ancient.eu, which seems otherwise very credible . . .
- But when I skipped forward in the video, I eventually found the rest of the credible documentary, and the credible part was interesting, and hinted at how what we consider ceremonial magic these days comes from ancient Egypt.
- But anyway, it seems that some people think that The Book of Thoth was located in the astral plain, and ppl reached it via channeling
- In Ancient Egypt, only priests with special training could access the knowledge of Thoth
- It sounds like a lot of knowledge attributed to having come from Thoth actually came from the Babylonians
- No one’s ever found an actual spellbook as described, but there is something written in demotic script that has been called The Book of Thoth.
  - It’s a conversation between Thoth, referred to as “He Who Praises Knowledge” among other things, and a student, called “He Who Loves Learning”
  - They discuss bulls, cows, agriculture, as well as “the writings of the house of darkness” which probably meant the underworld
- An Egyptian historian who lived during the Ptolemaic period claimed that Thoth wrote 36,525 books, many of which were stored at temples in the “houses of life”
- An early Christian theologian claimed that there were 42 books that contained “the whole philosophy of the Egyptians,” and he said that Hermes had written it.
- That’s because the Graeco-Roman religion had combined Thoth with Hermes, who was a guide of souls and messenger of the Gods
- It sounds like Thoth was referred to as “thrice great,” and that’s how Thoth-Hermes became Hermes Trismegistus, who’s a huge figure when it comes to Hermeticism and alchemy, topics that I want to learn more about and talk more about another time.
- But there was something called the Emerald Tablet, a wisdom text, or hermetica, that contained the secret of prima materia, or the substance that you start with in alchemy, and that you’d transmute into the Philosopher’s Stone. This was a really important text to European alchemists, and it claims to have been written by Hermes Trismegistus
  - While the tablet’s text is supposedly ancient, it sounds like it was more likely Arabic and written between the 6th and 8th centuries
  - Isaac Newton was interested in alchemy, and a translation that he’d created was found among his alchemical papers
- So this is just a tiny bit about the Book of Thoth and how Egyptian magic fed into medieval alchemy and ceremonial magic nowadays, though I want to return to the topic of alchemy in a future episode.

Sources consulted RE: The Book of Thoth and the First Egyptologist

Books RE: The Book of Thoth and the First Egyptologist

Ancient Egyptian Myths and Legends By Lewis Spence (1915):
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43662/43662-h/43662-h.htm
Ancient Egyptian Literature Vol III by Miriam Lichtheim (1973):
https://archive.org/details/MiriamLichtheimAncientEgyptianLiteratureVolIII/page/n67/mode/2up
Ancient Egyptian Legends by M.A. Murray (1920):
https://archive.org/details/AncientEgyptianLegends/page/n39/mode/2up
STORIES OF THE HIGH PRIESTS OF MEMPHIS by F. LL. GRIFFITH, M.A. (1900): http://etana.org/sites/default/files/coretexts/15563.pdf

Websites RE: The Book of Thoth and the First Egyptologist

https://www.ancient.eu/article/1054/the-tales-of-prince-setna/
https://www.ancient.eu/Khaemweset/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apis_(deity)
https://www.popsci.com/blog-network/unpopular-science/did-ancient-aliens-build-giant-stone-boxes-egypt/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j9uHyDSH0s&feature=youtu.be
https://www.ancient.eu/Sea_Peoples/
https://echoesofegypt.peabody.yale.edu/egyptosophy/fragments-book-thoth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes_Trismegistus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeticism
https://www.ancient.eu/Bronze_Age_Collapse/
https://www.ancient.eu/Thoth/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Thoth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Tablet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prima_materia
https://www.ancient.eu/Thoth/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notre-Dame_de_Paris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis,_Egypt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramesses_II
https://www.ancient.eu/imhotep/
https://www.ancient.eu/video/1031/the-book-of-thoth/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Kingdom_of_Egypt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Thoth
https://www.ancient.eu/article/1054/the-tales-of-prince-setna/https://www.ancient.eu/article/1056/setna-i-a-detailed-summary–commentary/
https://www.ancient.eu/Khaemweset/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Egyptian_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_hieroglyphs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_Catholic_Church
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Egypt#Greek_rule
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemaic_Kingdom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Dynasty_of_Egypt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_the_Great
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerxes_I
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt_(Roman_province)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imhotep
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imhotep_(The_Mummy)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osiris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammit
http://www.egyptianmyths.net/mythsealletr.htm
http://www.perankhgroup.com/The%20Sealed%20Letter%20-%20Se%20osiris.htm
http://www.egyptianmyths.net/section-myths.htm
https://www.ancient.eu/article/1057/setna-ii-a-detailed-summary–commentary/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memphis,_Egypt
https://www.ancient.eu/article/885/egyptian-gods—the-complete-list/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osiris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crook_and_flail
http://ib205.tripod.com/setne_2.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osiris
https://www.ancient.eu/article/1054/the-tales-of-prince-setna/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Magical_Papyri
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tale_of_Setne_Khamwas_and_Si-Osire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaemweset
https://www.thetorah.com/article/yhwhs-war-against-the-egyptian-sun-god-ra
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/magic.htm
http://www.egyptsearch.com/forums/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=next_topic;f=15;t=002869;go=older
http://www.attalus.org/egypt/setne.html
http://vr.theatre.ntu.edu.tw/hlee/course/th6_520/sty_egy/minor/seallet.htm
https://amp.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/dcpm06/in_the_story_of_se_osiris_we_discover_ancient/
https://www.ancient.eu/article/1054/the-tales-of-prince-setna/
https://books.google.com/books?id=5z3CAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PT336&ots=gonD6AeP9c&dq=se-osiris&pg=PT336#v=onepage&q=se-osiris&f=false
https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/mortuary-mask-khaemwaset
https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/bas-relief-prince-khaemwaset
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/3441
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah15225
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/46579
http://www.globalegyptianmuseum.org/detail.aspx?id=1096
https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG54170
https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100035505
https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/death_sakkara_gallery_04.shtml
http://www.joanannlansberry.com/fotoart/brklyn/khaemwaset.html
http://carlos.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/items/show/8035
https://egyptmanchester.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/prince-khaemwasets-signature-deposits-being-part-of-history/
https://www.academia.edu/1042964/_Khaemwaset_in_The_Encyclopedia_of_Ancient_History_Blackwell_2013_
http://www.ancient-egypt.co.uk/roscicrucian/pages/rosicrucian%20museum%2C%20San%20Jose%2C%20May-2005%2C%20259.htm
http://www.digitalsculpture.org/egypt/main/model/d5b9dfb529b94903974f748c2b315829
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Thoth

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The Haunted Luxor Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas: Part 1

The Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas is one of the most iconic hotels on the strip—and supposedly one of the most haunted.

Back in the 1990s, there were grand plans to make Vegas a new Disney-type destination, full of ornate themed resorts and fun activities for children. The Luxor Hotel and Casino, an Ancient Egyptian themed hotel that’s shaped like a giant obsidian pyramid with a beam of light coming out of the top, was a strange and fascinating example of Vegas’ ’90s family-friendly ambitions. But all that changed in the early 2000s, when Vegas changed tack.

This week is a look at the history of the hotel, from its construction and grand opening to its current de-themed state, plus some initial thoughts on why people might believe the hotel is cursed.

Highlights include:
• A ill-fated pyramid hotel project that was planned for the site next to the Luxor
• Mysterious dead links
• A light that’s visible from space
• Special elevators that go sideways and up to bring people to their rooms
• Ancient alien 3D movies
• Authentic reproductions of Ancient Egyptian artifacts

Episode Script for The Haunted Luxor Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas: Part 1

We’ve been talking Ancient Egypt for the last few weeks, so I wanted to pivot and talk about a haunted hotel that was inspired by Ancient Egypt, the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas.
I’m gonna start by talking about the history of the hotel, what made it strange and unique, my experiences from when I stayed there as a kid (which unfortunately didn’t involve anything paranormal, that I noticed), and what it’s like now. But I did want to mention right off the bat that it’s known as a very haunted hotel.
- Also, and I’m not gonna get very much into this since it could be its own episode or series but the Luxor is also the hotel where Tupac Shakur was staying on the night he died. For anyone not familiar with his story, he was one of the most influential rappers of all time, he was killed in Vegas in 1996, though that’s complicated and there are a ton of conspiracy theories that posit that he’s still alive. Google it if you want to know more about that.
- I was trying to think of other reasons why folks may have heard of the Luxor, so here’s another thing: if you’ve seen the music video for Will Smith’s 1997 song Getting Jiggy Wit It, part of that was filmed at the Luxor.
- One thing you’ll notice is that the most famous things that happened at the Luxor were in the mid-to-late 1990s.
- That’s because the Luxor has had a bit of a fall since opening to fanfare and 10,000 guests almost exactly 27 years ago, on October 15, 1993.
I’ve been to Vegas once, when I was about 5 years old, in 1995, and while we were there, we stayed at the newly opened Luxor hotel.
- I really loved it there and still have extremely vivid memories of the trip and the Luxor in particular, because it was so cool.
During the 90s, there was an attempt to make Vegas into a sort of Disneyland, somewhere kid-friendly, with grand hotels that catered toward families and spared no expense.
- Around that time, a number of themed resorts that catered towards kids were created.
- Some of those include hotels like the medieval-themed Excalibur in 1990, and its neighbor, and the Egyptian-themed Luxor and pirate-themed Treasure Island which both opened in 1993.
- The Excalibur was built on a site that back in the 1970s, had been intended to be the site of what was supposed to be the first themed mega-resort in Vegas.
  - In 1976, developers planned to build Xanadu, a hotel that would feature a pyramid design and would have cost $150million to build
  - Rather than looking Egyptian, this pyramid would have been more aztec-style. It was intended to have 2,000 rooms, a 20-story atrium, and some sort of flaming water feature.
  - It sounds like the project ran into financing issues, though I also read that there were issues with sewer line installations that screwed up the project.
  - The site was immediately next to where the Luxor hotel was built, and I wonder if Xanadu had been built, that may have made a pyramid-shaped hotel like the Luxor less novel? Maybe they never would have built the Luxor if the Xanadu had succeeded?
  - As a sidenote, I want to look at Xanadu in a future episode–not just the Xanadu hotel, but the idea of Xanadu, because this hotel isn’t the only failed major project called Xanadu, and I feel like there’s something strange, or cursed, about things called Xanadu. (Remember that the mansion in Citizen Kane was called Xanadu as well.)
  - Remember, of course, that Xanadu was the capital of Kublai Khan’s empire, and it came to represent opulence and destroyed splendor, which feels very a propos when it comes to Vegas and maybe America in general.
The Luxor opened three years after the Excalibur did.
- There’s a great 30-minute promotional “documentary” on youtube that tells the story of the Luxor’s conception and construction, which I’ve watched a few times. It’s about a half hour long and it has that delightfully positive early 90s vibe. It kinda feels like the BTS videos that DVDs used to have
- It talks about the development of the Luxor, and the storytelling behind the hotel, including the guy who designed the shows and theatres inside the hotel. He was the guy who designed rides at Disney, including the Back to the Future one.
  - One thing they talk about is how they made a 3D ride with moving seats, like at Disney, that’s basically an ancient aliens type story, where two people go back in time to ancient egypt and it’s a highly technological civilization with spaceships and lazer guns and stuff.
    - They made up a whole “archiectural” style that they called “crypto-Egypto”
    - They show how they made all the miniatures for the shows, and sets, and it’s really really detailed–like one of the sets has over 1,000 lights, and they talk about how the cameras are “computer controlled” etc.
    - They talk about how each image in the CGI stuff is 90 MB of data, which they call “a computer worth of data” which is hilarious.
    - There’s a whole trilogy of films and live performances–which I don’t remember seeing and may have been too young for.
  - But anyway, about the construction of the hotel itself: They built casino and hotel in 18 months, for $375 million (which were drawn from Circus Circus’ petty cash, rather than from outside investors). There’d been a trailer park there before the Luxor was built.
  - The pyramid was 30 stories high–10 stories more than the failed Xanadu–and it was one of the largest glass-and-metal structures that’d been built. It contains 11 acres of glass.
  - There were 2,500 rooms when it first opened, along with a 100,000 square foot casino.
  - The hotel is shaped like a pyramid, of course, since it was named after the city, Luxor (where the ancient city of Thebes had been located.)
  - The pyramid is topped with the world’s most powerful light, which can be seen from space. It’s 42.3 billion candela. One candela is about the equivalent of one normal wax candle, so it’s like . . . 42.3 billion candles.
    - When the lights are on, the temparature in the lamp room is 300 degrees F.
    - While the light, called the Luxor Sky Beam, has operated every night since the hotel opened, since 2008, they only light half the lamps to save money and electricity.
    - The light is so strong that you can see it from airplanes flying near LA.
    - And the light has its own ecosystem: it attracts months, which attracts bats and birds, which attract owls
  - There’s also a single sphinx in front of the pyramid, which is actually larger than the actual sphinxes in Egypt, since if they did it to scale, it would look too small next to the pyramid hotel.
    - The sphinx is 10 stories tall, and as wide as 9 lanes of traffic.
  - There are over 100 “computerized fountains” in front, with lazer beams that come out of the sphinx’s eyes to project onto a water screen.
  - There was enough carpet put down in the Luxor to cover 34 football fields.
  - The atrium of the Luxor was the largest in the world. (That was true back then, but not anymore.)
    - Apparently, 9 747s could be stacked on top of each other in the atrium
  - And because it was built at a slant, the elevators, or “inclinators” as they called them, had to go up at a 39-degree-angle along the sloped slides of the pyramid–there was one at each corner of the atrium.
  - And all around the sides of the slanting walls of the atrium are the rooms, which exit out onto the hallways that look straight down over the atrium so you could see all the cool stuff below.
  - When they opened, there was also a Nile river ride, which I remember making my parents go on a number of times.
    - Apparently, the original idea behind the river ride was to take people from the check in desk to the inclinators so they could go upstairs.
    - The Nile ride was a sort of faux-archaeological tour. There was a guide on the boat who’d give you a tour and talk about some of the reproductions of egyptian sites and artifacts.
    - One highlight I remember from when I was there: at one point there was a bridge with a waterfall that the boat passed under, and it was timed so that the waterfall stopped right before you went under it, and the tour guide would say if a drop of water fell on you there, it was good luck.
    - There was a really impressive attention to detail in terms of the ancient Egyptian stuff there.
      - There as a recreation of a temple of Isis from 50 BC, as well as the statues at Abu Simbel (which, the real temple at Abu Simbel was something that Ramesses the Great, who we talked about last week, built), and a replica of King Tut’s Tomb.
    - I also recall some talking animatronic camels.
  - The video was made before this, but in 1996, there was a $240 million expansion of the Luxor, which added a imax theatre, ice rink, and laser light show. And then in 1998, they added 2,000 rooms in ziggurat-style towers, for $675 million. I have no idea how the first expansion cost 2/3 as much as the initial construction, and then the second addition cost almost double–that seems really weird.
  - The video is so positive; they quote someone saying “this place will never close, it’ll be here forever, it’ll be open 24 hours/day.”
  - Well, that’s sort of a foolish and fate-tempting thing to say about an Ancient Egyptian-themed hotel.
  - As the youtube comments of the video are quick to point out, things have really, really changed.
    - The technology that they used to make the attractions look quaint and are extremely dated by our standards, and those attractions are closed now anyway.
    - Coronavirus shut down Vegas, along with the rest of the country, for a while, making the really grand statements seem especially silly nowadays.
    - Vegas itself has changed. After a the foray into themed resorts and family-friendly splendor, it was decided that gambling and drinking was better business–I imagine the margin on casinos is way, way, better than the margin on free Nile river board rides and overpriced kids menus–and what I thought of as a kid as the “fun” parts of Vegas were phased out.
    - I mentioned Treasure Island, before–if you’ve seen Miss Congeniality 2, you may remember the pirate show that was there back in the 1990s and early 2000s.
      - I remember seeing it and thinking it was cool, definitely Disney worthy.
      - In 2003, Treasure Island took out that show and replaced it with what the president of the casino called a “sexy and beautiful, adult Broadway-caliber show.” I don’t really know why he seems to think that Broadway provides adult entertainment–maybe he’s thinking of the old Times Square before that got Disney-ified, but whatever. It sounds like the hotel’s owners realized that fun disney pirate stuff doesn’t appeal to adults looking to party and loose a bunch of money at casinos.
      - Also, around the time of the revamp, Treasure Island rebranded as “TI,” which seems really weird to me, beause 1) it just makes me think of the rapper, and 2) because it isn’t memorable and doesn’t really say anything, whereas at least Treasure Island fits with the casino theme.
      - In 2013, the Sirens of TI–the adult version of the show–was shut down and replaced by a shopping and entertainment center with a CVS as the anchor tenant. So sounds like Vegas has gone the way that NYC has–take out everything interesting and replace it with a CVS.
    - Likewise, Exaclibur had a cool statue of Merin on a high turret of the castle, which in 2007, they replaced with something advertising Dick’s Last resort.
      - Starting in 2006, they started removing the medieval themes, most of which were gone by 2010.
    - Sadly, the same thing happened with the Luxor.
      - The Luxor had been built by the Circus Circus Enterprises, but was purchased by MGM Resorts International in 2005.
      - In July 2007, they spent $300 million–almost as much as they spent to build the hotel in the first place–to renovate 80% of the Luxor’s public areas. They stripped out the Egyptian stuff and replaced it with generic-feeling, kinda seedy looking restaurants, bars, and lounges.
      - There are two shows at the Luxor these days: a topless show called “Fantasy” and a Carrot Top comedy show.
      - There’s also a club on the casino floor called “Cathouse.”
      - And I believe that the Nile River ride that I loved so much as a kid was only open for three years, I guess from 1993-1996. And then, after that, they drained the river ride and filled it in to have more public walking space.
Nowadays, the cheapest room, the pyramid two queen room, which sleeps four guests and has two queen sized beds, and is about the same size as my apartment, costs $37/night. The most expensive room I could find was the Tower Two-Bedroom Penthouse Suite, which is 3,600 square feet, which is $733/night.
You can stay in the pyramid, which is where I stayed in the 1990s–one really distinctive thing about the pyramid rooms is that the windows and outer walls are at a slant, since they’re the outside of the pyramid.
They later built a tower with additional rooms, which have normal walls and which look like they might be a bit nicer and more modern. (Those rooms start at $45.)
So the Luxor is really, really cheap. I’m sure COVID doesn’t help, but just for contrast, in NYC, there were headlines this week about how hotel room prices were way, way down during COVID, so now the average daily room rate is $135, whereas usually in October they’re $336.
- And a lot of hotels here are closed.
- But for example, the Pierre Hotel, a luxury hotel on Central Park, has priced its cheapest room, a 350 square foot room that sleeps 2 people, at $745/night right now, whereas their most expensive suite, which is 2,088 square foot and sleeps 5 people, starts at $22,000/night.
- So when you see that you can get a suite at the Luxor for $733/night, we’re talking bargain basement. And of course there’s a difference between staying in NYC and Vegas, and I guess at Vegas they expect to make more money from the casinos than from the rooms, but still.
But honestly, as I was doing this research on the Luxor and saw how cheap the rooms were, it made me kind of sad–it just seems not worth it to keep the hotel open.
In fact, this summer, rumors have started flying that the Luxor is being considered for demolition.
- Interestingly, I was reading some articles about this a month or so ago and several of the articles I read are now dead links, but I still found a few sites from July 2020 that address the rumor that the Luxor, and possibly the Exaclibur, may be torn down.
- I know the games industry is extremely powerful, so I don’t know if financial pressure, or something else brought down the original articles I read, but just to be clear: this is a rumor, and the fact that the original articles have been taken down make me think it may have been a false rumor, or at least a killed one. I feel a little skeptical of it, since it doesn’t really seem like a great time to tear down a couple hotels and then spend probably a billion dollars building news ones, though what do I know?
  - To read a bit from the now-removed article on VitalVegas.com, which I found on archive.org:
    - “De-theming casinos in Las Vegas has happened fairly frequently in recent years, as the perception of themes has evolved from cool to kitschy (or downright tacky) over time.
    - Many changes have already been made at Luxor to move away from its original theme, but it’s virtually impossible to re-imagine a massive pyramid.
    - The same dilemma is faced by Excalibur. Good luck tweaking a castle.
    - Our sources say company officials have discussed demolition of both Luxor and Excalibur for at least five years, but have been unable to proceed due to union contracts. It’s possible the COVID-19 shutdown has paved the way for what’s to come for Luxor.”
I don’t know. There are tons of stories of old classic Vegas hotels like the Sands, Riveiera, and Stardust, but there’ve also been false rumors of demolitions of other hotels, like the Rio, recently.
Next week, we’ll get into the haunting of the Luxor, but there’s one more bit of the hotel itself that I want to talk about: Now, despite my fond memories of the Luxor, it seems like there’s some bad vibes at there, that much is clear.
But also, I doubt it helps that the Luxor is also host to two exhibits:

○ One of them is the “Bodies” exhibit that was so popular a decade or so ago. To be clear, the Vegas exhibit isn’t the only one. I remember back in, say 2005-2008, there were tons and tons of “Bodies” exhibits all over the world. The Luxor got a permanent version of the “Bodies” exhibit in 2009.

○ In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s an exhibit shows real human bodies that have had the skin stripped off, perserved using a method called plastination, and then dissected and displayed in different stages. Like for example, posted like they’re running, or playing tennis, etc.

○ There are some major issues with the “Bodies” exhibit, aside from it being awfully creepy and gruesome. Human rights advocates have raised concerns that the bodies are gathered from executed Chinese political prisoners, without the consent of the prisoners and their families

To read from the wikipedia page about the exhibit:
“the front page of the exhibition website displays a disclaimer about the presumed origin of the bodies and fetuses, saying that it “relies solely on the representations of its Chinese partners” and “cannot independently verify” that the bodies do not belong to executed prisoners”
Also , to read a bit from a 2006 NPR report:
- “One delicate ethical concern stands out above all the others: whether the bodies were legitimately obtained. Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the inventor of plastination and the impresario behind the Body Worlds exhibitions, says that every whole body exhibited in North America comes from fully informed European and American donors, who gave permission, in writing, for their bodies to be displayed. The science museums that have hosted Body Worlds also make this assurance.
- “What I certainly never use for public exhibitions are unclaimed bodies, prisoners, bodies from mental institutions and executed prisoners,” von Hagens says.
- Chinese medical schools supply von Hagens with unclaimed bodies, which he plastinates and sells to universities. Von Hagens used to take cadavers from the former Soviet Union, but he stopped after body-trafficking scandals in Russia and the Kyrgyz Republic.
- Five years ago, customs officers intercepted 56 bodies and hundreds of brain samples sent from the Novosibirsk Medical Academy to von Hagens’ lab in Heidelberg, Germany. The cadavers were traced to a Russian medical examiner who was convicted last year of illegally selling the bodies of homeless people, prisoners and indigent hospital patients.
- Von Hagens was not charged with any wrongdoing, and says his cadavers are obtained only through proper legal and ethical channels.
- Still, NPR has learned there’s no clear paper trail from willing donors to exhibited bodies.”
A number of religious groups, as well as bioethicits, have objected to the concept in general. There’s something really sick about paying money to look at exhibits of human bodies, put out on display, especially when the company that put on the exhibit hasn’t been able to come up with consent documentation for the people who are on display.
The Bodies exhibit just reopened last week, after the COVID shutdown, and has been updated with displays showing the effects of COVID on the human body
And if the creepy bodies obtained by a creepy German doctor aren’t enough for you, there’s also a Titanic exhibit that includes artifacts from the wreck, including, to quote the exhibit’s website “luggage, the ship’s whistles, floor tiles from the first-class smoking room, a window frame from the Verandah Cafe and an unopened bottle of champagne with a 1900 vintage”
I feel really nostalgic about the Luxor and if I ever go to Vegas again, I’d love to stay there for old time’s sake. But also for ghost hunting.

Sources consulted RE: The Haunted Luxor Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas

Articles RE: The Haunted Luxor Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas

Wright, Gordon. “Pyramidal shape pushes the envelope.” Building Design & Construction, vol. 35, no. 8, Aug. 1994, p. 36+. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A15687724/AONE?u=nypl&sid=AONE&xid=710afd9f. Accessed 12 Oct. 2020.
Hartinger, Brent. “Is it real or is it just really cool.” Omni, vol. 17, no. 3, Dec. 1994, p. 35. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A15986878/AONE?u=nypl&sid=AONE&xid=5abe0e0d. Accessed 12 Oct. 2020.

Websites RE: The Haunted Luxor Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas

The Making of Luxor Las Vegas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwB14kIEI2A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Las_Vegas_casinos_that_never_opened#Xanadu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxor_Las_Vegas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excalibur_Hotel_and_Casino
https://excalibur.mgmresorts.com/en.html
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7203118/anniversary-tupac-shakur-murder-shot-dead-las-vegas/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur#Death
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettin’_Jiggy_wit_It
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mirage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Island_Hotel_and_Casin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream_Meadowlands
https://gaming.unlv.edu/Xanadu/then.html
http://digital.library.unlv.edu/skyline/hotel/xanadu
https://viewfinder.expedia.com/most-amazing-hotels-never-built/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Simbel_temples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candela
https://www.lasvegasadvisor.com/question/luxor-implosion/
https://web.archive.org/web/20200831185429/https://vitalvegas.com/rumor-mill-demolition-could-be-in-the-cards-for-luxor/
https://web.archive.org/web/20161226060524/
http://www.reviewjournal.com/business/luxors-floor-under-review
https://web.archive.org/web/20200912074529/
https://www.casino.org/news/luxor-las-vegas-demolition-rumors-spread-insiders-say-days-numbered/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sands_Hotel_and_Casino
http://onlinenevada.org/articles/luxor-hotel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_G._Bennett_(gaming_executive)
https://web.archive.org/web/20190803113506/https://www.casino.org/blog/deaths-in-luxor/
https://www.reference.com/history/many-people-died-building-empire-state-building-48bddec3439ab036
https://www.forconstructionpros.com/blogs/construction-toolbox/blog/12096401/looking-back-on-the-worlds-deadliest-construction-projects
https://www.reviewjournal.com/entertainment/entertainment-columns/kats/vegas-attraction-bodies-adds-covid-exhibit-titanic-back-online-2140592/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodies:_The_Exhibition
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5637687
https://www.ktnv.com/positivelylv/now-open-titanic-the-artifact-exhibition-and-bodies-the-exhibition-at-luxor-hotel-and-casino
https://luxor.mgmresorts.com/en/entertainment/titanic.html
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/861169/las-vegas-shooting-mandalay-bay-resort-luxor-hotel-bomb-threat
https://www.inquisitr.com/4531623/las-vegas-shooting-conspiracy-theories-surface-illuminati-area-51-luxor/
https://illuminatiwatcher.com/las-vegas-shooting-stephen-paddock-illuminati-conspiracy-theories/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travel-truths/famous-waypoints-aviation-luxor-sky-beam/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g45963-d111709-Reviews-Luxor_Hotel_Casino-Las_Vegas_Nevada.html
http://www.becksghosthunters.com/2019/01/the-luxor-in-las-vegas-is-haunted-what.html
https://vegasghosts.com/luxor-dark-pyramid-vegas/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Providence
https://www.vegasbright.com/2016/03/29/luxors-questionable-origins-the-crookedness-of-an-era-gone-by/
https://www.bestofvegas.com/articles/haunted-hotels-in-las-vegas/
https://www.travelchannel.com/destinations/us/nv/las-vegas/articles/luxor-las-vegas
https://lasvegassun.com/news/1996/sep/26/woman-commits-suicide-inside-luxor/
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/08/high-rollers-and-high-strangeness-the-haunted-casinos-of-las-vegas/
http://hauntedhoneymoon.com/hauntedplaces/luxor.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3sZKKrfkEo
https://www.hauntedrooms.com/nevada/las-vegas/haunted-places/haunted-hotels
https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/nevada/articles/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-las-vegas-luxor-hotel/
http://www.hauntedpoker.com/true-hauntings/luxor-las-vegas-haunted.html
https://www.thrillist.com/lifestyle/las-vegas/haunted-houses-in-las-vegas-nevada-halloween
https://vitalvegas.com/rumor-mill-demolition-could-be-in-the-cards-for-luxor/
https://vitalvegas.com/insider-secrets-really-really-dont-want-know-las-vegas/
http://www.weirdca.com/location.php?location=128
https://amyscrypt.com/haunted-places-las-vegas-nevada/
https://www.lasvegasadvisor.com/question/luxor-boat-ride/
http://www.vegastripping.com/news/blog/4282/luxor-sinks/
https://ballenvegas.com/haunted-vegas/
https://www.bestuscasinos.org/news/las-vegas-luxor-may-soon-demolished/
http://www.city-data.com/forum/las-vegas/1668131-luxor-haunted-2.html
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7203118/anniversary-tupac-shakur-murder-shot-dead-las-vegas/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/with-prices-down-24200-per-room-nyc-hotels-set-for-more-pain/ar-BB19RI8Z
https://www.thepierreny.com/
https://luxor.mgmresorts.com/en.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3sZKKrfkEo
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/lightning-bolt-strikes-las-vegas-2071605
https://www.lasvegasinsideout.com/luxor-hotel-after-opening-in-1993/
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-10-17-tr-46901-story.html
http://www.lvstriphistory.com/ie/luxor.htm
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-07-13-fi-12815-story.html

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The Haunted Luxor Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas: Part 2

A look at the Luxor Hotel ghosts in Las Vegas, as well as some of the tragedies and violence that have happened in the area.

This episode is focused on the haunted aspects of the hotel, including creepy things that have happened there and nearby, theories about why it may be haunted, ideas about what should be done to counteract the Luxor “curse” and more.

Note: This episode contains brief mentions of suicide, domestic violence, mass shooting, bombing, and falling from a great height.

Highlights include:
• A possible burial ground for mob victims
• What supposedly happens to your body if you die in a Vegas hotel
• Mysterious deaths and violence
• Theories about the hotel’s “curse” and how to lift it
• Possible Illuminati connections

Episode Script for The Haunted Luxor Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas: Part 2

“We think this is going to be the most strikingly dramatic hotel Las Vegas or the whole world has seen,” said William Bennett, chairman of Circus Circus Enterprises Inc. “There’s a lot of things in there that nobody knows about. The inside is going to be a knockout.” -LA Times, July 1993

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-07-13-fi-12815-story.html

So I know I’ve talked for a long time about the hotel’s history and shifting identity, but I haven’t talked at all about the strange, tragic, and potentially paranormal elements of the hotel’s history.
So let’s get into the more urban legends parts of this story, which means of course that it’s time to talk about some rumored suicides, and it’s also time to put on our most skeptical hats.
- Because while I love urban legends and stories of hauntings, I find most of them, including these, very suspect
- Also, like in seemingly all urban legends, there’s plenty of mentions of suicide in this, so if that’s not something you want to hear about, heads up about that.
Back when we looked at the Hawthorne Hotel, I talked about how one thing that I found notable about the Hawthorne was that so much stuff had happened there.
- It wasn’t just one story: it seemed like the hotel, or the site that the hotel was on, had attracted an unusually large number of strange things, and maybe the collective energy of all of that had something to do with hauntings.
- I feel similarly about the Luxor–there’s no one thing that really makes me feel that it’s definitely haunted, but more like a bunch of different details that seem to weirdly converge at the Luxor.
- Also, apparently the intersection that Exaclibur and Luxor sit at, where Tropicana and Las Vegas Boulevard meet, has the most hotel rooms of any intersection in the world. So that’s a lot of lives and souls moving through there, and in a place like Vegas, where people travel to party and often lose huge sums of money, it seems like there could be an awful lot of psychic upset and human pain there.
- They say that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and maybe that saying applies to ghosts, too.
- I know that suicides are extremely common in Vegas, and a lot of desperate people go there to try to win something with their last dollars. They’re so common that there’s even supposedly a policy that if you shoot yourself in your hotel room and cause damage to the room or furniture, your estate will be billed for the damage.
- I was also reading that apparently every time someone dies in a Vegas hotel room, that room has to be quarantined for 2 weeks, which hotels don’t want to have to do. So many hotels supposedly move bodies to other areas of the hotel before calling the cops, so the don’t have to go through the trouble of closing up the room for 2 weeks. But the good news is that if you die in a Vegas hotel and it’s not a suicide, the standard practice is to comp the room.
- To read a bit from VitalVegas.com:
  - Some of the most gruesome suicides happen off of hotel balconies and parking garages, but the absolute winner in the area of ghastly suicides has to be the Luxor. Why’s that? Well, because if you jump from a balcony or parking garage, you land outside. At Luxor, because of its pyramid design, jumpers jump inside the building, into the casino and reception area.
Supposedly the Luxor was built on the site of a burial ground for mob victims. To read from bestofvegas.com:
- “Another possible reason for ghost sightings at the Luxor have to do with the much talked about “holes” in Las Vegas. The term “holes on the Strip” refers to the fact that years ago the town was laced with mobsters who supposedly buried bodies all along the south end of the Strip because at the time there were no buildings there. The Luxor is said to have been built on top of a popular burial site.”
But it is true that the Luxor was built very quickly and cheapy, and who knows, maybe some corners were cut.
The hotel wasn’t totally done being built when it opened, actually. Some of the first guests stayed in rooms that weren’t quite completed. And there were issues with the elevators, or, as they called them “inclinators”
Shortly after opening, the owners learned that the hotel was sinking into the sand and had to make adjustments to stop it. Apparently there was a soft spot under a bit of the hotel, which is pretty unusual–I guess the desert floor is usually pretty hard.
In 1994, one year after the Luxor opened, William Bennett, who ran Circus Circus enterprises and oversaw the creation of both Exalibur and Luxor, was ousted.
- Just one note: Circus Circus is said to be haunted, and there are supposedly a number of murders and suicides that happened there. People have said that they’ve heard screams of whispers crying for help, or “Help Me” materializing on bathroom mirrors.
- Excalibur is also supposedly haunted (there are strange technology issues, like alarm clocks going off when they aren’t supposed too, static coming from TVs that are off, etc. also furniture supposedly has moved on its own, etc.) But there doesn’t seem to be stories about why this would happen.
So on a now-defunct page on casino.org that I had to dig up in the wayback machine, as I did for many of my sources here, I found some interesting rumors:
- Supposedly, 7 construction workers died when the Luxor was originally built, though elsewhere I read that 3 workers died. That, to me, seems not particularly unusual, though, again, what do I know.
  - Here’s my frame of reference, though:
    - 5 people died when building the Empire State Building
    - More than 30,000 people died building the Panama Canal
    - 11 people died during construction for the Rio de Janeiro Olympics
    - World Trade Center construction resulted in 60 worker deaths
    - 5 workers died while building The Sears Tower
    - 6 people died building Las Vegas’ CityCenter project
    - 28 people died while building San Francisco’s Bay Bridge
  - So to me, I’m hearing that construction work is extremely dangerous, and maybe there are legends of all of those places being haunted, but if that’s the case, then most major building projects would be haunted by the ghosts of construction workers
  - But to read from vegasghosts.com:
    - Perhaps significantly due to the main pyramid’s steeply sloping shapes, the Luxor’s construction is considered to have been extremely difficult and dangerous. The resort’s construction may very well remain the most treacherous construction process in the history of the Strip. The fallen workers have not gone completely forgotten, however. At times, especially in quiet parts of the hotel, the ghosts of the construction workers can be seen. When the Luxor’s Nile Riverboat ride was still operational, some guests claimed to have seen their ghosts roaming the tunnels.
I already touched on the Tupac connection–it is strange that he was staying at the Luxor the night he died, out of all the hotels in Vegas.
One thing that’s invited speculation about ghosts is the hotel itself. Its Egyptian theme invites speculation and seems mysterious.
- Maybe it has to do with how it’s a huge black glass pyramid with the brightest beam of light on earth coming out of the top?? It’s a really weird structure, when you think about it.
- Some folks say that the pyramid’s shape attracts dark energy, and that an eye needs to be placed at the top of the pyramid to counteract the curse.
  - I don’t get that really, since the eye of providence or all-seeing eye has such a strong connection to things like the dollar bill, and to freemasonry, but not to ancient Egypt, to my knowledge. (There is the eye of Horus in ancient Egyptian symbolism, but that didn’t crown the pyramids or anything.)
- Some people say that the pyramid should have been more accurate–supposedly in ancient Egypt, pyramids were supposed to be flanked by two sphinxes, one on each side, so it’s protected from both directions. But the Luxor has a single pyramid, facing east. (Supposedly the Great Pyramid at Giza used to have a second sphinx, which was destroyed.)
- The hotel was, at least back when I visited, decorated with detailed reproductions of ancient Egyptian artifacts, and some people have pointed out the discrepancy between the lovingly crafting, authentic reproductions of things like King Tut’s tomb, there was less attention to detail and accuracy elsewhere in the structure.
  - One interesting tidbit is that the replica of King Tut’s tomb was just one of two sets authorized by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities (it’s now housed at the Las Vegas Natural History Museum)
- One thing that a lot of youtube commenters pointed out was that for the Sphinx, they made the ancient Egyptians look really white, which is really screwed up and can’t have brought anything positive.
Supposedly two guests have killed themselves by jumping into the atrium, which sort of makes sense to be because like I mentioned, the rooms open out around the atrium, which is 30 stories tall.
- In 1996, a woman, , who some people claimed was a sex worker, supposedly fell from the 26th floor and died. She landed right where the buffet was then; the food court stands where she fell–some ghost tours have apparently claimed that they tore out the old buffet because of fear of contamination, but my guess is that they prob just wanted to freshen up the place–it’s too gruesome to eat at the buffet where someone died.
  - The Las Vegas Sun called it a suicide. To read from the September 1996 article about the woman’s death:
    - Police have “no idea who she is,” Keeton said. She appeared to be a Hispanic or Asian woman in her 30s. She did not have a purse or identification with her, he said.
    - The coroner’s office is using fingerprints and dental records to attempt to identify her, a spokeswoman said today.
They say this may have been a suicide. Some people claim that she’d just gotten an HIV diagnosis so killed herself, though I don’t know how people would know that if they couldn’t identify her–that sounds made up.
But this is interesting to me because it’s similar to some of the legends of the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, which we looked at a month or two ago. An unidentified woman fell to her death there, too.
Another guest supposedly died falling from the 10th floor. It doesn’t sound like it was a voluntary death.
- He supposedly landed on the express check out counter, which has since been moved
In May 2007, a homemade pipe bomb went off in the parking garage of the Luxor. One 24-year-old person died; he’d been a worker at the Nathan’s hot dog stand in the Luxor’s food court.
- The bomb was underneath an upside-down plastic cup; when the worker picked up the cup, it exploded.
- It seems that this man was intentionally targeted, though it’s unclear why, and some people said it was a random killing.
- Two men were arrested for the bombing and put in jail for life with no chance of parole.
- The hotel wasn’t evacuated and operations didn’t stop at all–it doesn’t seem like the bomb had an impact outside of the garage, and it didn’t damage the building at all.
In 2010, a former football player from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas tried to intervene in a physical altercation between another guest, a friend of his who happened to be an MMA fighter, and the fighter’s girlfriend. The MMA fighter was drunk and angry, and grabbed his girlfriend by the neck and hit her.
- The football player intervened, trying to restrain the MMA fighter, who ended up brutally assaulting and killing him.
- He never work up again, but later a court claimed that the football player died of an overdose, not from the fight. Which is . . . Weird.
According to an archived article from September 2010 in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, there’d been a number of structural problems with Vegas resorts, and a decent amount of renovation work that’d been done in Vegas without permits.
- It sounds like that prompted a number of investigations of different resorts, and a routine inspection may have unearthed something strange at the Luxor:
  - “The Clark County building division in mid-July ordered the Luxor to vacate a section of the pyramid building’s basement level, which holds various offices not open to the public. The order came after Lochsa Engineering did a study for MGM Resorts International, which owns the hotel-casino. MGM hired the firm when county inspectors, in March, found two unfinished support columns in the pyramid’s basement.
  - Lochsa determined the two unfinished columns were not part of the building’s original plans. But MGM completed the columns anyway and is now evaluating how to further strengthen the structure. Lochsa also looked at the “load bearing capacity” of the pyramid’s casino level — which is over the basement.
  - The basement closure is below, but “near the main entrance of the subject property,” according to the county’s July 16 notice of violation. The document says completion of the two “partially cast concrete columns … will not fully resolve the structural repair requirements” for the casino level’s “deficient slab.” . . .
  - To date, the Luxor’s ongoing inspection has generated 1,129 correction notices and notices of violation, according to a search of the county’s website. Items range from the great — such as the casino slab problem — to small points of maintenance”
In 2012, a casino employee was murdered by her boyfriend in the hotel’s lobby.
Also in 2012, a hotel guest died of Legionnaires disease. This was the third case of te disease, apparently, but wasn’t caught because water tests came back negative, until after the guest died, when they came back positive.
And again, in 2012, an airman visiting from a nearby Air Force base fell 25 feet down an elevator shaft. He’d gotten into a fight with a colleague in the lobby of the west tower, and was pushed against the elevator door, which suddenly opened, despite there not being an elevator there. He fell to his death.
In 2013, lightning struck the Luxor Hotel and Mandalay Bay, during a storm that made 33,000 people lose power and that saw 740 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes in 3 hours.
You might remember the shooting that killed 60 people and injured 411 people at the Mandalay Bay Hotel back in 2017, during a concert.
- That was close enough to the Luxor that during the shooting, authorities couldn’t tell if the shots were coming from the Mandalay Bay or Luxor
- There are definitely plenty of conspiracy theories about the shooting, seeking to link it to the illuminati, government programs like MKULTRA
- Let’s read a bit from illuminatiwatcher.com:
  - The Luxor is known as the Egyptian themed casino with the pyramid that has the illuminated apex and obelisk nearby. These symbols are of great usage to the “Illuminati” who subscribe to many of the magickal and esoteric concepts of ancient Egypt and its mystery schools that shared these ideas only to the initiates deemed worthy.
- So that’s a whole thing that’s adjacent to the Luxor.
It’s said that there are 5 different ghosts at the Luxor:
- A woman supposedly walks through the halls of the 12th, 13th, and 14th floors, breathing down guests necks and pushing them.
- Some people say that the construction workers who died appear in quiet parts of the hotel
I read a number of trip advisor reviews that mention that the hotel feels creepy and haunted, and many have said that it’s very run down and crappy. Many people complained of bad smells and flickering lights.
- One reviewer said:
  - “And if you believe in spirits/ghosts, the Luxor is rumored to be haunted. be careful looking down over the railing, stories have it that people who have died at the hotel make you feel like jumping when looking over the railing!”
- Another said:
  - “Here is the best part My fiance screamed for me to come here when I was brushing my teeth. I came out and asked whats wrong? the man was stunned and couldn’t speak. He said a little girl from the across the room asked help me … Wow now we have a ghost in our room, he woke me later to ask if I could hear singing.”
- There’s a long review from December 2016 where someone describes a series of frightening events, including being woken by a spider crawling down her face and neck, and maybe a hand grabbing her, and then she climbed out of bed and her husband saw a pretty blonde woman in a hat–maybe a beret–standing at their bedside, who then disappeared.
  - Then they went to sleep in the other bed in the room, but during the night, she felt someone wrapping the covers tight around her and leaning against her back, which I found very interesting, because that’s similar to what happened to Jen when we stayed at the Hawthorne Hotel, as we talk about in those episodes.
  - The next day, they went to the concierge, and the woman there was very nice but didn’t seem surprised by the experience. She said they’d move them to a different room, out of the pyramid (where they’d been staying on the 12th floor) and into one of the newer towers. That seemed to help, though the guest said that she experienced electric shocks throughout the hotel, even after their rooms moved.
  - A ghost hunter on trip advisor saw orbs and their friend felt a hand at the bottom of the comforter. They also said the hotel gave them a sense of vertigo, as if the hallways were all at an angle and they were walking at a slant, which makes sense, because of the hotel’s shape.
  - Another reviewer said:
    - “running the risk of sounding insane, I swear my room was haunted. I always felt like there was a shadowy figure just at the edge of my vision and this creeped me out like nothing before. “
A blogger, at becksghosthunters.com, said that they experienced someone going through their luggage during the night. Hopefully that was a ghost.
One urban legend theorizes that after a few coincidental deaths started happening at the Luxor, the mob started using it as a place to kill victims, since people believed there was a curse

Sources consulted RE: Luxor Hotel Ghosts

Articles RE: Luxor Hotel Ghosts

Wright, Gordon. “Pyramidal shape pushes the envelope.” Building Design & Construction, vol. 35, no. 8, Aug. 1994, p. 36+. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A15687724/AONE?u=nypl&sid=AONE&xid=710afd9f. Accessed 12 Oct. 2020.
Hartinger, Brent. “Is it real or is it just really cool.” Omni, vol. 17, no. 3, Dec. 1994, p. 35. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A15986878/AONE?u=nypl&sid=AONE&xid=5abe0e0d. Accessed 12 Oct. 2020.

Websites RE: Luxor Hotel Ghosts

The Making of Luxor Las Vegas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwB14kIEI2A
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Las_Vegas_casinos_that_never_opened#Xanadu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxor_Las_Vegas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excalibur_Hotel_and_Casino
https://excalibur.mgmresorts.com/en.html
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7203118/anniversary-tupac-shakur-murder-shot-dead-las-vegas/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur#Death
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettin’_Jiggy_wit_It
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mirage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Island_Hotel_and_Casin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream_Meadowlands
https://gaming.unlv.edu/Xanadu/then.html
http://digital.library.unlv.edu/skyline/hotel/xanadu
https://viewfinder.expedia.com/most-amazing-hotels-never-built/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanadu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Simbel_temples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candela
https://www.lasvegasadvisor.com/question/luxor-implosion/
https://web.archive.org/web/20200831185429/https://vitalvegas.com/rumor-mill-demolition-could-be-in-the-cards-for-luxor/
https://web.archive.org/web/20161226060524/
http://www.reviewjournal.com/business/luxors-floor-under-review
https://web.archive.org/web/20200912074529/
https://www.casino.org/news/luxor-las-vegas-demolition-rumors-spread-insiders-say-days-numbered/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sands_Hotel_and_Casino
http://onlinenevada.org/articles/luxor-hotel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_G._Bennett_(gaming_executive)
https://web.archive.org/web/20190803113506/https://www.casino.org/blog/deaths-in-luxor/
https://www.reference.com/history/many-people-died-building-empire-state-building-48bddec3439ab036
https://www.forconstructionpros.com/blogs/construction-toolbox/blog/12096401/looking-back-on-the-worlds-deadliest-construction-projects
https://www.reviewjournal.com/entertainment/entertainment-columns/kats/vegas-attraction-bodies-adds-covid-exhibit-titanic-back-online-2140592/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodies:_The_Exhibition
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5637687
https://www.ktnv.com/positivelylv/now-open-titanic-the-artifact-exhibition-and-bodies-the-exhibition-at-luxor-hotel-and-casino
https://luxor.mgmresorts.com/en/entertainment/titanic.html
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/861169/las-vegas-shooting-mandalay-bay-resort-luxor-hotel-bomb-threat
https://www.inquisitr.com/4531623/las-vegas-shooting-conspiracy-theories-surface-illuminati-area-51-luxor/
https://illuminatiwatcher.com/las-vegas-shooting-stephen-paddock-illuminati-conspiracy-theories/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travel-truths/famous-waypoints-aviation-luxor-sky-beam/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g45963-d111709-Reviews-Luxor_Hotel_Casino-Las_Vegas_Nevada.html
http://www.becksghosthunters.com/2019/01/the-luxor-in-las-vegas-is-haunted-what.html
https://vegasghosts.com/luxor-dark-pyramid-vegas/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Providence
https://www.vegasbright.com/2016/03/29/luxors-questionable-origins-the-crookedness-of-an-era-gone-by/
https://www.bestofvegas.com/articles/haunted-hotels-in-las-vegas/
https://www.travelchannel.com/destinations/us/nv/las-vegas/articles/luxor-las-vegas
https://lasvegassun.com/news/1996/sep/26/woman-commits-suicide-inside-luxor/
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/08/high-rollers-and-high-strangeness-the-haunted-casinos-of-las-vegas/
http://hauntedhoneymoon.com/hauntedplaces/luxor.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3sZKKrfkEo
https://www.hauntedrooms.com/nevada/las-vegas/haunted-places/haunted-hotels
https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/nevada/articles/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-las-vegas-luxor-hotel/
http://www.hauntedpoker.com/true-hauntings/luxor-las-vegas-haunted.html
https://www.thrillist.com/lifestyle/las-vegas/haunted-houses-in-las-vegas-nevada-halloween
https://vitalvegas.com/rumor-mill-demolition-could-be-in-the-cards-for-luxor/
https://vitalvegas.com/insider-secrets-really-really-dont-want-know-las-vegas/
http://www.weirdca.com/location.php?location=128
https://amyscrypt.com/haunted-places-las-vegas-nevada/
https://www.lasvegasadvisor.com/question/luxor-boat-ride/
http://www.vegastripping.com/news/blog/4282/luxor-sinks/
https://ballenvegas.com/haunted-vegas/
https://www.bestuscasinos.org/news/las-vegas-luxor-may-soon-demolished/
http://www.city-data.com/forum/las-vegas/1668131-luxor-haunted-2.html
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7203118/anniversary-tupac-shakur-murder-shot-dead-las-vegas/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/with-prices-down-24200-per-room-nyc-hotels-set-for-more-pain/ar-BB19RI8Z
https://www.thepierreny.com/
https://luxor.mgmresorts.com/en.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3sZKKrfkEo
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/lightning-bolt-strikes-las-vegas-2071605
https://www.lasvegasinsideout.com/luxor-hotel-after-opening-in-1993/
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-10-17-tr-46901-story.html
http://www.lvstriphistory.com/ie/luxor.htm
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-07-13-fi-12815-story.html

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A Victorian Lunatic’s Fort: Fort Maxey, Blackwell’s Island, NYC

In the mid-19th century, Thomas Maxey, a patient at the New York Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, built Fort Maxey, a strange structure complete with cannons, a garden of tall flowers, and mysterious carvings.

The infamous New York Lunatic Asylum has its share of chilling stories. But one odd, forgotten story is the tale of a mysterious man who took it upon himself to build a bizarre, hobbit-hole like “fort,” which included a bridge, a bizarre stone gateway, and a toll for curious visitors.

Thomas Maxey, the “lunatic” who built the structure single-handedly, believed that the government would one day realize how valuable the fort was and purchase it from him. But in the meantime, he lived in the fort himself, surrounding himself with hollyhocks and broken weapons, donning pretty hats, and regaling his guests with stories about mythology and the ancients.

Highlights include:
• An infamous lunatic asylum
• An “insane” man who seems smarter than most sane people
• People being committed to the asylum for no reason
• Nellie Bly’s gutsy investigative reporting
• Some follow-up on the Luxor, and magical triangles

“At the farthest extremity of the Island the ground on which [Fort Maxey] stands has been rescued from the grasp of Neptune by the . . . endeavors only of its proprietor, whose name is given to the structure—Thomas Maxey, Esq., architect, mason, carpenter, civil engineer, philosopher, and philanthropist.”
-from an article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, from February 1866

Pictures of Fort Maxey

Within Fort Maxey-Harper’s New Monthly Magazine Volume 126 December 1865 to May 1866

Grand Entrance to Fort Maxey, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. March 24, 1866

Gateway To Fort Maxey, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine Volume 126 December 1865 to May 1866

Unwanted Visitors-Fort Maxey. Frank Leslie’s llustrated_Newspaper. March 24, 1866

Episode Script for A Victorian Lunatic’s Fort: Fort Maxey, Blackwell’s Island, NYC

-from an article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, from February 1866

First, some follow up RE: the Luxor and pyramid shapes. I talked last week about how I didn’t understand why people might consider a pyramid cursed or powerful aside from sort of sensationalist ideas about Ancient Egypt and the “mummy’s curse,” etc.

But I was reading a book called Aleister Crowley and the Ouija Board by J. Edward Cornelius, which I’ve mentioned before. I’d read bits and pieces of it but I’m actually reading it in order now. It has a lot to say about ceremonial magic and that kind of more structured occultism (which contrasts with the extremely loosy goosey, heresay type urban legends that I was looking at RE: the Luxor)
There’s a really interesting passage in the book about the planchette, which is the heart-or-triangle shaped pointer that moves around the Ouija board, and it talks about why triangle shapes are meaningful. I wanted to read a bit of that, because I think it could speak a bit to why a pyramid shape might have some occult resonance.
- “The triangle is one side of a pyramid whose shape was used by the ancients as a tomb. The structure of a pyramid, with its apex pointing upward, projects the spirit of the deceased into the nether world. . . . The triangle as an image has an almost archetypal effect on our mind and especially on invisible entities like the elementáis, which abound in the lower astral plane. Magicians have known for centuries that the magickal image of a triangle acts as a “between state” which is neither an entity’s world or ours. In some respect it is a doorway that swings both ways. You’ll find images of a triangle in the pages of almost every ancient magickal grimoire. It is within a triangle that a magician will summon a disincarnated entity in order to communicate, bind them and control them at the same time.”
The book then goes on to talk about details of summoning spirits and the use of a magical triangle. It then continues:
- “Use of the magical triangle for summoning entities has been around for centuries. The danger is not in the simplicity of the symbol itself, but rather in its misuse in effecting a gateway into the invisible world without the knowledge and ability to control that which is being summoned.”
And then there was an interesting bit about a black mirror, which stood out to me, because the Luxor is, in effect, a black mirror in the shape of a pyramid:
- “In some of the old grimoires the triangle is pictured as being laid out on a table with either a black mirror or a crystal ball on a stand in the very center.”
So I’m not sure that the urban legend websites that talk about the Luxor’s shape had this specific occult information in mind, but I wonder if it may be a case of accidentally stumbling across some kind of truth.
This week, I want to look at a strange, almost entirely forgotten structure that supposedly stood at the northernmost point of Blackwell’s Island, now known as Roosevelt Island. And I also want to talk about the patient who built this odd fort.
First, some background on the location and the Lunatic asylum where this supposedly insane architect lived:
- The island is in the middle of the East River in NYC, between Manhattan and Queens, and if you want to know more about the island in general, check out the Renwick Smallpox Hospital episodes that we did. And if you want to read even more, there’s an excellent book about the island called Damnation Island by Stacy Horn. That book is a big source of background info for this episode, but like many things written about the island, it contains no mention of the patient and story we’ll be looking at today.
On the island, there were a number of grim institutions: hospitals, a prison, a workhouse, and a lunatic asylum. Today, only the octaganal atrium of the lunatic asylum still stands, though nowaways it’s the entryway into a fancy apartment building.
In its time, though, the Lunatic Asylum was famous for being a truly awful place to be.
- The Asylum is most famous because the famous reporter Nellie Bly did an investigative report about it. This is a story that most Americans learn in school, but basically she pretended to be insane so she could see what conditions were really like in the Lunatic Asylum.
- In her book about the experience, Ten Days in a Mad-House, she said that once she got herself committed, she stopped pretending to be insane and instead acted completely normal.
- But the more normally she behaved, the more insane people thought she was.
- After leaving, she said that she believed that perfectly sane women were locked up in the asylum.
  - And this is backed up by other sources. For example, in the 1870s, a doctor testified that they’d found at least 60 patients with no commitment papers or admission documents
- She said that it would be better to be condemned as a criminal than thrown in the asylum. To read from her book:
  - Compare this with a criminal, who is given every chance to prove his innocence. Who would not rather be a murderer and take the chance for life than be declared insane, without hope of escape?
- And the conditions she described were truly horrific. I’ll link to the full text of her book in the shownotes if anyone is curious and wants to read it.
The Asylum was the first in NYC, and it opened in 1839, and the idea was for it to house the city’s “lunatic poor,” who previously had often been put into prisons. Many of the patients were immigrants, particularly from Ireland and Germany.
It was located on the northern end of the Island–there was a main building in addition to other, smaller buildings.
- There was a building called “The Lodge” for very violent and disturbed cases
- A structure called “The Retreat” was for chronic cases, especially people who were suicidal and deemed too noisy for the main asylum, but not violent like those sent to the lodge
- When things got dire, small pavilions would be added along the northern shore of the Island–they were basically just wooden shacks. They were meant to hold 50 “quieter” patients, but often housed 75-90, or more, patients
In addition to the octagonal tower, the wings of the hospital were crenellated, so it looked very castle-like.
The asylum, like many other buildings on the island, was built from stone quarried on the island, a grim gray stone called Fordham gneiss
When they first started drawing up the plans for the asylum, the idea was that no more than 200 patients would live there at once.
- On the first day the hospital opened, June 10, 1839, 197 people were transferred from Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan to the Lunatic Asylum. So they were at capacity on day 1.
- In 1840, the asylum housed 278 patients
- by 1870, it housed 1,300 people, even though there hadn’t been any major expansion or infrastructure improvements
- It turns out they had seriously underestimated how many people needed mental health care
  - In Damnation Island, Stacy Horn points out that in 1858, people believed that .002% of people needed mental health care
  - But today, 28% of the population has some kind of anxiety disorder, which back in the 19th century, could get you committed
- Another problem was that the commissioners of the asylum were political appointees, and weren’t experts, so the people actually doing the work on the island had to go to them and beg for anything they needed
- Also, convicts from the prison were often put to work at the asylum, which saved money but caused rampant abuse
- They spent 18 cents per day on each patient ($4.88 in today’s money), so of course patients weren’t well fed or cared for in any way
- Things were really, really bad. Sanitary conditions were awful, people died from all sorts of disease. When Dickens toured the island in 1842, I believe, he had this to say about the asylum, which he wrote in his book American Notes for General Circulation (the full text of which is linked in the shownotes):
  - “The building is handsome; and is remarkable for a spacious and elegant staircase. The whole structure is not yet finished, but it is already one of considerable size and extent, and is capable of accommodating a very large number of patients.
  - I cannot say that I derived much comfort from the inspection of this charity. . . . everything had a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful. The moping idiot, cowering down with long dishevelled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror. In the dining-room, a bare, dull, dreary place, with nothing for the eye to rest on but the empty walls, a woman was locked up alone. She was bent, they told me, on committing suicide. If anything could have strengthened her in her resolution, it would certainly have been the insupportable monotony of such an existence.
  - The terrible crowd with which these halls and galleries were filled, so shocked me, that I abridged my stay within the shortest limits, and declined to see that portion of the building in which the refractory and violent were under closer restraint. “
I don’t really want to go further into how bad conditions were in the asylum, just because I find it really disturbing and upsetting.
But suffice to say, things were bad, and there was very little for the patients to do. It was even hard to come by reading material. Maybe once a week, there might be some kind of small entertainment planned, like occasional lectures by doctors or concerts.
And there were a few really special occasions:
- A big event was the widely-publicized Lunatic’s Ball, where they’d set up a pavilion for dancing and patients, attendants, and doctors would all dance. That was a popular event for the newspapers.
- A couple times a year, the patients might get to see the magic lantern, which is basically a slide projector. Sometimes patients would get to sit in a dark room and see pictures of Arctic explorations, or fantastical things like dancing goblins and ghosts
So, despite all of this grimness, there was of course a public fascination with the asylum and its odd inmates, so a number of sensational articles profiled the patients. But there’s one patient whose story is so interesting, and so elliptical, that I’ve found myself really fascinated.
That man is Thomas Maxey, an allegedly insane patient who built a strange stone fort with an arched entry gate and a beautiful garden, constructed on land that he’d reclaimed from the east river through his own engineering skill.
- When I first heard of Fort Maxey, I had a lot of questions–not just about what it was, what it looked like, why it was built, and what happened to it, but also about why on earth a supposed lunatic was given free reign to do a major construction project all on his own.
- I’ve had a lot of trouble finding the answers to that last question, but my guess is that Thomas Maxey may have been housed in one of the pavilions on the north edge of the island. They were hastily constructed buildings, and I could imagine him wandering out and deciding he wanted to build a fort to live in, and it sounds like once the administrators of the hospital and island saw that he was doing something useful–namely, literally expanding the island through his engineering, they let him keep doing it.
There’s a great article from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, from February 1866, that’s written by a former patient of the Lunatic Asylum.
The article is pretty positive, which I think means it should be taken with a grain of salt.
But I want to read a bit from that article. This passage is pretty long, but I think it really helps paint a picture of what the island was like, and also it gives some hints to why and how a asylum patient would be given enough free reign to literally build a fort.
- The Asylum grounds contain some fifteen or twenty acres (the island containing one hundred), and produce . . . the vegetables . . . used by the Institution. . . The tilling of the land, like most of the work about the Asylum, is done by patients under the guidance of a paid official. A considerable portion of the grounds is devoted to yards for the benefit of the insane, and an extensive garden blooms with many colored flowers. Rarities are not infrequent.
- An ornamental summer-house adds to the charm of the spectacle, while grand old willows, horse chestnuts, and button-woods, with other trees, make the scene immediately contiguous to the main Asylum exceedingly picturesque by their diversified and luxuriant foliage. The carriage road to the principal entrance runs through a densely-shaded avenue, and a fine vista presents itself—at the end of which the blue water gleaming in the sun, dotted here and there with a white sail, delights the eye. The aspect of nature can not be too highly estimated in its effects upon the better class of patients ; it is the most prominent alleviation of the sufferings they feel in being separated from friends, and for no sin confined in durance vile. It affords them that on which they can build many a pleasant thought, and helps them to relieve their minds of the fancies which oppress them.
So that also helps answer the question of why a patient would be allowed to build a weird fort.
Though I do want to offer this passage from Nellie Bly’s book as a counterpoint, because it’s clear that not all patients were given such freedom:
- I looked at the pretty lawn, which I had once thought was such a comfort to the poor creatures confined on the island, and laughed at my own notions. What enjoyment is it to them? They are not allowed on the grass—it is only to look at. I saw some patients eagerly and caressingly lift a nut or a colored leaf that had fallen on the path. But they were not allowed to keep them. The nurses would always compel them to throw their little bit of God’s comfort away.
So I’m not sure what made medical professionals deprive some inmates of a leaf while allowing others to manage construction projects.
The article has a great description of the fort:
- The fort is a circular mound of earth, on which stands a wall some four feet high, built of blocks of clay and grass dug from the marsh behind it. Through the wall project the mouths of several large wooden cannon, which, when presented to him by the Commissioners during the past war, Thomas accepted with many thanks, declaring they would be a great protection to the Island and city in frightening off rebel privateers. He has erected a house of novel appearance within this parapet containing two sleeping apartments, a kitchen, and sitting-room, together comjjrising a space less than twelve feet by eight. His garden shows a taste for the sublime, none but the tallest flowers being therein rdmitted. The hollyhock and sunflowers sadly interfere with a view of his interesting domicile. He is now building a stone magazine back of this to contain his ammunition, which exists in vast quantities—in his imagination. The whole structure, together with the long embanked road leading to it, is the work of his own hands, and has occupied more than three years of what he deems his valuable time. Nor is the work without value to the Commissioners, for in the process of construction he has, in order to render it accessible, dug several ditches through the marsh, and thus drained and rendered useful a great part of it. The extent of his labors and of the work may be understood when it is said that at least sixteen square rods have been raised from eight to ten feet, and that a great part of the material was carried a considerable distance.
He has also ornamented the causeway leading to the fort by a stone gate, the erection of which would seem to mark an era in architecture, as it is not built according to the rules of any ancient or modern school.
I think it’s so fascinating that he basically invented his own architecture style–I’ll include pictures of the house and gate in the shownotes at buriedsecretspodcast.com if you want to take a look.
But apparently the gate was covered in ornate carvings and had two openings near the top, which Maxey said was to accommodate wild geese who might want to make their nests there.
Having spent a bunch of time on Roosevelt Island, especially since coronavirus started, I can confirm that there are tons and tons of wild geese there, who nest all over the island in the spring.
After the gate, there’s a bridge that leads up to the fort.
When they reach the fort, the journalist says that they’re greeted by an excited man wearing a woman’s bonnet.
Then they go inside the fort, which is tiny and can only hold 3 people at a time. The interior is crowded with wood carvings and a large stone oven. It’s furnished with discarded items from the asylum.
There’s a great description of this strange structure, or fort, in an article in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. The story’s called “A Singular Lunatic,” and it was published March 24, 1866:
- “Travellers on the East River and Sound steamboats, as the enter Hurl Gate on their passage from the metropolis, invariably have their attention drawn to a strange structure on the extremity of Blackwell’s Island. A fort there stands, such as the pupils of a military school might be imagined to have erected for amusement. Toy-like as it seems, it is rendered imposing by the mouths of several terrrific-looking cannon which project from its sides. A nearer approach, and alarm departs; they are discovered to be merely wooden dummies; while an oddly-built shanty, submerged in foliage, attracted the gaze, and assures one of the peaceful nature of the proprietor.”
The article then compares it to something from Robinson Crusoe, describing drawbridges, a moat, and a “ponderous mass of masonry supporting the back of the cottage”
Apparently the structure had detailed and extensive engravings that the inhabitant, Thomas Maxey, did himself.
- “Unaided he has drained the marsh, dug turf for the embankment of his fort and the long avenue leading to it. Alone he has conveyed large blocks of stone to the interior of his edifice, and built of them a magazine or cellar. The masonry of the grand entrance is, as well as its design, solely of Tom’s construction; so, too, are the queer architectural adornments in wood-work with which the establishment is filled.”
Apparently Maxey had been working on his project continuously for three years, and hadn’t stopped yet.
Beside his fort, to the left, there was a fisherman’s hunt with an oven, where it sounds like someone lived. Apparently Maxey thought of the fisherman as his tenant.
Maxey claimed that the goal of his project was to make a fortune. He believed that the city government would eventually acknowledge his accomplishment and purchase the fort at a large sum for the city’s protection.
He mentioned that plan to everyone who visited him. And since he saw his property as so valuable, he charged visitors, who often paid in ten-cent stamps, and sometimes in dollars. The journalist guessed that Maxey probably had $30 cash.
The journalist avoided paying the entry fee by saying that he was a civil engineer sent from Washington to inspect and report on the fort.
But most people who refused to pay were met with attack: Maxey would throw dirt and rocks at them, trapping them in the marsh and forcing asylum employees to rescue them.
Occasionally, small boats would drop by the fort in the summer, curious to see what it is. For those trespassers, Maxey claimed there was a $50 fine.
Articles about Maxey tend to have long passages of conversation with him which seem calculated to goad Maxey into giving an interesting answer.
- So from this article, the reporter asks Maxey, “The work goes bravely on, eh?”
- And Maxey replies very earnestly:
  - Yes, I’m finishing this addition to the house. Strong stone-work, you see. If I’m attacked, you know, I can retreat into my wooden house there; and if then the enemy follow, I can retire into this fortification and keep them all at bay. They’d have to come one by one, and I’d shoot each one as he appeared.
- The reporter then asks him about his rifle, which Maxey claims just needs a bit of a cleaning, but which the reporter describes as “a rusty fire-lock of antediluvian date, of which the trigger is gone, and the stock is splintered.”
- Then he starts arguing with Maxey about how his gun is worthless, etc. It sounds like it was an old Revolutionary war gun that someone gave to him.
And the reporter then compares him to Don Quixote and Rip Van Winkle, and says he’s like a child making a fake fort. I think the writer is very cruel and condescending in his description of Maxey, who sound like he legitimately is intelligent, since he built a seawall to reclaim land plus a fort with a cool archway and a beautiful garden. Maybe he’s weird, but someone who isn’t smart couldn’t design and construct a fort and arch and engineer a way to reclaim marshy land.
I guess Maxey talked a lot, and it sounds like some of his favorite topics were science, mythology, and history.
The reporter, seeking to prove that Maxey was a lunatic, asked him some questions that made literally no sense to me. Then when he gets nonsensical, confused answers, he uses that as a way to underscore Maxey’s apparently lunacy.
- The Harper’s article I was reading from earlier has a moment where that reporter also starts asking Maxey weird questions, like “Can a Chimera, ruminating in vacuum, disseminate second intentions?” Which of course Maxey responds to strangely.
I don’t feel like I have enough information to say how sane or insane Thomas Maxey was, but he kind of just sounds like an eccentric inventor to me, more than anything else.
- The author of the Harper’s article, who’d been a patient himself, closed the article with this really disturbing sentiment:
  - There are within the walls, it is true, a few no more crazy than many outsiders; but they are destitute of friends, and a passage to the world at large would intensify their idiosyncrasies and finally compel their return to the Asylum. Any person able and willing to take them out and try them in their respective professions would be gladly “welcomed by the resident physician. They excite pity which to a certain extent can not be shown them.
So, as you can tell, I’m pretty skeptical of the contention that this apparent genius, Thomas Maxey, was a lunatic, based on the data I have. But I find his story fascinating, and almost charming–or at least as charming as any story like this one can be.
- It at least feels charming compared to the awful, dark history of the rest of Blackwell’s Island. Amid all of the death, and disease, and abuses, it’s refreshing to see engravings of Maxey’s beautiful and strange fort. I stumbled across Fort Maxey six months ago while researching the Renwick Smallpox Hospital episodes and have been fascinated by it ever since.
So, what happened to Maxey? I’ve searched findagrave.com, but haven’t been able to find any Thomas Maxeys buried in New York. I also haven’t been able to find anything saying who he was before he was committed, or what he was committed for. That remains a mystery.
But what we do know is that the fort was destroyed, and Maxey’s masterpiece was forgotten.
And this is where we’ll pick back up next week, where we’ll look at the mysterious lighthouse that now stands on the ground where Fort Maxey once was, and which to this day, casts a weak glow over the waters of the Hell Gate.

Sources consulted RE: Fort Maxey Blackwell’s Island

Books consulted RE: Fort Maxey Blackwell’s Island

Damnation Island : Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York by Stacy Horne
Ten days in a Mad-House by Nellie Bly (1887): https://archive.org/details/3304680.med.yale.edu
American Notes for General Circulation by Charles Dickens: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/675/675-h/675-h.htm
Architecture of Madness: https://ia601204.us.archive.org/21/items/ArchitectureOfMadness/ArchitectureOfMadness.pdf
The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New York by Junius Henri Browne, 1869: https://archive.org/details/greatmetropolism00browuoft/page/8/mode/2up?q=blackwell%27s

Websites RE: Fort Maxey Blackwell’s Island

Great pics of the asylum: https://www.theruin.org/blog/2016/10/12/the-new-york-city-lunatic-asylum-a-history
https://quiverquotes.com/2017/05/03/to-be-sane-amongst-the-insane/
http://www.asylumprojects.org/index.php?title=Blackwell%27s_Island_Asylum
https://rihs.us/2020/03/30/charles-dickens-visit-%E2%80%A2-an-island-in-the-mist-%E2%80%A2-artworks-for-sale/
https://lisawallerrogers.com/2009/01/03/charles-dickens-visit-to-blackwells-island-asylum-1842/
https://www.melinadruga.com/blackwellsislandasylum/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2005/10/roosevelt-island-2005/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwell_Island_Light
https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2018/06/25/dancing-at-the-lunatics-ball-on-blackwells-island/
http://www.hauntingdarkness.com/2012/01/ghosts-of-roosevelt-island.html
“BLACKWELL’S ISLAND LUNATIC ASYLUM.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Feb1866, Vol. 32 Issue 189, preceding p274-294. 22p. 20 Illustrations:
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine Volume 126 December 1865 to May 1866: https://archive.org/details/harpersnew32various/page/290/mode/2up?q=fort+maxey
Article page 184: https://archive.org/details/harpersweekly00bonn/page/184/mode/2up?q=blackwell%27s
Article page 91: https://archive.org/details/harpersweeklyv13bonn/page/91/mode/2up?q=blackwell%27s
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/roosevelt-island-lighthouse
http://www.correctionhistory.org/rooseveltisland/html/rooseveltislandtour_lighthouse.html
https://rihs.us/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-August-Blackwells-Almanac.pdf
https://www.loc.gov/item/ny0949/
https://www.loc.gov/item/ny0953/
https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2007/10/mysteries-of-roosevelt-island-madmans.html
https://forgotten-ny.com/2005/10/roosevelt-island-2005/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwell_Island_Light
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/islands-of-the
undesirables-roosevelt-island-blackwell-s-island
https://lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=753
https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/an-afternoon-at-blackwells-light
Harper’s Weekly Archives: https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=harpersweekly
HARPER’S WEEKLY. A JOURNAL OF CIVILIZATION. / Volume IX, Issue 466:
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/h/harpersweekly/harpersweekly-idx?coll=harpersweekly;type=HTML;rgn=DIV1;id=;byte=10925913

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The Roosevelt Island Lighthouse, or The Blackwell Island Light, NYC

A look at the mysterious Gothic lighthouse that stands at the tip of New York City’s Roosevelt Island.

Did a lunatic named Thomas Maxey build the lighthouse? If so, why did a now-missing stone say that an unknown person named John McCarthy built it? Or was it designed by 19th century starchitect, James Renwick, Jr, who was also responsible for St. Patrick’s Cathedral?

There isn’t a lot of good information about this online, but a deep dive into newspaper archives had helped get some answers. Chris shares some theories about the lighthouse, as well as more about the industrious “lunatic,” Thomas Maxey, who may have had a hand in its construction.

Highlights include:
• More about Fort Maxey
• James Renwick, Jr, architect of St. Patrick’s Cathedral
• Drama with the US Lighthouse Board
• Plenty of wild speculation

Pictures of The Roosevelt Island Lighthouse

Seen from the ferry, October 2020

Sign at the Roosevelt Island Lighthouse, May 2020

Bollard at the Roosevelt Island Lighthouse, May 2020

Doorway of the Roosevelt Island Lighthouse, May 2020

Roosevelt Island Lighthouse, May 2020

Foliate details, Roosevelt Island Lighthouse, May 2020

Roosevelt Island Lighthouse, May 2020

The lighthouse seen from Hallet’s Cove, Astoria, November 2020

An 1851 nautical chart showing what the northern tip of Blackwell’s Island looked like, overlaid on the island on Google Earth

What the northern end of Roosevelt Island looks like today

Episode Script for The Roosevelt Island Lighthouse, or The Blackwell Island Light, NYC

“The lighthouse is a handsome 19th-century structure with an interesting legendary history . . . Was built under the supervision of one of New York’s most prominent architects, James Renwick, Jr. . . . its boldly scaled Gothic detail and rock-faced walls give it a stony, rustic character.”

–from the Landmarks Preservation Commission report on the Lighthouse on Roosevelt Island, March 25, 1976

If you look up the Blackwells Island Light or Roosevelt Island Lighthouse, you’ll find a version of this story: The lighthouse was built in 1872, with James Renwick Jr, who was perhaps NYC’s most famous architect, supervising.
Until the late 20th century, a stone stood at the base of the lighthouse said, in finely chiseled letters:
- THIS IS THE WORK THAT WAS DONE BY ME, JOHN MCCARTHY, WHO BUILT THE LIGHTHOUSE WITH HIS OWN HANDS, FROM THE FOUNDATION TO THE ROOF. ALL WHO READ THIS PRAY FOR THE REPOSE OF HIS SOUL.
Most accounts online say that McCarthy was a patient at the Lunatic Asylum, an Irish stonemason, who built the lighthouse–maybe under Renwick’s direction, maybe not? Renwick designed many other buildings that were owned by the NYC Department of Corrections and Charities on both Blackwell’s Island and nearby Ward’s and Randall’s Islands, so maybe he was considered the supervising architect by default? So maybe he designed it but McCarthy executed the construction?
Then, some accounts claim that McCarthy was the same person as Thomas Maxey, who built a fort around the same location as the lighthouse, and reclaimed the land that the lighthouse was on. And some people seem to suggest that Thomas Maxey didn’t exist, and McCarthy was the one who built the fort?
Basically, a lack of good records have made this lighthouse the subject of tons of speculation and urban legends, which like most urban legends, end up being a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy and get distorted.
Oh, also, another weird wrinkle: the stone giving John McCarthy credit for building the lighthouse disappeared during the 1960s, and no one knows what happened to it
The Roosevelt Island Historical Society points out that the only things we can be certain of are:
- The lighthouse is 50 feet tall
- It was made from gray gneiss quarried on the island, like most other structures there at the time
- It started operating in September 1872
- It showed a fixed red light at a focal plane 54 feet above the river
- It was a private lighthouse, that is to say, it wasn’t an official Coast Guard light
  - Despite that, the US Lighthouse Board said it was one of the best “private lights,” and they provided a fourth-order Fresnel lens to use in the lantern room
  - The Lighthouse Board, in their 1883 annual report, criticized private lights in general, because they were unreliable, went on and off without giving mariners enough notice, and confusing mariners because they’re so irregular
  - About the Blackwells Island Light, they said:
    - “It has gone out a number of times recently, and so much to the inconvenience, if not danger, of mariners, that complaint has been made, and the Board has been subjected to unmerited criticism for failing to do what was alleged to be its duty, when in fact it has not the slightest control over that light.”
  - And Blackwell’s island and its lighthouse were right near Hell Gate, one of the most dangerous and infamous stretches of water at the time, so I’d imagine that it was an especially big problem that the light was so unreliable
  - About a decade later, the Lighthouse Board built its own beacon, a new electric light on Hallet’s Point, which is the short of Queens right near Blackwell’s Island, to help mariners navigate Hell Gate
  - We know that the Blackwell Island light was decommissioned in the 1940s, then added to the national register of historic places in 1972, written up by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1975, and made a city landmark. In was partially restored around ’76, and then in 1998, an anonymous donation allowed a total restoration
  - Also, the lighthouse used to have a conical roof, which you can see in a film by Thomas Edison from 1903 which I’ll link in the shownotes, but it now has a
  - Nowadays, it stands at the tip of the island and is very visible from the queens waterfront, from which I see it practically every day
  - In the shownotes, I’ll include some pictures I took of the lighthouse back in May, as well as some recent pictures I took from the new ferry that goes from Astoria to the Upper East side and which gives a great view of the lighthouse.
So that’s what we do know I’ve been looking into some of the mysterious things about this lighthouse and trying to get the most solid answers that I can find:
- What happened to Fort Maxey?
  Who built it? Maxey? Renwick? McCarthy?
- Why is there so much incorrect information about this?
Last week, we talked about Fort Maxey, which was built on Blackwell’s Island–now called Roosevelt Island–by a patient named Thomas Maxey, from the infamous New York Lunatic Asylum. Supposedly, the idea was that the fort would be a valuable defense against the British, or privateers, or some other maritime threat.
- And Maxey believed that one day, the government would purchase the land and building from him, recognizing how valuable it really was.
- One thing I wanted to mention especially for people who don’t live in New York City, is that the fort stood on the north end of Roosevelt Island, facing out toward a treacherous (and now famously haunted) stretch of the east river called the Hell Gate, which I’ll probably talk about next week.
- There’s one detail about that, which I was thinking about last week but didn’t mention. So the about the fort’s location means that it looks North, toward the Hudson River, which travels further up into New York state. You’re not looking south toward the Atlantic, which is where I’d assume malignant ships might come from
- I kinda dismissed that detail, thinking that Maxey shouldn’t be blamed for using the land that was available to him, which was of course that northern part of the island near the Lunatic asylum. But also in the back of my head, I was kinda like, “eh, he was a lunatic maybe, so why would I expect him to think strategically.”
- But to be fair, I learned this week that during the war of 1812, the US War Department built a blockhouse with two cannons on a tiny island just north of Blackwell’s Island, called Great Mill Rock, about 2700 feet away from where Fort Maxey would later be built.
  - They also built fortfications at Hallet’s point, which is on the shoreline of Astoria, about 875 feet away from where Fort Maxey was.
  - And there was another one on the Manhattan shoreline about 1300 feet away from Fort Maxey.
  - So the location of Fort Maxey is actually extremely logical–it was right where three other forts were built earlier in the 19th century.
While doing the research for this week’s episode, I found an 1865 article in the New Haven Palladium and and an 1866 article in the New York Times that had some details I hadn’t been able to find out last week. So the info I’m about to share is from both articles:
Maxey was Irish, and had been born in county Wexford.
In 1866, he was about 70 years old
- Before going insane, he was supposedly “a thrifty farmer in the neighborhood of Harlem.”
- To read a bit more from the NYT article:
  - Domestic unhappiness of some kind unsettled his mind, and he became ultimately an inmate of the Asylum, where being found to be quite harmless (but incurable), he was allowed to roam around, and, as he never abused the priviledge, he became quite a licensed individual. For a long time, the thought that the island was in danger of attack from outside barbarians haunted his imagination, giving shape at last to an idea for its protection, which he proceeded to carry out.s
Apparently, in addition to hollyhocks and other tall flowers, Maxey also grew potatoes in his garden.
And the roof of the fort was thatched with straw and weeds.
He was a little above medium height, and “was dressed in brown pantaloons and shirt sleeves, with his head covered by a woman’s while silk bonnet, which he wore in the manner of a helmet.”
When the NYT met him, he was dressed in a tattered asylum uniform, “with a mysterious roll, like a sausage, round his neck, (in which we afterward learned he secreted his money often.” They said his face was dirty and unwashed.
The New Haven Palladium reporter says that Maxey talked a lot, “in language more original than intelligible.”
The NYT points out that the interior of the fort had some unique cupboards that Maxey had built himself, and to read from the article: “as odd looking as everything else, patched and painted over with grotesque shapes and heyrogliphics.”
Maxey kept a sort of wishful guestbook called the “Fort Maxey Register,” which apparently had the names of famous people, including Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Byron, the Duke of Wellington, Napoleon, and Shakespeare, and it listed the amount of money they’d supposedly donated to him (from 5 cents to $1.)
- That’s the craziest-sounding thing I’ve heard about Maxey, though to be honest, it was a great sales tactic, because it guilted the reporter into signing their name and paying the fee.
- The reporter said that the register was neatly written.
- Also, Maxey told the reporter that the city owed him $172,000 for his work building the fort, but he said he would have accepted as little as $1K to buy him some presentable clothes that he could wear when receiving visitors from the City, and he complained of “being made to eat ‘with the poo loonies in the hall’” . . . I think these complaints are pretty legitimate. Basically, he’s asking to be allowed to have some dignity and not be humiliated or forced to spent time in the awful asylum with the abused patients, which seems fair to me.
He was really excited to show the Palladium reporter the whole house, and he pointed out how above the doorway, on a sign, there was a word: Communication. To that, the reporter said “This, he seemed to think, possessed some mystical meaning, but we could not make it out.”
- But that, to me, seems obvious: Maxey was someone who loved talking to people and communicating, and there’s something so sad about him in his little island fort, isolated from everyone just because he’s seen as insane.
One thing that I talked about last week was how Maxey had reclaimed a bunch of marshy land at the tip of Blackwell’s Island. Because that’s where the lighthouse is now, I did some research about this land.
- Well, I happened to stumble upon a 1851 nautical chart of the Hell Gate, which includes what Roosevelt Island used to look like, before Thomas Maxey’s work. The northern end of the island is basically an unrecognizable mass of mostly submerged rocks.
- By my rough estimate, he turned about 325 feet of water into land, but then there was an additional 837 feet of what looked like unusable marshland with weird little tidal pools or something in it.
  - The New Haven Palladium had a great, clear description of the marsh and the fort’s position in it, so to read from that:
    - It is reached by an elevated causeway of earth, about two feet broad and four feet high, forming a strong, secure, and not ungraceful access through a salt water marsh, for the distance of about 300 yards, to a little promontory on which the fort is built.
  - 300 yards is about 900 feet, so pretty close to my estimate from guessing by comparing google earth and the old map.
  - And the reporter also identified exactly where the gate lay in relation to the fort itself:
    - Midway the causeway is covered by a stone gateway, of no imaginable architectural style, but with a Gothic top, the whole formed by a multitude of stones of every size and color, every side and angle being as rough as the bed of a torrent, but with a certain method in its madness which grows upon the mind of the gazer.
- So I wanted to make sure to share that info, since I hadn’t found this article until a couple days ago. But to get back to the work that Maxey did on the island:
- One question I wanted to answer was who actually drained the marsh and turned it into usable land, which seems like happened either shortly before or shortly after the lighthouse was built, but I haven’t had luck confirming that Maxey did it for sure, though newspaper accounts seem to suggest that he did end up draining it.
- I’ve been trying to find nautical charts from the 1860s-1880s but haven’t had a ton of luck, but I found a 1891 chart that shows the northern end of the island with the lighthouse, looking as it does today.
- In the shownotes, I’ll include a side-by-side comparison of what it looked like before Maxey’s efforts versus now–it’s really remarkable.
- Nowadays, that land is home to a Lighthouse Park, which contains the Blackwell Island Light, which we’ll talk about a lot today, as well as a medical building.
So, like I mentioned last week, it’s extremely difficult to find any information about Thomas Maxey, Fort Maxey, and the real history of the lighthouse that replaced his fort.
I’ve read that he’d started the work maybe around 1853, or 1863, or 1860, and the NYT article suggested he’d been working on the fort for “half his lifetime” which seems like at least a slight exaggeration, but it also seems more likely than having just started a few years before.
- This week, when I was doing more research, I found an article that suggested that Maxey started work on the fort in 1818, which while Maxey was apparently a pretty old man in the 1860s, still seems extremely implausible to me. First, the Lunatic Asylum wasn’t even built until 1834, so if Maxey was a patient there, the very earliest he could have started work was in the 1830s. I found an 1865 article that said that Maxey had been an inmate of the asylum for about 25 years, meaning that he would have arrived on the island around 1840.
- Also, it’s worth mentioning that unless you were a prisoner or patient at one of the institutions on Blackwell’s Island, or someone who worked there, you couldn’t (and wouldn’t want to) live on the island. So there isn’t a chance that Maxey would have just been a random island resident who was mistaken for a lunatic. Because there were no random island residents.
Most websites about the Blackwell Island Light say that Maxey was convinced to destroy his own fort when city officials bribed him with fake money.
- In one sense, that tracks: He did believe that the city would want to buy the fort from him, and he was used to accepting weird things like ten-cent stamps as payment for visitors’ admissions fees.
- But I tried really hard to find any kind of documentation of this deal. The earliest written record of this supposed deal that I was able to find was the 1976 Landmarks Preservation Commission report on the Lighthouse. If this urban legend is a photocopy of a photocopy, the Landmarks report is one of the first photocopies that disseminated a possibly distorted version of what really happened.
  - It’s very clear to me that all of the other websites got this intel from this report, or other websites that referenced this report, because the same language about the deal and specific quotes about Maxey from the warden’s report is repeated everywhere, and it definitely originated from this report.
  - So I spent many hours going through hundreds of articles–pretty much everything that I could find in any databases that the New York Public Library has access to–and I couldn’t find a mention of this deal.
    - I did find a different story, though:
    - On December 29, 1870, the Chicago Evening Mail published a very sarcastic story about the fort, mocking its weakness, and ending with the real news, which is that the Thursday before, the fort had burned down. It sounds like some coals from the fireplace fell on the floor, causing a fire that destroyed the building.
    - But by July 1871, Maxey had rebuilt the fort. Some reports say that he believed he’d sold it to the city for $150K? I wonder if someone from the city “bought” some of the land he’d reclaimed from the sea in order to build the lighthouse?
    - Then, a number of articles from July and August of 1874 say that the new fort had just been destroyed by another fire. Weirdly, that second fire was also on a Thursday, on July 23rd, 1874, at 5 am.
      - It sounds like after the fires, he claimed that the city owed him 1 million dollars, or 500K, depending on the newspaper article you read.
      - Reports said that he planned to build a third fort.
      - And one newspaper article mentioned something important, which is that an engineer on the Island, a Mr. Gormley, sometimes hired Maxey to do work for him. So Maxey wasn’t just working on his fort, he was also doing other projects at the request of public officials.
I haven’t been able to learn whether a third Fort Maxey was ever built, but I doubt it. There’s also another issue here: The Blackwells Island Light was supposedly built right around the location where Fort Maxey was in 1872, but Fort Maxey version 2 would have been under construction there at the same time.
Were the two buildings right next to each other?
- If so, it seems likely that Maxey would have helped build the lighthouse, since it sounds like he loved building things and wouldn’t have been able to resist building something as grand and useful as a lighthouse right on his front step.
- I haven’t been able to find any real answer to this question, since I’m relying entirely on contemporary newspaper accounts, since I haven’t really found anything written since the 19th century that even mentions that Maxey’s fort burned down even once.
So, one thing I’ve been thinking about when considering who may have built the lighthouse is Maxey’s construction work. Do I think he was capable of building or helping to build the lighthouse, which was obviously far more polished than his fort?
I think he may have been, in part because he built his fort basically just from flotsam and jetsum–the authorities said he could build using any materials he found, but they wouldn’t requisition any materials for him. So if he actually had help, and the materials he needed, maybe he could have made something much more polished.
Like I mentioned last week, he obviously had engineering ability.

To read from the NYT:

The fort is an almost circular mound of earth, well faced with sods against the action of the river and the soil wheeled there to form it must have weighed hundreds of tons. One side of this mount a fantastic structure has been raised, of no precise order of architecture, but intended for the fighting place when the time comes.
This description is from 1866, four years before the first fire that “destroyed” Fort Maxey, and 6 years before the lighthouse was built. A few notable things here:
1. In 6 years, he may have done a lot more work reclaiming land around the causeway and fort, building out the current shape of the island. But I can’t confirm that–I wish I could find an accurate nautical map of the island from around 1870-1874.
2. But even if he didn’t build out the island more, perhaps the lighthouse was built on the little island where his fort had been built, or at least where the fighting place was? The thing about the circular mound made be pause, since the lighthouse is on a circular stone base, which from old pictures I’ve seen was surrounded by dirt before being paved over to become part of lighthouse park. Part of me wonders if the lighthouse and its stone base were built first, on the little island, and then later the land was completely filled around it?
  1. I wanted to read this bit of the landmark report about it, to explain:
    1. The lighthouse is encircled by a small yard paved with flagstone. An entry walk at the south is flanked by stone bollards which have pyramidal tops carved with simple trefoils.
  2. Bollards are basically just short vertical posts, which according to wikipedia, used to refer to a post used for mooring boats. In the 19th century, it seems like that’s what they generally were for. So maybe they were put there to facilitate tying up small craft that came up to the lighthouse (I’m imagining like rowboats, since there were a lot of rocks and stuff there.) Or, I could imagine them being ornamental posts that might look nice at the end of a bridge or causeway. Maybe the land hadn’t been totally filled in when they were built, and the bridge to Fort Maxey led right up to the lighthouse door–that’s a sensible reason to have an entry walk there. Right now, it looks kinda silly to have a designated entry walk area around the door to the lighthouse, when there’s land totally surrounding the lighthouse.
Another notable thing from the landmarks report is that it describes the doorway, which has “an incised pointed arch above a splayed keystone with flanking corbels . . . Designed in a rustic version of the Gothic style.”
- This stood out to me because it made me think of how the NYT article described the vaguely gothic top of the gate to Fort Maxey.
- But more than that, it made me think of an illustration of Fort Maxey from one of the articles last week: it had an arch and windows that are vaguely reminescent of the arch and windows of the lighthouse that was built later.

So that’s some info about Maxey’s construction ability and some similarities between his fort and the lighthouse.

But articles about the lighthouse all mention John McCarthy. Who was this guy? People say that he was a lunatic, but I think that’s just people conflating him and Maxey.
So I did some research.
Unfortunately for me, John McCarthy is a really common name. I did a TON of digging and came up with many John McCarthys from around this time, and several of them are worth mentioning:
- According to an April 30, 1873 article in the New York Herald about a prison escape on Blackwell’s Island, there was a keeper at the prison named John McCarthy. But we can eliminate him from our list of potential builders, I think. There’s no reason to think that a guard would be enlisted to help build a lighthouse.
- An April 24, 1889 article in the Evening World mentions a Captain John McCarthy, who was the pilot of the charity boat Minnehannock, and was also the pilot of the tug boat Fidelity during construction of a building on Hart’s Island–a nearby island, which was and is now a potter’s field for NYC. The Fidelity towed all of the stone “used to sink and fill the crib” which I believe refers to a crib dock. That’s the most expensive type of dock to build, and the most permanent kind, which requires a really sturdy foundation, usually a wooden “crib” or container filled with rocks. At any rate, I think we can cross this John McCarthy off too, because a captain wouldn’t have the spare time or expertise to build a lighthouse.
- An August 8, 1870, article in the New York Tribune lists some convicts who were sentenced to the penitentary at Blackwell’s Island during the Court of Special Sessions. One of those people was a petty criminal named “John McCarthy alias Cockney Jack, an old offender and noted pickpocket in this city . . . Convicted of larceny of a valise, and sent to the Penitentiary for four months.”
  - I think that this is our guy. Here’s why:
    - Prisoners were often forced to do manual labor around the island
    - Even tho he was only sentenced to be on the island for 4 months, it sounds like he was in and out of there, and maybe after his release, he got arrested again and earned a longer sentence. It was pretty common for people to end up back at the island again and again.
    - The inscription, asking people to pray for his soul, definitely feels like something a prisoner, someone with a guilty conscience, might write
    - A 1919 article in the New York Press suggests that this was the McCarthy. The article said, of the lighthouse contruction, plainly:
      - McCarthy was a workhouse prisoner. He had two assistants on the job.
    - The article also mentions Maxey as a separate person–so in 1919, the two of them hadn’t been combined the in the popular imagination.
So after all of this, what do I think happened? I like the idea that Maxey had some sort of hand in the lighthouse, and I think it’s possible that his fort, which had a vaguely gothic style, may have inspired Renwick, who I think probably was the person who designed the lighthouse, if I had to guess.
- I found an illustration of Fort Maxey that really reminded me of the lighthouse–the drawing is of a sort of doorway with window recessed above the arched doorway, in a way that’s really reminiscent of the lighthouse.
- So even if Maxey and Renwick never spoke (though my guess is that they probably did, if Renwick was surveying the area for the lighthouse) I think that the sight of Maxey’s creation would have influenced the plans for the lighthouse.
- Maxey at this point would have been old, in his 70s. It sounds like he was maybe still working on fort maxey version 3 at the time, but I wonder if he assisted McCarthy with the lighthouse building
- At any rate, it seems like McCarthy may have done the lion’s share of the construction work, and wanted to be remembered for it.

Sources consulted RE: The Roosevelt Island Lighthouse

See the A Victorian Lunatic’s Fort: Fort Maxey, Blackwell’s Island, NYC, for additional sources for this episode.

Videos of The Roosevelt Island Lighthouse

Thomas Edison’s 1903 video of Blackwell’s Island, including the lighthouse.

Articles consulted RE: The Roosevelt Island Lighthouse

The Chicago Evening Mail (Chicago, Illinois) · Thu, Dec 29, 1870 · Page 3
https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/668142082 Downloaded on Oct 29, 2020
The Meriden Daily Republican (Meriden, Connecticut) · Thu, Jul 23, 1874 · Page 3. https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/674763408 Downloaded on Oct 29, 2020
The St. Albans Weekly Messenger (Saint Albans, Vermont) · Fri, Jul 31, 1874 · Page 6 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/443287342 Downloaded on Oct 29, 2020
“Facts and Fancies” The Milwaukee Sentinel: July 31, 1874. Page 3.
Boston Post (Boston, Massachusetts) · Sat, Jul 25, 1874 · Page 4 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/74392312 Downloaded on Oct 29, 2020
Wayne County Herald (Honesdale, Pennsylvania) · Thu, Aug 6, 1874 · Page 1
https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/362447557 Downloaded on Oct 29, 2020
Fort Maxey, Wednesday, July 19, 1865, New Haven Palladium, 25 , Issue 179
The Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) · Wed, Jul 19, 1871 · Page 8 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/167861583 Downloaded on Oct 29, 2020
Black River Gazette (Ludlow, Vermont) · Fri, Jan 13, 1871 · Page 1
https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/355365618 Downloaded on Oct 29, 2020
The Times (Streator, Illinois) · Wed, Sep 11, 1889 · Page 1
https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/543479332 Downloaded on Oct 29, 2020
FOR HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS: SACEESTIOUS AT A MEETING OT THE PILOT COMMISSIONERS
New York Times (1857-1922); Dec 30, 1896; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 8
A Blackwell’s Island Stampede. New York Herald. April 30, 1873
Paid for Twice. The Evening World (New York, New York) · Wed, Apr 24, 1889 · Page 1 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/78637510 Downloaded on Oct 30, 2020
In the Court of Special . . . New York Tribune. August 8, 1870
“On a flagstone in front of the lighthouse. . .” New York NY Press 1909 – 1257

Books consulted RE: The Roosevelt Island Lighthouse

Annual Report of the Light-House Board of the United States to the Secretary … By United States. Light-House Board
Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York by Ted Steinberg
The Bricklayer, Mason and Plasterer, Volumes 24-25: Practical Lessons in Bricklaying
Roosevelt Island By Judith Berdy

Websites RE: The Roosevelt Island Lighthouse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollard
Dock Construction Guide
Sticks & Stones – A Traditional Les Cheneaux Crib Dock Replacement Project
https://web.archive.org/web/20090517003017/http://nyc10044.com/timeln/timeline.html
The Lighthouse
https://gothamist.com/news/the-strange-history-of-nycs-mighty-hell-gate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate_Bridge
https://www.geographicus.com/P/AntiqueMap/HellGateRooseveltIsland-uscs-1891
Current nautical chart: https://charts.noaa.gov/BookletChart/12339_BookletChart.pdf
https://lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=75
https://www.liboatingworld.com/single-post/2018/05/30/Exploring-NYs-East-River-Some-of-Its-Rich-History
https://www.us-lighthouses.com/blackwell-island-lighthouse
The Lighthouse
https://rioc.ny.gov/179/The-Lighthouse
Mysteries of Roosevelt Island: The Madman’s Lighthouse
http://www.correctionhistory.org/rooseveltisland/
http://www.correctionhistory.org/rooseveltisland/html/chapincards4.html#lite2
http://www.correctionhistory.org/rooseveltisland/html/rooseveltislandtour_lighthouse.html
https://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2010/10/mysterious-blackwell-island-lighthouse.html
The Lighthouses of NYC
https://rihs.us/2020/09/
https://www.stonehengenyc.com/blog/Roosevelt-Island-Day-Trip?_escaped_fragment_=#!
Lighthouse Park Roosevelt Island 900 Main Street New York, NY 10044
https://www.nps.gov/places/blackwell-s-island-new-york-city.htm
Lighthouse pics: https://www.loc.gov/item/ny0953/
Landmarks commission report: http://www.neighborhoodpreservationcenter.org/db/bb_files/LIGHTHOUSE-ROOSEVELT-IS.pdf
https://rihs.us/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-August-Blackwells-Almanac.pdf
Tuesday, September 1, 2020 -SOME WONDERFUL LIGHTHOUSES NEARBY
The Lighthouse
https://joebrunoonthemob.wordpress.com/tag/the-whyos/
https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/mill-rock-park/history
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/podcast/july17/nop08-historical-maps-charts.html
1903 pic of lighthouse and island:
https://picryl.com/media/panorama-of-blackwells-island-ny
1886 map: https://picryl.com/media/blackwells-wards-and-randalls-islands-and-adjacent-shores-of-east-and-harlem-31f143?zoom=true
http://www.correctionhistory.org/rooseveltisland/html/rooseveltislandtour_lighthouse.html
http://americanyc.org/documents/10184/57129/AYC+2013+Spring+Cruising+Notes+Final.pdf/6594f92b-dc97-46ad-95fb-d6ee8c5a8b38?version=1.0
https://libraetd.lib.virginia.edu/downloads/1z40kt09r?filename=Dissertation_final_Libra.pdf
Report of the Welfare Island Planning and Development Committee : submitted to John V. Lindsay, Mayor, City of New York, February 1969. by Welfare Island Planning and Development Committee. https://archive.org/details/reportofwelfarei00welf/page/30/mode/2up?q=mccarthy
https://rioc.ny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/56/New-York-1960s-Chap-8-PDF
https://daniel-lanciana.medium.com/new-york-icons-harbor-islands-cdfe3097c66c
To Be Sane Amongst the Insane
http://www.asylumprojects.org/index.php?title=Blackwell%27s_Island_Asylum
CHARLES DICKENS VISIT • AN ISLAND IN THE MIST • ARTWORKS FOR SALE
Nellie Bly: Charles Dickens’ Visit to Blackwell’s Island Asylum 1842 – Part 4
https://www.melinadruga.com/blackwellsislandasylum/
ROOSEVELT ISLAND 2005
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwell_Island_Light
https://lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=753
https://vos.noaa.gov/MWL/aug_07/hellgate.shtml

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Sunken Treasure at Hell Gate, New York City

Sunken Treasure at Hell Gate, New York City: Legend has it that beneath the East River lies millions of dollars in gold.

In 1780, during the Revolutionary War, a British frigate called the HMS Hussar struck a reef and sank to the bottom of the East River. Many people believe that the ship carried an enormous amount of gold as payroll for British soldiers.

Despite its location in the most dangerous waters in the area, treasure hunters have searched for the Hussar in vain for years. One submarine inventor lost his entire fortune in the search for the treasure, while other salvagers have sunk millions into the search. If the treasure is there, it seems that it doesn’t want to be found . . .

Highlights include:
• A loaded cannon found in Central Park in 2013
• Shipworms, aka the “Termites of the Sea”
• Hidden treasure maps found at the New York Public Library
• The inventor of the modern submarine
• The largest explosion before the atomic bomb

Pictures of the Hell Gate

Hallet’s Point and the Hell Gate

The Hell Gate, with the RFK and Hell Gate Bridge in the distance

Hell Gate mural beneath the Hell Gate bridge in Astoria Park

The Hell Gate and Hell Gate Bridge seen from Astoria Park

The bottom of the Hell Gate bridge

Episode Script for Sunken Treasure at Hell Gate, New York City

“There must be some mania at work to explain those who plunge into the violent murk of Hell Gate, looking for a ship that may be nothing more than a splintering of worm-eaten wood.” -from a 2002 article in the New York Times

“But for more than two centuries, an ordinary British frigate pressed into service during the Revolutionary War has been the object of countless searches in and around the East River. The H.M.S. Hussar might have been forgotten along with other shipwrecks lying at the bottom of New York’s waters, if not for one thing: an oft-repeated story that it might have gone down with a fortune in gold coins.” -from a New York Times article, September 4, 2013

“The Hussar sits out there as a ship of dreams. It has value because it’s part of the story, it’s part of the history of New York.”

-James Sinclair, a marine archaeologist who was part of an expedition in 2000 to the Titanic shipwreck, quoted in a 2013 New York Times article

“Simon Lake, the submarine inventor, who announced that he soon is going to try to salvage the gold from the supposedly gold-laden British frigate Hussar, which sank in Hell Gate in 1780, is far from the first to attempt it.” -The New Yorker, October 13, 1934 P. 22

There are literally hundreds of places in America named after either hell, or the devil. Often, the locations earn their name by some geological element that makes the area especially dangerous, or ominuos looking. It’s also common for places with the name hell to have stories of hauntings.
New York City’s Hell Gate ticks both boxes. I’ve heard people compare it to the Bermuda Triangle, because it was once so dangerous that 1,000 ships ran aground there every year.
Located in the East River, just north of Roosevelt Island, is a tidal strait called Hellgate.
It’s at the confluence of three bodies of water: the Hudson River, coming down from Upstate New York; the Long Island Sound; and the East River.
And to make matters worse, until the late 19th century, the waters were full of huge rocks that boats tended to wreck on. There were also lots of whirlpools.
Even though the waterway is safer now, it still looks pretty intense, full of eddies and areas that, to me, look suspiciously like whirlpools. I actually ran along the Hell Gate this weekend, and took a ferry across the east river just south of the Hell Gate. It’s a beautiful view these days, but definitely still feels ominous, even on a sunny day like the one this weekend, when the park along the waterfront, Astoria Park, was packed with people having picnics and working out.
The strait was originally called Hellegat in Dutch, which I’ve read means “Hell Channel,” though other sources have said it means “bright strait” or “clear opening,” though those are much less apropos monikers. The area’s also sometimes been called Hurl Gate, which supposedly comes from the Dutch for whirl and for “hole, gap, or mouth,” so basically whirlpool.
So today, I want to look at the second-most famous ship to have sunk at the Hell Gate: a British Royal Navy Mermaid-Class frigate called the HMS Hussar. It had 3 masts, 28 guns, and was built in 1763.
- The ship was 114 feet long, 34 feet wide, weighed 619 tons, and had a crew of 100.
So here’s the story, and I’m gonna try to get the Revolutionary War history parts correct, but I’m a little weak when it comes to war history, so forgive me if I get anything wrong:
- So during the Revolutionary War, by 1780, the British weren’t doing so hot in New York. The French had joined forces with Washington’s troops, who were just north of the city.
- Also, at the time the British army owed a bunch of back pay to their soldiers.
- It was decided that the Hussar would bring the 960,000 British pounds worth of gold (which I think is like a billion and a half dollars in today’s money?) That number’s been disputed, but that’s partially because at the time, the British had good reason to downplay the amount of gold that was on board,
- There were also about 70-80 American prisoners aboard the ship, below deck.
- The captain decided to go through the Hell Gate, which the pilot had said was a bad idea.
  - Legend has it that the Hussar had used an enslaved man named Swan as a pilot to navigate the Hell Gate. Swan’s widow claimed that she frequently heard him say that “there was a large quantity of money on board the ship when she sunk.”
- Right before they reached the Long Island Sound, the Hussar hit a reef called Pot Rock and started to sink. The Captain, Charles Pole, tried to run her aground, but instead she sank into 16 fathoms of water.
- While most of the British crew survived, all of the American prisoners went down with the ship.
  - A 1856 expedition to the wreck found many bones, which, to quote the NYT: showed “evidently, that a part, if not all the American prisoners on board were manacled and chained”
- Of course, the British immediately denied that there’d been all that gold on board. But of course they did, since they wouldn’t have wanted the Americans to find it, and wouldn’t have wanted the Americans to know what a huge loss it was.
  - But at any rate, at the inquest, the Captain said there was no gold on board when it sunk, and the first mate said they’d unloaded the gold before going upriver.
- For several days after the ship sunk, its masts stuck out of the water, though they were eventually swept away.
Starting in the 1780s, people have tried in vain to find the ship. And, remember, the Hell Gate is a notoriously dangerous area, so that’d make treasure hunting that much harder.
To quote Njscuba.net:
- “The Hussar is of historic interest only. It is sunk in Hell Gate, in the middle of New York City. The treacherous currents, polluted waters, and heavy traffic make it undiveable, except by professionals with specialized equipment.”
Bob Sterner of Freeport, Long Island, who’s a shipwreck diver and former editor of Immersed Magazine, described Hell Gate this way:
- “Many divers don’t realize the conditions. Just in driving past Hell Gate, the waters appear angry. The currents are unpredictable as they swirl in one direction, then another, always moving and boiling like a hot pot. Slack tide lasts about 15 minutes.”
Between the early 19th century and the 1980s, many people tried to find the ship. I wanted to talk about a few of them.
Thomas Jefferson financed an expedition.
There were at least three British expeditions to try to find the wreck, a fact that for many people reinforces the idea that there really was gold on it.
- An 1856 New-York Daily Times article said “In the spring of 1794 two brigs were dispatched from England to undertake the recovery of the lost treasure. They came fully equipped with men, a large diving-bell, and other equipments for sub-marine explorations.”
In 1823, a man named Samuel Davis invented a machine to raise sunken ships and said he was going to raise the Hussar.
In 1830, a group of English people using a diving bell tried to find it, and failed.
There was one salvager in 1880 named George M. Thomas, who according to the NYT was “an itinerant street preacher turned patent medicine vendor”
In 1900, divers looking for a sunken yacht found an iron anchor that said “HMS Hussar.” They sold the anchor for $20 in a junk shop.
In the 1930s, a treasure hunter, mechanical engineer, and naval architect named Simon Lake searched for the Hussar.
- Simon Lake is an interesting character: he was a really important and influential submarine designer who built his first submarine in 1894 at the request of the navy.
- He had a bunch of underwater firsts: He took the first underwater pictures and movie and the first underwater ship-to-shore phone calls.
- Later in his life, he made submarines for non-military usage, including for the purpose of treasure hunting. However, despite his attempts, he didn’t find the Hussar.
- Or at least that’s what some sources say. Other places claim that he found the ship, but not the gold.
- There’s a great New Yorker article about it from October 13, 1934, that I wanted to read from:
“Simon Lake, the submarine inventor, who announced that he soon is going to try to salvage the gold from the supposedly gold-laden British frigate Hussar, which sank in Hell Gate in 1780, is far from the first to attempt it. A giant vacuum cleaner is his description of the apparatus he is going to use. The first attempts to reach the Hussar were made while her masts were still visible above the water. In 1823 a man named Samuel Davis tried to raise the ship. In 1880 a Captain Thomas financed a salvage ship by selling stock in a company called Treasure T Trove, Inc. In the nineties a syndicate spent 20,000 dollars and got one of Hussar’s worm-eaten, oaken ribs, which was made into a cane and is now owned by a man in Brooklyn.”
There’s also a 1935 NYT article which talked about how Lake worked on creating a “baby” submarine to find the Hussar. Apparently, he found three wrecks in the area, all of which were covered in 15 feet of silt.
- He then installed a glass window at the bottom of the submarine’s bow, and added a probing device that can be controlled from within the submarine.
I searched “Simon Lake Hussar” in the historical NYT archives, ad the headlines really tell a story:
- They start in 1934 with LAKE’S SUBMARINE FAILS OF LAUNCHING: Mother Ship is Unable to Pull It Off Ways at Stratford — New Attempt Tuesday. TREASURE HUNT TO FOLLOW But Tests Come First — Coal Cargoes to Be Sought as Well as Sunken Gold.
- Then there’re articles about the hunt for the treasure in 1935, including one headlined, “HUNT PIECES OF EIGHT.: Lake’s Submarine Retrieves Pail and Clam Shell in East River.” The article talks about how Lake took journalists down in the submarine, as well as a Miss Mildred Stone. The article closes with “When yesterday’s excursion was over Miss Stone came to the surface with one pail, rusty, and one half of a clamshell in poor condition. Everybody else got grease stains on his clothes.”
- Then, in June 1936: LACK OF FUNDS HALTS LAKE’S TREASURE HUNT: His Submarine to Be Auctioned if He Fails to Get $394 to Pay Deckhand.
- Then, things look up by September 1936: LAKE THINKS HULK IS TREASURE SHIP: Inventor Believes He Has Found Wreck of Frigate Hussar in East River. CARRIED $1,800,000 GOLD Probing Reveals Hard Timbers in Indicated Position, and Treasury Is Notified.
  - The article talks about how Lake called reporters into his office, and said, “If I were a betting man, I would lay 100 o 1 the Hussar has been found at last. For fifty years I have been spectulating on the likelihood of locating this ship and within six weeks I expect to step within her hold. Now, nobody can tell what gold there is. It’s not the gold so much as the satisfaction of solving a riddle, though some gold would do no harm.”
  - Apparently, on September 4, Lake’s 70th birthday, he found the Hussar during a sounding expedition off the shore of the Bronx, around East 130th and 140th streets.
  - He said that the ship was covered in 12 feet of silt, which they were going to pump off, so then the submarine and divers could go down and see the ship.
  - He said that he believed he could raise the Hussar in time to be exhibited at the upcoming World’s Fair, which was scheduled for 1939 here in Queens, NY.
- But that was not to be. By November 1936, we get this headline: SIMON LAKE AGAIN SUED: Inventor Seeking $4,000,000 Gold In $1,800 Foreclosure Action.
  - Basically he had some issues with back taxes and the mortgage on his house in Connecticut
- Then, in March 1937, there’s an article about his house being foreclosed on, and in November 1937, there’s an article about getting a delay n the foreclosure. That article says “Mr. Lake ran into financial difficulties about a year ago in attempts to salvage a $5,000,000 treasure in gold which some say sank in the East River at New York with the British frigate Hussar in 1780. The yield from the salvage venture has been meager.”
- In his autobiography, Lake said “No one now knows precisely where the old hulk rests, and my explorations early in 1937 were unsuccessful. I have not given up the idea, but other things are more pressing.”
- Then, in June 1945, the times printed Lake’s obituary. He was 78 when he died . The article gives a summary of what happened in the intervening years between his search for the Hussar and his death:
  - He spent three years and a fortune in this venture while the world watched. All he recovered was a handful of modern coins. In 1937, his white-pillared colonial home in Milford, Conn., was sold under foreclosure and was made into a funeral parlor. The inventor moved up the street a few doors to a two-family house and continued to use his three-room workshop in a little factory building.
- There’s so much to unpack here: It feels almost like this treasure is cursed somehow–it drove this man to his ruin, and there’s something almost poetic about how, after losing his home to a search for a sunken treasure that a bunch of POWs died next to in a treacherous waterway, where so many people had died since then–after losing his house to that, it became a funeral parlor.
The next treasure hunter I found good info about was from the 1980s:
- According to the New York Times, in 1985, a salvage expert named Barry L. Clifford claimed he’d found the ship about 175 feet off the short of the Bronx, beneath 80 feet of murky water. He said he was going to get federal permission to raise the wreck. He said he used sonar technology, like the technology used to find the Titanic.
- To read a bit from the article:
“Visible on the sonograph is some sort of superstructure, perhaps a beam, lying across the bow and two forward holes that Mr. Clifford and Garry Kozak, an engineer with Klein Associates, said could be hold openings typical of a ship of the Hussar’s design. The masts seem to be missing.”
Clifford said he wanted to find the artifacts and put them on display for the public.
He also said that at 80 feet, the East River is very cold, and, to quote him “the lack of worms means that the ship could be perfectly preserved.”
- Just a sidenote here: the two mentions of worms really stood out to me, because that’s such a creepy image–the idea of these underwater worms eating away at a shipwreck, like worms in a decaying corpse.
- So I looked it up, and it looks like the worms referred to here are marine borers. I actually found a 2019 article talking about what a huge issue marine borers have become along New York City’s 520 miles of shoreline.
- Apparently marine borers have been an issue in ports for centuries. They’re shipworms, so named because sometimes ppl blamed them for sinking wooden ships.
- Apparently, by the 1960s, there was so much raw sewage, and oil and chemicals, in the city’s rivers that they borers couldn’t survive anymore. People would even bring their boats into the NY harbor to clean marine borers off their boats.
- But as the water quality in the city’s rivers have improved, that’s made the habitat more hospitable for marine borers, so they’ve returned to NYC. Though to be clear, even though NYC’s waterways are cleaner than they’ve been in a century, apparently whenever there are heavy rains, the city’s sewer system gets overloaded and sewage spills into the rivers.
- But back to the marine borers, to read from the NYT:
  - “The two most common borers are a kind of shipworm called Teredo navalis, which is actually a wormlike clam, and tiny crustaceans known as gribbles. They often work together, with shipworms boring tunnels inside timber pilings and gribbles chewing from the outside, according to scientists and city officials.”
- So there are now projects underway to coat wooden pilings in epoxy to try to prevent damage
- Marine borers are a huge problem now, but shipworms were an issue in the past, as well. People have called them “termites of the sea,” and they ate most of the wood on the Titanic. Also, apparently in 1502 Columbus lost his ships to marine borers while on his 4th trip to the Americas.
- So they really are a consideration when it comes to salvaging shipwrecks, because you could find a shipwreck only to discover it’s basically been eaten by worms.
But a follow-up article in 1987 says that while Clifford’s company had dove the area at least 6 times, and explored 6 different shipwrecks there, he still hadn’t found the Hussar. There was a seventh wreck, buried deep in the mud, or as one article put in “”buried in about 15 feet of soft ooze””, that they thought might be the Hussar.
- The article quotes an archeologist who’d examined some of the china fragments they’d found while diving, and he said that it was all 19th century stuff, and they hadn’t found anything from the 18th century. I love this line from the archaeologist: he said the china was ”the kind of thing you find almost anywhere on the bottom there.”
  - I love the idea that the bottom of the East River is just strewn with broken china from the 19th century.
- Clifford said that he was going to try to identify the mysterious 7th wreck. And I wanted to read a bit of the article:
  - The river is contaminated with such curios as abandoned cars and washing machines, he notes, and the visibility – well, ”you can close your eyes right now; it’s like that.”
Apparently, Clifford was also working on a sunken pirate galleon in Cape Cod, and he said the East River was a real culture shock after what I assume is much clearer waters there.
A 2013 NYT article mentioned Clifford’s work: after diving almost every day during three winters (they dove in winter because the cold made the water clearer), they didn’t find the Hussar. They did, however, find a different ship, which was exactly the same size as the Hussar, and had the same hatch openings. Clifford said: “Every other day we were breaking open the Champagne bottles because we thought we found it.”
- And I wanted to read a bit of the article:
- After sinking over $1 million into the hunt, Mr. Clifford and his crew finally packed up their dive gear. They saw all forms of human waste, and even a dead body, but no Hussar.
- “It’s a very tough place to dive,” he said. “If you asked me if I’d do it today, I’d say no.”
There’s a 2002 article in the NYT about a 41-year-old actor and real estate agent named Joseph Governali, who searched for the Hussar. His stage name is Joey Treasures, of course, though.
- He claimed to have found a rare old map in the NYPL that showed the location of the Hussar in a spot that no one thought it would be in. And the map was misfiled, so Governali had that info all to himself.
- He also retrieved several artifacts during East River dives, including part of the ballast, and iron nail, and a 10-pint pitcher.
- Other experts have said that those artifacts could have come from many different wrecks, and didn’t necessarily come from the Hussar.
The wreck has never been found.
Many people have looked for it, though it’s important to note that whoever finds it won’t be able to just pocket the money: NYS law says that objects with historic value found on state land belongs to the state.
However, bizarrely, in 2013, one of the Hussar’s cannons was found in a building in Central Park, loaded with live gunpowder and shot. To read from wikipedia:
- On 11 January 2013, preservationists with the Central Park Conservancy in New York were removing rust from a cannon from Hussar when they discovered it still contained gunpowder, wadding, and a cannonball. Police were called and bomb disposal staff eventually removed about 1.8 pounds of active black gunpowder from the cannon, which they disposed of at a gun range. “We silenced British cannon fire in 1776 and we don’t want to hear it again in Central Park,” the New York Police Department said in a statement.
In the late 19th century, the Army Corps of Engineers blew up many of the hell gate’s rocks. In fact, one of the explosions during that process was the most powerful explosion of all time, up until the nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
So it’s very possible that the remains of the Hussar could have been blown up in that huge explosion, or buried during another instance of blasting or dredging in the Hell Gate. It’s been said that the wreck may have been covered up by landfill in the Bronx.
- In 2013, after Hurricane Sandy, a man named Steven Smith found curved wooden joints on the shores of the Bronx.
- To read from the NYT:
  - ” They were partially submerged in the river, and had been, until the storm last fall, hidden under layers of concrete blocks and building scrap.
  - “Hey, this could be the Hussar,” Mr. Smith, 60, exclaimed recently, before swearing a reporter and photographer for The New York Times to secrecy about the location, for fear of being overrun by treasure hunters.”
The blasting that the Corps of Engineers did improved things in Hell Gate, however, the most famous and tragic shipwreck of the Hell Gate’s history happened after that, in 1904.
And that’s where we’ll pick up next week, with the story of that wreck, and a look at the ghost stories of the Hell Gate.
“Prior to 1872, huge boulders protruded from the surface of the swirling waters, making navigation at this juncture extremely hazardous. More than 100 ships sank, their crews perishing in the undertows and riptides. This place is called ‘Hell Gate.’” -Roosevelt Island By Judith Berdy

Sources consulted RE: Sunken Treasure at Hell Gate

Articles consulted RE: Sunken Treasure at Hell Gate

“HUSSAR GOLD QUEST RESUMED BY INVENTOR: SIMON LAKE IN ‘BABY’ SUBMARINE TO INVESTIGATE 3 HULKS FOUND SUNK NEAR HELL GATE.” New York Times (1923-Current file), Aug 06 1935, p. 19. ProQuest. Web. 8 Nov. 2020 .
LAKE’S SUBMARINE FAILS OF LAUNCHING: Mother Ship is Unable to Pull It … Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES. New York Times (1923-Current file); Oct 7, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index
pg. 27
LACK OF FUNDS HALTS LAKE’S TREASURE HUNT: His Submarine to Be Auctioned if He Fails to Get $394 to Pay Deckhand. New York Times (1923-Current file); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]21 June 1936: 23.
HUNT PIECES OF EIGHT.: Lake’s Submarine Retrieves Pail and Clam Shell in East River. New York Times (1923-Current file); Sep 27, 1935;
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index
pg. 23
LAKE THINKS HULK IS TREASURE SHIP: Inventor Believes He Has Found Wreck of Frigate Hussar in East River. CARRIED $1,800,000 GOLD Probing Reveals Hard Timbers in Indicated Position, and Treasury Is Notified. New York Times (1923-Current file); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]26 Sep 1936: 17.
SIMON LAKE AGAIN SUED: Inventor Seeking $4,000,000 Gold In $1,800 Foreclosure Action. New York Times (1923-Current file); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]11 Nov 1936: 2.
Simon Lake’s Home Is Foreclosed. New York Times (1923-Current file); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]06 Mar 1937: 15.
SIMON LAKE GETS RESPITE: Court Grants New Delay in Foreclosure Sale of Milford Home. New York Times (1923-Current file); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]18 Nov 1937: 18.
LYONS OFFERS GOLD TO BOOM THE BRONX: It’s Not His Gold and He Isn’t Even Sure It’s There, but He Believes in Hunting It AT BOTTOM OF EAST RIVER Book Says Frigate Hussar, With $4,000,000 in Bullion Aboard, Sank There in 1780 New York Times (1923-Current file); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]12 Feb 1940: 18.
SIMON LAKE DEAD; INVENTOR WAS 78: Father of Modern Submarine Intended Craft Only for Use in Peaceful Pursuits HUNTED SUNKEN TREASURE Lost Fortune Attempting to Salvage Lusitania, Recover Millions in East River Built 100 Craft During the War Experimented in Baltimore Founded Bridgeport Concern Sought Lusitania Treasure Family of Welsh Origin. The New York Times, 1934.New York Times (1923-Current file); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]24 June 1945: 22.
Ship of Dreams: Ship of Dreams
Vanderbilt, Tom.New York Times (1923-Current file); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]17 Feb 2002: cy1.

Books consulted RE: Sunken Treasure at Hell Gate

Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York by Ted Steinberg
Roosevelt Island By Judith Berdy

Websites RE: Sunken Treasure at Hell Gate

Devil places: https://spookygeology.com/devil-places/
Devil places map: https://gizmodo.com/hail-satan-a-map-of-all-the-places-named-after-the-dev-1456016654
https://gothamist.com/news/the-strange-history-of-nycs-mighty-hell-gate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate_Bridge
https://www.geographicus.com/P/AntiqueMap/HellGateRooseveltIsland-uscs-1891
Current nautical chart: https://charts.noaa.gov/BookletChart/12339_BookletChart.pdf
https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/870743950/
https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/mill-rock-park/history
1886 map: https://picryl.com/media/blackwells-wards-and-randalls-islands-and-adjacent-shores-of-east-and-harlem-31f143?zoom=true
https://vos.noaa.gov/MWL/aug_07/hellgate.shtml
Hell gate charts:
https://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/new_york_charts/hell_gate.html
Removal of Hell Gate rocks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Removal_of_Hell_Gate_rocks
The conquest of Hell Gate:
https://www.nan.usace.army.mil/Portals/37/docs/history/hellgate.pdf
https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/mill-rock-park/history
https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/mill-rock-park/
Hell gate map 1700s:
https://picryl.com/media/map-of-new-york-i-with-the-adjacent-rocks-and-other-remarkable-parts-of-hell-cc02a9
Hell gate pics:
https://picryl.com/search?q=hell%20gate
Opening hell gate:
https://picryl.com/media/opening-hell-gate-at-a-cost-of-dollar7000000-map-course-of-wider-hell-gate-ab9a7f
Destruction of flood rock: https://picryl.com/media/destruction-of-flood-rock-at-hell-gate-2ef359
Rev war map: https://picryl.com/media/a-plan-of-the-narrows-of-hells-gate-in-the-east-river-near-which-batteries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_strait
https://www.givemeastoria.com/2020/09/17/a-treasure-under-hell-gate/
https://blogcritics.org/new-york-citys-hell-gate-bridges/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Hussar_(1763)
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/26/nyregion/in-east-river-a-gold-frigate-and-high-hopes.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/29/weekinreview/the-region-raise-the-hms-hussar.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/09/nyregion/follow-up-on-the-news-about-that-gold-in-the-east-river.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/nyregion/finding-trash-and-worse-but-so-far-no-ship-with-treasure.html
http://www.simonlake.com/html/explorer.html
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1934/10/13/hussar
http://www.simonlake.com/html/explorer.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Lake
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/nyregion/ny-harbor-wood-eating-shipworms.html
https://nypost.com/2004/04/19/worm-warfare-borer-destroying-our-waterfronts/
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/07/nyregion/diver-to-explore-east-river-wreck-for-treasure.html
https://mysteriouswritings.com/the-mystery-and-lost-treasure-of-the-h-m-s-hussar/
https://numa.net/2019/08/is-hms-hussars-treasure-in-a-landfill/
http://www.bronxmall.com/cult/film/page4.html
http://thesimonlakestory.com/
https://njscuba.net/sites/site_treasure.php

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The General Slocum Disaster, Hell Gate, New York City

The General Slocum Disaster: On a summer afternoon in 1904, the General Slocum, a supposedly unsinkable ship carrying about 1,300 people bound for a picnic, caught fire and sank in New York City’s notorious Hell Gate.

The General Slocum disaster was the second-worst maritime disaster in US history and the greatest loss of life in NYC before 9/11. But it’s been largely forgotten. When a church group and their neighbors went on an ill-fated day trip to Long Island, they encountered a disaster of unfathomable proportions, bolstered by greed, incompetence, and cowardice. And they would pay for other people’s mistakes with their own lives.

Over 1,000 people, mostly women and children, died that day, decimating the population of Manhattan’s Little Germany and devastating family members who’d been left behind. While this is an upsetting story, it’s an important one when looking at the Hell Gate’s history, as well as stories of the paranormal in the area.

Note: This episode contains stories about many people–including children–drowning and dying in a fire.

Highlights include:
• Drunk anarchists from Paterson, NJ
• What happened to NYC’s lost neighborhood of Little Germany
• An unsinkable ship that sank 8 years before the Titanic
• Heroic rescue efforts by tugboat captains and hospital employees and patients
• Guilty parties getting away with, if not murder, then manslaughter
• A possibly cursed ship

Episode Script for The General Slocum Disaster, Hell Gate, New York City

“It is absolutely impossible . . . to describe the horrible scene on the Slocum. The flames spread so rapidly and it seemed only a second before the whole craft was ablaze from end to end.” -an eyewitness quote printed in the New York Times, June 16, 1904
Next week, I want to talk about hauntings that have been reported in the Hell Gate area, but this week, I want to talk about one of the tragedies that inspired much of the talk of hauntings, bc it was so horrific. This is pretty upsetting, and includes stories about people drowning and dying in fires, and it also includes stories about children dying. So if any of that is something you don’t want to listen to, you can skip this episode and join me next week for the episode about the Hell Gate bridge and urban legends about the area.
- In 1904, there was an accident that happened at Hell Gate, and it was the greatest loss of human life in a NYC disaster until 9/11. It was also the second-worst maritime disaster to happen in the US. This is a pretty upsetting story, so if you’re sensitive to this kind of thing, particularly stories about people drowning and children being hurt, maybe skip it.
- The accident happened onboard the PS Genera Slocum, a passenger steamboat that had been built in Brooklyn in 1891. She was one of those boats with a sidewheel, and was 235 feet long, 37.5 feet long, and was built from white oak and yellow pine. It had a capacity of 3,000 passengers.
- She had three decks, three watertight compartments, and 250 electric lights.
  - She was said to be unsinkable, because of the watertight compartments.
- The General Slocum had issues from the beginning.
- Just 4 months after being launched, in 1891, she ran aground in the Rockaways and had to be pulled out by tugboats.
- On July 29 1894, she was returning from the Rockaways carrying 4,700 passengers and hit a sandbar with so much force that the electrical generator went out. That means that all the lights went out. Hundreds of people were injured in the chaos.
- Then in August 1894, the General Slocum ran aground off Coney Island during a storm. And it sounds like during the storm, they had to transfer the passengers to a different ship to be brought away.
- The next month, in September 1894, the General Slocum hit a tugboat in the East River, which damaged the General Slocum’s steering.
- In July 1898, the General Slocum collided with a ship called the Amelia, near lower Manhattan.
- My favorite anecdote is in August 17, 1901, the General Slocum was carrying 900 drunk anarchists from Paterson, NJ, when the anarchists “started a riot” on board and tried to take over the ship. The crew fought back and didn’t let them, and when they came back to shore, the police arrested 17 of the men.
- Then, in 1902, the General Slocum ran aground again, with 400 people onboard. They couldn’t get the ship out, forcing the passengers to spend the night on the ship.
- So the General Slocum had a very bad record already, when on Wednesday, June 15, 1904, St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, which was located in Little Germany in Manhattan, hired it to take them on an excursion for $350.
  - One sidenote: I’d never heard of Little Germany, because it doesn’t exist anymore, in part because a lot of people who lived there were on board the Slocum with the church group this day. But it had been a neighborhood in the Lower East Side and East Village.
- It was tradition for the church group to go on a trip like this every year, and they’d done it for 17 consecutive years.
- Over 1,400 people, mostly women and children, got onto the General Slocum, looking forward to the picnic they were going to have on Long Island. Someone told the NYT that the ratio of women to men on board had been 12:1, so it really was predominantly women.
- The ship left at 9:30 am. The plan was for the boat to take them up the East River, then over to the Long Island Sound to a place called Eatons Neck, Long Island, where there was a picnic site.
- It made it up much of the East River, but after it passed Roosevelt Island and passed under where the RFK bridge is today, a discarded cigarette–or maybe a match–started a fire started in the ship’s Lamp Room. Unfortunately, the room was full of straw, oily rags, and lamp oil, which fed the fire. Some eyewitnesses said that the fire actual started at a paint locker which was full of flammable liquides, or a cabin full of gasoline. Either way, there were a bunch of flammable things on this wooden boat.
- Around 10 am, people noticed the fire.
- A 12-year-old boy tried to warn the captain, but the captain didn’t believe him. It was 10 minutes before the captain was officially notified.
- So, let’s pause here. This ship’s had a bunch of problems throughout its life, and the whole time, it’s been owned by the same company. Now, if you owned a boat that tended to have disasters happen to it, you’d think that you’d really make sure your safety protocols were all buttoned up.
- However, my guess is that the owners’ negligence may have been responsible for some of the ship’s earlier issues, based on what happened here. Though the captain deserves a healthy amount of blame here as well.
  - The captain had a couple options here.
  - He could have run the ship aground, or stopped at a nearby landing.
    - From studying nautical maps of the Hell Gate, I can confirm that there were tons of docks they could have gone to: they were close to Manhattan, but also Blackwell’s Island, which had several docks, and Hallets Point and Hallet’s Cove, which had docks.
    - According to a NYT article from the days after the disaster, the ship was only 300 feet from the shore of Manhattan when the fire started
    - The captain said that tried to go to a pier at 134th street, but a tugboat captain told he he shouldn’t because there was lumber and oil tanks stored there.
    - Some people say that he didn’t do it because of insurance reasons.
    - Still others say that the captain was afraid the steering gear would break down because of the currents.
    - There are stories of people who stood on shore watching the ship burn, wondering why the captain didn’t just steer the ship to shore.
  - So instead he just kept going, straight into headwinds that fanned the flames.
    - Between the wind and the ship’s flammable paint, the fire got out of control quickly.
    - It sounds like he was aiming for North Brother Island, which was a mile away from where the ship caught fire.
- But that might have been less of a disaster, if the owners had maintained or replaced the safety equipment at all.
  - When the crew tried to use the fire hose, they found it had rotted through.
  - When they tried to get the lifeboats down, they found they were tied up out of reach, and they couldn’t get them down. Some people said that they had been painted and wired in place.
  - The crew had never been made to do a fire drill.
    - Apparently they didn’t even warn passengers about the fire or tell them what to do, so people panicked. The crew was supposedly in such a rush to abandon ship that they pushed passengers out of the way in their haste to get out.
    - The crew reportered that the fire was “a blaze that could not be conquered” and fighting it was “like trying to put out hell itself.”
  - One important thing to remember is that at the time, most Americans didn’t know how to swim, including most of the passengers on the General Slocum.
  - Many of the life preservers were kept up high, where many of the women and children couldn’t reach them. The people who got their hands on them found that they were worthless; they fell apart in their hands.
  - It’s been alleged that the company that manufactured the life preservers had filled them with granulated cork, which was cheaper but less effective than actual solid cork.
    - Also, to meet the weight requirements for life preservers, they’d added iron weights to the preservers.
    - Also, the life vests had hung above deck, in the elements, for 13 years, and the canvas covers had rotted through, so when they tried to use them, the powdered cork scattered everywhere.
  - This part is really upsetting, but mothers found life vests and put them on their children, then threw them in the water to save them from the fire. But the life vests didn’t work, and they had to watch their children drown.
  - Also at the time people tended to wear heavy wool clothing, which when it got wet, became really heavy and weighed people down. Especially if you’re a woman wearing all those layers of clothes.
  - So, many people drowned when they jumped out of the boat to escape the fire.
    - But the people who didn’t jump didn’t fare better: the floors of the boat collapsed, killing more people.
    - Many of the people who survived that ended up in the water with the paddles, which were still turning, and which killed even more people.
  - The captain was able to ground the ship about 25 feet from the shore of North Brother Island. He was the last person off the ship.
  - North Brother Island, a very creepy and interesting island that I want to talk more about later. But the thing to know about North Brother Island is that it had some hospitals on it, so both staff and patients came out to help save people, forming human chains to get people out of the water.
    - Apparently the patients in the contagious wards of the hospital on North Brother Island flipped out because they had to watch the disaster from their windows but couldn’t help. It took 50 doctors and nurses to restrain them, and they were locked up.
    - According to the City Health Commissioner, who was visiting the island, “Along the beach the boats were carrying in the living and dying and towing in the dead.”
    - There were tons of examples of people trying to help: for example, one tugboat captain came up to the General Slocum and was able to save 100 people.
    - Of course, there was also the story of the captain of a huge white motorized yacht who watched the disaster through binoculars without trying to help.
  - The captain and several crew members left the General Slocum as it settled. Apparently they were able to jump onto a nearby tugboat and were hospitalized. Though the captain said that he stayed with the boat as long as he could have, and that his cap even caught fire, though naturally he would say that.
  - The casualties were steep:
    - These numbers are a bit lower than some numbers I’ve seen elesewhere, but according to the Coast Guard, there had been 1,358 passengers and 30 crew on board.
    - 613 passengers were adults (mostly women), and 745 were children.
    - All told, 893 passengers and two crew members were confirmed as dying. (Though the final death count was set at 1,021, though there hadn’t been a ship’s manifest so they couldn’t be sure. The Brooklyn Eagle reporter 1,204 people as dead or missing.)
    - 62 passengers were missing or unidentified.
    - 175 passengers were injured, and 5 crew members were injured.
    - Only 228 passengers escaped without injury, though 23 of the 30 crew members were uninjured.
    - The captain lost sight in one eye because of the fire, and he stayed on the ship until his feet blistered from the heat.
  - After the disaster, a federal grand jury indicted eight people: the captain, two inspectors, and some employees of the Knickerbocker Steamship Company, who owned the ship.
    - The captain was the only person who was convicted: he was found guilty of criminal negligence, though the jury didn’t find him guilty of the two charges of manslaughter that’d been leveled against him. He was sentenced to a 10 year prison sentence, and spent 3 and a half years at Sing Sing before being paroled.
      - A lot of accounts of the accident put the blame on the captain, but it looks to me like he was maybe just a scapegoat.
    - His wife tried to get a presidential pardon for him. Teddy Roosevelt, who was president, declined to pardon him, though Taft ended up pardoning him in 1912.
    - The Knickerbocker Steamship Company paid a small fine, even though there was evidence that they’d falsified inspection records.
    - The manufacturers of the life preservers were indicted, but not convicted.
    - Also, the ship had passed inspection, supposedly just a few weeks before.
    - So this, like most other tragedies, is about how greed and cowardice hurts innocent people but the real villains are rarely punished.
  - The remains of the General Slocum were salvaged and turned into a barge, which sank while carrying a cargo of coal in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of NJ during a storm in 1911. Four people were on board, and they all survived.
  - Like I mentioned earlier, this was devestating for the German community in NYC, but there had also been members of the Jewish and Italian communities on board. It sounds like a lot of people from the neighborhood went, even if they weren’t members of the church.
    - It seems that the remains of the Germany community moved up to Yorkville in the Upper East Side, and Astoria in Queens. Which is really grim, since those are two locations on the water looking out toward where the General Slocum disaster happened.
- So anytime you’re talking about hauntings in Hell Gate, you have to keep in mind that there was massive loss of life there, some of which was young, innocent people who died because of human greed.
  - If you google it, you can see pictures of bodies being washed up on shore after the General Slocum disaster. Many bodies were swept onto North Brother Island, as well as onto the shores all around there.
  - Officials and rescue parties tried to collect the bodies, though the shores were swarmed with souvenir hunters and people looking to take jewelry off the corpses.
  - Divers brought up bodies that had sunk with the ship.
  - Crowds of mourners lined the shore, and supposedly many grieving family members had to be stopped from throwing themselves into the river.

Sources consulted RE: The General Slocum Disaster

Websites consulted RE: The General Slocum Disaster

https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/tag/east-river-shipwrecks/
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/south-carolina/haunted-oakwood-cemetery-sc/
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/kentucky/kasey-cemetery-ky/
https://www.haunted-places-to-go.com/haunted-huntsville.html
https://www.insider.com/urban-legends-us-2018-1#alabama-hells-gate-bridge-1
http://theghostdiaries.com/places-around-the-world-known-as-the-gates-of-hell/
https://gothamist.com/news/the-strange-history-of-nycs-mighty-hell-gate
https://www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-german-saboteurs-invade-america-in-1942.htm
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/earth-without-people
https://www.timeout.com/newyork/attractions/hell-gate-bridge
https://boroughsofthedead.com/hell-gate-bridge-a-great-survivor/
https://www.stonehengenyc.com/blog/haunted-new-york
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_General_Slocum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Evangelical_Lutheran_Church_of_St._Mark
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Germany,_Manhattan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Germany,_Manhattan
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/06/13/great-slocum-disaster-june-15-1904
https://antiquephotographics.com/the-general-slocum-disaster-ny-harbor-1904/
https://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/2014/06/14/the-1904-general-slocum-disaster-had-survivors-that-lived-into-the-21st-century/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-spectacle-of-horror-the-burning-of-the-general-slocum-104712974/
http://behindthescenes.nyhistory.org/general-slocum-disaster-photos/
https://history.wikia.org/wiki/List_of_General_Slocum_victims
https://www.garemaritime.com/the-general-slocum/
https://thehauntedjournal.wordpress.com/2018/04/20/hell-gate-bridge/
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/earth-without-people
https://www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-german-saboteurs-invade-america-in-1942.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate_Bridge
https://ltvsquad.com/2005/05/13/hell-gate-bridge/

Articles RE: The General Slocum Disaster

TALES OF HORROR TOLD BY SURVIVORS: Eye-Witness Stories of Swift and Awful Panic. FAMILY PARTIES WIPED OUT Mrny Brave Deeds on Board the Doomed Steamboat Amid Scenes of Wild Panic. New York Times (1857-1922); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]16 June 1904: 2.
GRIEF-CRAZED CROWDS VIEW LINES OF DEAD: Scores Prevented from Throwing Themselves Into River. BOAT LOADS OF BODIES Immense Crowds Weeping and Struggling Seek to Identify Them. MANY PATHETIC INCIDENTS Measures Taken by Officials to Safeguard Interest of Relatives — Over $200,000 in Valuables Found on the Victims. New York Times (1857-1922); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]16 June 1904: 1.
1,000 LIVES MAY BE LOST IN BURNING OF THE EXCURSION BOAT GEN. SLOCUM: St. Mark’s Church Excursion Ends in Disaster in East River Close to Land and Safety. 693 BODIES FOUND — HUNDREDS MISSING OR INJURED Flames Following Explosion Drive Scores to Death in the Water. FIERCE STRUGGLES FOR ROTTEN LIFE PRESERVERS The Captain, Instead of Making for the Nearest Landing, Runs the Doomed Vessel Ashore on North Brother Island in Deep Water — Many Thrilling Rescues — Few Men on Board to Stem the Panic of Women and Children.
New York Times (1857-1922); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]16 June 1904: 1.

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The Haunted Hell Gate, New York City

Paranormal stories about New York City’s Hell Gate abound, from stories about a serial killer living inside the Hell Gate Bridge, to a tale of an encounter with the devil and a possible EVP that Chris just found in a recording from April.

Many of the stories of the Hell Gate center around the grand Hell Gate Bridge, so this episode dives into the bridge’s history, as well as accounts of people sneaking up onto the bridge and exploring it. The episode closes out with a recording that Chris did on the shore alongside the Hell Gate back in April 2020, which Chris thought was just a normal recording, but which maybe actually contains a couple somewhat terrifying EVPs? (Listen to the end for that.)

Highlights include:
• The best place to hide from zombies in NYC
• Other Hell Gates
• The Nazi plot to destroy the Hell Gate bridge
• A funny flaw in the Hell Gate’s paint job

Note: This episode includes brief mentions of suicide.

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Pictures of the Hell Gate Bridge

The Hell Gate Bridge, April 2020

Beneath the Hell Gate Bridge, April 2020

The Hell Gate Bridge, April 2020

The Triboro Bridge (left) and Hell Gate Bridge (right)

The underside of the Hell Gate Bridge, with its red lights, April 2020

The Triboro Bridge with the Hell Gate bridge behind it, April 2020

The Hell Gate Bridge seen from Astoria Park, April 2020

Plaque commemorating the General Slocum Disaster, April 2020

Triboro Bridge seen from near the Hell Gate Bridge, April 2020

The bottom of the Hell Gate bridge, November 2020

Hell Gate mural beneath the Hell Gate bridge in Astoria Park, November 2020

The Hell Gate, with the RFK and Hell Gate Bridge in the distance, November 2020

The Hell Gate and Hell Gate Bridge seen from Astoria Park, November 2020

Episode Script for The Haunted Hell Gate, New York City

“At first he thought that he might be dreaming, for Hell Gate was a place of such repute that one might readily have bad dreams there, and the legends of the spot passed quickly through his mind: the skeletons that lived in the wreck . . . and looked out at passing ships with blue lights in the eye-sockets of their skulls” -Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land by Charles M. Skinner (1896)

Sidenote, while I was googling stuff like “hell gate haunted” and “hell gate ghosts,” a bunch of other hell gates came up, including haunted houses, but also a few other interesting spots:
- One is a cemetery in south Carolina called Oakwood Cemetery that’s been nicknamed Hells Gate. It began as a potters field for prisoners who were then relocated, leading to reports of paranormal activity. But then also in 2012, a caretaker found that someone had broken into a concrete vault and pried open a casket, stealing the head of a corpse. Then, a month later, the robbers dumped the head back into the cemetery (without returning it to the casket.)
- There’s also a cemetery in Kentucky called Kasey Cemetery, which has been nicknamed The Gates of Hell, which has the run-of-the-mill haunting stories.
- There’s also a ghost town called Huntsville, in Alabama, which has a that has a huge mansion with a creepy, heavy black gate that people have dubbed “Hell’s Gate,” and which sits at the base of mountain. Supposedly if you drive up to it, a phantom car chases you off and then disappears. But if you get beyond the gate, you reach an area called “Owens Cross Roads” which apparently is very spooky, and you’ll hear screams and people running around you, etc.
- There’s also a Hell Gate bridge in Alabama, where a young couple supposedly ran their car off the side and drowned, and there’re stories about the couple materializing in your car, or of seeing a portal to hell full of flames, if you drive across it. The bridge is now is closed to cars and in a state of disrepair.
Well, another Hell Gate Bridge that’s closed to cars is our own Hell Gate Bridge right here in NYC. It’s a railroad bridge that was completed in 1916.
- It was a big deal when in 1917, a Pennsylvania Railroad train went over the bridge, carrying passengers from Washington to Boston, because that was the first time there’s been uninterrupted train travel between the cities.
- Construction of the bridge was very dangerous, especially since the bridge is over 1,000 feet high, but no one died during the project.
- The bridge is extremely sturdy. Around 2017, one Astoria resident, who’d been inside the bottom part of the stone pier, told the New York Times that if zombies ever attack NYC, he’s going to the Hell Gate. To quote him: “It looks like an old castle. There’s a room that is seven, eight stories high…. And the view is fantastic.”
  - It’s been said that if humans were wiped out, the other NYC bridges would all crumble within 100-300 years without maintenance, whereas the Hell Gate would last for 1,000 years.
- The bridge is an important part of rail travel in the Northeast Corridor, but during World War II, it was important for transporting weapons too.
  - Because of that, it was a target for the Nazis–they sent in a group of saboteurs via a U-boat that landed on Long Island in the middle of the night on June 13, 1942.
  - Luckily, a member of the coast guard saw them, but he was unarmed so had to just report them to the authorities. A manhunt began, but the group of saboteurs managed to catch the last train to the city and stay in a hotel near Penn Station for the night. However, one of the group’s leaders lost his nerve and turned himself in, and the FBI arrested the rest of the group, who were all electrocuted. The man who turned himself in was sent back to Germany, but since he was a traitor, the Germans wouldn’t allow him in, so he lived on the American side of the Berlin wall for pretty much the rest of his life, and died in 1992, when he was 89.
- Nowadays the bridge is owned by Amtrak, and contains two Amtrak tracks and one freight track.
- The bridge was repainted for the first time in the 1990s. They chose a rich red color, called “Hell gate Red,” but a flaw in the paint caused it to fade to a sort of splotchy pinkish color. The fading started before they were even done repainting.
- There are some additional stories about the Hell Gate that I didn’t get to last week, so let’s get into those.
  - First, I read some stuff that I haven’t been able to confirm, but which is interesting so I’m gonna repeat it: supposedly, there are stories of British soldiers during the revolutionary war tying American prisoners to rocks in the Hell Gate and so that they drowned when the tide rose. Supposedly people hear their cries to this day.
  - There have also definitely been suicides in the Hell Gate area. I’ve walked across the RFK bridge, which is next to the Hell Gate Bridge, and there are tons of signs imploring people not to jump. It’s been years since I’ve been there but I also remember there being a telephone there that you could call for help from?
    - One sidenote, though, is that since COVID started, I’ve noticed some “please don’t kill yourself” signs that have been added to the Queensboro Bridge, which connects Queens and Manhattan and runs over Roosevelt Island. That’s definitely new.
    - But at any rate, anywhere where there’s been a lot of suicides, there’ll be a lot of ghost stories.
  - Supposedly there were also a bunch of mafia body drops around the bridge.
- So let’s get into some of the Hell Gate’s ghost stories, which mostly center around the bridge:
  - In the 1970s, there was an urban legend among teenagers about a dangerous insane man living inside one of the bridge’s towers. People said that he set up a torture chamber in there to torment the children he kidnapped. People would dare each other to climb up the hellgate bridge.
    - One thing that kind of made me think about was the Staten Island urban legend, Cropsey, which has some similarities, so if you’re interested in that type of urban legend, there’s a pretty good documentary about that called Cropsey.
    - One thing that unites both the Hell Gate Bridge legends and Cropsey is that both locations are near insane asylums. When the Hell Gate Bridge was first built, people worried that insane patients from the asylum on Ward’s Island, which the bridge connects to Queens, would escape. The idea was that they’d hide out in the towers and attack residents of Astoria. They even reworked part of the plans for the bridge to make the towers harder to climb. So you can see where the urban legend came from.
  - People say they see orbs and lights near the bridge. The story is that they’re the souls of the many people who’ve died there.
  - Urban explorers have climbed up onto the bridge, which is of course both dangerous and illegal since it’s an active train line.
    - I read one website (https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/) that said that the southern arch of the bridge was built to resemble a triumphal arch, like in Rome
    - They said that you could climb up into the arches and see the city from up top, from 7-8 stories high. They said that the spiral staircase inside the arch is pitch black, has a small iron staircase, and has some large slits like arrowslits in medieval castles. They also said that the air inside the arches is extremely heavy and full of particles, and that there’s tons of dirt all over the floors.
    - I wanted to read a bit of this urban explorer’s account:
      - On our way down we happened to catch sight of a light further below in the tower. Climbing down further we discovered that the tower itself was hollow and inside were four great halls, 7 stories tall each. . . . A stairwell led down under the floor to a locked door, one which was familiar to me from my many walks around the outside of the bridge in the day. This was the easy way, the less fun way, the practical way in.
    - I’ll link to the whole account in the shownotes, it’s accompanied by pictures and I really recommend you checking it out.
    - There are also some interesting comments on the post: A commenter named George Hall also had an interesting story about climbing up onto the bridge in the 70s:
      - “Kids used to climb up into the gridwork from the stone base attached to the park and see how far the could or dared to go out over the river. A long rope was somehow involved. The river was much more intimidating then. There were severe whirlpools under the bridge; occasionally smaller recreational craft would get stuck there. “
I also wanted to read a comment by an Alexander P:
- Seeing your beautiful pics of The Hell Gate Bridge brings me back to my youth as a teenager growing up in Astoria in early 80’s.My brother Nick,myself and our friend Perry used to free climb the bridge all the time.We would start at the base of the bridge on the Astoria park side.We would free climb up the
- Angled beams that ran to the railroad tracks on top.We became so proficient at it that we would have contests to see how fast we could make it to the top. Our fastest time was 68 seconds.We would challenge ourselves all the time by using different free climbing technics.We would even free climb in the rain.We used to climb up and go down the beams on the Randills Island side.When I think back on all the adventures we had on thar bridge I’m astounded as to how fearless and athletic we where,and Insanely stupid!!! we had a few near death incidents but that never stopped us.I sometimes now have dreams about climbing the bridge again,and in my dreams I’m terrified.One of my most precious life memories is sitting in the middle of the top arch on a cloudless warm summer day and looking at the breathtaking view.I was master of all I surveyed.
It’s hard to find specific stories of hauntings and ghosts around Hell Gate, even though there are many more vague legends, but I wanted to read this bit from a post on the Newtown Pentacle blog, which is a really cool blog that I recommend checking out:
- Why the Amtrak people have never sprung for a lighting system for the Hell Gate Bridge, I cannot imagine. It’s like owning a luxury car and never washing or polishing it. Might have something to do with not disturbing those battrachian things, that cannot possibly exist, which live on the bottom of the Hell Gate section of the East River. Peter Stuyvesant is rumored to have left behind a message scrawled onto a piece of yellowed parchment, which every Mayor of NYC has received on their first day in office, advising that there are things in NY Harbor which are best left alone. The Lenape knew that it is best not to delve too deep, nor stare too long into the abyssal water hereabouts, lest that which dwells below takes notice.
- Do you honestly believe that the United States Army Corps of Engineers set off the greatest explosion in human history here back in 1885, a detonation whose force was only exceeded after the emergence of the Atomic Bomb, merely to aid navigation? . . .
- There wasn’t much movement in the water, but I was prepared to bolt just in case. I’ve heard tell of an orthodox priest named Kiriglou that would spend his evenings along this stretch of Hells Gate back in the early 1980’s. Rumors and stories, myths and legends, that’s what the native Astorians routinely offer in return for a shot of whisky. Supposedly this Kiriglou fellow would toss some kind of charm, attached to a stout cord, into the water and mutter words described to me as a rough sort of Cretan dialect, one which the teller believed to originate in the rugged Sfakia region of that ancient island. Nobody knew if Kiriglou was associated with one of the wholesome Orthodox churches frequented by the local Hellenic community, or was some sort of heretic or ascetic. What happened to him, and what he was doing with that charm, is just another Astoria story.
I’d never heard this story about Peter Stuyvesant’s note, but I love it. (Peter Stuyvesant was basically the last Dutch governor of NYC back in the 1600s) I’m also not sure how many of the story I just read is made up or a joke, but still, it’s evocative and interesting and I like it.
- The Newtown Pentacle did turn me onto a 1896 book called Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, which had some stories I hadn’t seen elsewhere
- First, it describes Peter Stuyvesant’s encounter with the devil:
  - “Satan appears to have troubled the early settlers in America almost as grievously as he did the German students. He came in many shapes to many people, and sometimes he met his match. Did he not try to stop old Peter Stuyvesant from rowing through Hell Gate one moonlight night, and did not that tough old soldier put something at his shoulder that Satan thought must be his wooden leg? But it wasn’t a leg: it was a gun, loaded with a silver bullet that had been charged home with prayer. Peter fired and the missile whistled off to Ward’s Island, where three boys found it afterward and swapped it for double handfuls of doughnuts and bulls’ eyes. Incidentally it passed between the devil’s ribs and the fiend exploded with a yell and a smell, the latter of sulphur, to Peter’s blended satisfaction and alarm.”
It describes the pirate spook, a person “who used to brattle around the tavern at Corlaer’s Hook, and who tumbled into the East River while trying to lug an iron chest aboard of a suspicious craft that had stolen in to shore in a fog. This . . . Bogy was often seen riding up Hell Gate a-straddle of that very chest, snapping his fingers at the stars and roaring Bacchanalian odes, just as skipper Onderdonk’s boatswain, who had been buried at sea without prayers, chased the ship for days, sitting on the waves, with his shroud for a sail, and shoving hills of water after the vessel with the plash of his hands.”
The most famous haunted story about hell Gate is this: Supposedly, if you hear a train stop on the bridge in the middle of the night, that means it’s letting out the ghosts of the people who drowned in the Hell Gate. Some people say it’s not a real train, but a ghost train.
Y’all know that I’m both very interested in but sceptical of urban legends. I think that vague urban legends are interesting because they hint at what people are anxious about or scared of, but I don’t think they hold much water in terms of likelihood of being real. For me, the more detailed and specific an urban legend or haunting story is, the more likely I am to think there could be something there.
- So let’s talk about trains stopping in the middle of the night. I used to live in a weird part of Queens that was sort of a dead zone between the neighborhoods of Astoria, Woodside, East Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights. And my apartment happened to be smack-dab between two train lines:
  - The Amtrak ran right outside my bedroom window, so close that I had people tell me they saw me sitting at my desk. In fact, when we came back from Salem earlier this year, I was able to see into my old bedroom window and saw that the current tenant still has the ikea curtains I bought back in 2012.
  - Then, on the other side of the apartment, at the front of the house, you could see the highway, which I guess would have been the BQE, and another set of train tracks. This carried the freight train, or as I called it, the “trash train” because it often seemed like the cars were full of trash.
  - So you could go to bed to the sound of the passenger train, and then get up an eat breakfast and watch the trash train go by.
  - For the record, it was a huge, beautiful apartment–it was a 3-br, 2-bath with a dishwasher and balcony and my roommates and I had a whole floor, and our rent was really low.
  - But the reason why I bring this up is I can confirm two things, because since I used to sleep literally right next to the amtrak tracks: first, trains don’t really run late at night. Usually, if noise from the tracks woke me up at night, it was just construction workers fixing up the rails. And second, when trains do run, it wasn’t that unusual for the train to just sit for a while on the tracks. I wasn’t at a stop or anything; I was on basically the straightaway where the trains speed by between the suburbs of the city and the final stop in Manhattan. But it really was common for me to look out the window and just see a train full of passengers waiting on the tracks, I assume because of train traffic or delays at Penn Station. So I assume the same thing may happen on the Hell Gate Bridge when there’s traffic down the line.
  - So while I think the idea of the train stopping to let ghosts out on the bridge is very capital-R Romantic, I can say that it’s not strange at all that trains might stop on the bridge for a while. Though it is true that it’s not super common for trains to run late at night.
- And finally, I will say that I’ve been to Astoria Park alone at night and it’s definitely creepy. I ventured there during the early days of the pandemic, on a rainy Friday night in April maybe, and it was pretty much empty and it was super creepy.
  - I actually did a recording of that trip to the part, so I’ll play us out on that audio–I’ll play three clips from that night where you can hear me getting really freaked out on the recording, after talking about some of the disasters that happened there, and then one where you can hear the waves, and one where you can hear the waves breaking on a beach of broken glass (put in audio for that)

Sources consulted RE: The Haunted Hell Gate

For more sources consulted, check out The General Slocum Disaster, Hell Gate, New York City.

Websites consulted RE: The Haunted Hell Gate

https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/2010/06/inside-the-hell-gate-bridge/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2009/11/hells-arches-concrete-supports-of-the-hell-gate-bridge-approach/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2010/05/02/hungry-ghosts/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2020/03/03/starved-monsters/
https://newtownpentacle.com/tag/hell-gate-bridge/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2016/07/11/half-smile/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2016/06/24/vacant-box/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2010/06/05/from-hells-gate-loosed-upon-the-world/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2010/11/30/shocking-coruscations/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2009/06/05/the-river-of-sound/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2009/09/23/the-bright-passage/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2016/09/30/civic-spirit/
http://wirednewyork.com/bridges/hell_gate_bridge/
https://www.qchron.com/qboro/stories/you-ain-t-afraid-of-no-ghost-we-ll-see-about-that/article_010ee09d-001f-5505-a643-147da790ecbf.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Stuyvesant
https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/tag/east-river-shipwrecks/
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/south-carolina/haunted-oakwood-cemetery-sc/
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/kentucky/kasey-cemetery-ky/
https://www.haunted-places-to-go.com/haunted-huntsville.html
https://www.insider.com/urban-legends-us-2018-1#alabama-hells-gate-bridge-1
http://theghostdiaries.com/places-around-the-world-known-as-the-gates-of-hell/
https://gothamist.com/news/the-strange-history-of-nycs-mighty-hell-gate
https://www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-german-saboteurs-invade-america-in-1942.htm
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/earth-without-people
https://www.timeout.com/newyork/attractions/hell-gate-bridge
https://boroughsofthedead.com/hell-gate-bridge-a-great-survivor/
https://thehauntedjournal.wordpress.com/2018/04/20/hell-gate-bridge/
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/earth-without-people
https://www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-german-saboteurs-invade-america-in-1942.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate_Bridge
https://ltvsquad.com/2005/05/13/hell-gate-bridge/

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Haunted Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel, NYC

A look at two of NYC’s oldest and most haunted churches: Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel, two famous houses of worship in Manhattan’s Financial District with cemeteries tucked into their churchyards.

Highlights include:
• Disinterring corpses to free up space in the cemetery
• A body (and ghost?) with a missing head
• Edgar Allen Poe’s possible cemetery cottage
• 2:30 am church services
• A child’s Egyptian-style sarcophagus found during a playground’s construction
• A look at some of the forgotten evils that happened in Manhattan

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Pictures of Haunted Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel

Ruins of Trinity Church from Etchings of Old New York, Illustrations from “Old New York: from the Battery to Bloomingdale” by Eliza Greatorex and M. Despard (1875)

Trinity Church from Walks in Our Churchyards: Old New York, Trinity Parish By John Flavel Mines · 1896

St. John’s burying ground, from the New York Public Library’s collections

St. John’s burial ground from the New York Public Library’s collections

View of the churchyard of St. Paul’s Chapel from Etchings of Old New York, Illustrations from “Old New York: from the Battery to Bloomingdale” by Eliza Greatorex and M. Despard (1875)

St. Paul’s Chapel from Etchings of Old New York, Illustrations from “Old New York: from the Battery to Bloomingdale” by Eliza Greatorex and M. Despard (1875)

St. Paul’s seen from the south side; from Etchings of Old New York, Illustrations from “Old New York: from the Battery to Bloomingdale” by Eliza Greatorex and M. Despard (1875)

Episode Script for Haunted Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel, NYC

“The dead have company here. The feet of the living pass up and down the street hard by, and among these footfalls are those of descendants of the quiet ones. . . They are sleeping, too, in the shadows of the homes in which they lived and were happy.” -Walks in Our Churchyards: Old New York, Trinity Parish By John Flavel Mines · 1896

As you may have guessed from the cold open, we’re talking haunted churches! We’ll be looking at two churches that are located in Manhattan’s Financial District: Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel. They’re both big tourist destinations near the World Trade Center, so if you’ve been to NYC as a tourist, you’ve almost certainly seen them.
The book I read from for the cold open is all about the churchyards of Trinity church, which held over 100,000 bodies. I really love that quote because it reframes the world basically from a ghost’s point of view, describing what the world must be like to one of the dead in the churchyards of a bustling city.

Trinity Church

Trinity Church stands pretty close to Wall Street, on Broadway, in the Financial District. When it was first built, it was on the banks of the Hudson River, but landfill has extended the Island out by a lot, so it’s sort of in the middle of that part of FiDi now.
Trinity Church was first built in 1698, though the current Gothic Revival structure dates from the 1830s.
120,000 bodies have been buried in Trinity Church’s small graveyard
Alexander Hamilton, one of my more hated historical figures, is buried in the churchyard there.
There’s a great quote from Andrea Janes, who founded a spooky tour company in NYC called Boroughs of the Dead, from a Business Insider article, that I wanted to read. She’s talking about how in 1822, the church’s sexton was so desperate to find space to bury more bodies that he would “go around with a spade, testing the earth and see where it was soft, where the coffins and corpses had become decrepit enough that you could dig right into them, and take the bones into the charnel house, and bury somebody new.”
Some bodies were buried just 18 inches below the surface.
The smell was so bad they had to lay lime down to combat the stench.
By 1842, they were really-really out of space, so they bought some land in upper Manhattan from ornithologist John James Audubon and started burying people up there.
As a sidenote: If you check out the episodes I did about Calvary Cemetery, I talk a bit about how space had become a big problem in Manhattan churchyards, which led to the Rural Cemetery Act, so check out those episodes for more on that.
Trinity also had a third cemetery in the Village, called St. John’s Cemetery, where 10,000 mostly poor and young people were buried between 1806-1852. Most people weren’t able to afford a tombstone: there were only about 800 monuments in the cemetery.
- The best-known person buried there was Aaron Burr’s first wife, Theodosia Bartow Burr.
- Though there was also a sex worker named Helen Jewett, who was famously murdered in 1836, which became a media sensation. She was buried at St. John’s Cemetery, but four nights later, medical students stole and dissected her body.
- The land was converted to a park in 1897, to much Trinity Church’s dismay. They moved 250 bodies and left the other 9,750 bodies there. The tombstones were buried in place; they just left one small memorial to some fallen firemen.
- In an 1899 NY Tribune article, it was reported that all of the bones found when digging the park’s “lake” were reinterred beneath a large stone kiosk, which is where the bathrooms and bandstand are.
- Then, when they later filled the lake, some of the old tombstones were used as fill.
- It is now James J. Walker Park.
- Back in 1939, during constriction on a playground renovation, they found a child-sized cast-iron coffin in an underground vault.
  - The coffin was an Egyptian style sarcophagus.

The New York World-Telegram said “The girl’s cast iron casket…had a glass window in the top. Her white silk dress still looked fresh and dainty. After 89 years, you could still see that she’d been a pretty yellow haired child.”

This was the body of Mary Elizabeth Tisdall, 6 years and 8 months old, died April 14, 1850. She died of brain congestion, and had lived with her family on East 9th Street, near Astor Place, in a house that no longer exists. Her father was a coal merchant from Bristol, as well as a prominent Mason. He was a grandmaster of St. John’s Lodge and he wrote a famous Masonic poem. Mary’s brother outlived her, going on to become a Greek professor at City College.
Today, Mary’s body lies in the catacombs beneath Trinity Church.
One weird sidenote: There’s an old map that shows the burial ground as it was in 1854, and there’s a little house on the burial ground, where there’s a handwritten note that says “E.A Poe 113 1/2”
- So it seems possible that Edgar Allen Poe lived in a cemetery in Manhattan for a while, maybe in the 1830s
- Elsewhere, though, it’s said that Poe lived on nearby Carmine Street and just liked walking in the cemetery.
There’s a 2014 blog post by Jeremy Sierra on Trinity Church’s website, where he details his coworkers’ experiences with ghosts in their offices at 74 trinity place, which is right behind Trinity Church. To read a bit of that:
- “I’d heard about hauntings at 74 Trinity Place, where our offices were located until our move in September. . . .
- Rita tells me that she saw a ghost on the fourth floor several times. It was almost a shadow, wearing what appeared to be 19th century clothing, including a hat with a big brim, she said.
- She first time saw it in the storage room where they keep boxes of artwork from a 9/11 exhibit. Later, she found it peering into her office. “I’m not scared of them,” she said of the ghosts.
- Two other staff members, Luke and Casey, describe a similar ghost on the 10th floor, which was used mostly storage, while doing an inventory. It briefly peeked its big-brimmed hat and head around the corner. They both felt chills. . . .
- Strangely, though there are many thousands of people buried in the Trinity churchyard, there are few ghost stories in the Trinity archives. Anne, the archivist, can only tell me about 17th century medical students from Columbia University, who robbed the Trinity graveyard for bodies to use in their education. . . . She does mention the time someone standing at her desk suddenly told her he saw an old man appear behind her.
- Leah recounts a day in the archives years ago, when several boxes of notecards apparently threw themselves off a shelf. You can see the resulting mess in the photo below (she thinks it’s the ghost of Morgan Dix, former rector of Trinity. Those are indexes of his books).”
The blog post also reports that the Rev. Mark Bozzuti-Jones has blessed some offices that people said were haunted.
The book Haunted Manhattan reports that phantom laughter has been heard near the tombstone of one Adam Allyn, a comedian who died in 1768
There’s also the story of Robert Fulton, an inventor who designed the first steam-powered warship among other inventions. He was buried at the Trinity churchyard, and has been seen wandering around with a model of his steamboat, the Clermont.
- He started appearing when most ferries stopped running after WWII, though as ferry service has increased in NYC recently, he supposedly appears less often
Since Alexander Hamilton is buried at Trinity Church, he’s been seen at nearby City Hall Park dressed in revolutionary war uniform.
- He’s also been spotted near his grave
Captain Kidd, the famous privateer, is also said to haunt Trinity Church. Back in the 1690s, he provided a winch to raise the stones to for the church steeple
- Though he was a privateer–which is basically a pirate with permission from the government–he was scapegoated for piracy and hanged in London in 1701. He wasn’t even allowed to defend himself.
- Though he died in London, he supposedly wished to be buried at Trinity Church, so the story is that he still walks around the churchyard

St. Paul’s Chapel

If you go a few blocks north on Broadway, you’ll arrive at St. Paul’s Chapel.
Located in the Financial District near City Hall Park, this chapel used to be part of my daily landscape. Back when I still worked in an office, my wife Amy and I would go for a few-mile-long walk every morning before work, and we always passed by St. Paul’s Chapel.
I rarely took lunch breaks, but when I did, I usually visited the cemetery, which is in the churchyard behind St. Paul’s Chapel, and is full of many worn-down monuments and is a peaceful little spot to walk through, even though it’s next to the Oculus, a major transportation hub, and the World Trade Center.
St. Paul’s Chapel is famous because of its proximity to the WTC.
- Building 5 of the WTC was right across the street from St. Paul’s, and the towers were a block away.
- Though St. Paul’s churchyard ended up with a lot of debris and some broken tombstones during the attach, the chapel was totally fine.
- For months after the disaster, it was a relief center for recovery workers and a sort of shrine memorializing the dead.
- In 2003, the churchyard was restored: the headstones had to be vacuumed and washed, because corrosive particles had gotten into their surfaces because of the dust storm from the towers’ collapse. There were also two inches of ash-filled topsoil that they got rid of and replaced with sod
But I mention all of this mostly because that’s what it’s known for now. But its history goes way back.
I wanted to read a bit more from Walks in Our Churchyards, became the author really eloquently describes what I felt when I’d go down to the cemetery on my lunch breaks:
- They who sleep beneath are not the dead, but the living. We know about them; have read of their faults and their virtues . . . We are the dreamers and they are the folk of action. You shall be passing any night when the moon is shining on these grasses and look through the iron rails that keep out a disturbing world, and every stone shall cry out to you from its sculpturings and make you long to know the story of the ashes that was once a man or woman of your world, and then you shall turn away and gaze upon the painted names of men that gleam from the walls of buildings across the way and that eagerly announce their business to the world, and you shall feel no such throb of sympathy nor sense of weird comradeship as when your face was set towards the dead. Did I not say that we are the dreamers?
I just love how goth people were in the 19th century.
St. Paul’s Chapel the oldest standing church in NYC, in part because when the British captured NYC during the Revolutionary war, they burnt down a quarter of the city in the Great New York City Fire of 1776, including Trinity Church.
When the church was completed in 1766, it was the tallest building in the city.
St. Paul’s Chapel is a late Georgian Style church.
After George Washington was inaugurated as president in 1789, he prayed at St. Paul’s, and he attended St. Paul’s until Philly became the capitol of the US in 1790. So there’s a pew set aside for him there.
St. Paul’s has other revolutionary war ties. There’s a big monument to Major General Richard Montgomery, who fought in the Revolutionary war and was killed during an assault on Montreal in 1775. The monument was built in 1776. In 1818, his body was disinterred from where it’d been buried, in Quebec, and brought to St. Paul’s Church to be buried beneath the chapel’s east porch.
The churchyard behind the church, on the west side, has 800 gravestones, and there are 30 vaults beneath the churchyard and the chapel.
People stopped being buried there in the 19th century when it became illegal to bury people in lower Manhattan, though some people were still buried in family vaults up until the early 20th century.
A few other interesting things about the chapel:
On and off from around 1904-1918, St. Paul’s had a 2:30 AM service every Sunday.
- Many of the city’s newspapers and print shops were nearby, as well as the post office and telegraph companies, where people worked 24/7. And their work was lit by the light bulb, since the neighborhood had gotten electricity in 1882.
- There were about 5,000 nigh workers in the area, and 2,000 of them were Protestant. The nearby Catholic church had late-night mass which many Protestants ended up going to because there was no other option, so a vicar named Montague Geer decided that there should be a protestant option for middle-of-the-night services.
- Usually around 70-100 people attended
- In 1911, St. Paul’s got an electric sign on the broadway side which they turned on at 10 pm Saturday nights and had on till 3:30 am on Sundays, to advertise the service
In 1962, during some conservation work on the chapel, they found bones and hundreds of oyster shells beneath the flooring.
- The shells suggested that the area had been a camp for indigenous people (I’d assume the Lenape? Though the report I read didn’t say for sure.)
- The bones were from sheep, cows, and pigs.
- They also found, beneath a pew on the far east side, an old flyer from a Barnum show from 1872. PT Barnum’s Museum was once across the street from the chapel, and he had a traveling show associated with it.
- Then, when they took the casing off the columns that hold up the roof, they found that they were actually huge tree trunks. They’re pine trunks with about a 24″ diameter at the bottom, which had been fashioned into an octagonal shape and then put into stone bases. So they were surprising to discover that.
- Then, as they removed some marble flooring that had been put down in the 19th century, which had fallen into disrepair, they found bits of old glass bottles. And in the south center aisle, beneath the floor, they discovered fragments of two small tombstones. Strangely, both the people mentioned on the tombstones were buried out in the churchyard, so the tombstones presence beneath the chapel floor was a mystery.
So what ghost stories are associated with St. Paul’s?
- The big one is the headless ghost of an actor named George Frederick Cooke. In life, he’d been a successful Shakespearean actor. He’d also been an alcoholic who owed some people a lot of money. He went to America on tour in 1810, where he played Richard III in NY to great acclaim, and then went on to Boston, Providence, Philly, and Baltimore. But when the war of 1812 broke out, he got stuck in the US. He died of cirrhosis while in NY in 1812, and he was buried at St. Paul’s Chapel, initially in the Stranger’s Vault.
  - He was famous, so people were morbidly interested in his corpse, in a very 19th century way.
  - For example, it’s said that his toe or finger was stolen by another actor who sent it to Cooke’s wife in London. Cooke’s wife was horrified and threw it away.
  - When they moved his body from the Stranger’s Vault to a public grave, his head was missing.
  - Now, there’s probably no big mystery here. To pay his outstanding debts, Cooke had left his head to science. (Apparently they paid for that kind of thing back in the day.)
  - So, after he died, he was decapitated.
  - In 1821, Cooke was re-buried with a new memorial paid for by one of his protegees.
  - The story goes that his skull was used as Yorick’s skull during performances of Hamlet at New York’s Park Theater. It’s definitely not unheard of for famous actors’ skulls to be used in Hamlet performances.
  - In 1938, Cooke’s skull was donated to the Thomas Jefferson Medical School Library in Philly.
  - Starting in 1821, when Cooke’s new monument was put up, people began saying that his headless ghost has been seen prowling around the churchyard and in an nearby alley where a theater once stood. Some people say he’s searching for his missing head.
- There have also been reports of George Washington’s ghost appearing to pray at the chapel
Also, this is just an aside, but as usual, it’s a long aside:
- I’ve said this before, but I don’t think you can really talk about hauntings in a location without talking about the location’s history. And so when talking about hauntings in lower Manhattan, we need to look at the history of real, bone-chilling evil done in Manhattan’s Financial District, which has been happening for a long time.
- Wall Street has done a lot of bad things in recent years that are too numerous to go into, but I think everyone knows about. But I want to take a couple minutes to talk about the genocide and human rights abuses that occurred in this area, as well.
  - What a lot of people don’t know or forget is that Wall Street was basically built by the slave trade.
  - Enslaved people literally built the wall that wall street was named after, back in the 1600s.
  - And just a reminder, the Transatlantic slave trade was huge: it’s estimated to have involved 40,000 ships carrying about 80 people per day for 400 years.
  - For two centuries, New York was the capital of American slavery. For pretty much as long as New York–or really, New Amsterdam–existed, there were enslaved people.
  - During the colonial period, 41% of New York’s households owned slaves. For comparison, in Philly, that number was 6%, and in Boston, it was 2%.
  - After Charleston, South Carolina, NYC was the largest slave-owning port city. During the mid-1700s, 1 in 5 New Yorkers were enslaved.
  - In the 18th century, Wall Street was home to a major market that sold enslaved people. Established in 1709, it was a privately owned market where grain, meal, and people were sold. It was called the Meal Market.
  - On Wall Street, there’s a big famous building called Federal Hall–you’ve definitely seen it on TV, it’s all white stone and grand columns.
  - Federal Hall, back when it was the British City Hall, used to have a jail on the top floor and a dungeon in the basement. And in 1741, during a slave rebellion, 100 enslaved people were captured and thrown in the dungeon. They spent an entire summer trapped in the dungeon, and during that time, many of them were killed.
  - Also, I talk about this in more detail during the episode about Potter’s Fields in Manhattan, but there’s also a long-forgotten cemetery where both free and enslaved Black people were buried, just north of City Hall park, a short walk north on Broadway from Trinity Church.
    - That burial ground was totally forgotten until 1991, when a big construction project turned up human remains.
    - But about 20,000 Black people had been buried in Lower Manhattan, and back in the late 1700s, a number of bodies were stolen for medical experiments.
  - Slavery in New York lasted until 1827, when it was finally abolished in the state. Slavery had been outlawed in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania 40 years before.
  - Despite NYC’s ties to slavery, that part of the city’s history has been pretty much written out and forgotten.
- But the dark history of the area around Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel doesn’t stop there, unfortunately. Today, there’s a museum in the Financial District called the National Museum of the American Indian. The museum stands on the location where Fort Amsterdam, the Dutch headquarters on the tip of Manhattan, was in the 1600s.
  - In the 1840s, the director general of New Amsterdam (basically the governor) was a man named Willem Kieft.
  - Kieft was a fail son, as far as I can tell. He had no real experience or qualifications; it seems that the Dutch West India Company appointed him as director because he had family connections.
  - So this fail son came to New Amsterdam, took the helm and decided that he was going to reduce operating costs by demanding tribute payments from the indigenous peoples living in the area.
  - He was told not to do that, by colonists who’d lived in the area for a while, but he ignored them.
  - Tribal leadership said they weren’t going to pay the tribute.
  - So Kieft started pushing for a war, and eventually decided to kill every Algonquin, but especially the women and children.
  - Kieft’s forces killed 120 people, in North Jersey (then known as Pavonia) and the Lower East Side (then known as Corlear’s Hook).
  - This part is very graphic, but a Dutch man named David Pietersz. de Vries wrote in his journal:

“Infants were torn from their mother’s breasts, and hacked to pieces in the presence of their parents, and pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to small boards, were cut, stuck, and pierced, and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone. Some were thrown into the river, and when the fathers and mothers endeavored to save them, the soldiers would not let them come on land but made both parents and children drown”

After the massacre, the heads of the murdered people were put up around Fort Amsterdam as decoration.
During the ensuing war, white colonizers fled to Fort Amsterdam, and Kieft decided to create a buffer area between Fort Amsterdam and the Algonquian-speaking Lenape, in the land that the white people had left.
- That buffer area was about 130 acres of land, centering on where Washington Square Park was today.
- The land was called “Land of the Blacks” or “Free Negro Lots,” and was inhabited by Black people who were considered half-free.
- Half-freedom or partial freedom was a thing in New Amsterdam in the mid-1600s, where some enslaved Black people were allowed to earn wages (also, at the time, it apparently wasn’t uncommon for working class white people to marry half-free Black people.)
- There were about 30 farms in “Land of the Blacks.” And it seems that as the English took over New Amsterdam, the Dutch freed about 40 people who had half-slave status, so the English wouldn’t re-enslave them.
  - I’m not 100% sure, but I think that may have been what happened to some of the inhabitants of “Land of the Blacks.”
  - Though I do think the British ended land-owning rights for Black people.
- What we do know is that the village was destroyed by anti-Black laws after the New York Slave Revolt of 1712.
- Afterwards, there apparently was a neighborhood called Little Africa, in Greenwich Village. In the late 19th century, a lot of the inhabitants of Little Africa were from the south, and had moved up to NY after the civil war ended.
- At its height, more than 14,000 formerly enslaved Black people lived on Minetta Street and Minetta Lane in the Village.
- It sounds like most Black residents left the area by the mid-19th century.
- Little Africa also had the first Black church in the city, Mother Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church.
  - The congregation, which was founded in 1796, still meets today in a neo-Gothic building on 137th Street, in Harlem.
  - The current building opened in 1925, but the congregation met several other places over its hundreds of years of existence, and it was an important part of the abolitionist movement, and was an Underground Railway refuge.
That was a bit of history that I found really interesting and wanted to share, however, to go back to the 1600s:
After the massacre of indigenous peoples and the war that resulted from Kieft’s bloodthirsty and foolish agenda, Kieft was fired in 1647 and replaced with Peter Stuyvesant.
Kieft drowned in a shipwreck on the way back to the Netherlands, and good riddance.
Peter Stuyvesant also wasn’t great, though.
We’ll talk about Stuyvesant in next week’s episode, but he was the last director general of New Amsterdam, and there are a TON of ghost stories about Stuyvesant, one of which I shared in the Ghosts of Hell Gate episode.
Stuyvesant was an awful guy.
He was famous for hating religious freedom. He was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church and had issues with Lutherans, Catholics, and Quakers. But he especially hated Jewish people; he was a famed anti-Semite.
A few things he did included denying Jewish people equal rights, as well as saying a lot of awful things about Jewish people. He tried to get Jewish people, even those with Dutch passports, forcibly deported from the colony, though the Dutch West India Company didn’t let him do that.
He also ordered the public torture of a 23-year-old Quaker preacher, and he passed a law saying that anyone who harbored Quakers would be punished with fines and imprisonment
A lot of stuff in NYC is named after Stuyvesant, including a famous housing development called Stuyvesant Town, a very good high school, Stuyvesant High School, and a neighborhood called Bedford-Stuyvesant. Everyone calls them Stuytown, Stuy High, and Bed-Stuy, so it’s easy to forget that they’re named after him.

Sources consulted RE: Haunted Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel

Books

Real Hauntings by Hans Holzer (1995)
This House is Haunted by Hans Holzer (1997)
Walks in Our Churchyards: Old New York, Trinity Parish By John Flavel Mines · 1896
Ghosts of Manhattan: Legendary Spirits and Notorious Haunts by Philip Ernest Schoenberg · 2009
Etchings of Old New York, Illustrations from “Old New York: from the Battery to Bloomingdale” by Eliza Greatorex and M. Despard (1875)
Relics of Manhattan [electronic resource] : a series of photographs, from pen and ink sketches taken on the spot (1869) by Eliza Greatorex

Websites

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-haunted-history-of-lower-manhattan-2015-10
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wall-streets-slave-peddli_n_1147314
https://www.nps.gov/afbg/learn/historyculture/enslavement.htm
https://peoplesworld.org/article/slavery-in-new-york-uncovering-the-brutal-truth/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade
http://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/history.htm
http://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/about_exhibit.htm
https://www.nps.gov/afbg/learn/historyculture/enslavement.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_New_Netherland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Kieft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kieft%27s_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Amsterdam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Church_(Manhattan)
https://untappedcities.com/2017/06/09/the-top-10-secrets-of-nycs-st-pauls-chapel/?displayall=true
https://didyouknowfacts.com/the-headless-ghost-of-st-pauls-chapel/
https://www.trinitywallstreet.org/blogs/archivists-mailbag/trees-inside-st-pauls-chapel
https://untappedcities.com/2017/06/09/the-top-10-secrets-of-nycs-st-pauls-chapel/?displayall=true
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Paul%27s_Chapel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mark’s_Church_in-the-Bowery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_New_York_(state)#Half-slavery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_the_Blacks_(Manhattan)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_African_Methodist_Episcopal_Zion_Church
Information about Little Africa and the history of Black people in Greenwich Village: https://greenwichvillage.nyc/blog/2020/02/10/look-black-history-village/
https://atlantablackstar.com/2015/06/16/burial-remains-tell-the-story-of-new-yorks-little-africa/
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/nyregion/in-their-footsteps.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquian_peoples
https://untappedcities.com/2015/02/25/today-in-nyc-history-a-1643-massacre-of-the-lenape-almost-dooms-new-amsterdam/
https://www.ncai.org/resources/resolutions/national-american-indian-holocaust-museum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Burial_Ground_National_Monument
https://www.trinitywallstreet.org/blogs/trinity-notes/ghosts-trinity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Church_Cemetery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Walker_Park
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s_Burying_Ground
https://www.trinitywallstreet.org/blogs/archives/mummy-trinity-church
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/74852371/mary-elizabeth-tisdall
https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/tag/mary-elizabeth-tisdall/
https://keithyorkcity.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/st-johns-graveyard-little-leaguers-now-play-ball-above-10000-corpses/
https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/st-johns-cemetery/
https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/2011/06/04/st-marks-in-the-bowery-churchyard-and-cemetery/
https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/st-pauls-chapel-churchyard/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/544841964/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/75469677@N00/4420876543/in/set-72157623465293193/
https://www.6sqft.com/10-offbeat-spots-that-reveal-new-york-citys-haunted-history/
https://ny.curbed.com/maps/new-york-city-haunted-buildings-halloween
https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2015/10/the-ghost-of-peter-stuyvesant-may-still-haunt-the-east-village.html
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2010/02/02/where-st-johns-old-burying-ground
https://nypost.com/2014/10/25/the-hidden-cemeteries-of-nyc/
https://www.6sqft.com/what-lies-below-nycs-forgotten-and-hidden-graveyards/
https://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2010/05/burying-ground-below-ballfield-james.html
https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2389220
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Church_Cemetery
https://the-line-up.com/haunted-churches
https://nyghosts.com/st-marks-church-in-the-bowery/
http://www.weirdus.com/states/new_york/ghosts/st_marks_church/index.php
https://nyghosts.com/st-marks-church/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2014/07/adam-allyn-comedian-trinity-church-cemetery/
https://the-line-up.com/ghosts-st-marks-church-in-the-bowery
https://the-line-up.com/the-headless-ghost-of-st-pauls-chapel
https://untappedcities.com/2017/06/09/the-top-10-secrets-of-nycs-st-pauls-chapel/?displayall=true
https://www.trinitywallstreet.org/blogs/archivists-mailbag/church-wee-hours
https://www.trinitywallstreet.org/blogs/archivists-mailbag/trees-inside-st-pauls-chapel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mark’s_Church_in-the-Bowery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Turney_Stewart
https://gomadnomad.com/2011/10/25/new-york-city-haunted-cemeteries/
http://www.liparanormalinvestigators.com/haunted-places-on-li/the-five-boroughs/trinity-church-cemetery/
http://www.scoutingny.com/the-masked-lady-of-broadway/
https://nyghosts.com/st-marks-church/
https://keithyorkcity.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/st-johns-graveyard-little-leaguers-now-play-ball-above-10000-corpses/
https://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2010/05/burying-ground-below-ballfield-james.html

Don’t miss our past episodes:

Haunted St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery

A look at haunted St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, the second-oldest church still standing in Manhattan, which is full of hauntings both legendary and questionable.

Highlights include:
• A wealthy man’s remains being stolen and held for ransom
• A very grumpy ghost
• An heir who convened with his ancestor’s ghost instead of marrying
• A mysteriously ringing church bell

You can listen to more audio on patreon ($3/month): https://www.patreon.com/buriedsecrets

E-mail us at buriedsecretspodcast@gmail.com.

Pictures of Haunted St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery

St Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery from Etchings of Old New York, 1875

St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery from Relics of Manhattan (1869) by Eliza Greatorex

Stuyvesant Bowery House from Etchings of Old New York, 1875

Episode Script for Haunted St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery

After St. Paul’s, the second oldest church in the city is St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, and the fourth oldest building in the city.
The location has been a place of worship since 1660, when the last Dutch governor of New York, Peter Stuyvesant, bought the land for a farm and built a chapel on the site of today’s St. Mark’s church. The 300 acres of farm were the best farmland on the whole island of Manhattan.
Peter Stuyvesant was known for being a jerk, a bigot, and an anti-Semite. Most websites tend to call him stuff like “a stern leader” but let’s call a spade a spade here.
He had lost a leg during a conflict with the Spanish in the West Indies, so he used a peg-leg with silver studs.
In 1672, Stuyvesant died, and was buried in the vault beneath the chapel.
Throughout the 1700s, the chapel fell into disrepair. Eventually, there was just the foundation and the Stuyvesant family vault beneath it.
In 1793, Peter Stuyvesant IV, the original Peter Stuyvesant’s great-grandson, donated the chapel to the Episcopal Church (the family had converted), on the condition that a new church be built there.
In 1799, St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery was completed. It was the first Episcopal parish that was separate from Trinity church, which we talked about last time.
During the first half of the 19th century, there were two burial sites affiliated with the church.
- The first was the yards around the church, which was for vault interments
  - The first vaults were built in 1807.
  - Many of NYC’s rich and famous were buried there.
  - In 1876, a millionaire named AT Stewart was buried in the east yard.
    - Stewart had an early department store, which made him rich
    - two years after he was buried, someone stole his remains and held them for ransom.
    - The case was never resolved as far as the public is concerned, but some people say that his widow negotiated to get the remains back in 1881. The ransom was supposedly $200K and she negotiated it down to $20K. His body was supposedly hidden at his department store until an Episcopal church was built on Long Island in 1884, and his remains were moved there.
  - Some people claim to see his restless ghost. And during the 19th century, it seems that people claimed to see his ghost at his store and at St. Mark’s.
- There was also a nearby cemetery, east on 11th street, for regular graves. Peter Stuyvesant IV had donated it as a burial ground in 1803, on the condition that any of the current or former enslaved people who he owned, or their children, would be buried there for free. And yes, there were slave-owners in NYC in the 19th century, until 1827; check out the last episode for a bit more about slavery in NYC.
- It’s unclear how many people were buried there, but the burial ground was closed in 1851, and then the remains were moved to Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn in 1864 and residential buildings were built on the site.
The Stuyvesant vault is still at the church, beneath the east wall, but it was closed for good when the last Stuyvesant was buried there in 1953.
- The Stuyvesants were always the richest or second-richest family in NYC until they died out.
- Apparently the last Stuyvesant didn’t marry, but he was known for going to the church every Sunday for hours to commune with Peter Stuyvesant’s spirit. At his funeral, some people claimed to hear the rapping of a peg leg as if it was greeting him as he was buried in the vault.
- Though the Stuyvesants are gone, their ancestors remain. For example, the Wainwrights–like Loudon Wainwright III, Rufus Wainwright, and Martha Wainwright, are descended from the family.
Legend has it that Peter Stuyvesant haunts the church. Though before haunting the church, he haunted his family mansion, scaring the servants into dropping and breaking dishes and crockery. One of his daughters claimed to see him.
After the mansion burned down in 1744, people started seeing him where his remains were buried. He was also sighted inspecting the remains of the destroyed mansion.
Then, in 1831, he was sighted again, as the city built second avenue through his family’s farm, and again in 1900, when second avenue was widened. He was not successful in scaring off the workmen.
He’s supposedly unhappy with how the city has grown and how his old farmland is overrun with so much noise and activity. It’s said that he was once so disturbed by the sounds of the city that he awoke from his slumber to ring the bells of the church angrily.
He also supposedly interrupts services by stomping around and singing Dutch hymns, since as I talked about last week, he was anti-pretty much every religion than the Dutch Reformed Church that he was a member of. So apparently he doesn’t appreciate being buried beneath an Episcopalian church.
There’s a story about a sexton who went into the church late at night to grab something for the rector, when he saw the ghost of Stuyvesant. The sexton ran away, and then Stuyvesant walked through the locked church door and began pulling on the bell rope.
- Back in the day, church bells were rung for emergencies like a fire or big announcement.
- So the story goes that when people rushed to the church to see what was going on, the church was empty. But the bell rope had been torn and the lower part of the rope was gone.
To read a passage from a 1966 children’s book called The Ghost of Peg-Leg Peter by M.A. Jagendorf
- “His body had been put into a closed vault. But that did not stop the ghost of the governor from stomping around on black or moonlit nights in his old haunts; his farm and the city hall where he had once reigned. Folks heard his stomping peg leg with the silver band, and saw him — and ran away in fear. Â That pleased him, particularly if they were English. He wanted no one around his grave, least of all the enemy who had robbed him and the Dutch Government.”
I’ve also read another version of the story, which I’m inclined to believe more, because it makes more sense and has more specificity. According to the book Haunted Manhattan, on Good Friday, April 14, 1865, the church bell began ringing. The rector hurried out to take a look, and saw a ghost with a peg leg in period Dutch clothes running away. What made this strange was that the bell was rung without the rope: the bell rope had been cut off a few days before. Then, the next night, the bell rope was seen on the Stuyvesant family vault.
There’s another great story in the same book, which is that during the 1930s, a priest always noticed that a young man sat in the same corner and stared in his direction during his sermon. I don’t know why that would have stood out, unless the priest really wasn’t used to people paying attention, which does seem possible.
- The priest finally asked the young man what he was looking at, and the man said that when the priest gave sermons, he saw a man in Dutch period costume with a peg leg, alongside a woman in Dutch period costume
There’s a different version of that same story in Hans Holzer’s books Real Hauntings and This House Is Haunted. I’m inclined to believe Holzer’s account over the story from Haunted Manhattan, because it has more specificity and because Holzer seems to have conducted the interviews personally. Both Real Hauntings and This House Is Haunted tell the same story almost word for word, but I’ll read the version from Real Hauntings:
- “I talked to the Reverend Richard E. McEvoy, later Archdeacon of St.John’s, but for many years rector of St. Mark’s, about any apparitions he or others might have seen in the church. Legend, of course, has old Peter Stuyvesant rambling about now and then. The reverend proved to be a keen observer, and quite neutral in the matter of ghosts. He himself had not seen anything unusual. But there was a man, a churchgoer, whom he had known for many years. This man always sat in a certain pew on the right side of the church.
- Queried by the rector about his peculiar insistence on that seat, the man freely admitted it was because from there he could see “her”—the “her” being a female wraith who appeared in the church to listen to the sermon, and then disappeared again. At the spot he had chosen, he could always be next to her! I pressed the rector about any personal experiences. Finally he thought that he had seen something like a figure in white out of the corner of one eye, a figure that passed, and quickly disappeared. That was ten years before.”
Holzer tells another story about a man he spoke to on the advice of the rector, a Foreman Cole, who came regularly to wind the clock at St. Mark’s, and who’d been in and around St. Mark’s for 26 years.
- Cole once saw someone in the balcony at 1 am.
- And 15 years before that sighting, he had a more specific and dramatic one. I’ll read directly from Real Hauntings since Holzer tells the story so well:
- “It was winter, and the church was closed to the public, for it was after 5:00
- P.M. That evening it got dark early, but there was still some light left when Cole let himself into the building. Nobody was supposed to be in the church at that time, as Cole well knew, being familiar with the rector’s hours.
- Nevertheless, to his amazement, he clearly saw a woman standing in the back of the church, near the entrance door, in the center aisle. Think-
- ing that she was a late churchgoer who had been locked in by mistake, and worried that she might stumble in the semidarkness, he called out to her, “Wait, lady, don’t move till I turn the lights on.”
- He took his eyes off her for a moment and quickly switched the lights on. But he found himself alone; she had vanished into thin air from her spot well within the nave of the church.
- Unnerved, Cole ran to the entrance door and found it firmly locked. He then examined all the windows and found them equally well secured.
- I asked Cole if there was anything peculiar about the woman’s appearance. He thought for a moment, then said, “Yes, there was. She seemed to ignore me, looked right through me, and did not respond to my words.”
- Six weeks later, he had another supernormal experience. Again alone in the church, with all doors locked, he saw a man who looked to him like one of the Bowery derelicts outside. He wore shabby clothes and did not seem to “belong” here. Quickly, Cole switched on the lights to examine his visitor. But he had vanished, exactly as the woman had.”
Holzer reports that Cole had other experiences as well, including hearing frequent banging, “uncanny” feelings, chills in some areas of the church, and footsteps when no one was there.
- One caveat here: I’m not sure whether the church has radiator heat, but I assume that it probably does (rather than having been retrofitted with a more recent climate control.) If that’s the case, it’s very common for radiators to build up calcium deposits which then bang loudly through the pipes. I experienced this when I was at Fordham, which was the last place I lived with working radiator heat, and it was always a surprise how erratic and loud the radiators could be. So anytime I hear about banging in an old building, without an explanation of why it couldn’t be a radiator (like if it was summer or something), I’m a little wary.
Holzer also brought in a psychic, who had been to the church once when she was in the neighborhood and felt it was haunted. The psychic said that she felt “a man with a cane walking down the middle aisle behind us.” Holzer supposed that was Peter Stuyvesant. Then she said she saw a woman in wide skirts near the back door of the church, and, to quote her: “I see a white shape floating away from that marble slab in the rear!”
- I mention this psychic story because they’ve been written in a couple books and therefore are part of the lore of the church, however, I find them extremely dubious, especially since St. Mark’s is a famously haunted church and I’m sure the psychic had heard some of its stories.
- My philosophy when considering paranormal events is this:
  1. If someone believes they saw something, and genuinely believe it was something paranormal, then I give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that they had some sort of paranormal experience, in their own personal perception, whether or not they have any real proof.
  2. However, I’d say that I’m a skeptical believer. And I find stories credible when there are a bunch of different inputs or data points that point to something being the case, particularly when someone didn’t know the history of whatever paranormal spot where they were.
    1. So for example, I experienced a few things during a trip to Salem that I went on last year, as did Jen, who’s been on the podcast in the past, and my wife, Amy. Because several disparate things happened to us: all three of us experienced the estes session, which was spooky but only partially conclusive, and then Jen had a possible sleep paralysis experience, and then I found an extremely clear EVP on a recording that Jen also listened to and corroborated, then I feel like we were genuinely onto something.
    2. My suspicions were confirmed when I did additional research on the Hawthorne Hotel and that part of Salem months later, and learned things that 1) I hadn’t been aware of, 2) which weren’t readily available online (I had to really dig through historical records), and 3) fit together as part of a narrative that made some sort of sense to me, though I still have many unanswered questions
    3. So there are some things that I feel like are as solid as they can be, and which I don’t have a problem asking other people to believe my experience for the most part. However, I wouldn’t be surprised or upset if people were skeptical about my experience of the EVP, since Jen and I heard it really clearly in Salem, but once I left Salem, the recording sounded fairly different and it was much less clear when I listened back to it. And because it was recorded on a sleep tracking app on my phone, I haven’t been able to successfully share it with other people.
    4. Because of that, if someone wants to say my EVP experience was BS, then I totally get it, though for myself, I believe it was real, and I have a lot of questions about why I could only hear it clearly in our hotel room where it was recorded.
  3. So with that example out of the way, when someone has no narrative proof for what they experience (like if they just get a vibe or impression), that might suggest that something’s up, or it might not. There just isn’t enough information. But the story becomes more suspect if they have a vested interest in having had an experience, or if it fits neatly into a story and confirms an existing bias. And that goes doubly if it confirms and existing and widely-known story.
Also, I know that Hans Holzer was criticized for sometimes having unsubstantiated claims and being not totally trustworthy.
So, with that out of the way, I wanted to move onto another story about St. Mark’s from Haunted Manhattan: On Christmas Day 1995, the congregation heard someone singing “One hundred bottles of rum” and when they went to the room that held refreshments, they saw someone in Dutch period costume and a peg leg walk into the wall. The punchbowl had been drunk down an inch
And the author of Haunted Manhattan said he spoke to a woman in 2003 who attended late-night services, and she heard what sounded like a peg leg behind her.
People have also said that they’ve seen strange shadows in the windows from the street, and the sound of a peg-leg has been reported inside the church
Supposedly there’s also the ghost of a woman in the church, though I see that fewer places. She’s supposed to be wearing period clothing–though I’m not sure from which period–and disappears when you get too close. She’s been seen in the pews and the balcony.
Apparently St. Mark’s Church rents out some rooms in the rectory; according to the book Ghosts of Manhattan, a writer reported that when she lived there, her dog got really scared and wouldn’t go into one room unless she was there. She also said she saw people’s shadows even when no one was there.

Sources consulted RE: Haunted St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery

Books

Real Hauntings by Hans Holzer (1995)
This House is Haunted by Hans Holzer (1997)
Walks in Our Churchyards: Old New York, Trinity Parish By John Flavel Mines · 1896
Ghosts of Manhattan: Legendary Spirits and Notorious Haunts by Philip Ernest Schoenberg · 2009
Etchings of Old New York, Illustrations from “Old New York: from the Battery to Bloomingdale” by Eliza Greatorex and M. Despard (1875)
Relics of Manhattan [electronic resource] : a series of photographs, from pen and ink sketches taken on the spot (1869) by Eliza Greatorex

Websites

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-haunted-history-of-lower-manhattan-2015-10
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wall-streets-slave-peddli_n_1147314
https://www.nps.gov/afbg/learn/historyculture/enslavement.htm
https://peoplesworld.org/article/slavery-in-new-york-uncovering-the-brutal-truth/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade
http://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/history.htm
http://www.slaveryinnewyork.org/about_exhibit.htm
https://www.nps.gov/afbg/learn/historyculture/enslavement.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_New_Netherland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Kieft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kieft%27s_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Amsterdam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Church_(Manhattan)
https://untappedcities.com/2017/06/09/the-top-10-secrets-of-nycs-st-pauls-chapel/?displayall=true
https://didyouknowfacts.com/the-headless-ghost-of-st-pauls-chapel/
https://www.trinitywallstreet.org/blogs/archivists-mailbag/trees-inside-st-pauls-chapel
https://untappedcities.com/2017/06/09/the-top-10-secrets-of-nycs-st-pauls-chapel/?displayall=true
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Paul%27s_Chapel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mark’s_Church_in-the-Bowery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_New_York_(state)#Half-slavery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_the_Blacks_(Manhattan)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_African_Methodist_Episcopal_Zion_Church
Information about Little Africa and the history of Black people in Greenwich Village: https://greenwichvillage.nyc/blog/2020/02/10/look-black-history-village/
https://atlantablackstar.com/2015/06/16/burial-remains-tell-the-story-of-new-yorks-little-africa/
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/nyregion/in-their-footsteps.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquian_peoples
https://untappedcities.com/2015/02/25/today-in-nyc-history-a-1643-massacre-of-the-lenape-almost-dooms-new-amsterdam/
https://www.ncai.org/resources/resolutions/national-american-indian-holocaust-museum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Burial_Ground_National_Monument
https://www.trinitywallstreet.org/blogs/trinity-notes/ghosts-trinity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Church_Cemetery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_J._Walker_Park
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s_Burying_Ground
https://www.trinitywallstreet.org/blogs/archives/mummy-trinity-church
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/74852371/mary-elizabeth-tisdall
https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/tag/mary-elizabeth-tisdall/
https://keithyorkcity.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/st-johns-graveyard-little-leaguers-now-play-ball-above-10000-corpses/
https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/st-johns-cemetery/
https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/2011/06/04/st-marks-in-the-bowery-churchyard-and-cemetery/
https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/st-pauls-chapel-churchyard/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/544841964/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/75469677@N00/4420876543/in/set-72157623465293193/
https://www.6sqft.com/10-offbeat-spots-that-reveal-new-york-citys-haunted-history/
https://ny.curbed.com/maps/new-york-city-haunted-buildings-halloween
https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2015/10/the-ghost-of-peter-stuyvesant-may-still-haunt-the-east-village.html
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2010/02/02/where-st-johns-old-burying-ground
https://nypost.com/2014/10/25/the-hidden-cemeteries-of-nyc/
https://www.6sqft.com/what-lies-below-nycs-forgotten-and-hidden-graveyards/
https://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2010/05/burying-ground-below-ballfield-james.html
https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2389220
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Church_Cemetery
https://the-line-up.com/haunted-churches
https://nyghosts.com/st-marks-church-in-the-bowery/
http://www.weirdus.com/states/new_york/ghosts/st_marks_church/index.php
https://nyghosts.com/st-marks-church/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2014/07/adam-allyn-comedian-trinity-church-cemetery/
https://the-line-up.com/ghosts-st-marks-church-in-the-bowery
https://the-line-up.com/the-headless-ghost-of-st-pauls-chapel
https://untappedcities.com/2017/06/09/the-top-10-secrets-of-nycs-st-pauls-chapel/?displayall=true
https://www.trinitywallstreet.org/blogs/archivists-mailbag/church-wee-hours
https://www.trinitywallstreet.org/blogs/archivists-mailbag/trees-inside-st-pauls-chapel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mark’s_Church_in-the-Bowery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Turney_Stewart
https://gomadnomad.com/2011/10/25/new-york-city-haunted-cemeteries/
http://www.liparanormalinvestigators.com/haunted-places-on-li/the-five-boroughs/trinity-church-cemetery/
http://www.scoutingny.com/the-masked-lady-of-broadway/
https://nyghosts.com/st-marks-church/
https://keithyorkcity.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/st-johns-graveyard-little-leaguers-now-play-ball-above-10000-corpses/
https://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2010/05/burying-ground-below-ballfield-james.html

Don’t miss our past episodes:

The New York Crystal Palace (Part 1)

The New York Crystal Palace: A look at New York City’s ill-fated Crystal Palace, a beautiful structure built on an abandoned cemetery on the outskirts of town.

In the mid-19th century, a castle of glass stood in the wilds of what is now a bustling part of New York City. It was an answer to a similar Crystal Palace in London, which had hosted an exhibition a couple years before.

The Crystal Palace and the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations was meant to represent American industry and ingenuity, but ended its days as a decrepit symbol of excess and mismanagement before going up in flames. Here’s part 1 of its story.

Highlights include:
• The story behind how NYC became a tourist destination
• Weird inventions like the “mechanical leech” and the “typeographer”
• The gardener-architect who built the world’s tallest fountain
• A sort of mini Eiffel Tower that sprouted up next to the Crystal Palace

Follow the podcast on instagram @buriedsecretspodcast

E-mail the podcast at buriedsecretspodcast@gmail.com.

Pictures of the Crystal Palace

Birds Eye View of the New York Crystal Palace and Environs 1853 (from http://crystalpalace.visualizingnyc.org/)

Latting Observatory broadside ca. 1853 (from http://crystalpalace.visualizingnyc.org/)

Latting Observatory from Valentine’s manual of old New York

August Petermann and Karl Gildemeister, designers; August Petermann, lithographer. New York Exhibition Building, 1852. Lithograph. Museum of the City of New York

New York Crystal Palace Illustrated Description of the Building (from http://crystalpalace.visualizingnyc.org/)

The Crystal Palace Dome (from http://crystalpalace.visualizingnyc.org/)

New York, 1855. From the Latting Observatory. (from http://crystalpalace.visualizingnyc.org/)

From New-York in a nutshell by Frederick Saunders

The Crystal Palace Exterior View. Victor Prevost, photographer, New York. 1853–54. Salted paper photograph (from http://crystalpalace.visualizingnyc.org/)

The New York Crystal Palace and Latting Observatory 1853 (from http://crystalpalace.visualizingnyc.org/)

Present Appearance of the Crystal Palace (from http://crystalpalace.visualizingnyc.org/)

From Old New York yesterday & today by Henry Collins Brown, 1922

Birds Eye View of the New York Crystal Palace and Environs 1853 (from http://crystalpalace.visualizingnyc.org/)

Episode Script

Sources

The main source for this episode is The Finest Building in America: The New York Crystal Palace 1853-1858 by Edwin G. Burrows (2015), though the full source list as always is in the shownotes at buriedsecretspodcast.com

Inspiration

There had been a Crystal Palace in London, which had been an international sensation and which is still pretty famous today, even though the building no longer exists (it burned down in the 1930s).
- London’s Crystal Palace opened in 1851 in the bucolic setting of Hyde Park. It had tons of green space around it, and was really a beautiful setting.
- The palace was made of plate glass and cast iron, and it had the most glass ever used in a building. These were really new materials, and the technology to create sheet glass had only come about in 1832, so it really was groundbreaking.
- The architect was a gardener named Joseph Paxton, who at the time that he submitted his design, was the Duke of Devonshire’s Head Gardener for the Chatsworth House estate.
  - If you’ve seen the Kubrick film Barry Lyndon, it was the filming location of Castle Hackton, or, if you’ve seen the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie, that estate was the filming location for Pemberly, Darcy’s home.
  - So at first I was wondering why a gardener would be qualified to do an architecture project, and was wondering if he was an amateur or self taught like a James Renwick Jr type. But I looked up Chatsworth House, and the improvements that Paxton made to its grounds, and during his tenure there, Paxton did a lot of design and architecture type projects, including:
    - A rockery and pond
    - A fountain that was built for a visit from Tzar Nicolas I, which was built in only six months (they had to work during the night using flares as light.) The idea was that it would be the tallest fountain in the world, which involved building a lake an 8-acre on the moors above the house so they could get the right water pressure. The fountain’s jets reached heights of 296 feet, so about as tall as a 21-story building, but the Tzar’s visit never happened, and Nicolas I died about a decade later without visiting Chatsworth.
    - He also built the a lily house, which is where the giant Amazon water lilly was cultivated for he first time, as well as a set of greenhouses
      - And one thing I wanted to mention that was related to the greenhouses: one thing that Paxton grew there was bananas, specifically Cavendish bananas (they were named after the Duke of Devonshire, his employer, whose name was William Cavendish.) Today, Cavendish bananas are the main type of bananas that are eaten around the world today. So if you’ve enjoyed a bananas recently, you can thank Joseph Paxton
    - And, most importantly for our purposes here, he built the Great Conservatory, which was completed in 1841 and was the largest glass house in the world at that time. At the time, you couldn’t get sheet glass bigger than 3 feet long, but 4-feet pieces were specially made for the Conservatory. Since tropical plants were grown in there, it had to be heated, which was accomplished with 8 boilers and 7 miles of iron pipe. There was also a carriageway in the center, and when the Queen came by and was driven through, the Conservatory was lit with 12,000 lamps.
      - Sadly, the Conservatory is no longer around: it was really expensive to maintain, and wasn’t heated during WWI, so all the plants died, and the Conservatory was demolished in the 1920s
    - But basically the Conservatory was a testing ground for the Crystal Palace, so it makes a lot of sense that he was hired for the job–he had pioneered this new thing
    - The Commission in charge of the Crystal Palace needed something build quickly and cheaply, and Paxton delivered: it took 2,000 men 8 months to build, and cost less than 80K pounds
- Visitors were stunned by, for example, how the building didn’t need lights inside, since it was illuminated by sunlight for the glass.
- 13,000-14,000 exhibitors came from around the world
- 6 million people were admitted to the exhibition between May and October 1851
- The Crystal Palace was 990,000 square feet
- It was so tall that it contained full-grown elm trees
- It was heavily publicized in America, and journalists wrote articles praising it, so the Crystal Palace in London became such a big deal in the states that, in typical fashion, Americans decided that we needed one too
The idea that many elites had was that an American Crystal palace would increase industrialization by making people appreciate and want manufactured products. A lot of people had a lot of lofty-sounding ways of putting it, but basically it sounds like they wanted to teach people consumerism, especially poor people. Some folks seemed to think that young craftsmen could come and get ideas for new inventions and products, but for the most part, it seemed all about “civilizing” or “cultivating” poor rubes who, apparently, weren’t smart enough to know they needed a bunch of useless stuff.
- A Unitarian minister named Henry Bellows, who preached to a wealthy congregation, had this to say about the exhibition; it was “a great popular advertisement–a plan for letting the people know what is to be had, and who has it–a scheme for creating wants by exhibiting ingenious means of supplying them, and thus developing new forms of labor and new markets for them.”
- I just think this whole line of thinking is really gross.
- However, I do love the idea of the Crystal Palace, especially since the US didn’t have big museums like we do now, so it would be an opportunity for people to see great art and learn about interesting new technology. It’s just that I find the motivations of some of the Crystal Palace Association, who led to charge to construct a Crystal Palace in NYC, really despicable
- It’s important to remember that there was also a ton of civil unrest around this time, and the gap between the rich and the poor was widening a lot.
  - Wealthy people spoke out often about how they needed to suppress workers rights and human rights movements, and poor people resented the people who were growing rich on their labor while also looking down on the laborers who created their wealth.
- This wasn’t an issue that was going to be solved by building a Crystal Palace, and maybe there’s a metaphor or joke here about throwing stones in glass houses, but at any rate, it was decided that NY would have its own Crystal Palace.

Construction and opening

First, they needed to find a block to build it: the idea had been to construct the crystal palace further downtown, where Madison Square Park is now, but the rich people who lived near there objected.
- So, instead, they located it in what today is the heart of midtown but back then was an undeveloped area of muddy empty lots: 42nd street, on the east side of 6th avenue.
- You may remember this location from two past episodes:
  - In the Victorian Egyptomania episode, I talked about the Croton Reservoir, a giant Egyptian revival structure that held the clean water that came from upstate via the Croton Aqueduct. There was a promenade around the top that people would stroll around, but on the whole, it was apparently known as a pretty grim structure, and didn’t last that long.
  - And then also, in the Potter’s Fields of Manhattan episode, I talked about how they attempted to build a nice cemetery beside the reservoir, but the ground was swampy and gross, and no one wanted to buy plots, so it became a potters field. Most of the people buried there had died from cholera, pneumonia, smallpox, tuberculosis, and typhoid fever.
- The Reservoir was where the main NYPL building, the one with lions in front, and which was featured in ghostbusters, stands now. And the potter’s field was where Bryant Park is today.
- So the site of the former potter’s field on Reservoir Square is the location that the city allowed the Crystal Palace to be built in.
- Not exactly an auspicious beginning, to be put in a spot where even a cemetery hadn’t been able to flourish.
- It’s unclear exactly what happened to the bodies when the Crystal Palace was built. The book The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries, says:
  - “The remains in this cemetery may have been removed to another burial ground in 1852 to make way for The Crystal Palace, an entertainment venue, which opened on this site the following year.”
A ton of famous architects submitted proposals for the building, but the design by two foreign architects, a Danish man named Georg Carstensen and a German man named Charles Gildemeister, won.
- Carstensen had been one of the architects of Tivoli Gardens, in Copenhangen, which is still around today.
- Things didn’t really go well with the architects.
- First, the budget for the building was $200K. Their plan called for a budget of $300K, they claimed, though really it would have cost more than that.
- Some cost-saving measures really hobbled the construction. For example:
  - There was supposed to be a basement level. That was important because 1) it would have elevated the whole building by 6 feet, allowing it to obscure the huge Croton Reservoir behind the Crystal Palace, and 2) it would have allowed a beautiful fountain to be installed.
    - However, the basement level was nixed to save money, which really ruined the intended impact of the palace
    - The fountain was replaced by what was, by all accounts, a hideous statue of George Washington
- The architects were blamed for everything that went wrong with the construction, which took longer and was more expensive than planned, though it doesn’t sound like it was really the architects’ fault.
  - The architects were supposed to be paid $5K, but were only ever paid $4K
  - Carstensen returned to Copenhagen in 1855 and supposedly died penniless and forgotten there in 1857
  - Gildemeister returned to Germany in 1857 and died in 1869
  - Neither of their deaths were really remarked upon in the American press, which seems right, since during the opening ceremonies of the Crystal Palace and other publicity, the architects were neither honored or mentioned, really
People flocked to the palace’s construction site to watch it being built, which was apparently a grand sight, even though construction wasn’t going so well
- Aside from the delays caused by argument, cost-cutting, and mismanagement, there were other hold-ups, like a hailstorm that killed 3 workers, broke a bunch of windows, and flooded the exhibition floor (FBA 68)
Across the street from the Crystal Palace, an enterprising inventor named Waring Latting began construction of a strange looking structure called the Latting Observatory.
- It was a large octagonal observation tower which had a 75-foot-wide base and came to a small point at the top, where it was only 6 feet wide.
- It afforded panoramic views of the area, which had never been seen before, in this time before aviation and tall buildings.
- At 27 stories tall, it was the tallest building in NYC, and one of the tallest human-made structures at the time. The only taller structures were the Great Pyramid at Giza and some European Cathedrals (FBA 70)
- If you look at images of the NY Crystal Palace, you’ll usually see the tall, pointy Latting Observatory beside it, so much so that people often thought it was part of the exhibition (it wasn’t)
But it wasn’t the only structure to pop up and capitalize on the crowds of visitors to the Exhibition–there’s a great quote from the NYT at the time:
- “There are Crystal Stables, and Crystal Cake Shops, and Crystal Groggeries, and Crystal ice-cream Saloons. One old woman has set up a Crystal Fruit Stall, at which oranges and bananas, in every stage of decomposition may be purchased. We noticed a dilapidated hovel on Sixth-Avenue, which was called by its proprietor the Crystal Hall of Pleasure.” (FBA 54)
Basically, in real NY style, everyone who could profit off of the excitement over the palace did so, with gusto. The area around the Crystal Palace became somewhat seedy, and plenty of people moralized about it.

What was displayed inside the crystal palace?

There were 4,300 exhibits from 6,000 contributors from 23 foreign countries
The initial idea was that it would be way better curated and organized than London’s Crystal Palace, which some people had said felt cluttered and confusing
This is a pretty good illustration of the Crystal Palace in general–you know, it’s creators are like, “We’ll do everything better than they did in London” and then they did the opposite
So the exhibition in London has 30 categories of items, and the America exhibition, which was supposed to be simplified, had 31–they added a category for musical instruments. Some of the other categories were “substances used as food”, “philosophical instruments,” “mixed fabrics,” wearing apparel,” and “fine arts” (FBA 107) Fine arts included at least 675 paintings, for example, so they definitely went hard on this.
Basically, the exhibition had lots of cool things, though also junk. The list included: a map of the US drawn by a public school student, stomach pumps, a “mechanical leech,” birdcages, doorbells, wigs, fake diamonds, sugar tongs, iceboxes, clothes, a much more. A NYT reporter wrote: “The mind becomes very quickly exhausted from the quantity of material crowded on the view and very soon produces additional physical lassitude. To-day we saw may faint-looking and wearied persons, looking sorrowfully around for some place to rest themselves.”
One visitor called it “a wilderness of objects”
Gaslights weren’t installed until later on in the summer, so some things were so in shadow that you just couldn’t tell what they were, especially items on the east side of the building, where they ended up in the shadow of the reservoir until the afternoon.
And even if you could see something, there often wasn’t anyone who knew what it was who could explain it to you, and things didn’t seem to be well labeled.
There also weren’t many new innovations that hadn’t been previously displayed or revealed elsewhere, aside from an electric motor and an early typewriter called a “typeographer”
Mostly the exhibition was noteworthy because there was so much stuff.
Also, the machine arcade, where all the machines were held, got really loud, especially the part that had looms, spinners, and other textile manufacturing machines–it really sounds pretty overwhelming
A 124-year-old man, who had been enslaved and owned by George Washington, was intended to be displayed as a curiosity at the exhibition. A writer from the London Weekly News wasn’t impressed by the exhibition as a whole, and wrote “What do you think of the showing up of a slave as an article of American manufacture?” (FBA 84-85) It’s unclear if this person was ever displayed, but it sound like he wasn’t, thankfully.

Responses

Until the Crystal Palace was built, people in the US vacationed in the countryside. It wasn’t really a thing for people to go into cities to see the sights there.
- If they went to the city, it was only to transfer trains on their way to a more bucolic location.
- John Dalberg, an English historian, writer, and politician, who was famous for saying “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”, had this to say of NYC at the time:
  - “There is little to be seen in New York; it is not a fine city.”
- So basically, people might travel to cities for work, but there weren’t really tourist attractions in the city, as we understand them now.
- That all changed with the Crystal Palace–suddenly, NYC became a destination for folks.
- So when all the rich people left NYC in July and August (much like they do now), tourists came in to see the Crystal Palace
A 17-year-old Samuel Clemens–who would later be known as Mark Twain–went to the Crystal Palace and was transfixed. He’d recently moved to NYC, and wrote to his family back in Hannibal, Missouri, that the it was “a perfect fairy palace–beautiful beyond description.” (FBA 87)
Walt Whitman, whose famous book Leaves of Grass would be published the next year, in 1855, was a young poet from Brooklyn at the time, visited the Crystal Palace so many times that the cops became suspicious and started following him around. He returned so many times to look at a Danish statue called Christ and his Apostles, which people said was the best piece of art at the exhibition. (FBA 94)

Issues

So, you might be wondering what happened to the Crystal Palace. If it was this beautiful and beloved structure, so why isn’t it still there?
If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you can probably the answer to this: the NY Crystal Palace, like so many beautiful buildings in history, burned down.
But this building didn’t just burn down–after all, buildings are destroyed in fires all the time, but their stories often survive. So why did people just sort of forget about the Crystal Palace, and why wasn’t it rebuilt?
So, from the beginning, the Crystal Palace Association had financial issues.
- In February 1854, stockholders learned that even though the Association had earned $350K in ticket sales from the 1.2 million people who visited the exhibition, they still owed their creditors $125K. (That’s about $3.8 million in today’s dollars.)
- They’d even had to mortgage the building
- So the Association got a new board of directors of 25 men, which was made up of many business magnates, bankers, and lawyers, and also included Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune. Greeley was a real character–I find him pretty delightful–and supported causes like socialism, vegetarianism, feminism, temperance, and of course, the abolition of slavery. He was kinda an interesting choice for the board, I think, but also he was a really important figure in NY at the time, so in that way, it makes sense.
- Well, Greeley had a friend who also made it onto the board, someone who was actually controversial: one Phineas Taylor Barnum, aka PT Barnum, the famous showman.

And we’ll pick back up next week, and take a look at what PT Barnum did to try to save the Crystal Palace, as well as the disaster that claimed the palace.

Sources consulted

Books

The Finest Building in America: The New York Crystal Palace 1853-1858 by Edwin G. Burrows (2015)
The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries by Carolee Inskeep (2000)
How to See the New York Crystal Palace: Being a Concise Guide to the Principal Objects in the Exhibition as Remodeled, 1854 by the Association for the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations
A Day in the New York Crystal Palace and how to Make the Most of it: Being a Popular Companion to the “Official Catalogue,” and A Guide to All the Objects of Special Interest in the New York Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations by William Carey Richards
Official Catalogue of the New-York Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, 1853
Art and Industry as Represented in the Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in New York 1853 by Horace Greeley
Old New York yesterday & today by Henry Collins Brown, 1922
New-York in a nutshell by Frederick Saunders
Valentine’s manual of old New York by Henry Collins Brown, 1919
New York Crystal Palace: Illustrated Description of the Building
Fifteen Minutes Around New York by George G. Foster, 1854
Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park, Volume 1 by Samuel Phillips

Articles

A Mammoth Tree. NEW-YORK CITY. New York Daily Times (1851-1857); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]09 Aug 1855: 1

Websites

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Palace#The_Great_Exhibition_of_1851
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latting_Observatory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Crystal_Palace
http://crystalpalace.visualizingnyc.org/digital-publication/
https://nypost.com/2018/02/03/nycs-first-architectural-wonder-went-down-in-flames/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Crystal_Palace
bgc.bard.edu/gallery/exhibitions/3/new-york-crystal-palace-1853
https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2015/03/the-crystal-palace-americas-first-worlds-fair-and-bizarre-treasures-of-the-19th-century.html
https://books.google.com/books?id=XRNBAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=crystal+palace+new+york+guide&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NCcMVabVJ8elgwTkhoPABQ&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=crystal%20palace%20new%20york%20guide&f=false
https://books.google.com/books?id=9ecZAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=crystal+palace+new+york+guide&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NCcMVabVJ8elgwTkhoPABQ&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=crystal%20palace%20new%20york%20guide&f=false
https://lithub.com/the-question-of-homoeroticism-in-whitmans-poetry/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_Acton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Greeley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art
https://aleteia.org/2019/10/07/thorvaldsens-christus-was-once-considered-the-most-perfect-statue-of-christ-in-the-world/

Don’t miss our past episodes:

The New York Crystal Palace Destroyed (Part 2)

It only took 15 minutes for the New York Crystal Palace, a beautiful building made of iron and glass, to be destroyed.

Financially insolvent and falling apart, the building had seen better days. New management attempted to save the beautiful edifice, but its ruin was too far gone. What had once been a glamorous tourist attraction became a decrepit mess.

New York City considered selling it for scraps, or moving the building to Philadelphia, but the screws that kept it together had rusted, making the Crystal Palace too expensive to even take apart. It was almost a blessing when a fire–which was blamed on arson but was more likely the rest of some cost-saving compromises on the gas lines–burned the building to the ground.

But, as the New York Tribune said: “We shall never have another Crystal palace. Its glorious dome . . . is no more; its galleries, its treasures, its magnificent expanses indispensable to the mass-gatherings of this great metropolis–its superb memories are all gone, and gone forever.”

Highlights include:
• PT Barnum’s attempts to save the Crystal Palace
• An elevator safety demonstration that involved repeatedly cutting the cord
• An exclusive gala organized by conmen and ending in a brawl between ultra-wealthy guests
• How a sensation like the Crystal Palace could have been forgotten

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E-mail the podcast at buriedsecretspodcast@gmail.com.

Pictures of the New York Crystal Palace Destroyed

Souvenir coin (source: Museum of the City of New York)

(source: Museum of the City of New York)

Folded souvenir with views of New York buildings, including the Crystal Palace, 1857. (source: Museum of the City of New York)

Folded souvenir with views of New York buildings, 1857. (source: Museum of the City of New York)

Flyer for a sale of relics (source: Museum of the City of New York)

Episode Script for The New York Crystal Palace Destroyed (Part 2)

“Your chief motive, of course, in coming to New York at the present time, was to see the Crystal Palace. Not that you had any very correct or decided idea as to what the Crystal Palace was or is—but that, as every body has been for some months past talking and writing about the Crystal Palace, and as you have been told that all the world is to be there, you naturally feel that you ought to be there too ; and so, here you are.”

-Fifteen Minutes Around New York by George G. Foster, 1854

“The old burial ground was built over briefly during the 1853 World’s Fair by New York’s own magnificent Crystal Palace, which burnt down in 1858. Over one million people visited the Crystal Palace during the fair; over one million walked across another of New York’s forgotten burial grounds.” -Peripheral Memory: New York’s Forgotten Landscape by Deborah Ann Buelow

“For some time to come — the Crystal Palace will be the great crowning object of attraction to all classes.” -New-York in a nutshell

“Crystal Palace Relics! Mrs. Richardson, of New York (who was one of the unfortunate persons burnt out by the fire that destroyed the Crystal Palace,) by permission of the MAYOR OF NEW YORK, and of John H. White, Esq., Crystal Palace Receiver, obtained a number of curiosities very valuable for a cabinet, produced by the melting of the Building, and articles on exhibition, which she now offers to visitors at the FAIR AT PALACE GARDEN, as interesting souvenirs of all that remains of the finest building ever erected in America–a building made entirely of glass and iron, except the floors–and supposed to be almost wholly free from danger of fire; yet, it was utterly destroyed on the 5th of October, 1858, in fifteen minutes’ time.” -an advertisement for a sale of Crystal Palace Souvenirs

“Crystal Palace Relics! Mrs. Richardson, of New York . . . obtained a number of curiosities very valuable for a cabinet, produced by the melting of the Building . . . which she now offers to visitors . . . as interesting souvenirs of all that remains of the finest building ever erected in America–a building made entirely of glass and iron, except the floors–and supposed to be almost wholly free from danger of fire; yet, it was utterly destroyed . . . in fifteen minutes’ time.” -an advertisement for a sale of Crystal Palace Souvenirs

Barnum made a lot of sense as a board member: he was very rich, and more importantly, he knew how to put on a good show and draw people in. However, he was also famous for his hoaxes and weird novelty displays, like the time he displayed a “Feejee Mermaid” that was really a mummified monkey sewn onto a fish tale, among many other hoaxes and creative flourishes to charm the masses.
I do think that a lot of the opposition to Barnum being on the board was because he was kinda a crass showman who didn’t seem to despise ordinary people, at least not the same way a lot of wealthy people did. If the goal of the exhibition was to train people to have good taste, bringing Barnum on wasn’t exactly a recipe for that.
One stockholder said that the palace should be “an arena for artistic competition, and not a mere toy shop for common huckstering” as a dig against Barnum (FBA 149)
Barnum wasn’t totally thrilled with the idea, though.
- Originally, back in 1851, he’d been asked to help create NYC’s Crystal Palace, but Barnum thought it was a bad idea: he said it was too soon after London’s Crystal Palace, and that it’d lose money
- Barnum claims that he took on his new role on the Crystal Palace board “much against my own judgement”, and a week after he joined, he was asked to become president of the Association
- He agreed grudgingly, but demanded to examine the books, and said he’d quit if he didn’t like what he saw
- I guess he was okay with the books, because he spent a few months revitalizing the Crystal Palace–or trying to.
- He loaned what were supposedly large amounts of his personal fortune so the Association could pay their creditors (he got a $40K mortgage on the Crystal Palace in exchange for that)
- He raised money by getting hotels and railroads to buy tons of tickets in advance
- He also let exhibitors show their wares for free and advertise their prices (making it sort of more like a mall, than a museum), he negotiated with train and steamboat companies to get reduced fares between NYC and popular vacation spots like Newport and Cape May, made admission cheaper, and said that the “refreshmen saloons” would have reasonably priced snacks
- He made alterations to the building, closing it for a month, before what was set to be a big re-inaguration
- He would later claim that “I never labored so hard, night and day.”
- Things went better for Barnum than for the previous president, but he still encountered issues
  - The publisher of Scientific American, sued the Association, saying it’d borrowed too much money and violated its charter, and an injunction related to that made it hard to settle the Associations debts
  - A six-person envoy from England had checked out the Crystal Palace, and they published their very negative report about the exhibition. To be fair, it was kinda a mess: for example, when they got to the states, the exhibition wasn’t even ready, so the group had to split up and travel all over the country
- The night before the big re-opening in May 1854, there was a very heavy rainstorm, but apparently Barnum was there, bright eyed and bushy tailed, waving his umbrella around and getting everyone into position. It was a parade that included a band, veterans, clergymen, government employees, tradesmen, etc.
  - The crowd of 10,000 people who gathered at reservoir square to watch the parade was smaller than expected, and when it started drizzling again, people with tickets went in to listen to a ton of speeches, which were mostly inaudible because the acoustics of the building were truly awful. Also, since people couldn’t hear, they kept leaving, which made it even harder to hear
- Barnum started some new programming to draw people in, including Sunday concerts, which newspapers said disrespected the fact that it was the sabbath. And anyway, despite the 1,500 performers, people really couldn’t hear anything
- The hired a famous balloonist to take off from the Crystal Palace grounds, but the balloonist crashed in Queens, fell out of the basket, and lost the balloon, which kept going on without him until it ran out of steam and grounded itself in Connecticut
- One nice thing that happened was that Elisha Otis demonstrated his safety mechanism for freight elevators: it was an automatic brake that stopped the car from plummeting to the bottom in the event of a broken cable
  - His demonstration elevator was very tall, so it had to take the place of honor beneath the dome, where Otis apparently would ride up and down, occasionally cutting the rope to demonstrate the brake’s effectiveness
  - Of course, this was a hugely important invention, and one that allowed skyscrapers to begin to be a thing.
- By July 1854, Barnum resigned, because his changed hadn’t really made a difference.
  - Barnum told a friend: “I was an ass for having anything to do with the Crystal Palace.”
- The next president of the Association was a lawyer and trustee
- The Association decided to close the Exhibition in October and auction off unclaimed items .
  - After the announcement, even fewer people visited the Crystal Palace, and by fall of 1854, Harper’s called it a “glittering mausoleum of happy hopes and betrayed confidences
  - There was debate about what to do with the building.
    - Some said to tear it down and sell it for scrap
    - Some said they should move it to Philadelphia
  - When they set up the auction for unclaimed items, no one was interested in buying, so they cancelled the event
- Not everyone was happy it was closing, though. The Ohio State Journal said:
  - In spite of all the sneers upon it, the Exhibition has been most important to the country. It will be a long time before we again see such a magnificent and beautiful edifice as the Palace, or such a collection of statuary and paintings as have been on exhibition there
- And I think that’s a really good point. The Metropolitan Museum wouldn’t open until 1870 so it’d be a while before NYC had another big museum–I don’t think there were any other major art museums in the city before the Met

So now what?

It’s a sad situation: there’s this beautiful building, but nobody really knows what to do with in, since the Exhibition fizzled out and investors were wary about being burned again.

When it first opened, a lot of sideshows and businesses catering to the Crystal Palace’s clientele had opened, but now they mostly moved on, leaving the Crystal Palace on its own in the shadow of the Reservoir.

The Latting Observatory went out of business, and was purchased by a marble company who inexplicably removed the top 75 feet of the tower

The exhibits had been cleared out of the Crystal Palace, and where enormous crowds had once thronged, a single cashier manned the palace. For 25 cents, curious visitors could walk around the empty building

The Crystal Palace Association was dissolved and its assets were given to a receiver who needed to either find a new place to move the palace, or to give it to the city, per the palace’s lease

People suggested that the city council tear down the palace, or turn it into a produce market, museum, or train station–something respectable

Also, for context, around this time, the economy took a turn. There’d been a boom in the early 1850s, but by the winter of 54-55, things were getting grim, with lots of layoffs, evictions, etc. That caused a lot of civil unrest and tensions between the rich and the poor, as labor leaders asked for things like rent freezes and guaranteed employment and wealthy New Yorkers ignored their cries.

Meanwhile, the Scientifc American publisher was still suing Barnum and airing all the dirty laundry of the Associations bad management and missteps

And they still didn’t know what the building would be used for

In June 1855, a giant tree from California, marketed as “Washingtonea Gigantea or Monster Tree of California,” was shipped to NYC in pieces. It was a sequoia 300 feet tall, 31 feet wide, and it was supposedly older than the Pyramids, and from Moses’ time

It was revealed on July 4, and 7,000 people paid .25 cents to see it
But there wasn’t as much excitement as they expected, and because the tree was sliced up, with the pieces stacked on top of each other, people thought it was just a bunch of different trees stacked on top of each other and passed off as a really big sequoia
So later, once it left the Crystal Palace, the tree was set up in London’s Crystal Palace, where people were more into it
So the tree was a bust
Next, they tried renting out the palace for conventions and stuff
- The Association of Publishers had an event there
- An inventors convention was held there
- There were some weddings
- The American Institute moved its annual fair there
  - The fair was usually very popular, though it’d done poorly when the Exhibition was happening at the Palace in 53, since it was stiff competition and people were excited to see the building, etc
  - So in 1855, when they had their fair at the Crystal Palace, it was a hit–the organizers said it had been profitable, even
    - They had more art and industrial items to exhibit, and had a lot of the best pieces of artwork from the Exhibition
    - They kept the two saloons open for refreshments
    - The sequoia was still there
    - There was also a beautiful display of fruit and flowers
    - There were some cool gadgets, like a steam-powered wood-splitting machine, an automatic grain scale, and an elevated railroad that constantly ran around the interior of the building above visitors’ heads. There was also a window washing device and a “petticoat lifter” that made it easier for women wearing hooped skirts to go up and down stairs
    - They also held contents, like a competition between fire engines, which was won by a water pumper who was able to shoot a stream of water up 162 feet, along the side of what was left of the Latting Observatory
    - The fair was such a hit that the institute tried to buy the building, but they couldn’t settle on a price with the court-appointed receiver. But they did continue to hold the fair there for the next few years
- So, around the beginning of 1856, the receiver tried to renew the five-year lease that the palace had with the city
  - That seemingly simple thing became a HUGE issue, because different people wanted to do different things with the palace
  - But long story short, the lease was not renewed
- Then, in August 1856, in a moment of foreshadowing, the Latting Observatory burned down in a fire that also destroyed more than 24 tenements, leaving what I assume were hundreds of families homeless
- The Crystal Palace was mostly unhurt: some hot embers landed onn the roof, and the heat of the fire melted off some of the solder between glass panels
- In early 1857, the lease on the land that the Crystal Palace stood on expired, and the receiver tried to sell the palace to the city. The building had cost more than $700K to build, and the parts could be sold for scrap for $80K. The receiver said he’d sell it to the city for an incredibly cheap $150K
- But some people believed that since it was now on city land, the city owned the palace
- So there ensued a bunch of fighting, during which the palace began to decay, since no one wanted to take responsibility for maintaining it (And it was a high-maintenance building: for reference, they would’ve needed to hire 40 full-time glaziers just to keep the glass in the building)
- The city council looked into it and found that thousands of screws and maybe millions of bolts that held the building together were terribly rusted, meaning it would take about a year to take the building apart
- For a bit of context, things weren’t going so well in the city: there was a lot of civil unrest and wealthy people in NYC were becoming more and more afraid of the poor people they’d been ignoring and condescending to and whose labor had made them so wealthy.
  - In August 1857, the Panic of 1857 began when the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust, a really solid bank whose president had been on the Board of the Crystal Palace association, went down because the company had made risky loans and the manager had taken to lining his pockets with company money
  - The resulting credit squeeze took down hundreds of other financial institutions, and by mid-October, the banks were unsteady, business had ground to a standstill, half the wall street brokers were now unemployed, and Europe and South America were also suffering.
  - By November, tens of thousands of working men and women in NYC were out of work. And winter was coming.
  - The mayor of NYC hired unemployed people to work on big city projects like Central Park. The laborers were paid in cornmeal, potatoes, and flour. Only a few thousand people were hired in this program, and of course the mayor was accused of being a communist
  - Remember that, much like today, the ultra-wealthy thought that charity was showing up at a fancy ball or gala, not making sure that people had jobs and got paid
  - So because rich people love a ball, a “colossal charity soiree” happened at the Crystal Palace in April 1858.
    - It was a huge event, and 10K-15K people crowded into the Crystal Palace
    - It seemed to be going okay, until around 1 am, when a huge number of people, ready to go home, went to the cloakroom and there was absolute chaos. They turned over barricades, knocked down shelves, and wealthy gentlemen started to brawl
    - Many women fled to the street, leaving behind their coats
    - Around 3:30, two hours into the melee, two men got into a knife fight, though they weren’t seriously injured
    - So we’re seeing these wealthy people behave just like the uncouth poor people they love to vilify
    - Then, after ALL that, it turns out that most of the money raised in the event had gone missing, and instead lined the pockets of the people who organized the event. The charitable society who had created the gala also conveniently vanished.
    - So, to recap, this party that was supposedly for charity just ended up being charity for already-wealthy con men, and turned into a drunken brawl that would rival any that might have happened in the parts of town that the wealthy wouldn’t be caught dead in
  - The economy would eventually get better once the civil war started
- Meanwhile, the building kept slowly falling apart: during the summer of 1858, a huge chandelier that had been suspended beneath the dome fell down. No one was hurt, but it was a bad sign.
- In 1858, the new mayor of NYC proclaimed that the city owned the Crystal Palace, and would take it apart it if the receiver didn’t do it by May 1858
- The mayor ended up sending out the police and comptroller, who took possession of the palace and confiscated $100K worth of property
- The city didn’t demolish the palace, though. It hosted a celebration of a transatlantic cable in September 1858
- Then, on October 5th, as the American Institute fair was just starting up, the Crystal Palace burned down.
We aren’t totally sure why it burned down, but here’s what we do know:
- It happened during the day, when people were inside–luckily everyone escaped and no one was seriously injured.
- The fire broke out in a storeroom.
The official narrative is that an arsonist started the fire, because people were confused about how a building made of mostly steel and glass, which was supposed to be fireproof, could burn down so quickly. Because this fire happened really, really fast, way faster than a building built of less fireproof materials. That’s literally what the NYT said, that “its destruction was more rapid than any building of wood could possibly have been.” And that is suspicious, for sure.
- There are stories about a man in a dark coat leaving the storeroom with his hat pulled down to hide his face, and conjecture that he was hired by local landowners who didn’t like how seedy the area had become.
But that’s not at all what I think happened.
- This is an Occam’s razor thing for me, and I believe an eyewitness who had a much more plausible account, even if the account was hushed up a bit:
- This unnamed eyewitness told the NYT that he’d heard someone say they were going to light the gas, and then right after that, he hear the shouts of “fire”
- He said:
  - “I saw streams of fire like snakes running in all directions through the building and setting it on fire nearly as fast as a man could run. The color of the smoke, the intensitiy of the flame, and two or three small explosions, forces the idea to my mind that, to save a few dollars, the gas pipes of the Crystal Palace had only been gutta percha instead of wrought iron tubes; and that shortly after the gas was turned on there was a leak somewhere in [the] rear of the north nave which set fire to the gas tubes . . . [which] was the true and legitimate cause of this lamentable disaster.”
- Gutta percha is latex, by the way. (FBA xii-xiii)
- The witness returned to the scene the next day and searched for evidence of iron tubes in the rubble, but didn’t see them. Which seems a little weird, since there had been 30,000 feet of gas lines in the Crystal palace.
- The firm that installed the gas lines said they were made of wrought iron with lead fittings, and that they were inspected and in good condition.
- We already know that the builders of the Crystal Palace wanted to cut corners and save money. For example, during construction, it wasn’t uncommon for materials like metal beams to arrive and be the wrong length, forcing workmen to have to use a method called “cut and ty” or “cut and try” which is exactly what it sounds like. However, that’s something that’s used for carpentry, not precise metal work. The American Phrenological Journal said that “every part of [the Crystal Palace] had to be more or less sprung, in order to bring the parts into place. The author of The Finest Building in America suggests that maybe construction techniques hadn’t caught up to the new materials being used in construction.
- So I think the contractors were lying; it wouldn’t be the first time someone lied under oath. And I also wouldn’t be surprised if the Crystal Palace Association, who built the Crystal Palace, knew it. That could be a reason for the story of arson spreading so far and wide.
- But, whatever happened, the Crystal Palace was no more. One detail I wanted to share was also a description in the NYT of what the palace sounded like burning down, which was the sound of: “the cracking of glass, and roaring of wind & flames, as they rushed up through the roof and sides of the building.”
- The New York Tribune said: “We shall never have another Crystal palace. Its glorious dome . . . Is no more; its galleries, its treasures, its magnificent expanses indispensable to the mass-gatherings of this great metropolis–its superb memories are all gone, and gone forever.”
- An enterprising woman named Mrs. Richardson, an exhibitor whose display had been destroyed in the fire, sold lumps of melted glass and iron from the ruins, describing them as “curiosities very valuable for a cabinet”
- So nobody really wanted to rebuild the palace, since it’d been almost as good as slated for destruction. So the city moved on, and the Crystal Palace, which had gained so much acclaim and fascination in its early days, was thoroughly forgotten.
- And, as the author of The Finest Building in America says, “Even before Reservoir Square became Bryant Park, a leafy oasis in the concrete desert of midtown Manhattan, what had once been the most famous destination in the United States was all but forgotten. . . . It has been the subject of no more than a handful of scholarly articles and earns at best passing mention in a few standard narratives of the period.”
  - So if you want to know more, I highly recommend picking up The Finest Building in America by Edwin G. Burrows, which came out about 5 years ago and seeks to correct how everyone has seemingly forgotten the Crystal Palace.

Sources consulted RE: the New York Crystal Palace Destroyed

Books

The Finest Building in America: The New York Crystal Palace 1853-1858 by Edwin G. Burrows (2015)
The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries by Carolee Inskeep (2000)
How to See the New York Crystal Palace: Being a Concise Guide to the Principal Objects in the Exhibition as Remodeled, 1854 by the Association for the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations
A Day in the New York Crystal Palace and how to Make the Most of it: Being a Popular Companion to the “Official Catalogue,” and A Guide to All the Objects of Special Interest in the New York Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations by William Carey Richards
Official Catalogue of the New-York Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations, 1853
Art and Industry as Represented in the Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in New York 1853 by Horace Greeley
Old New York yesterday & today by Henry Collins Brown, 1922
New-York in a nutshell by Frederick Saunders
Valentine’s manual of old New York by Henry Collins Brown, 1919
New York Crystal Palace: Illustrated Description of the Building
Fifteen Minutes Around New York by George G. Foster, 1854
Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park, Volume 1 by Samuel Phillips

Articles

A Mammoth Tree. NEW-YORK CITY. New York Daily Times (1851-1857); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]09 Aug 1855: 1

Websites

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Palace#The_Great_Exhibition_of_1851
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latting_Observatory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Crystal_Palace
http://crystalpalace.visualizingnyc.org/digital-publication/
https://nypost.com/2018/02/03/nycs-first-architectural-wonder-went-down-in-flames/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Crystal_Palace
bgc.bard.edu/gallery/exhibitions/3/new-york-crystal-palace-1853
https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2015/03/the-crystal-palace-americas-first-worlds-fair-and-bizarre-treasures-of-the-19th-century.html
https://books.google.com/books?id=XRNBAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=crystal+palace+new+york+guide&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NCcMVabVJ8elgwTkhoPABQ&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=crystal%20palace%20new%20york%20guide&f=false
https://books.google.com/books?id=9ecZAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=crystal+palace+new+york+guide&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NCcMVabVJ8elgwTkhoPABQ&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=crystal%20palace%20new%20york%20guide&f=false
https://lithub.com/the-question-of-homoeroticism-in-whitmans-poetry/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_Acton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Greeley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art
https://aleteia.org/2019/10/07/thorvaldsens-christus-was-once-considered-the-most-perfect-statue-of-christ-in-the-world/

Don’t miss our past episodes:

Johannes Kelpius and Occult Monks in Philadelphia

In the 1690s, a Transylvania-born mystic, occultist, musician, and writer named Johannes Kelpius led a group of 40 Rosicrucian monks to colonial Philadelphia to wait for the end of the world.

Though Kelpius and his group of highly-educated mystics were disappointed when the day of revelation didn’t come, they made the best of their new home, building an observatory, a botanical garden, and an orchard. They also wrote poetry, composed music, and studied alchemy, divination, and conjuring.

Records show that they experienced a number of paranormal events, including the sighting or a ghostly figure at the edge of the woods during a celebration around a bonfire, blue flames emerging from a fresh grave, and more. There are also stories of Kelpius’ followers performing astral projection, and Kelpius himself possessed a magical stone that he guarded fiercely, but which has since vanished.

Highlights include:
• A ghost who appeared at a bonfire-lit celebration
• Blue flames emerging from a fresh grave
• A cave full of serpents
• Astral projection into a London coffeehouse
• The philosopher’s stone?

Follow the podcast on instagram @buriedsecretspodcast

E-mail the podcast at buriedsecretspodcast@gmail.com.

Pictures of Johannes Kelpius

Cave of Kelpius. Image credit: Steven L. Johnson – Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenljohnson/7996580601/

Painting of Johannes Kelpius by Christopher Witt – The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, http://www.hsp.org

Episode Script for Johannes Kelpius and Occult Monks in Philadelphia

“Deep in the woods, where the small river slid

Snake-like in shade, the Helmstadt Mystic hid,

Weird as a wizard, over arts forbid,

. . .

Whereby he read what man ne’er read before,

And saw the visions man shall see no more,

Till the great angel, striding sea and shore,

Shall bid all flesh await, on land or ships,

The warning trump of the Apocalypse,

Shattering the heavens before the dread eclipse.”

– John Greenleaf Whittier, “Pennsylvania Pilgrim” 1872

The Society of the Woman in the Wilderness

Now, let’s take a look at this doomsday cult.
It went by several names, including “the Hermits of the Wissahickon,” “The Society of the Woman in the Wilderness,” “the Hermits of the Ridge,” or the “Mystic Brotherhood.” The Woman in the Wilderness was a character from the Book of Revelation, and I just love the image that the name evokes–it’s very scary and mystic.
Today, one of the caves where this cult lived, called the Cave of Kelpius, stands in philly, on a hillside in Philly’s Fairmount Park, above the Wissahickon Creek near a Hermit Lane.
- The cave isn’t technically a cave: it’s been described as “a manmade structure about the size of a springhouse”
  - A springhouse was a building that was constructed on top of a spring, to keep things from falling in and contaminating it. Some people believe that this wasn’t Kelpius’ cave at all, and that it was just a basic springhouse.
  - The structure once had a fireplace and chimney, which were removed in the 1940s because of vandalism.
- There’s a marker that the Rosicrucians put there that says that this was the site where Philly’s first mystical guru came to meditate and wait for the second coming.
- So, let’s go back to the 1600s and look at the story of Johannes Kelpius, the mystic who led his group to Philly to wait for the end of the world.
- Philadelphia had recently been founded in 1682 by a Quaker named William Penn.
- Pennsylvania Colony had a reputation for being very tolerant when it came to religion, so it was the perfect place for Kelpius to bring his doomsday cult.
- Kelpius was born in Transylvania–yes, really, Transylvania–in 1667. His birth name was Johann Kelp, but back then, it was customary for academics to receive Latinized names, so after attending a university in Bavaria, he received his new name, Johannes Kelpius
  - When he was 22, he’d earned a masters degree in theology, and he’d published some stuff.
  - While at the university, he became interested in Pietism, which is a Lutheran movement that emphicizes biblical doctrine, as well as piety on an individual level.
  - I’d never heard of this, but I guess it was a big influence on Protestantism in North America and Europe. It sounds like it emphacized frugality, restraint, and order. I guess there’s also a sort of mysticism tied into it. Apparently esoteric and heretical Christian ideas were often lumped into Pietism.
  - When he was 20, Kelpius became a follower of Johann Jacob Zimmerman, a German noncomformist theologian, mathematician, astronomer, and former cleric whose belief in the upcoming end of the world, and criticism of the state church, cost him his religious position. Zimmerman’s followers were all highly educated, and Zimmerman called them “the Society of Perfection” or “Chapter of Perfection”
    - Though nowadays we tend to view the occult and religion as separate, people used to view them as connected. So Zimmerman’s group was full of highly educated religious people who I’ve seen referred to as cabbalists, hermeticists, rosacrucians, and just generally students of the occult.
    - There’s a great article called German Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania by Elizabeth W. Fisher that talks all about Kelpius and his comrades, and it has a good summary of what Rosicrucianism meant at the time. Apparently two 16th century authors wrote about Rosicrucianism and popularized it; one of those authors is Johann Valentin Andreae. To read a bit from the article:
    - In the Fama, or Discovery of the Most Noble Order of the Rosy Cross, Andreae created a fictitious character, Christian Rosencreutz, who had lived for one hundred and six years, from 1378 to 1484. The story held that Rosencreutz had been a great traveller, and in the course of his travels is in the Arab countries and Spain, he learned the “Magia and Cabala”–a “treasure surpassing that of Kings and Emperors.” But Rosencreutz believed that the time was not yet right to reveal this knowledge, and so he “appointed loyal and faithful heirs of his arts and also of his name”–a Rosicrucian fraternity–to guard this knowledge for posterity. These brothers were all evangelical Christians, and confessed “to have the knowledge of Jesus Christ.”
    - This secret knowledge was powerful; it gave the Rosicrucian brothers the ability to read “that great Book of Nature.” This book was open to all, “yet there are but few that can read and understand the same.” Borrowing the fundamental premise of the cabbala, the Rosicrucians argued that God imprinted the same characters and letters that he had incorporated into the Holy Scripture “into the Wonderful Creation of Heaven and Earth.” Like astronomers and mathematicians who could predict eclipses, the Rosicrucians could “fore-see the darkness or obscurations of the Church and how long they shall last. We have borrowed our Magick writing, and have found out, and made a new Language for our selves in the which withall is declared the Nature of all Things.”23
    - Nature was the key to knowledge, for God had revealed divine meaning in the hieroglyphic characters he had written in the Universe. Since his whole creation was harmonious, and the microcosm corresponded to the macrocosm, then men could attain knowledge of divine things through mathematical-magical systems.
From his published works, it’s clear that Kelpius was familiar with Rosicrucianism, and it seems likely that Zimmerman and Kelpius met at a Rosicrucian or cabbalistic meeting
Zimmerman determined that Revelation, or, you know, the end of the world, was at hand, and that the place to be was Philadelphia. Philadelphia means the city of brotherly love in Greek I believe, but it also means something else.
I’d forgotten this, since it’s been a while since I last read Revelation, but if you take a look in your Bible at Revelation 3:7-13, there’s a section about the church in Philadelphia. I’ll read a few verses from the NIV:
- “To the angel of the church in Philadelphia write:
- These are the words of him who is holy and true, who holds the key of David. What he opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open. 8 I know your deeds. See, I have placed before you an open door that no one can shut. I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.”
- [and skipping ahead a bit]
- “Since you have kept my command to endure patiently, I will also keep you from the hour of trial that is going to come on the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth.
- 11 I am coming soon. “
- Or, from the NAB:
- ““To the angel of the church in Philadelphia,[a] write this:
- “‘The holy one, the true,
- who holds the key of David,
- who opens and no one shall close,
- who closes and no one shall open,
- says this:
- 8 “‘“I know your works (behold, I have left an open door[b] before you, which no one can close). You have limited strength, and yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name.”
- [skipping ahead a bit]
- “10 Because you have kept my message of endurance,[c] I will keep you safe in the time of trial that is going to come to the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth. 11 I am coming quickly.”
As the group that followed Zimmerman prepared to leave for the American colonies, Zimmerman suddenly died, leaving 27-year-old Kelpius as the leader of the group.
Around 1694, the group of about 40 people arrive in Maryland and went onto Philadelphia (which at the time was what we’d consider very small, with only about 500 houses in the whole city,) and it was on the edge of the wilderness.
- The number of monks who came–40–is significant. During the Biblical flood, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. Moses spent 40 days and night at Mount Sinai. Moses and co wandered the desert for 40 years. Jesus fasted in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. And so on, there are a LOT of 40s in the bible.
In the Philly area, they built a large meeting house, which was 40 square feet, and which they may have lived in.
- However, they may actually have been living separately in nearby caves or cabins.
- Been said that they kept books and scientific equipment in the caves, though I’ve also read that the meeting house contained an observatory to be used for astronomy.
- Some people said that they even had a telescope, but at any rate, it was the first observatory set up by colonizers in the New World.
They thought that the world would end–or, you know, the events of the book of revelation would happen, in 1694. To read a bit of the wikipedia page, which put it very poetically:

“Though no sign or revelation accompanied the year 1694, the faithful, known as the Hermits or Mystics of the Wissahickon, continued to live in celibacy, searching the stars and hoping for the end.”

Meanwhile, they build a school for kids in the neighborhood, held worship services that were open to the public, and, since they were well educated, shared their medical knowledge. They also opened a botanical garden and orchard, studied astronomy, and wrote poetry and music. They also dabbled in alchemy, divination, and conjuring.
Every year, the celebrated the anniversary of their arrival on June 23, which is St. John’s Eve. I’ve never head of St. John’s Eve, but it’s the day before the feast of John the Baptist, and because it nearly coincides with the summer solstice, it can be a pretty big celebration in some places. Traditionally, people light bonfires and collect medicinal herbs.
- The monks would light a bonfire in the woods and then scatter embers. The idea was that this symbolized how the sunlight wanes between summer and winter solstice.
- In 1701, after the St. John’s Eve bonfire, the monks are reported to have seen “a white, obscure moving body in the air, which, as it approached, assumed the form and mien of an angel…it receded into the shadows of the forest and appeared again immediately before them as the fairest of the lovely.”
Things seemed to be going pretty well, you know, aside from the end of the world thing not happening.
Kelpius apparently believed that he’d be transfigured like the prophet Elijah and brought into heaven in the flesh.
He spent 3 days praying for that, but when it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, he spoke to his friend Daniel Geissler, gave him a sealed box, and asked him to throw it into the Schuylkill River.
Geissler knew that Kelpius had been searching for immortality, and he thought that the box might contain something to help with that, so instead of throwing it into the river, he hid it on the riverbank.
When Geissler returned, Kelpius looked at him and said ‘Daniel, thou hast not done as I bid thee, nor hast thou cast the casket into the river, but hast hidden it near the shore.’
Now convinced that Kelpius had mystical powers, Geissler went back and threw the box into the water. He claims that when he did it, the box exploded, followed by thunder and lightning.
We have no idea if this story is true, of course: there’s an article in the Philly Voice that points out similarities to the King Arthur myth, when Arthur tells a knight to throw Excalibur, his magic sword, into the enchanted late. Though the knight doesn’t want to at first, eventually he throws it in, and the lady of the lake emerges to take it. Folks have pointed out that since Kelpius and his followers were highly educated, they would have been familiar with the legends of King Arthur.
Then, Kelpius died of tuberculosis, or maybe pneumonia, in 1708, at the age of 35. His death was supposedly caused by exposure during the cold winter; as a mystic who probably worked to deny bodily pain, he probably didn’t always make healthy decisions. When they lowered his coffin into his grave, they released a white dove.
We don’t know where Kelpius was buried.
After his death, the community declined.
It’s said that 6 monks still followed the lifestyle after the others left. People in the area would occasionally see them walking single file, wearing hoods and sandals. It’s said that 6 ghostly figures are still seen on Forbidden Drive, which I guess is a nearby road.
I wanted to read a story about one of Kelpius’ remaining disciples from the Southern Cross Review:
- Conrad Matthai possessed both healing powers and psychic ability. He cast horoscopes, exorcised demons, prophesied, and had the ability to project his “astral body.” In 1740 the wife of a ship captain consulted him. She inquired about her absent husband who had left on a voyage to Africa more than 6 months previously. Matthai excused himself, then repaired to his bedroom for over an hour. The woman peeked in at one point and saw him lying on his bunk, “pale and motionless as if he were dead.” (Sachse 394) When Matthai emerged from his bedchamber he told the lady that her husband sat in a London coffeehouse at that moment and would soon set sail for Philadelphia.
- As predicted, the captain returned three months later. After hearing his wife’s account, he decided to visit the fortune-telling hermit. Upon seeing Matthai the captain declared that he had met him before in a London coffeehouse just prior to leaving for Philadelphia. The old man had given him a start by walking up to his table and saying: “you haven’t written your wife; she’s worried sick about you.”
The monks’ story seems to haves mostly been forgotten, aside from the cave in the park in Philly, and an oil painting by Christopher Dewitt, or maybe Christopher Witt (he’s been called both names), an English doctor who painted Kelpius in 1705.
- That painting is apparently the oldest oil portrait in the US.
- Dewitt had also built a pipe organ for the group, who heavily featured music in their religious practice. That was the first pipe organ in what would become the US.
- And in 1738, Dewitt apparently bestowed the first medical degree in Pennsylvania, to one of his interns.
- Dewitt was the last surviving member of Kelpius’ group. To read a bit more from the Southern Cross Review:
  - “Witt’s healing powers were so remarkable that some superstitious folk in Germantown called the doctor a “hexenmeister,” and crossed themselves after passing him on the street. Most of us know that Amish farmers put hex signs on barns to repel evil spirits. A “hexenmeister” is a kind of warlock who can impose and lift curses.”
- I assume this tradition and superstition is tied to the practice of folk medicine in Pennsylvania, also called powwow. Practicioners of powwow in the past were often seen as witches or warlocks.
- A botanist named John Bartram once wrote a nice little account of visiting Dewitt:
  - “I have lately been to visit our friend Dr. Witt (in Germantown near Washington Lane & Gtn. Ave.), where I spent four or five hours very agreeably—sometimes in his garden, where I viewed every kind of plant, I believe that grew therein…We went into his study, which was furnished with books containing different kinds of learning; as Philosophy, Natural Magic, Divinity, nay even Mystic Divinity; all of which were the subjects of our discourse within doors, which alternately gave way to Botany, every time we walked in the garden. I could have wished thee the enjoyment of so much diversion, as to have heard our (conversation.)…”
- Though one bad thing we know about Dewitt is that when he was 70 years old, Dewitt purchased an enslaved man named Robert Claymoore to help him with household chores.
  - Claymoore was very mechanically minded, so Dewitt taught him clock making, which was another of Dewitt’s random skills.
  - People in the area who believed that Dewitt was a “hexenmeister” often claimed that Claymoore was his familiar.
  - After Dewitt died, to quote the Southern Cross review: “Robert Claymoore received his freedom, a dwelling, small plot of land, furniture, clock-making tools, and other household contents.”
  - So that’s something at least, I guess. Dewitt left most of his land to a tailor who had apparently showed kindness to the monks, and he also left 60 pounds to the hospital to treat indigent people.
- And I want to read one more bit about Dewitt’s burial:
  - “Mourners wrapped Dr. Witt’s body in a linen sheet and put it in an unvarnished pine box. As the early February sun set, they interred him beside Daniel Giessler, Christian Warmer, and a few anonymous Hermits of the Ridge in the community’s graveyard on High St. between Baynton & Morton Sts., which measured 40 feet by 40 feet. “Spectral blue flames were seen dancing around his grave…for weeks.” (Sachse 422) In 1859 the Episcopal Diocese of Philadelphia built St. Michael’s Church on top of the burial plot, which locals then called “Spook Hill.””
But there is one lingering mystery. There’s a legendary stone that Kelpius was said to have, which may have been inside the box that Kelpius had thrown into the river. To read a bit of a headline from the DC Evening Star from 1909:

Philadelphia Girl Owns Stone of Wisdom

Mystics and believers in the occult often have occasion to refer to the teachings of Father Kelpius–prayed and taught and underwent visions which have puzzled the students of latter days–inspiration of visions was a mysterious stone brought from India–mystic Kelpius had found it on the floor of a cave inhabited by vicious serprents–broke the stone in two pieces and brought only half to the new world–before his death he ordered his half thrown into the Wissahickon, and the half left in the old world has now come to Miss Yetta Norworthe of Philadelphia

The article goes on to talk more about the stone:
- Through its powers, real or imaginary, he could read the future, he could conjure up wonderful dreams, visions much like those of Swedenborg.
  The stone enabled him to wield over his mystic followers an influence such as can hardly be understood today, and a cult grew up around him.
  Along the stream in caves and in an abbey which has now been turned to the highly modern uses of a gold club the followers of Kelpius read and studied, dreamed and prayed.
  And ever their inspiration and guiding star was the sacred stone which the great leader had brought with him from India.
The stone apparently had “curious carvings, bearing the message of the serpent, symbol of all wisdom”
I wonder if that’s the ouroboros? This feels linked in with alchemy to me, with the snake (recalling the ouroboros) and the stone (recalling the alchemical philosopher’s stone) and the whole sense of mystic hermeticism.
Apparently, a handful of Kelpius’ followers wanted to inherit the stone on his death, but to prevent that from happening, apparently because he feared people would use the stone for ill, he threw the stone into the Wissahickon river.
However, Kelpius had left half of the stone in Europe, so in 1909, that half was brought the America by one of Kelpius’ distant descendant (the article says she was a collatoral descendant, which I assume means a descendant of a sibling or cousin or something)
So this descendant, Yetta Norworthe, became interested in the occult. Supposedly some of her other relatives owned the stone at one time or another, but she’s the only one who understands its message: she said that she can tell the future using it.
Her studies brought her repeatedly to the shores of the Wissahickon, where she meditated and reflected like someone on a pilgrimage, and she said:
- “I have now progressed to the point where I, too, can conjure up visions, and I am convinced that these are genuine and not merely the imagination of a sensitive and impressionable woman.
  “I can shut my eyes and produce a most wonderful picture of Kelpius, in his cowl, teaching the lessons of gentleness and humility to the hermit monks that lived with him. There are religious ceremonies the like of which I have never known in this modern world of ours, queer rituals, chanting hyms, odd prayers.
She goes on to talk about Kelpius, who was very young when he took the stone from the cave of serpents in India, and apparently by the time he was 21, he started experiencing dreams and visions, which impressed occultists at the time, who began to follow him. He took his followers to the new world, and in fact, one of William Penn’s friends paid for their passage.
She said that some followers lived in the meeting house, of abbey, as she called it, but Kelpius chose to live in the cave that remains today. He studied the stone there.
He gave specific instructions about the stone that he left in Europe, saying that it should pass down from the male head of the family, and not to be given to a woman in the family until there was a woman who understood what the markings meant
So as a child, Norworthe began studying the stone, and soon enough she knew more about it than anyone else, and was given the stone.
She said something that sounds very tied to hermeticism and alchemy:
- People of the west are apt to be unjustly prejudiced against the wisdom religion of the east, owing to the unpleasant things they are told about serpent-worship in India and Greece. And while I may not speak fully, I may explain how the fate of the world is linked with that of the serpent in wisdom religion. The Term serpent means wisdom, and nothing else, to the occult student.
  To the mystic the serpent represents the perpetually renovated world, typified by the casting of his skin and the return to a second youth every year. To me the symbol is perfect. The mathematical figure of life is likewise complete in the symbol, where the serpent coils himself into a perfect circle with his tail in his mouth, having neither beginning nor end. This depicts eternity, or more properly speaking, immortality, of which all mystics are assured.”
She also says something interesting about how Kelpius knew that a “woman’s era” would be dawning, which is why he left the stone to her

Sources consulted RE: Johannes Kelpius

Articles

“Prophesies and Revelations”: German Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania
Author(s): Elizabeth W. Fisher Source: The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography , Jul., 1985, Vol. 109, No. 3 (Jul., 1985), pp. 299-333 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20091938
DC evening star article: https://kelpiusblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/19090814_dc_evening_star_kelpius_stone.pdf
Southern Cross Review article: https://southerncrossreview.org/25/tyson.htm

Websites

http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/Johannes_Kelpius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Kelpius
https://www.ushistory.org/oddities/kelpius.htm
https://hymnary.org/person/Kelpius_John
http://dictionnaire.sensagent.leparisien.fr/johannes+kelpius/en-en/
https://vugradhistory.wordpress.com/tag/kelpius/
https://www.montgomerynews.com/roxreview/news/diving-into-the-cave-of-kelpius/article_73e2b896-c5ad-588e-b749-99dd8b6a7739.html
https://infogalactic.com/info/Wissahickon_Creek
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Transylvania_(1570%E2%80%931711)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvania
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_B%C3%B6hme
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Jacob_Zimmermann
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Pennsylvania_Pilgrim
http://kelpius.org/
https://kelpiusblog.wordpress.com/
https://kelpiusblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/15/share-your-kelpius-stone-of-wisdom-stories/
https://kelpiusblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/heinrich-bernhard-koster-and-irenia/
https://kelpiusblog.wordpress.com/2013/06/16/june-15-2013-kelpius-society-hosts-summer
solstice-program-at-philadelphia-museum-of-art/
https://kelpiusblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/193/
https://kelpiusblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/46/
https://kelpiusblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/06/request-for-research-and-information/
https://hiddencityphila.org/2011/11/doomsday-cult-on-the-wissahickon/
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/cave-of-kelpius
https://denamerlino.com/the-hermit-of-the-wissahickon/
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation%203%3A7-13&version=NIV
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation%203%3A7-13&version=NABRE
http://www.oddthingsiveseen.com/2007/08/cave-of-kelpius.html
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/cave-of-kelpius
https://www.phillyvoice.com/did-wissahickon-hermit-have-fabled-philosophers-stone/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_house
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_John%27s_Eve
https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-americas/cave-kelipus-place-where-ardent-believers-waited-second-coming-007048
https://www.ushistory.org/oddities/kelpius.htm
https://kelpiusblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/06/request-for-research-and-information/
https://kelpiusblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/46/
https://kelpiusblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/193/
https://kelpiusblog.wordpress.com/2013/06/16/june-15-2013-kelpius-society-hosts-summer-solstice-program-at-philadelphia-museum-of-art/
https://kelpiusblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/heinrich-bernhard-koster-and-irenia/
https://kelpiusblog.wordpress.com/
http://kelpius.org/aboutus.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Transylvania_(1570%E2%80%931711)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Pennsylvania_Pilgrim
Map: http://www.phillyh2o.org/backpages/Maps/FairmountPk_1871_FHS.jpg

Don’t miss past episodes:

The Ghostbusters Ruling

When a woman sells her home and doesn’t disclose that friendly ghosts haunt it, the subsequent court case leads to the New York Supreme Court officially declaring the house haunted.

In 1989, Helen Ackley sold the 18-room Victorian mansion that she’d lived in for 24 years. Located at 1 Laveta Place in Nyack, New York, overlooking the Hudson River, and lovingly restored by Helen and her late husband when they first purchased it in the 1960s, it was the perfect home for the Stambovskys, a Wall Street Trader and his wife, who purchased it. Except for one thing–the house was haunted.

Helen Ackley was proud of her ghosts, and seemed to consider them close friends.

When a local architect mentioned the house’s paranormal reputation to the new buyer, Stambovsky immediately sued to get his down payment back, and refused to move into the home. That led to a court case, widely known as the Ghostbusters Ruling, that went to the New York Supreme Court–twice–and cumulated with a pun-filled ruling that quoted the ghost from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as well as the hit 1984 movie Ghostbusters. The judge had spoken: “as a matter of law, the house is haunted.”

Highlights include:
• Fun facts about haunted houses
• The ghost of a Revolutionary War naval officer
• A fixer-upper with ghosts
• A spirit-approved paint job

Follow the podcast on instagram @buriedsecretspodcast

E-mail the podcast at buriedsecretspodcast@gmail.com.

Episode Script for The Ghostbusters Ruling

From a 2017 survey by Realtor.com:
- In fact, according to the Haunted House Real Estate Survey realtor.com® released today,
- Open to living in a haunted house?
  - 33 percent of approximately 1,000 respondents said they are open to living in a haunted house,
  - 25 percent might be, and
  - 42 percent are not open to the idea.
- About 40 percent of people who are open to a haunted home said they’d want to see that home price go down to put money down on it.
  - Another 35 percent said it would have to be in a better neighborhood to make the move,
  - 32 percent said they wanted extra footage and
  - 29 percent said they’d move in if they had more bedrooms.
  - Only 8 percent of respondents said they require no additional perks to purchase a haunted home
- 47 percent of those surveyed said they would live in a home where someone died,
  - 27 percent said they might, and
  - 26 percent said, “NO WAY.”
- For example, 48 percent who agreed they’d make a haunted house home said they could tolerate cold or hot spots in their home.
- Things that go bump in the night? Here, 45 percent of respondents said, “no problem.”
- That feeling when the hair stands up on the back of your neck? Thirty-nine percent said they were okay with strange feelings in certain rooms.
- A strange shadow over your bed while you sleep? Well, 35 percent said “meh” to unexplained shadows.
- But, when it comes to floating tables or creepy, unknown touches, only 20 percent of respondents felt comfortable with this.
- According to the survey, 28 percent think they have lived in a haunted home,
  - 14 percent think they may have, and
  - 58 percent indicate they have never lived in one.
- When asked what made them think the home was haunted,
  - 58 percent said they heard strange, unexplainable noises,
  - 51 percent felt that creepy feeling in certain rooms and
  - 40 percent said they’ve seen objects move or just completely disappear.
From a 2018 Realtor.com survey:
- most buyers probably wouldn’t know their home-to-be was haunted.
- Only about 34% of sellers would disclose ghosts to interested buyers,
- while another 27% would only tell them if they were asked about it.
- The study also saw that millennials were the most likely generation to buy a haunted house
- Living in a haunted home is more common than one would imagine, and not necessarily a surprise to the occupants.
  - Nearly two in five people believe they have lived in a haunted (or possibly haunted) house, and
  - 44 percent of them either suspected or were fully aware of said haunting before moving in.
  - In fact, the majority of people under 55 years old suspected — or were sure — their home was haunted before they moved in, a decision possibly incentivized by a lower home price or better neighborhood.
  - Hearing strange noises (54 percent) topped the list of most common spooky behaviors, followed by
  - odd feelings in certain rooms (45 percent) and
  - erratic pet behavior (34 percent).
This is a case that’s taught in law school, I think mostly because it’s fun?
This inspired many funny article names:
- from the NYT: 18 Rms. Riv Vu. Ghosts
- From the Star Tribune in Minneapolis: Buyer fears ghost of resale future but judge won’t slime the deal
- Capital, Annapolis: The Realities of Real Estate: Buying a haunted house
The house we’re talking about today is an 18-room Queen Anne Victorian house. The Queen Anne Victorian style is what you think of when you think of a really ornate victorian, with towers and turrets, gingerbread trim, fancy windows, and a really asymmetrical façade. The house is 5,000 square feet. It has 7 bedrooms, 4.5 baths
- nowadays it also has:
  - a 3 car garage,
  - concrete countertops and a renovated kitchen,
  - an in-ground hot tub
  - it retains the original inlaid floors, arched doorways, and stained glass accents throughout
  - it has a wraparound porch that faces the river
  - a turret
  - pocket doors
  - window seats
  - coffered ceiling
- located at 1 Leveta Place, at the end of a dead-end street with a beautiful view of the Hudson River, in Nyack, NY. There are views of the Hudson from almost every window.
- It’s walking distance from downtown.
- AT the time of this story it was painted gray, but it’s blue now.
- Nyack is a town in Rockland County.
- It’s right across the Hudson River from Sleepy Hollow
- I found an interview with a paranormal investigator named Linda Zimmerman who claimed that Nyack is the most haunted town in the most haunted county in NYS (basically b/c of the history of colonialism)
It was built around 1890 and was originally a boarding house, but then it became a private residence.
In the 1960s, Helen and George Ackley moved in. The house was in disrepair so it was a fixer upper.
Apparently everyone in the town (which was really small, with just 7K inhabitants) knew the house was haunted, but no one told them
The owner, a woman named Helen Ackley, had talked about how haunted her house was before, including in a Reader’s Digest article from 1977, and in local ghost tours.
The ghosts sounded pretty nice:
- From Readers Digest piece: ”He was sitting in midair, watching me paint the ceiling in the living room, rocking and back forth,. I was on an 8-foot stepladder. I asked if he approved of what we were doing to the house, if the colors were to his liking. He smiled and he nodded his head.”
  - From Steve Lee.com: Helen believed this aforementioned gentleman to be Sir George, wife of Lady Margaret. The couple lived in the area during the 18th century. In addition to this couple, Helen asserted that there was another ghost in residence, a Navy Lieutenant from the American Revolution.
- one ghost watched her paint a room and approved of it, one woke up her daughter every day for school, and small gifts appeared mysteriously (including a small ring left on the stairs, and a small knicknack box, and a silver sugar tong). Also, she said that one ghost remnded her of Santa Claus, and another was wearing clothes from the Revolutionary War era
From the Village Voice:
- There were at least two actual ghost sightings over the years, too, both of which Ackley described in detail, right down to the spooks’ fashion sensibilities. One apparition, spotted by a friend who spent the night, was “a man dressed in a long jacket of the Revolutionary period.” Ackley herself encountered the other while home alone painting the living-room walls:
- “What did he look like? He was the most cheerful and solid-looking little person I’ve ever seen. A cap of white hair framed his round, apple-cheeked face, and there were piercing blue eyes under thick white eyebrows. His light-blue suit was immaculate, the cuffs of the short unbuttoned jacket turned back over ruffles at his wrists. A white ruffled stock showed at his throat. Below breeches cut to his kneecaps he wore white hose and shiny black pumps with buckles.”
- She asked the spirit if he approved of her remodeling decisions; he was there for only a minute, and then he was gone.
- “No, I wasn’t drinking that day,” Ackley wrote. “No, the paint fumes hadn’t got to me…he seemed happy to be there, and I was proud to meet him.”
- The lot of them got along famously from there on out, and by the time she penned her piece, Ackley had come to “savor these happenings…if the time comes for us to move again,” she wondered, “is there any way we can take our otherworldly friends with us?”
- Ackley made a concerted effort to publicize her visitors. There was the piece in the Digest, of course, and she even had the place featured on a walking tour of Nyack. She was proud of her ghosts.
From at 1990 NYT article:
- As for whether he will see the ghosts in Nyack – in 22 years, the owner, Helen V. Ackley, has seen only one
  ”He was sitting in midair, watching me paint the ceiling in the living room, rocking and back forth,” she said. ”I was on an 8-foot stepladder. I asked if he approved of what we were doing to the house, if the colors were to his liking. He smiled and he nodded his head.”
  Mrs. Ackley said one of the other ghosts would waltz into her daughter’s bedroom. ”We don’t know whether or not she was the one who woke the children up by shaking the bed,” she said.
  Ghost No. 3 was a Navy lieutenant during the American Revolution. ”My son saw him eyeball to eyeball outside the basement door,” Mrs. Ackley said.
I found a great story from a man who married one of Helen’s daughters, Cynthia, about his experiences in the house:
- The first happened on Christmas eve. I was home alone due to various activities. I was playing Christmas elf in the living room putting gifts together. It was totally quiet in the house. After a while I kept hearing a muffled conversation coming from the dining room around the wall. I would get up and walk over, and nobody was there. I felt like I was being watched. I had purposely turned on every light in the surrounding rooms. I was getting nervous. Then my future Brother-In-Law suddenly pounded on the door making me jump out of my skin, and the talking stopped.
- The second incident happened in our bedroom on the third floor. It was a clear dark night, Cyn had already fallen asleep and I was drifting. Then I heard the bedroom door creak, and the floor boards squeak. My back was to the edge of the bed. Suddenly the edge of the bed by my mid-section depressed down, and I felt something lean against me. I went literally stone stiff! I was speechless and could hardly move. I was able to twist my neck around enough to see a womanly figure in a soft dress through the moonlight from the bay windows. I felt like she was looking straight at me. After about minute, the presence got up and walked back out of the room. I finally relaxed enough to shake my wife out of sound sleep acting like a toddler who just had a nightmare.
- Later I reflected on the incident. I believe the ghosts were checking me out because they knew my wife and her ex-husband. They probably wanted to see if I was a “good” person for her. It was the women that used to shake Cyn’s bed every morning to go to high school. After that episode no other sightings occurred. I did get the impression that they did “approve” of me, and my wife and I were married about 18 months later.
After more than 24 years of living there, Helen Ackley decided to sell their house and more to Texas or Florida, in part because the property taxes on the house were through the roof. (her husband had died years before)
In 1989, she sold it to Jeffrey Stambovsky, was a 38-year-old Wall Street bond trader, and his wife Patrice Soriero (who was pregnant at the time.) They put down a $32,000 down payment on the house, which sold for $650,000 ( $650K is about $1.3 million now)
when he found out about the ghost stories, he said it threatened his property value and wanted to pull out
- From the LA TImes:
  - Jeffrey and Patrice Stambovsky, who had decided in 1989 to buy the old 18-room mansion in Nyack for $650,00–but changed their mind after a local architect said, “Oh, you’re buying the haunted house.”
  - It seems they were not told, before they put down a $32,500 binder, that the owner, Helen Ackley, claimed for years that she had been seeing poltergeists. In a 1977 article in Reader’s Digest, she said one of them was a “cheerful, apple-cheeked man” who looked like Santa Claus.
  - In a local newspaper in 1982, she described the spirits as “dressed in Revolutionary period clothing, perhaps frozen in a time warp, waiting for someone or some reason to move on.”
  - In a 1989 article about a real estate tour in suburban Nyack, the house was described as “riverfront Victorian–with ghost.”
  - “I feel they are very good friends,” she said last year. Occasionally they would leave little gifts. “It’s very comforting to have them around when you are by yourself.”
  - … “Would you want to bump into George Washington in the middle of the night?” their [the Stambovskys’] lawyer asked.
  - Since Mrs. Ackley hadn’t said boo to them about the hauntings, they demanded their money back.
  - “My feeling is that Mrs. Ackley is a very neat old lady who likes to spin tales,” Stambovsky said. “But if my wife is influenced enough by that stuff to feel uncomfortable, that’s a good enough reason not to sink our life savings into the place.”
  - “We were the victims of ectoplasmic fraud,” he added.
  - The Stambovskys backed out of the deal and sued to get their down payment back.
  - From the Village Voice:
    - The couple wasn’t worried about ghosts, court records make clear. They weren’t superstitious. They were worried, effectively, about other people’s superstitions. Their argument was that a house reputed to be filled with restless spirits wouldn’t top the list of most house-hunters; at the very least, a certain population would be averse to the news, and that would make the house less marketable. They were worried they might have trouble selling the place in the future, at least for its maximum, unhaunted price. They backed out of the sale, which meant forfeiting their $32,500 deposit. But because Ackley hadn’t disclosed the home’s reputation, they didn’t think they should have to eat those costs, so they sued.
  - From a 1990 AP article:

That’s all well and good, but what if the ghosts only like the Ackley family, Soriero said.

″They might not like it if she moves,″ she said.

Once she sells the house, Ackley said, she plans to move to Orlando. She noted that ghosts usually get attached either to a particular person or a specific place and she doesn’t know what kind of ghosts she has.

″If they want to come with me, I’d be glad to have them,″ she said.

. . .

The ghosts can be heard going coming down the stairs in the morning and going back upstairs in the evening, Ackley said.

She said that when her four grown children were young, the ghosts would shake their beds to get them up in the morning.

In 1990, a New York Supreme Court judge said that he couldn’t get the down payment back; he said that there was precident in “buyer beware” cases where ppl bought houses and found they were on landfills or were about to have their sewers disconnected.
Some choice bits of testimony from the case:
- Testimony of Helen Ackley
- Q: You knew the house was haunted before you bought it yourself, isn’t that right Helen?
- A: Yes. I knew. Some kids from the neighborhood told me it was. I’m not afraid of ghosts.
- Q: Are there ghosts in that house at 1 LaVeta Place.
- A: Definitely. At least three – a married couple; and, a Navy Lieutenant from the American Revolution.
- Q: And there was a book written about those ghosts?
- A: Yes: Sir George, The Ghost of Nyack.
- Q: Did you ever see Sir George?
- A: Yes, sir: Sitting in midair, watching me paint the ceiling in the living room, rocking back and forth…I was on an 8-foot stepladder.
- Q: Did you say anything?
- A: I asked if he approved of what we were doing to the house.
- Q: What did he say?
- ATTORNEY: OBJECTION: HEARSAY!
- COURT: Counsel, please. OVERRULED! Please answer the question.
- A: He smiled and he nodded his head.
- Q: In fact, you wrote about that close encounter.
- A: Yes.
- Q: And you had it published in Reader’s Digest, right?
- A: Yep; and the local Nyack papers.
- Q: And in the Reader’s Digest article you wrote about spirits waking up your daughter for school?
- A: Yes. Like it says in the article, the spirit would wake my daughter for school by shaking the bed. When she was out of school for Spring Break, my daughter would shout before going to sleep that she did not have school the next day.
- Q: And what happened the next day?
- A: The next day, the bed did not shake.
- Q: Now, Helen, you never told any of this to Jeff before you signed the contract of sale, did you?
- A: Nope. Didn’t have to.
- ATTORNEY: OBJECTION! Move to strike everything after “Nope.”
- COURT: SUSTAINED as not responsive to the question.
- Testimony of Jeff
- Q: Are you afraid of ghosts.
- A: Terrified! You ever seen the movie Poltergeist?
- Q: Would you have entered into the contract to buy 1 LaVeta if you had known the house was haunted.
- A: Never!
- Q: Were there any other problems with the house?
- A: None. It was perfect as far as I or the inspectors could see. But I don’t want to live in a house that is haunted. And it is haunted.
A NYT article from 1990 about the NY Supreme Court ruling closes with:
- Mrs. Ackley said yesterday that she had not seen any ghosts recently, but that her son-in-law had a few months ago.
There were 50 prospective buyers, including the Amazing Kreskin, a mentalist who was looking for a place to keep his collection of paranormal things.
Another 1990 NYT article:
- . . . By contrast, Kreskin, a performer who describes himself as a mentalist and who uses only one name, wants the house only if it really is haunted. This has some people in Nyack thinking about deeply held beliefs and just how deeply they hold them.
- ”If I can sell a house, I believe in ghosts,” said Murray Jacobs, a real-estate agent who is to show Kreskin the house today. ”I’d believe in fairies, too, if that’s what it takes.” Mr. Jacobs and other agents have just had 25 to 50 calls about the house.
- Kreskin has gone house-hunting in the past, and has narrowed his search to something haunted. He wants a place for the memorabilia he has collected in a lifetime of doing experiments that come as close to demanding psychic powers as a man who says he does not have them can come: finding his paycheck anywhere in an auditorium, even in a stuffed turkey, for example.
- –Then the article talks about other houses Kreskin viewed, which he was able to find rational explanations for
From a NYT article, after:
- THE AMAZING KRESKIN says no deal on that turreted turn-of-the-century Victorian house in Nyack, N.Y. – the one the owner says has ghosts.
  Kreskin, a performer who describes himself as ”the world’s foremost mentalist” and uses only one name, said he decided not to bid on the three-story clapboard house after the owner’s son told the Fox News program ”A Current Affair” that videotaping a seance Kreskin had been thinking of holding there would cost $50,000.
  . . .
  The owner, HELEN ACKLEY, said the $50,000 came up in a conversation with her 29-year-old son, William, after she decided that reporters and camera crews were taking up too much of her time. ”My son said to me, ‘Would you do this for $50,000?’ I said sure. I laughed. He picked up the phone and when he told them that, it was a good stopper and I thought it was a good time to stop.” She said she told Kreskin he could have a seance, but without television coverage – a condition Kreskin said he could not accept.
  ”As a matter of policy, ‘A Current Affair’ does not pay for stories,” said a spokesman for the show, Jeff Erdel, ”so I think it would be highly unlikely that we would pay for a seance.”
  Kreskin, who toured the house briefly last month, said he was ”disappointed.” It went on the market after Justice EDWARD H. LEHNER ruled in State Supreme Court in Manhattan that a would-be buyer, JEFFREY M. STAMBOVSKY, had no right to his $32,500 down payment. Mr. Stambovsky backed out of a $650,000 contract on the house after finding out about the ghosts.
From an LA Times article from the time:
- Meanwhile, Kreskin, who calls himself the world’s leading mentalist, said he would consider buying the house if the ghosts proved to be real. He wanted to hold a seance in the house in 1990–to take a head count, or maybe a headless count–but Ackley’s son objected to “stunt publicity” and prompted Kreskin to back out by imposing a $50,000 fee for reporters to attend.
- The house was sold to someone other than the Stambovskys for slightly under $650,000.
After the Stambovskys backed out, film director, screenwriter and actor Adam Brooks bought it and lived there for 20 years.
- He wrote Definitely, Maybe; Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Wimbledon–and Practical Magic
- he never encountered any ghosts
Helen moved to Orlando. Apparently she struggled with leaving the ghosts, and asked them to come with her, but they didn’t.

Back to the court case, where the Stambovskys appealed the decision and tried to get their down payment back

The Stambovskys won the case on appeal in 1991; they were told thay they could sue to get their down payment back. They ended up getting most of it back.
- the court felt the haunted nature of the house was deliberately concealed. they also had a problem with how Ackley had publicized the hauntings and made them known to just about everyone but the buyers.
- Real estate agents were required by law to tell prospective buyers that a house was haunted, if the seller told them it was haunted.
- From the NYT:
  The Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Manhattan said that since the former owner of the house told many people in town that her house was possessed by ghosts, she was legally obligated to tell the buyer, too. . . .
  Andrew C. Bisculca, the lawyer for Mrs. Ackley, said she sold her house, moved away and had no comment. Mr. Stambovsky bought another house in Nyack, apparently with no poltergeists.
There were five judges; 3 of them were in favor of the Stambovskys getting their down payment back, and two dissented.
- From the majority opinions:
  - . . . While I agree with Supreme Court that the real estate broker, as agent for the seller, is under no duty to disclose to a potential buyer the phantasmal reputation of the premises and that, in his pursuit of a legal remedy for fraudulent misrepresentation against the seller, plaintiff hasn’t a ghost of a chance, I am nevertheless moved by the spirit of equity to allow the buyer to seek rescission of the contract of sale and recovery of his down payment.
  - . . . “Pity me not but lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold” (William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V [Ghost]).
  - . . From the perspective of a person in the position of plaintiff herein, a very practical problem arises with respect to the discovery of a paranormal phenomenon: “Who you gonna’ call?” as a title song to the movie “Ghostbusters” asks. Applying the strict rule of caveat emptor to a contract involving a house possessed by poltergeists conjures up visions of a psychic or medium routinely accompanying the structural engineer and Terminix man on an inspection of every home subject to a contract of sale. It portends that the prudent attorney will establish an escrow account lest the subject of the transaction come back to haunt him and his client — or pray that his malpractice insurance coverage extends to supernatural disasters. In the interest of avoiding such untenable consequences, the notion that a haunting is a condition which can and should be ascertained upon reasonable inspection of the premises is a hobgoblin which should be exorcised from the body of legal precedent and laid quietly to rest.
  - . . . Finally, if the language of the contract is to be construed as broadly as defendant urges to encompass the presence of poltergeists in the house, it cannot be said that she has delivered the premises “vacant” in accordance with her obligation under the provisions of the contract rider.
From the Village Voice article, Judge Rubin, who wrote the judgement for the appeal, said:
- “It was a real estate case, a fairly routine case, actually,” Rubin said. “It was never about whether anyone believes in ghosts.”
- Fair enough. But what about Rubin himself?
- The judge had his hands clasped in front of him. “Of course not.”
From Helen’s son in law:
- Around 1993 Helen was contacted by a paranormal researcher from Portland, Oregon. He was interested in the house and had a friend who had already communicated with her former roommates in Nyack. Helen went out to visit our family here in Oregon and arranged to meet with the researcher, Bill Merrill. She also met the channeler, Glenn Johnson.
- They were able to contact two ghosts from the Nyack residence from a location in Southern Oregon. One ghost called himself Sir George, the other called herself Margaret. The ghosts stated that it wasn’t as much fun in the house since the Ackley’s moved out. It is true that the eventual buyers played down the haunting, and did not want the ghosts. Anyway, the ghosts went on to explain various parts of history of the area along the Hudson between Nyack and Upper Nyack and Hook Mountain. Later Historians in Rockland County checked out the recounting and most of it held up, or could easily be true. The facts presented were highly obscure, and not readily available. In one meeting with the ghosts, they stated that they were to board and it was time to move on. So just maybe the Ghost of Nyack is no more…
- In 1995, Bill and Glenn published a book about these events. It is entitled: Sir George, The Ghost of Nyack by Bill Merrill & Glenn Johnson
However, by the 1995, NYS passed the Stigmatized Property Laws, which basically said that real estate agents only had to tell prospective buyers about physical issues with the home, not murders or suicides that happened there, or paranormal activity, unless they’re specifically asked about it.
Helen Ackley died in 2003, and her son believes that her spirit now lives in 1 Laveta Place.
From the New York Post:
- Singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson, who lived on the property from 2012 to 2015, says the home is enchanting — but not creepy.
- “I absolutely adored living at One LaVeta,” Michaelson says. “It’s a magical home. It’s a memorable home. It’s a home where people gather, it draws you in and comforts you. And the view is unbeatable.”
Matisyahu owns it now (a Jewish singer and rapper.
In September 2019, the house went up for sale for $1.9 million.
- I don’t think it’s been sold yet, because a couple weeks ago they lowered the price to $1.8 million
- Trulia calculates the mortgage to be more than $10K/month
- And in 2016, the property taxes were $43,000
- https://www.trulia.com/p/ny/nyack/1-laveta-pl-nyack-ny-10960–1100346429

Sources consulted RE: The Ghostbusters Ruling

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stambovsky_v._Ackley
http://www.ghosttheory.com/2015/09/03/the-haunted-house-on-the-hudson
http://www.ktransit.com/Kavanagh/Ghost/ghost-update.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/20/nyregion/phones-ringing-eerily-for-nyack-spook-home.html
http://www.ktransit.com/Kavanagh/Ghost/ghost-background.htm
https://nwsidebar.wsba.org/2013/10/31/halloween-law-lawyers/
https://loweringthebar.net/2008/09/case-law-hall-o.html
https://io9.gizmodo.com/this-new-york-mansion-is-legally-haunted-1788327098
https://www.coasttocoastam.com/article/legally-haunted-mansion-for-sale/
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/10/legally-haunted-mansion-up-for-sale-in-new-york/
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/new-york/legally-haunted-house-ny/
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-ghost-of-nyack-nyack-new-york
18 Rms. Riv Vu. Ghosts. Sullivan, Ronald.New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]16 Mar 1990: B.3.
Buyer fears ghost of resale future but judge won’t slime the deal: [METRO Edition] Star Tribune; Minneapolis, Minn. [Minneapolis, Minn]31 Mar 1990: 01R.
The Realities of Real Estate: Buying a haunted house
McWILLIAMS, BOB; McWILLIAMS, DONNA.Capital; Annapolis [Annapolis]27 Oct 2013: C.14.
“Let Buyer Beware? Indeed!” New York Times, 19 July 1991. New York State Newspapers,
https://link-gale-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/apps/doc/A175292062/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=0ad920f8. Accessed 11 Apr. 2020.
Anderson, Susan Heller, and James Barron. “CHRONICLE.” New York Times, 9 Apr. 1990. New York State Newspapers, https://link-gale-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/apps/doc/A175484954/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=b2b6f33c. Accessed 11 Apr. 2020.
Barron, James. “Phones Ringing (Eerily?) For Nyack Spook Home.” New York Times, 20 Mar. 1990. New York State Newspapers, https://link-gale-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/apps/doc/A175445997/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=409f4992. Accessed 11 Apr. 2020.
“‘Must home sellers disclose that a home is haunted?’.” Washingtonpost.com, 30 Oct. 2015. Gale OneFile: News, https://link-gale-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/apps/doc/A433186038/STND?u=nypl&sid=STND&xid=7110d7be. Accessed 11 Apr. 2020.
Tinning, Andrea. “Four ways to avoid having a ‘deadbeat’ roommate.” UWIRE Text, 31 Oct. 2017, p. 1. Gale OneFile: News, https://link-gale-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/apps/doc/A523809066/STND?u=nypl&sid=STND&xid=97a701c3. Accessed 11 Apr. 2020.
https://www.realtor.com/homemade/haunted-house-survey/
https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/millennials-more-likely-to-buy-haunted-houses/
https://news.move.com/2018-10-23-Millennials-Most-Likely-to-Purchase-a-Haunted-Home-for-Something-Extra
https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/haunted-house/
https://www.villagevoice.com/2015/10/20/how-a-quintuple-murder-and-a-dream-house-on-the-hudson-brought-the-paranormal-into-our-legal-system/
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-ghost-of-nyack-nyack-new-york
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreskin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghFzI9zq-WY
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-07-28-mn-274-story.html
https://nypost.com/2019/09/19/legally-haunted-new-york-manor-is-for-sale-again/?utm_campaign=iosapp
Stambovsky v. Ackley, 169 A.D.2d 254 (N.Y. App. Div. 1991) (https://casetext.com/case/stambovsky-v-ackley)
“‘HAUNTED’ HOUSES HAVE BECOME TRENDY.” Cincinnati Post [Cincinnati, OH], 29 Oct. 1996, p. 3C. Gale OneFile: News, https://link-gale-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/apps/doc/A72811237/STND?u=nypl&sid=STND&xid=accdb265. Accessed 11 Apr. 2020.
https://books.google.com/books?id=ehWLF6yYepYC&pg=PA72&lpg=PA72&dq=ackley+reader%27s+digest&source=bl&ots=oQ2WJZwoXb&sig=ACfU3U1F4I7-9nuZGO12hOsr0G9aT9UMeQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjh8sOwt-DoAhWjgnIEHfVEA944FBDoATAFegQIDBAz#v=onepage&q=ackley%20reader’s%20digest&f=false
https://books.google.com/books?id=eU7rj_hooGIC&pg=PP34&lpg=PP34&dq=ackley+reader%27s+digest&source=bl&ots=Hnm9mUpsY8&sig=ACfU3U19j_oZP1gmcGywif-_AW4Fmw9vVw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjh8sOwt-DoAhWjgnIEHfVEA944FBDoATACegQIDBAt#v=onepage&q=ackley%20reader’s%20digest&f=false
http://www.ghosttheory.com/2015/09/03/the-haunted-house-on-the-hudson
https://www.stevelee.com/featured/stambovsky-v-ackley-aka-ghostbusters-ruling/
https://pnlawyers.com/a-cup-of-joe-house-in-nyack-held-haunted-as-a-matter-of-law/
https://apnews.com/ff183e209fd81e5d716aeb344a457fa9
https://www.trulia.com/p/ny/nyack/1-laveta-pl-nyack-ny-10960–1100346429
https://www.lohud.com/story/money/real-estate/homes/sell-this-house/2015/09/01/ingrid-michaelson-nyack-home-sale/30567473/
https://nyacknewsandviews.com/2012/10/nyack-sketch-log-1-poltergeist-place/
https://athomeinnyack.wordpress.com/2010/10/29/nyacks-legally-haunted-house/
http://www.ghosttheory.com/2015/09/03/the-haunted-house-on-the-hudson
http://www.ktransit.com/Kavanagh/Ghost/ghost-background.htm
http://www.ktransit.com/Kavanagh/Ghost/ghost-court.htm
https://www.realtor.com/advice/buy/queen-anne-victorian/

Don’t miss past episodes:

Hidden Cemeteries in Astoria, Queens

Two tiny, forgotten cemeteries sit near each other in old Astoria: one was a burying ground for the wealthy families who ran the town, and the other was for Irish immigrants who fled the famine.

Here’s a look at the history behind the graveyards, as well as a puzzling mystery about a nearby churchyard that may or may not be a burial site.

Highlights include:
• Robbers hiding their loot in a church tower
• The mystery of a man with two graves
• The discovery of human remains during a construction project

Follow the podcast on instagram @buriedsecretspodcast

E-mail the podcast at buriedsecretspodcast@gmail.com.

Pictures of hidden cemeteries in Astoria

St. George’s Church Cemetery

The Irish Famine Cemetery

Episode Script for Hidden Cemeteries of Queens

I talk a lot about Astoria, the neighborhood, or more like “town,” in Queens where I live.
I actually have no idea how well known Astoria is outside of NYC, I’d only heard of Queens from the Ramones song We’re A Happy Family before moving to NYC.
But you’ve almost certainly seen Astoria in TV and movies, since there’s been a big film industry presence here since the 1920s.
I’ve talked about how I used to live right next to the big sort of film campus in the southern part of Astoria, which is made up of Kaufman Astoria Studios, the Museum of the Moving Image, and there’s also a big movie theatre over there too. Sometime I’ll do an episode about hauntings in that film complex, because there are some interesting stories over there. But basically Kaufman Astoria Studios has the biggest sound stage space than there is anywhere east of Hollywood, so a lot of stuff ends up being filmed there as well as on the streets of Astoria.
Some films were you can see the at least some shots of the streets of Astoria include: Goodfellas and A Bronx Tale, the newest set of Spider-Man movies, as well as TV shows like Orange is the New Black and Seinfeld (George’s family home was in Astoria), though hundreds of other films were made in Astoria.
So that’s where you may have seen or heard of Astoria.
As for the history of colonizers in Astoria, Peter Stuyvesant, the last dutch mayor of New Amsterdam, a very bad man who I’ve talked about before, granted a man named William Hallett some land on the shore of Astoria in the mid-1600s.
- According to the 1882 book History of Queens County, the land was inhabited by the Canarsie tribe, though native-land.ca says that the Munsee Lenape and Wappinger tribes, and maybe the Matinecock, lived in the area as well. .
- History of Queens County also says that two members of the Canarsie tribe, Pomwaukon and Roweroenesteo, deeded the land to the colonizers in the area on July 9, 1666, though it doesn’t go into a lot of detail.
- At the time, the area was called Mespat or Mespachtes, according to the 1852 book The annals of Newtown, in Queens County, New York by James Riker.
The oldest buildings in the area that are still standing are from 200 years later, in the mid-1800s. A fur merchant named Stephen Ailing Halsey incorporated the village of Astoria in 1839.
There was a lot of argument about what the town should be called, but it ended up being named after the wealthiest man in America, John Jacob Astor.
- Like many rich people today, Astor never deined to come to Astoria, even though it was named after him. Instead, he lived in a summer mansion called Astoria, on East 87th Street in Manhattan. He could look across the river from there and see Astoria.
- There were some rich businessmen, many of whom where lumber and shipping magnates, who did move to Astoria. Their houses were built fairly near the water, in an area that’s sometimes called Astoria Village or Old Astoria now. At the time, there was a ferry that went between Astoria and Manhattan, and service to that ferry was restored a few years back, but other than the ferry, this part of Astoria isn’t particularly accessible. It’s a bit of a weird little tucked-away pocket.
Despite having first moved to this part of Queens back in 2012 and having spent a lot of time exploring Astoria on foot, I had no idea that Old Astoria existed until last year, when I was searching for cemeteries in the area and found two in that area.
So that brings us to our first cemetery:

St. George’s Episcopal Church Cemetery

located in the churchyard of the historic St George’s Episcopal Church of Astoria, which I believe is the oldest church in Astoria.
In 1825, wealthy landowner Robert Blackwell donated the land to build St. George Episcopal church. For longtime listeners, yes, this is Robert Blackwell of the Blackwell family for whom nearby Blackwell’s Island, now called Roosevelt Island, which I’ve discussed in detail in the Renwick Smallpox Hospital episodes.
The original building, which burned down in 1894, was located at what’s now Astoria Boulevard, a few blocks away from the current structure, which was built at 27th avenue and 14 Street in 1904.
If you go to the church’s website, it has a history section, which contains only a clipping of a January 11, 1894 NYT article titled “St. George In Ruin: Oldest Protestant Episcopal Church in Astoria Destroyed by Fire.”
- It describes how the fire started:
  - “Funeral services were to have been held in the church this morning, and in order to have the edifice comfortably heated the sexton built a fire in the furnace last night. It is believed that the furnace became overheated and set fire to the woodwork.”
- There’s something a little ironic about a church burning down because of a funeral. Here’s what the article had to say about the old church:
  - “It was a frame structure, and stood on high ground on the corner of Main and Woolsley Streets. It was surrounded by a spacious churchyard, containing the vaults ad graves of members of the oldest family . . . The destroyed church contained a number of marble tablets erected to the memory of some of the oldest members of the congregation and several former rectors.”
- There’s also something really strange and dark to me about the history section of an extremely historic church’s website only containing and article from the 19th century about the first version of the church being burned down.
I haven’t been inside the church, but it’s supposed to have really nice, recently restored stained glass windows.
It sounds like in recent years, the parish has had some financial troubles, and in 2005, some of the land was leased or sold to a developer, who tore down the parish house, a historic building which had once been the Astoria Institute for the Education of Young Ladies, and replaced it with a very ugly building which seems to be a sort of nursing home or senior residence.
The first time I went there, it was to look for the final resting place of the Blackwell family (the namesake and former owners of Blackwell’s Island, now Roosevelt Island, which I’ve talked about in past episodes.) I was rewarded with views of a beautiful church that looked to me like it’d been transported out of the English countryside.
- The Blackwells once had their own burying ground, which was in use from around 1780-1857. It was located near the water, a bit southwest of where St. George’s is. Interestingly, the location of the cemetery was immediately south of where the Roosevelt Island Bridge, which was built in the 1950s, stands now. What makes that interesting to me is that the bridge that leads to the island once named for the Blackwells is now right at the location where the Blackwells once buried their dead.
- According to The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries by Carolee Inskeep, more than 60 people were buried in the old family cemetery.
- In October 1900, the remains were moved to St. George’s Churchyard. Later, a bottle factory was built on the site, though today, the Ravenswood Generating Station, a huge power plant that was built in the 1960s, stands there today.
- About 20% of NYC’s electricity comes from that plant, and as someone who spends a decent amount of time around the area, I can tell you that it is VERY hard to breathe near that particular station, especially in the summer when the peaker is running.
  - And, incidentally, the power plant was built right next to the largest public housing project in North America, the Queensbridge Houses, so all 6,000 people who live there have to breathe in the terrible air all the time.
  - There’s a reason why parts of Astoria are known as asthma alley, because respiratory illnesses are more common near the power plants.
- Anyway, the Ravenswood plant stands in the Ravenswood part of Astoria, and the power plant’s plot was also the location of the Jacob Blackwell Mansion.
- For a time, a bunch of wealthy people built fancy homes in Ravenswood, though by the 1870s, the rich people moved further east into Long Island, and many of their old mansions were turned into orphanages and asylums. If that isn’t very Victorian and Gothic, idk what is.
  - Incidentally, I was reading the excellent website the newtownpentacle.com, which is run by Mitch Waxman, and I wanted to read a bit from what he wrote about that area, since he happened to mention it in a blog post last week:
    - “”1909 is the year that Queensboro opened for business, and that was just ten years after Queens itself was fashioned by Manhattan’s ready political hands. Then, as now, riverfront property is quite valuable. Prime industrial land was being “wasted” on the indigent and immoral, so these mansions became quite prone to grisly total loss fires. “Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs” as the saying goes.””
- Even though the remains of the Blackwells were moved from the area near the Blackwell Mansion, to St. George’s Church, I found a delightful article in the Broklyn Daily Eagle from October 5, 1900, with my favorite kind of headline: “Human Skulls Unearthed.” I read from that article in the cold open, but the article also mentioned how the property where the bottle factory was, at the time at least, known as the old Williams’ estate, but the Blackwells were buried there. They said that they’d put any other remains they found in the Blackwell family vault at St. George’s Church.
- Also, this is just to fun not to share, but the next article in the newspaper is headlined “Opossum Killed” and is about a large possum that had been eating chickens in the area of Freeport, Long Island. I found the fact that that was in the newspaper hilarious for some reason, though your mileage may vary on that.
It looked like it constructed of rubble masonry using Fordham gneiss, had a tall tower crowned with four gargoyles, stained glass windows, and ornate doors.
And tucked behind it was a tiny, charming churchyard cemetery.
The graveyard was elevated by a high stone retaining wall and encircled by a chain link fence, so it was hard for me to get too close and see much of it. But by crossing the street and jumping up and down a few times, I was able to get a few glimpses of the headstones, including the large marker denoting the Blackwell family plot.
When I went back last month, I found a small alleyway that led to another side of the cemetery, where I could see through the fence a bit better. Part of the fence is falling down, and I read somewhere that you had access to the cemetery through the alleyway, so maybe the implication is that you can climb up through the broken fence to get in?
The Blackwell family was originally interred in the Blackwell Burial Ground in nearby Long Island City, on Vernon Boulevard about a block away from where the bridge to Roosevelt Island now stands. In 1900, their remains were relocated to this churchyard to make way for a bottle factory. The original St. George’s Church had been built on land donated by the Blackwells, so it makes sense that they would be relocated to the new location of the church when the need arose.
I had a really wonderful time walking around the neighborhood where the church is located; despite having spent 6 years in Western Queens, I’d never ventured to this exact block, and I was charmed by the beautiful church and nearby colonial-style homes with wrought-iron gates, rustic stone walls, and creeping wisteria.

A False Graveyard–the Church of the Redeemer in Astoria

The next cemetery I want to talk about is actually a false one.
Around the 1860s, according to a Feb 19, 1899 article in the Sun, “trouble occurred in the congregation of St. Georges Episcopal Church . . . And a number of the influential members withdrew and organized the Church of the Redeemer. Th new congregation held services for some time in a store, but in a few years came to own a handsome stone edifice at Crescent and Temple streets.”
- For a time, there was talk of reuniting the churches, especially after St. George’s burned down, but that never happened.
I found a really nice description of the church in a July 25, 1887 Brooklyn Daily Times article all about the different churches in the area:
- “Its architecture is early gothic, and with its solid walls clad in ivy . . . The elegant pile reminds one of what he has seen in old European towns. A young church, it already takes on an old appearance. Here many of the old Astoria families of the Episocopal church worship, but not the oldest, who are to be found at St. George’s Episcopal church.”
I stumbled across an interesting monument that looks like a grave marker in the churchyard garden. Since there didn’t seem to be a cemetery next to the church, and I didn’t see any other grave markers, I was puzzled about what was up with this.
I found out that a retired merchant named Cornelius Rapelye Trafford donated some money to the parish, a much-appreciated bequest since the church had money problems. According to a February 19, 1899, article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle: “Through the death of Cornelius Rapelye Trafford, a wealthy Astorian, the church was left $10,000 for a set of chimes. The bells were purchased and placed in the church tower built for that purpose.”
I found a bit of info about Trafford in the book History of Long Island City, New York by J. S Kelsey; 1896: He was born in 1809 and died in 1872. His father was one of the earliest colonizers to live at Halletts Cove, and the family lived at a beautiful mansion that even back then was 100 years old. Here’s a bit more about what the book has to say about him.
- “Mr. Trafford was a man of large means, which he expended liberally in the building of very many of the most attractive dwellings in different parts of Astoria and particularly on the ” Hill ” — always the aristocratic section. He was largely interested in the Astoria ferry, and aided materially in the first introduction of street cars, in fact, was to the time of his decease one of the most important factors in the community. He was noted for his geniality, and many remember with pleasure and gratitude his acts of unostentatious charity.
- “Mr. Trafford was never married, and therefore leaves no direct descendants to perpetuate the name. The beautiful chimes in the tower of the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, on the Crescent, were given in his will by Mr. Trafford, and annually on the recurrence of his birthday, ring out sweet melodies. A massive granite cross is a striking feature on the beautiful lawn in front of the church and marks the last resting place of Mr. Trafford.”
That last bit is really interesting, because my guess had been that it was put up as a sign of appreciation to honor the gift that Trafford made the church. I’m not totally sure which is true, though, because according to findagrave.com Trafford seems to be buried in Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, a popular burial place for the wealthiest 19th century New Yorkers, alongside George R. Rapelye and his wife, Jane Maria Suydam.
Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Roman Catholic Cemetery
- The first time I ever visited Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Roman Catholic Cemetery was on a rainy Friday night (04/24/20., I ran to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Roman Catholic Cemetery in Astoria, NY, also known as the Irish Famine Cemetery.
- This cemetery holds the remains of Irish immigrants who moved to Astoria in the 19th century to escape the Great Famine in Ireland.
  - Between 1840-1890, about 150 people were buried here. The last burial was in 1926. All but one of them–the church’s Italian gardener–were Irish.
  - Once Calvary Cemetery opened in 1848, most Catholics in Astoria, and the city in general, were buried there, which is why just a handful of people were interred in this little cemetery.
- This site was once the churchyard of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Roman Catholic Church, back when it was called St. John’s Church. The church was founded in 1841, incidentally the same year that Fordham University was founded. The original building was a wooden frame building that sat next to the cemetery.
- As the Catholic community grew, it was expanded, and eventually they built a larger building on Newtown Avenue, a few blocks away from the cemetery, leaving this little cemetery alone on an ordinary corner of a busy street. The current church building is really beautiful and has some gothic influences, and was finished in 1873.
- Today the cemetery sits behind a chain link fence across the street from a flat tire repair shop.
- Located near Astoria Park, very close to the RFK and Hellgate Bridges.
- Even though I can’t go inside these historic places, they’re little portals to our history, and each come with their own stories and characters. So much of history feels anonymous to me: the stories we know are usually either focused on the rich and famous (and often evil) people who made a name for themselves, but we forget all of the ordinary people who came before us. That’s one thing I love about cemeteries: it adds the names of ordinary people back into our history and unconscious, even if their stories are lost.
- This cemetery was especially interesting to me because of how . . . decrepit . . . it is as a whole. So many toppled and sinking tombstones. I think this is maintained by the Archdiocese of Brooklyn, and it feels kinda forgotten.

Sources consulted RE: cemeteries in Astoria

Books

The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries by Carolee Inskeep
Munsell’s History of Queens County, New York, 1882
The annals of Newtown, in Queens County, New York
by James Riker, 1852
History of Long Island City, New York. by J. SKelsey; Long Island Star Publishing Company, 1896
Queens Borough, New York City, 1910-1920 by Chamber of Commerce, 1920

Articles

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Sun, Feb 19, 1899 · Page 11
Ancestry.com. 1870 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2009. Images reproduced by FamilySearch. Year: 1870; Census Place: Astoria, Queens, New York; Roll: M593_1080; Page: 201A; Family History Library Film: 552579
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Sat, May 7, 1904 · Page 11 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/555908491
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Fri, Jun 17, 1887 · Page 1 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/556863449
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Sat, Jun 21, 1902 · Page 4 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/555932624
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Wed, Dec 28, 1887 · Page 1 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/556996064
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Sun, Apr 9, 1899 · Page 10 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/50420388
The Sun (New York, New York) · Sun, Feb 19, 1899 · Page 4 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/79105618
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Mon, Nov 10, 1902 · Page 9 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/555907855
Brooklyn Evening Star (Brooklyn, New York) · Wed, Aug 13, 1862 · Page 3 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/118125760
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Oct 15, 1903 · Page 11 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/555909576
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Fri, Oct 5, 1900 · Page 8 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/50360004
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Mon, Dec 5, 1887 · Page 1 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/556995547
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Jan 29, 1891 · Page 5 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/557824177
New York Daily Herald (New York, New York) · Sat, Feb 21, 1863 · Page 5 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/329273622
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Sat, Dec 26, 1903 · Page 14 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/555934521
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Fri, Apr 15, 1910 · Page 6 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/58335087
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Mon, Jul 25, 1887 · Page 1 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/556992361
Historical Archaeology of Religious Sites and Cemeteries
Author(s): Richard F. Veit, Sherene B. Baugher and Gerard P. Scharfenberger Source: Historical Archaeology , 2009, Vol. 43, No. 1, Historical Archaeology of Religious
Sites and Cemeteries (2009), pp. 1-11 Published by: Springer Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25617539
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Tue, Jan 11, 1910 · Page 8 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/55520065

Websites

https://www.brownstoner.com/history/st-george-church-astoria-village/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2020/03/van-alst-avenue-long-island-city/
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/irish-famine-cemetery
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https://gothamist.com/news/the-push-to-turn-nycs-polluting-peaker-plants-into-publicly-owned-solar-power
https://www.mountcarmelastoria.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2&Itemid=7
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http://www.pefagan.com/gen/queens/qmp_hal1840.htm
https://sorabji.com/cemeteries/index/category/119-the_graveyard_of_our_lady_of_mt_carmel_church_famine_cemetery_astoria
http://www.pefagan.com/gen/astoria/mtcarm/mtcminsc.htm
https://newtownpentacle.com/2021/02/26/neglected-orchard/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_General_Slocum
https://forgotten-ny.com/2016/05/irish-famine-cemetery-astoria-village/
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/irish-famine-cemetery
https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/1981308/our-lady-of-mount-carmel-catholic-cemetery

Don’t miss past episodes:

Ghosts of Hell Gate Sources / The Feminine Macabre

Thanks for reading my essay, “Ghosts of Hell Gate,” published in The Feminine Macabre! Here’s the list of all the works consulted in working on this essay.

It’s a long list, but I drew from research I did while working on these Buried Secrets Podcasts episodes, so have included all the sources I consulted while working on them: A Victorian Lunatic’s Fort: Fort Maxey, Blackwell’s Island, NYC, The Roosevelt Island Lighthouse, or The Blackwell Island Light, NYC, Sunken Treasure at Hell Gate, New York City, The General Slocum Disaster, Hell Gate, New York City, The Haunted Hell Gate, New York City.

Sources consulted

Articles consulted RE: Sunken Treasure at Hell Gate

“HUSSAR GOLD QUEST RESUMED BY INVENTOR: SIMON LAKE IN ‘BABY’ SUBMARINE TO INVESTIGATE 3 HULKS FOUND SUNK NEAR HELL GATE.” New York Times (1923-Current file), Aug 06 1935, p. 19. ProQuest. Web. 8 Nov. 2020
LAKE’S SUBMARINE FAILS OF LAUNCHING: Mother Ship is Unable to Pull It … Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES. New York Times (1923-Current file); Oct 7, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index
pg. 27
LACK OF FUNDS HALTS LAKE’S TREASURE HUNT: His Submarine to Be Auctioned if He Fails to Get $394 to Pay Deckhand. New York Times (1923-Current file); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]21 June 1936: 23.
HUNT PIECES OF EIGHT.: Lake’s Submarine Retrieves Pail and Clam Shell in East River. New York Times (1923-Current file); Sep 27, 1935;
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index
pg. 23
LAKE THINKS HULK IS TREASURE SHIP: Inventor Believes He Has Found Wreck of Frigate Hussar in East River. CARRIED $1,800,000 GOLD Probing Reveals Hard Timbers in Indicated Position, and Treasury Is Notified. New York Times (1923-Current file); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]26 Sep 1936: 17.
SIMON LAKE AGAIN SUED: Inventor Seeking $4,000,000 Gold In $1,800 Foreclosure Action. New York Times (1923-Current file); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]11 Nov 1936: 2.
Simon Lake’s Home Is Foreclosed. New York Times (1923-Current file); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]06 Mar 1937: 15.
SIMON LAKE GETS RESPITE: Court Grants New Delay in Foreclosure Sale of Milford Home. New York Times (1923-Current file); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]18 Nov 1937: 18.
LYONS OFFERS GOLD TO BOOM THE BRONX: It’s Not His Gold and He Isn’t Even Sure It’s There, but He Believes in Hunting It AT BOTTOM OF EAST RIVER Book Says Frigate Hussar, With $4,000,000 in Bullion Aboard, Sank There in 1780 New York Times (1923-Current file); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]12 Feb 1940: 18.
SIMON LAKE DEAD; INVENTOR WAS 78: Father of Modern Submarine Intended Craft Only for Use in Peaceful Pursuits HUNTED SUNKEN TREASURE Lost Fortune Attempting to Salvage Lusitania, Recover Millions in East River Built 100 Craft During the War Experimented in Baltimore Founded Bridgeport Concern Sought Lusitania Treasure Family of Welsh Origin. The New York Times, 1934.New York Times (1923-Current file); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]24 June 1945: 22.
Ship of Dreams: Ship of Dreams
Vanderbilt, Tom.New York Times (1923-Current file); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]17 Feb 2002: cy1.

Books consulted RE: Sunken Treasure at Hell Gate

Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York by Ted Steinberg
Roosevelt Island By Judith Berdy

Websites RE: Sunken Treasure at Hell Gate

Devil places: https://spookygeology.com/devil-places/
Devil places map: https://gizmodo.com/hail-satan-a-map-of-all-the-places-named-after-the-dev-1456016654
https://gothamist.com/news/the-strange-history-of-nycs-mighty-hell-gate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate_Bridge
https://www.geographicus.com/P/AntiqueMap/HellGateRooseveltIsland-uscs-1891
Current nautical chart: https://charts.noaa.gov/BookletChart/12339_BookletChart.pdf
https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/870743950/
https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/mill-rock-park/history
1886 map: https://picryl.com/media/blackwells-wards-and-randalls-islands-and-adjacent-shores-of-east-and-harlem-31f143?zoom=true
https://vos.noaa.gov/MWL/aug_07/hellgate.shtml
Hell gate charts:
https://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/new_york_charts/hell_gate.html
Removal of Hell Gate rocks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Removal_of_Hell_Gate_rocks
The conquest of Hell Gate:
https://www.nan.usace.army.mil/Portals/37/docs/history/hellgate.pdf
https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/mill-rock-park/history
https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/mill-rock-park/
Hell gate map 1700s:
https://picryl.com/media/map-of-new-york-i-with-the-adjacent-rocks-and-other-remarkable-parts-of-hell-cc02a9
Hell gate pics:
https://picryl.com/search?q=hell%20gate
Opening hell gate:
https://picryl.com/media/opening-hell-gate-at-a-cost-of-dollar7000000-map-course-of-wider-hell-gate-ab9a7f
Destruction of flood rock: https://picryl.com/media/destruction-of-flood-rock-at-hell-gate-2ef359
Rev war map: https://picryl.com/media/a-plan-of-the-narrows-of-hells-gate-in-the-east-river-near-which-batteries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_strait
https://www.givemeastoria.com/2020/09/17/a-treasure-under-hell-gate/
https://blogcritics.org/new-york-citys-hell-gate-bridges/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Hussar_(1763)
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/26/nyregion/in-east-river-a-gold-frigate-and-high-hopes.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/29/weekinreview/the-region-raise-the-hms-hussar.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/09/nyregion/follow-up-on-the-news-about-that-gold-in-the-east-river.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/nyregion/finding-trash-and-worse-but-so-far-no-ship-with-treasure.html
http://www.simonlake.com/html/explorer.html
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1934/10/13/hussar
http://www.simonlake.com/html/explorer.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Lake
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/nyregion/ny-harbor-wood-eating-shipworms.html
https://nypost.com/2004/04/19/worm-warfare-borer-destroying-our-waterfronts/
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/07/nyregion/diver-to-explore-east-river-wreck-for-treasure.html
https://mysteriouswritings.com/the-mystery-and-lost-treasure-of-the-h-m-s-hussar/
https://numa.net/2019/08/is-hms-hussars-treasure-in-a-landfill/
http://www.bronxmall.com/cult/film/page4.html
http://thesimonlakestory.com/
https://njscuba.net/sites/site_treasure.php

Additional sources

native-land.ca
http://landacknowledgements.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal
https://www.brickunderground.com/live/the-octagon-roosevelt-island
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/islands-of-the-undesirables-roosevelt-island-blackwell-s-island
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/living-grave-damnation-island-article-1.4011352

Websites consulted RE: The Haunted Hell Gate

https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/2010/06/inside-the-hell-gate-bridge/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2009/11/hells-arches-concrete-supports-of-the-hell-gate-bridge-approach/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2010/05/02/hungry-ghosts/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2020/03/03/starved-monsters/
https://newtownpentacle.com/tag/hell-gate-bridge/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2016/07/11/half-smile/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2016/06/24/vacant-box/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2010/06/05/from-hells-gate-loosed-upon-the-world/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2010/11/30/shocking-coruscations/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2009/06/05/the-river-of-sound/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2009/09/23/the-bright-passage/
https://newtownpentacle.com/2016/09/30/civic-spirit/
http://wirednewyork.com/bridges/hell_gate_bridge/
https://www.qchron.com/qboro/stories/you-ain-t-afraid-of-no-ghost-we-ll-see-about-that/article_010ee09d-001f-5505-a643-147da790ecbf.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Stuyvesant
https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/tag/east-river-shipwrecks/
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/south-carolina/haunted-oakwood-cemetery-sc/
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/kentucky/kasey-cemetery-ky/
https://www.haunted-places-to-go.com/haunted-huntsville.html
https://www.insider.com/urban-legends-us-2018-1#alabama-hells-gate-bridge-1
http://theghostdiaries.com/places-around-the-world-known-as-the-gates-of-hell/
https://gothamist.com/news/the-strange-history-of-nycs-mighty-hell-gate
https://www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-german-saboteurs-invade-america-in-1942.htm
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/earth-without-people
https://www.timeout.com/newyork/attractions/hell-gate-bridge
https://boroughsofthedead.com/hell-gate-bridge-a-great-survivor/
https://thehauntedjournal.wordpress.com/2018/04/20/hell-gate-bridge/
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/earth-without-people
https://www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-german-saboteurs-invade-america-in-1942.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate_Bridge
https://ltvsquad.com/2005/05/13/hell-gate-bridge/

Websites consulted RE: The General Slocum Disaster

https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/tag/east-river-shipwrecks/
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/south-carolina/haunted-oakwood-cemetery-sc/
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/kentucky/kasey-cemetery-ky/
https://www.haunted-places-to-go.com/haunted-huntsville.html
https://www.insider.com/urban-legends-us-2018-1#alabama-hells-gate-bridge-1
http://theghostdiaries.com/places-around-the-world-known-as-the-gates-of-hell/
https://gothamist.com/news/the-strange-history-of-nycs-mighty-hell-gate
https://www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-german-saboteurs-invade-america-in-1942.htm
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/earth-without-people
https://www.timeout.com/newyork/attractions/hell-gate-bridge
https://boroughsofthedead.com/hell-gate-bridge-a-great-survivor/
https://www.stonehengenyc.com/blog/haunted-new-york
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_General_Slocum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Evangelical_Lutheran_Church_of_St._Mark
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Germany,_Manhattan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Germany,_Manhattan
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/06/13/great-slocum-disaster-june-15-1904
https://antiquephotographics.com/the-general-slocum-disaster-ny-harbor-1904/
https://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/2014/06/14/the-1904-general-slocum-disaster-had-survivors-that-lived-into-the-21st-century/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-spectacle-of-horror-the-burning-of-the-general-slocum-104712974/
http://behindthescenes.nyhistory.org/general-slocum-disaster-photos/
https://history.wikia.org/wiki/List_of_General_Slocum_victims
https://www.garemaritime.com/the-general-slocum/
https://thehauntedjournal.wordpress.com/2018/04/20/hell-gate-bridge/
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/earth-without-people
https://www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-german-saboteurs-invade-america-in-1942.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate_Bridge
https://ltvsquad.com/2005/05/13/hell-gate-bridge/

Articles RE: The General Slocum Disaster

TALES OF HORROR TOLD BY SURVIVORS: Eye-Witness Stories of Swift and Awful Panic. FAMILY PARTIES WIPED OUT Mrny Brave Deeds on Board the Doomed Steamboat Amid Scenes of Wild Panic. New York Times (1857-1922); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]16 June 1904: 2.
GRIEF-CRAZED CROWDS VIEW LINES OF DEAD: Scores Prevented from Throwing Themselves Into River. BOAT LOADS OF BODIES Immense Crowds Weeping and Struggling Seek to Identify Them. MANY PATHETIC INCIDENTS Measures Taken by Officials to Safeguard Interest of Relatives — Over $200,000 in Valuables Found on the Victims. New York Times (1857-1922); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]16 June 1904: 1.
1,000 LIVES MAY BE LOST IN BURNING OF THE EXCURSION BOAT GEN. SLOCUM: St. Mark’s Church Excursion Ends in Disaster in East River Close to Land and Safety. 693 BODIES FOUND — HUNDREDS MISSING OR INJURED Flames Following Explosion Drive Scores to Death in the Water. FIERCE STRUGGLES FOR ROTTEN LIFE PRESERVERS The Captain, Instead of Making for the Nearest Landing, Runs the Doomed Vessel Ashore on North Brother Island in Deep Water — Many Thrilling Rescues — Few Men on Board to Stem the Panic of Women and Children.
New York Times (1857-1922); New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]16 June 1904: 1.

Videos of The Roosevelt Island Lighthouse

Thomas Edison’s 1903 video of Blackwell’s Island, including the lighthouse.

Articles consulted RE: The Roosevelt Island Lighthouse

The Chicago Evening Mail (Chicago, Illinois) · Thu, Dec 29, 1870 · Page 3
https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/668142082 Downloaded on Oct 29, 2020
The Meriden Daily Republican (Meriden, Connecticut) · Thu, Jul 23, 1874 · Page 3. https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/674763408 Downloaded on Oct 29, 2020
The St. Albans Weekly Messenger (Saint Albans, Vermont) · Fri, Jul 31, 1874 · Page 6 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/443287342 Downloaded on Oct 29, 2020
“Facts and Fancies” The Milwaukee Sentinel: July 31, 1874. Page 3.
Boston Post (Boston, Massachusetts) · Sat, Jul 25, 1874 · Page 4 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/74392312 Downloaded on Oct 29, 2020
Wayne County Herald (Honesdale, Pennsylvania) · Thu, Aug 6, 1874 · Page 1
https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/362447557 Downloaded on Oct 29, 2020
Fort Maxey, Wednesday, July 19, 1865, New Haven Palladium, 25 , Issue 179
The Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) · Wed, Jul 19, 1871 · Page 8 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/167861583 Downloaded on Oct 29, 2020
Black River Gazette (Ludlow, Vermont) · Fri, Jan 13, 1871 · Page 1
https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/355365618 Downloaded on Oct 29, 2020
The Times (Streator, Illinois) · Wed, Sep 11, 1889 · Page 1
https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/543479332 Downloaded on Oct 29, 2020
FOR HARBOR IMPROVEMENTS: SACEESTIOUS AT A MEETING OT THE PILOT COMMISSIONERS
New York Times (1857-1922); Dec 30, 1896; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 8
A Blackwell’s Island Stampede. New York Herald. April 30, 1873
Paid for Twice. The Evening World (New York, New York) · Wed, Apr 24, 1889 · Page 1 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/78637510 Downloaded on Oct 30, 2020
In the Court of Special . . . New York Tribune. August 8, 1870
“On a flagstone in front of the lighthouse. . .” New York NY Press 1909 – 1257

Books consulted RE: The Roosevelt Island Lighthouse

Annual Report of the Light-House Board of the United States to the Secretary … By United States. Light-House Board
Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York by Ted Steinberg
The Bricklayer, Mason and Plasterer, Volumes 24-25: Practical Lessons in Bricklaying
Roosevelt Island By Judith Berdy

Websites RE: The Roosevelt Island Lighthouse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollard
Dock Construction Guide
Sticks & Stones – A Traditional Les Cheneaux Crib Dock Replacement Project
https://web.archive.org/web/20090517003017/http://nyc10044.com/timeln/timeline.html
The Lighthouse
https://gothamist.com/news/the-strange-history-of-nycs-mighty-hell-gate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate_Bridge
https://www.geographicus.com/P/AntiqueMap/HellGateRooseveltIsland-uscs-1891
Current nautical chart: https://charts.noaa.gov/BookletChart/12339_BookletChart.pdf
https://lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=75
https://www.liboatingworld.com/single-post/2018/05/30/Exploring-NYs-East-River-Some-of-Its-Rich-History
https://www.us-lighthouses.com/blackwell-island-lighthouse
The Lighthouse
https://rioc.ny.gov/179/The-Lighthouse
Mysteries of Roosevelt Island: The Madman’s Lighthouse
http://www.correctionhistory.org/rooseveltisland/
http://www.correctionhistory.org/rooseveltisland/html/chapincards4.html#lite2
http://www.correctionhistory.org/rooseveltisland/html/rooseveltislandtour_lighthouse.html
https://daytoninmanhattan.blogspot.com/2010/10/mysterious-blackwell-island-lighthouse.html
The Lighthouses of NYC
https://rihs.us/2020/09/
https://www.stonehengenyc.com/blog/Roosevelt-Island-Day-Trip?_escaped_fragment_=#!
Lighthouse Park Roosevelt Island 900 Main Street New York, NY 10044
https://www.nps.gov/places/blackwell-s-island-new-york-city.htm
Lighthouse pics: https://www.loc.gov/item/ny0953/
Landmarks commission report: http://www.neighborhoodpreservationcenter.org/db/bb_files/LIGHTHOUSE-ROOSEVELT-IS.pdf
https://rihs.us/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-August-Blackwells-Almanac.pdf
Tuesday, September 1, 2020 -SOME WONDERFUL LIGHTHOUSES NEARBY
The Lighthouse
https://joebrunoonthemob.wordpress.com/tag/the-whyos/
https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/mill-rock-park/history
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/podcast/july17/nop08-historical-maps-charts.html
1903 pic of lighthouse and island:
https://picryl.com/media/panorama-of-blackwells-island-ny
1886 map: https://picryl.com/media/blackwells-wards-and-randalls-islands-and-adjacent-shores-of-east-and-harlem-31f143?zoom=true
http://www.correctionhistory.org/rooseveltisland/html/rooseveltislandtour_lighthouse.html
http://americanyc.org/documents/10184/57129/AYC+2013+Spring+Cruising+Notes+Final.pdf/6594f92b-dc97-46ad-95fb-d6ee8c5a8b38?version=1.0
https://libraetd.lib.virginia.edu/downloads/1z40kt09r?filename=Dissertation_final_Libra.pdf
Report of the Welfare Island Planning and Development Committee : submitted to John V. Lindsay, Mayor, City of New York, February 1969. by Welfare Island Planning and Development Committee. https://archive.org/details/reportofwelfarei00welf/page/30/mode/2up?q=mccarthy
https://rioc.ny.gov/DocumentCenter/View/56/New-York-1960s-Chap-8-PDF
https://daniel-lanciana.medium.com/new-york-icons-harbor-islands-cdfe3097c66c
To Be Sane Amongst the Insane
http://www.asylumprojects.org/index.php?title=Blackwell%27s_Island_Asylum
CHARLES DICKENS VISIT • AN ISLAND IN THE MIST • ARTWORKS FOR SALE
Nellie Bly: Charles Dickens’ Visit to Blackwell’s Island Asylum 1842 – Part 4
https://www.melinadruga.com/blackwellsislandasylum/
ROOSEVELT ISLAND 2005
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwell_Island_Light
https://lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=753
https://vos.noaa.gov/MWL/aug_07/hellgate.shtml

Books consulted RE: Fort Maxey Blackwell’s Island

Damnation Island : Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York by Stacy Horne
Ten days in a Mad-House by Nellie Bly (1887): https://archive.org/details/3304680.med.yale.edu
American Notes for General Circulation by Charles Dickens: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/675/675-h/675-h.htm
Architecture of Madness: https://ia601204.us.archive.org/21/items/ArchitectureOfMadness/ArchitectureOfMadness.pdf
The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New York by Junius Henri Browne, 1869: https://archive.org/details/greatmetropolism00browuoft/page/8/mode/2up?q=blackwell%27s

Websites RE: Fort Maxey Blackwell’s Island

Great pics of the asylum: https://www.theruin.org/blog/2016/10/12/the-new-york-city-lunatic-asylum-a-history
https://quiverquotes.com/2017/05/03/to-be-sane-amongst-the-insane/
http://www.asylumprojects.org/index.php?title=Blackwell%27s_Island_Asylum
https://rihs.us/2020/03/30/charles-dickens-visit-%E2%80%A2-an-island-in-the-mist-%E2%80%A2-artworks-for-sale/
https://lisawallerrogers.com/2009/01/03/charles-dickens-visit-to-blackwells-island-asylum-1842/
https://www.melinadruga.com/blackwellsislandasylum/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2005/10/roosevelt-island-2005/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwell_Island_Light
https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2018/06/25/dancing-at-the-lunatics-ball-on-blackwells-island/
http://www.hauntingdarkness.com/2012/01/ghosts-of-roosevelt-island.html
“BLACKWELL’S ISLAND LUNATIC ASYLUM.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Feb1866, Vol. 32 Issue 189, preceding p274-294. 22p. 20 Illustrations:
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine Volume 126 December 1865 to May 1866: https://archive.org/details/harpersnew32various/page/290/mode/2up?q=fort+maxey
Article page 184: https://archive.org/details/harpersweekly00bonn/page/184/mode/2up?q=blackwell%27s
Article page 91: https://archive.org/details/harpersweeklyv13bonn/page/91/mode/2up?q=blackwell%27s
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/roosevelt-island-lighthouse
http://www.correctionhistory.org/rooseveltisland/html/rooseveltislandtour_lighthouse.html
https://rihs.us/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-August-Blackwells-Almanac.pdf
https://www.loc.gov/item/ny0949/
https://www.loc.gov/item/ny0953/
https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2007/10/mysteries-of-roosevelt-island-madmans.html
https://forgotten-ny.com/2005/10/roosevelt-island-2005/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwell_Island_Light
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/islands-of-the
undesirables-roosevelt-island-blackwell-s-island
https://lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=753
https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/an-afternoon-at-blackwells-light
Harper’s Weekly Archives: https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=harpersweekly
HARPER’S WEEKLY. A JOURNAL OF CIVILIZATION. / Volume IX, Issue 466:
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/h/harpersweekly/harpersweekly-idx?coll=harpersweekly;type=HTML;rgn=DIV1;id=;byte=10925913

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Tombstones Around Socrates Sculpture Park in Astoria, Queens

Why are there tombstones around Socrates Sculpture Park? A look at a riverside New York City park surrounded by a wall of tombstones.

It seems that very few people have asked this question, at least on the internet, and there are no obvious answers. There is, however, a fascinating history behind this little park, as well as a whole host of possibilities for how this site came by its morbid gravestone wall.

Highlights include:
• The ultimate NYC villain: real estate developers
• A forgotten creek
• Queens’ penchant for illegal dumping grounds
• Two sculptors’ dreams of creating an open-air gallery

The Feminine Macabre Volume 1: https://www.etsy.com/listing/962586876/the-feminine-macabre-volume-1

Follow the podcast on instagram @buriedsecretspodcast

E-mail the podcast at buriedsecretspodcast@gmail.com.

Pictures of tombstones around Socrates Sculpture Park

Episode Script

Socrates Sculpture Park

I was originally going to talk about one and a half hidden cemeteries this week, but as you know, I have a tendency to go down a wormhole and my notes for this episode became two episode’s worth. So today let’s talk about that half cemetery.
There’s a beautiful park called the Socrates Sculpture Park, which is at Hallet’s Cove on the Queens waterfront, right across from the lighthouse at Roosevelt Island.
- Before it was a park, it was an illegal dumping ground, and before that, the Sunswick Creek flowed there, before it was filled in.
I’ve mentioned this park before, both here and on the show’s instagram. It’s one of my favorite places in NYC. It isn’t really near the subway, and it’s in Queens which people from other boroughs don’t come to super often unless they’re visiting someone here. But it’s a real hidden gem with a fascinating history; it’s this unbelievably beautiful waterfront park that is also an open-air art museum.
But the reason why I’m talking about this park is it has a stone wall around it, and some of the stones in the wall are very obviously grave markers.
No one seems to know the real story behind it, and as far as I can tell, only one other person on the internet is trying to figure out this mystery. Later on, I want to talk about my original theories about the tombstones, and this other person’s theories, but before we get to that, I want to talk a bit about the park’s history, since digging into the history of the park is going to be the key to figuring this out. Assuming I’m ever able to figure this out, which we’ll see.
I talk about this area of NYC very often, and it’s definitely an important area. For example, my city council representative, Costa Constantinides, has been doing a lot of work to try to improve the waterfront, including this part of the waterfront. Three of NYC’s largest housing projects are within about a mile of Socrates Sculpture Park, so that’s a lot of people who stand to have their quality of life improved if the waterfront is improved, whether it’s reducing the pollution from power plants–which I’ll talk about a bit more next week–or cleaning up the ruins of abandoned industrial projects. For example, in October 2020, he worked to get funding to, to read from an article in qns.com, “finally remove debris and trash, restore the riverbank’s ecology, and take down a decaying pier known as the ‘radio tower.’ . . . Built almost 70 years ago but long closed to the public due to its rotting condition, the radio tower embodies how physically and emotionally cut off western Queens residents are from their side of the East River.”
- One things you have to understand about Queens is that EVERYWHERE can and will be an illegal dumping down for industrial and household garbage if it can be. For example, when I lived in Woodside, I lived right next to the viaduct that connects to the Hell Gate bridge, which meant I had to cross under one of three viaduct arches every day to get to the subway. Two of the three of those arches would be FULL of garbages, from cast-off mattresses and strollers, to bags of trash and car parts, and other unidentified stuff.
- This may seem like a non-sequitir, but the dumping grounds of Queens are a vital part of this story.
- Basically, in between Socrates Sculpture Park and the Astoria houses, a housing project, there’s this big, broken-down pier that looks so decrepit that it leads people to consider it a dumping ground.
- To read another quote from my city council member:

“It’s just been a symbol of how Astoria Houses has been continually forgotten. This is more than just restoring the wetlands and removing the dock — this signals that we’re not going to leave broken down infrastructure in their backyard. It’s time to treat them with the respect they deserve.”

I went through the NYT archives looking for clues to the tombstone mystery, and found a number of very condescending articles from the 1980s and 1990s about Socrates Sculpture Park. They didn’t answer the mystery I’m trying to solve here, though there are a few hints, but I think they give a nice history of the park so wanted to read some articles about the park here.
Before I get to the articles from the 80s and 90s, I want to start with a great 2016 article from urbanomnibus.net that talks about the park’s history. The big thing I’ve been looking at for this research is any article that talks about what the site was like before the park existed, the construction of the park or its walls, or anything they found when cleaning up the site to make it a park. So let’s get into this article:
- When di Suvero, other artists, and nearby residents launched the Socrates project atop a former marine terminal on Hallet’s Cove, the neighborhood was quite different. Di Suvero recently described the Astoria of the 80s to the Times: there was a popular carjacking spot just up the road, and di Suvero was mugged by one of the park’s own maintenance employees at the door of his studio down the street.[4] Like many city neighborhoods targeted by artists priced out of Manhattan, this part of Astoria was far poorer and less safe than today. Nor did it immediately gentrify with the onset of artistic activity.
- Occupying the former marshland around the mouth of the tidal Sunswick Creek, which had been progressively filled beginning in the late 19th century, the terminal was still receiving barges in the early 1950s.[5] Like many vacant waterfront sites across the city during the 1970s and 1980s, the future park was used for illegal dumping and other surreptitious activity. It was just the kind of site that appealed to di Suvero. The former Chicago steelworker moved into a studio in a former waterfront brick handling shed just down the street in 1980, and was eyeing the open-air space to construct and display large-scale metal sculptures, some of which required the use of a construction crane. Working with the Athena Foundation, which he founded nine years earlier to support artistic endeavor in the city, di Suvero raised $200,000 for the park’s construction and negotiated a five-year lease on the property with its owner, the Department of Ports and Terminals, for a dollar a year.
- Straddling Broadway and extending north and south along Vernon Boulevard, this section of Astoria was far from New York’s downtown art scene and nearly a mile from the nearest subway station. By the 1980s, the area was a jumble of dilapidated piers, old factory buildings, warehouses, storage sheds, auto repair shops, and two- and three-story residential walkups, anchored by two public housing projects.[7] One of the area’s largest industrial employers, the Sohmer and Company Piano Factory, was shuttered in 1982 (the 96-year-old building was converted to residential condominiums beginning in 2007). Yet with di Suvero’s studio to the north and Isamu Noguchi’s studio, now the site of the Noguchi Museum, just to the south, Socrates was poised to become the center of a small but growing arts community.
- Di Suvero enlisted dozens of neighborhood volunteers and their children to contribute to his broad vision of local engagement. Throughout 1986, the team of artists and residents used their own sweat equity to remake the barren, debris-strewn site into a welcoming, if still raw, four-acre park with winding gravel paths and beds of wildflowers built around the installations of the inaugural exhibition.[8] Concrete piers and seawalls were still exposed throughout the landfill; artworks were placed on top of them.
New York Times, 27 Aug. 1986.:
- “The largest outdoor space in New York City for the exhibition of monumental works of sculpture will open next month in Long Island City, Queens, where Mark di Suvero and Isamu Noguchi have collaborated in building a landscaped sculpture park on an abandoned riverside lot.
- Once a garbage-strewn landfill across from the northern tip of Roosevelt Island, the sculpture park is being landscaped by teams of local youths in preparation for its opening. Called the Socrates Sculpture Park, the four-acre site will contain winding gravel paths, wildflower gardens, views of the East River and scores of sculptures by contemporary artists.”
From the New York Times, 12 Oct. 1986.:
- “The site is impressive. It is on the East River, facing the northern tip of Roosevelt Island, just south of Hell Gate, the point of intersection between the Harlem and East Rivers where treacherous currents decide periodically to wrestle unsuspecting boats to their death. The site was formerly the home of a marine terminal. The slip was filled in around 15 years ago, but some of the concrete pedestals used for moorings remain, and they are now bases for sculpture. Whatever happens on this plot of land will be engaged by the Manhattan skyline and the East River, which that are so much a part of American myth.
- According to a brochure for the sculpture park, the project is ”dedicated to Socrates in his search for the truth,” The driving force behind the park is the sculptor Mark di Suvero, whose large steel works feed off architecture, and who has a rare capacity to mobilize people from different walks of life. He had had his eye on what was then four acres of garbage and rubble since 1980 when he took over a former brickhandling facility down the road and began transforming it into a waterside studio. Di Suvero was instrumental in leasing the land from the city for five years, and in raising the $200,000 that has been spent so far in clearing and landscaping the grounds and assembling the first show. The park is still raw, and there is no sense yet of a clear guiding vision, but its very existence is remarkable, and its potential is almost unlimited.
- ”When the lease runs out the city is considering the possibility of turning two acres of the park into luxury housing,” di Suvero said. ”We would like to see all four acres remain a sculpture park indefinitely.””
I found a New York Times article from May 26 1994, when the Sculpture Park was officially made a park.
- “One man’s dream to clean up a garbage dump and build a park — a sculpture garden beside the East River with the jagged skyline of Manhattan a distant backdrop — officially became a reality yesterday.
- Since Mark di Suvero first wondered a decade ago whether there was a better way to make use of the littered lot beside his Queens studio, hundreds of his neighbors have worked tirelessly to help him create Socrates Sculpture Park, already a powerful draw for art aficionados from the city and beyond. Yesterday, it was formally dedicated as a city park, the first major addition to the park system in more than a decade.
- With the pull of a cord and the falling away of a blue drape, the Parks and Recreation Commissioner, Henry J. Stern, declared that the 4.5-acre former wasteland had been reclaimed as part of the city’s green space. . . .
- Socrates Sculpture Park, named for the philosopher, was conceived by Mr. di Suvero after he set up his studio in an old brick factory amid the warehouses and transmission shops along Vernon Boulevard. The site, facing the northern tip of Roosevelt Island and just south of Hell Gate, the treacherous juncture of the Harlem and East Rivers, had once been a marine terminal. The slip was filled in about 20 years ago, but some of the concrete moorings remained; ideal pedestals for sculpture, in Mr. di Suvero’s mind’s eye.
New York Times, 11 Aug. 1997.
- “In the 1980’s, the area was a prime site of illegal dumping; there was no fence, and broken steel and abandoned cars defined the landscape. Mr. di Suvero and Mr. Noguchi looked at the garbage and envisioned a protected park that could provide an ”ongoing experimental narrative” in the medium of sculpture.
- The city agreed to let the sculptors use the land, but only temporarily. Hundreds of neighborhood volunteers pitched in to clean out truckloads of trash. After a year’s work, the first exhibit was held in 1986. Since then, there have been two shows of 20 or so pieces a year. Children’s education classes, lectures, tours and concerts have also been offered.
- Mr. di Suvero and others continued to push for more permanent protection for the park, because developers for years had hungered to build luxury housing there but had been defeated by real estate recessions, lack of local amenities, distant transportation and other problems.”
Developers have continued to buy up land all around it and build hideous new construction that costs about double what a normal apartment in Astoria would cost.
According to a youtube video with 7 views made by Mark Thomas, In the 1970s or 1980s, St. Michael’s Cemetery was in disrepair, overgrown, didn’t even look like a cemetery. New management cleaned it up, then got rid of a bunch of tombstones and then put 6 feet of dirt on top of them, so they could keep burying people there. The people buried there hadn’t paid for perpetual care so they said it was within their rights to cover their graves. Then they had to do something with the tombstones, so they put them in the dumping ground that became Socrates Sculpture Park, so they used that to build the park’s wall. Mark Thomas says that he wants to find out whose tombstones they are, and then build a plaque so the people aren’t forgotten.
The tombstones consist mostly of square blocks with letters of them, there are some taller stones that have “lot” written on them, and others have numbers (usually in the 2,000s
He also makes the interesting comment that some of the stones are sinking
He guesses that the Tombstones may be from Mount Zion, but doesn’t really elaborate on why
However, people have said that the tombstones weren’t from St. Michael’s, b/c St. Michael’s has plots, not lots, and their numbering is different. So the mystery is
“Gorges” is the only full name on the stone, and there’s one stone that says “Ste” as if it’s part of someone’s name.
I’d always assumed they were cast off stones from maybe a nearby stone mason that may have been donated to the park
- I found a 30th anniversary book called Socrates Sculpture Park: Thirty years, that had a bit more info about what sort of stuff the former marine terminal was used for, which could maaaaaybe support my theory:
- “Formerly a port for offloading stone and sand, this neglected plot of landfill accumulated what the shipping terminal left behind, whether construction debris or collapsed piers.”
Or what if there’s another cemetery they’re from that doesn’t exist anymore?
I wrote to the park about a year ago and didn’t hear back, but supposedly the staff doesn’t know the story.

Sources consulted RE: tombstones around Socrates Sculpture Park

Books

The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries by Carolee Inskeep
Munsell’s History of Queens County, New York, 1882
The annals of Newtown, in Queens County, New York
by James Riker, 1852
History of Long Island City, New York. by J. SKelsey; Long Island Star Publishing Company, 1896
Queens Borough, New York City, 1910-1920 by Chamber of Commerce, 1920

Articles

Martin, Douglas. “Philosophies Differ on Future of Socrates Sculpture Park.” New York Times, 11 Aug. 1997. New York State Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A150303177/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=d82bdc7a. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.
“City Art Panel Names Nine Design Winners.” New York Times, 3 May 1986. New York State Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A176384041/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=5dabafca. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.
Mcgill, Douglas C. “A SCULPTURE PARK GROWS IN QUEENS.” New York Times, 27 Aug. 1986. New York State Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A176333799/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=a0136bbb. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.
Brenson, Michael. “GALLERY VIEW; Di Suvero’s Dream of a Sculpture Park Grows in Queens.” New York Times, 12 Oct. 1986. New York State Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A176302046/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=0aabdabf. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.
Yarrow, Andrew L. “14 REASONS WHY NEW YORK IS NEW.” New York Times, 3 Oct. 1986. New York State Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A176298273/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=a5bbadd3. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.
Brenson, Michael. “City as Sculpture Garden: Seeing the New and Daring.” New York Times, 17 July 1987. New York State Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A176103620/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=77574bf2. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.
Yarrow, Andrew L. “Art and History With River View Of Manhattan.” New York Times, 15 July 1988. New York State Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A175911795/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=a65aa516. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.
Brenson, Michael. “Bold Sculpture for Wide-Open Spaces.” New York Times, 21 July 1989. New York State Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A175735611/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=2bc0b1b4. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.
Brown, Frank. “If You’re Thinking of Living in: Astoria.” New York Times, 27 Aug. 1989. New York State Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A175747944/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=b9301eb6. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.
Brenson, Michael. “Sculpture for Troubled Places.” New York Times, 15 Oct. 1989. New York State Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A175778280/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=56b200a3. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.
Shepard, Richard F. “Astoria, a Greek Isle in the New York City Sea.” New York Times, 15 Nov. 1991. New York State Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A175384893/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=17dd4729. Accessed 7 Mar. 2021.
Brenson, Michael. “Cityful of Sculpture Under the Sky.” New York Times, 26 July 1991. New York State Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A175288866/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=2e3e11c9. Accessed 7 Mar. 2021.
“POSTINGS: Free Guide to Institutions; Arts in Long Island City.” New York Times, 20 Dec. 1992. New York State Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A175005016/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=ac7cf315. Accessed 7 Mar. 2021.
Hevesi, Dennis. “Sculpture Garden Rises in a New Patch of Green; The Latest Addition to New York City’s Park System, Named for a Philosopher.” New York Times, 26 May 1994. New York State Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A174435347/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=60c60ec9. Accessed 7 Mar. 2021.
Holloway, Lynette. “NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: LONG ISLAND CITY; Trailblazing for Urban Hikers.” New York Times, 19 June 1994. New York State Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A174445989/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=35863190. Accessed 7 Mar. 2021.
Steel, Tanya Wenman. “Gingham Checks and Thou.” New York Times, 22 June 1994. New York State Newspapers, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A174443349/SPN.SP01?u=nypl&sid=SPN.SP01&xid=d1ea8f96. Accessed 7 Mar. 2021.

Websites

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVfg3Jr1Rps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrBV3gRyiMU
https://wsbj.com/sorabji/2017/02/18/disintegrating-into-dirt-inverted-tombstones-obscure-memories.html
https://wsbj.com/sorabji/2020/11/02/the-mystery-of-socrates-sculpture-parks-wall-of-tombstones.html
https://untappedcities.com/2016/11/29/top-10-secrets-of-socrates-sculpture-park-in-nyc/?displayall=true
https://urbanomnibus.net/2016/12/socrates-30/
https://qns.com/2020/10/work-to-begin-on-hallets-cove-waterfront-this-winter/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Constantinideshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates_Sculpture_Park
https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/socrates-sculpture-parkhttps://6tocelebrate.org/site/socrates-sculpture-park/
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/12/arts/gallery-view-di-suvero-s-dream-of-a-sculpture-park-grows-in-queens.html
https://issuu.com/socratessculpturepark/docs/socrates_30th_anniversary_book_1610
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/337-affordable-apartments-up-for-grabs-in-lics-5-pointz-towers/ar-BB1e1m7b
https://www.hallettspoint.com/#availabilities
https://socratessculpturepark.org/artist/andrea-solstad/
https://socratessculpturepark.org/artist/sandy-williams-iv/
https://socratessculpturepark.org/artist/jeffrey-gibson/
https://socratessculpturepark.org/artist/paul-ramirez-jonas/

Don’t miss past episodes:

Lawrence Family Cemetery, Astoria, Queens

A look at Lawrence Family Cemetery in Astoria, NY, a small family cemetery dating from the 1600s, tucked into a residential neighborhood in New York City.

The Lawrences were an old family from Queens, New York, arriving in the area in the 1600s and buying land all over. Despite the destruction of many family cemeteries in NYC over the centuries, two Lawrence cemeteries have survived, one of which is in an Astoria man’s backyard.

The cemetery, surrounded by both a stone wall and a chain link fence, is closed to the public, though curious onlookers can peer through its iron gate and see a variety of tombstones, some of which belong to veterans of the Revolutionary war.

Highlights include:
• Forgotten cemeteries
• Accidentally scaring local cemetery owners
• A lost shoreline
• Inheriting a cemetery

Links mentioned in the episode:

Donate to the Emergency Release Fund to get high-risk people out of Rikers

Tiffany Cabán for council district 22 (Astoria): https://www.cabanforqueens.com/

Follow the podcast on instagram @buriedsecretspodcast

E-mail the podcast at buriedsecretspodcast@gmail.com.

Pictures of Lawrence Family Cemetery

Episode Script for Lawrence Cemetery

“A private cemetery holding the remains of this country’s great patriots should be considered as much a Landmark as are certain buildings. . . . The Lawrence Family cemetery is important, primarily because of the history connected with those who are buried there. It is also notable due to the beauty of its handsome grounds.” – the 1966 Landmarks Preservation Commission, April 18, 1966

Lawrence Cemetery in Astoria, NY

The Lawrences were an old Astoria family. They were English and came to America in the 1600s and ended up in Flushing in 1644. They bought land all over, including some land in Astoria in 1656.
I found their family crest in the 1852 book The annals of Newtown, in Queens County, New York; it’s a pretty boring one, just a shield with a jagged cross thing in the middle, something that looks like an overturned cup above that, and then a scroll with “quaero invenio,” or “I find” according to google translate.
As I talked about last week, many historic families cemeteries no longer exist; typically, the remains were removed and then stuff was built on top of the land. As I’ve mentioned before, NYC has basically been run by developers for a very long time, and a ton of history has been destroyed in the name of profit.
There are actually two Lawrence family cemeteries left in Queens. I don’t know if that speaks to their wealth, their influence, or just plain luck. One is in Bayside, which is in northern Queens, pretty far away from mass transit, so I’ve never been there. The other is right here in Astoria.
Last spring, I ran up to the Lawrence cemetery, which is in northern Astoria near the big Con Edison power plant and wastewater treatment plant. If you look at a map of northern Astoria, you’ll see there’s this bit of land that juts out a bit, kinda between the Hell Gate and Riker’s Island, and just north of Astoria park. That’s where the Coned plant is, and it’s notable because even on Google maps nowadays, it’s called Lawrence Point.
- Also, there used to be a family cemetery where the Coned plant is now, according to Carolee Inskeep’s The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries. At 20th avenue and 21st street in Astoria, the Berrien-Remsen Family Burial Ground, a private cemetery with gravestones dating from the 18th century to 1810, once stood. To read from her book:
  - This burial ground was at the north end of Berrien’s Lane, facing Berrien’s Creek and Berrien’s Island. It was obliterated in 1902 for construction of a gas manufacturing plant. Con-Edison now occupies the site.
- As you can probably guess, the Berrien family was another old family in Astoria, and Berrien Lane, Berrien’s Creek, and Berrien’s Island are all gone now. Landfill united Berrien’s Island with the mainland of Queens and is now also occupied by the Coned plant.
- Last episode, I talked about the Ravenswood Generating Station, which stands where the Blackwell family cemetery once was, and which is a major polluter that causes a lot of health problems for local residents. I have a friend who used to live up near the Coned plant, and they said that they had a lot of respiratory issues because of the plant. However, I believe the area around the Coned plant is less densely populated, since there aren’t 6,000 people living in public housing basically right next door. Off the top of my head, I think the closest public housing to the Coned plant would be the Astoria Houses on Hallet’s Point, just north of Socrates Sculpture Park, though I don’t know northern Astoria, also known as Ditmars, very well.
- One reason for that is that because of the power plant, the wastewater treatment plant, LaGuardia airport, and Riker’s Island, regular citizens don’t have access to the northern shoreline of Astoria. That whole area is blocked off and feels kinda dystopian and weird. The only real reason I’ve had to go up toward Astoria’s northern shore was to see the Lawrence Cemetery last year.
- Oh, and since I mentioned Riker’s Island, I actually talk about Riker’s in a bit more detail in one of the the Renwick Smallpox Hospital episodes, but just a reminder: Riker’s is a jail; 85% of the people who are imprisoned there are waiting for trial.
  - It’s an infamously unsafe place to be imprisoned, especially during COVID. I don’t want to get too off topic here, but if you do want to help people make bail and get out of there, you can donate to the Emergency Release Fund at emergencyreleasefund.com, which focuses on getting high-risk inmates out of Rikers, like queer and trans people.
  - If you’re listening to this, you probably agree with me that it’s a horrific human rights abuse to put people who haven’t even been convicted in jail for years, usually because they can’t afford bail. Basically, it ends up just housing people who are too poor to post bail.
    - But if that isn’t a convincing argument for you and you’re more concerned with money: for some reason that I don’t understand, it costs the city of New York $209,000 per person per year to house them in Riker’s. And while prisoners at Riker’s are used for slave labor, doing tasks like burying indigent people in NYC’s potter’s field, Hart Island, I think it’s obvious that that doesn’t offset the cost.
  - In NYC, the idea of closing Riker’s is a very popular one, and the current city council member who represents my district proposed legislation called the Renewable Riker’s Act, which will close Riker’s and instead use the land to generate power through renewable energy. That legislation was signed into law a couple weeks ago, which is great news for all of NYC.
    - And actually just last week I was out collecting signatures to get a great candidate for city council, Tiffany Caban, on the ballot, and she also supports closing Riker’s Island and Renewable Rikers. If you happen to live in Astoria, please vote for her on June 22. You can learn more about her at cabanforqueens.com
  - I know this might seem like a tangent, right, why am I talking about a local city council race in an episode about hidden cemeteries? It’s because history isn’t over, and power–both literal and figurative–here in Astoria is really relevant when looking at history, but particularly the history of family cemeteries around here.
  - I mean, multiple family cemeteries around here have literally been demolished to build power plants that are making people sick today. Landfill has made islands, like Berrien’s Island, vanish, and Rikers Island, for example, has been made four times bigger than it originally was, just so it could hold more prisoners. Homes have been obliterated, the shapes of islands have been changed, and it’s only when you start to look at historical maps of what the neighborhood was like a couple hundred years ago that you really realize all the things that have been buried, destroyed, and forgotten.
But Lawrence Cemetery is one piece of history that still stands.
The cemetery is more than 300 years old. It was founded in 1656, though it was officially founded in 1703, according to an inscription in stone beside its gate. It was landmarked in 1966. Oliver Lawrence was he last person buried there, in 1975.
This is a privately owned cemetery that’s not really open to the public. The current owner/caretaker is James M. Sheehan, whose wife inherited the cemetery and the house next door, where they live. Sheehan’s father-in-law had inherted the cemetery and the house next door from Ruth Lawrence, one of the last surviving Lawrences. Sheehan is 84 and has been the cemetery’s caretaker since 1956.
Records say that 94 people are buried in the cemetery, though Sheehan says it’s actually more.
I wanted to read a bit from a Queens Chronicle article from October 5, 2000:
- “The Lawrences were important folk, many playing key roles in local history. They intermarried with the Rikers, of Rikers Island. They are related to Captain James Lawrence, the naval officer whose words “Don’t give up the ship” during the War of 1812 have become immortalized.
- James Lawrence was buried in Trinity Church in Manhattan, as an honor, but the rest of his family is buried in Sheehan’s backyard.
- The graveyard holds the remains of lieutenant governors, New York City mayoral candidates, Revolutionary and Civil War heroes and other notables with rich histories.
- There is another Lawrence Cemetery, in Bayside, where the family eventually expanded their burials. That graveyard started in the 1800s and is now tended by the Bayside Historical Society.”
The cemetery stands on an ordinary street corner, elevated on a stone wall and behind both a chain-link fence with barbed wire (separating it from the street) and the more picturesque stone-and-iron fence.
Inside are three centuries’ worth of Lawrence family burials, including Sarah Lawrence (who the university was named after.)
The Lawrences were an old family, apparently descended from one of King Richard the Lionheart’s crusaders in England
I read somewhere that there supposedly used to be three Lawrence family cemeteries, including one a few blocks away from this one (which has been destroyed), though I didn’t see mention of that third one when I checked Carolee Inskeep’s book The Graveyard Shift, my trusty companion in all of this.
I did want to read a bit of the history from The Graveyard Shift, which calls the cemetery the Lawrence Manor Burial Ground:
- “In 1915, the cemetery was restored after some years of neglect. Its stone fence and wrought iron gate were repaired, and the grounds were planted with flowers. There were plans to purchase the surrounding property and convert it into a park as a historic site for future generations.”
I think it would be awesome for this to be a park someday; it’s a really beautiful cemetery.
A 1932 report called Description of Private and Family Cemeteries in the Borough of Queens describes the wall of the cemetery; the bit with the front gate, which faces 20th Road, formerly called Bowery Bay Road, is a “dressed stone wall with an iron rail fence,” and the part facing 35th Street is a “brick wall topped with iron rail fence.”
These days, the cemetery wall also has a chain-link fence around it, to really make sure people can’t get in.
The 1932 report has a list of all the inscriptions in the cemetery, and in addition to the Lawrences, there are other familiar names from old families in the area.
- For example, Abraham Riker Lawrence; I’ll talk about more the Riker family next week. There’s also a Ruth Lawrence who was the daughter of Andrew and Jane Riker.
- There’s also Agnes Rapelye, whose name I can’t see but whose relative, Cornelius Rapelye Trafford, I mentioned last week. He was the man with two graves.
- There’s also some members of the Suydam family. You may recognize that name because Trafford’s Green-wood Cemetery grave is beside one of the Suydams.
- There’s also an Amy Lawrence, who was the daughter of Cornelius and Amy Berrien of the nearby Berrien family. I like the inscription on her tombstone, which was “This life is a dream and an empty show / Into the wide world we must go.”
- Another inscription I like appears on Judith Lawrence’s marble tombstone. There’s a skull and cross bones with the words: “To this must all flesh come” which I find very metal and cool.
There’s a great Huffpost article about the cemetery from 2011, and it had some quotes from Sheehan I just had to read:
- “It’s heavenly living next to the cemetery. I consider the people there my neighbors, and I want to keep them looking good.”
- Another quote is: “I take pride in doing this. People always ask me if it’s scary. It’s not. It’s very tranquil here. I love to turn on the radio and sit out here in the evenings. But there are those scary moments — you feel something tugging at your shoulder, and you turn around and discover it’s the rosebush.”
Also, the article mentions how apparently his daughters used to hold seances at the cemetery, though it doesn’t go into any detail.
When I visited the cemetery, I wasn’t able to get many pictures of this cemetery, because as I crouched behind some cars trying to get a good angle of the gates and stones inside, Sheehan and (I think) his wife came out to go into the cemetery. They looked at me kinda suspiciously (can’t imagine why) so I scurried away.
Givemeastoria.com ran an article about Lawrence Cemetery in October 2020, and I wanted to close with a quote from that which looks ahead to the future of the cemetery:
- “The thing that worries me the most is what will happen to this place after I am gone,” said Sheehan.
- Sheehan has been tending the site for nearly 60 years, paying for repairs out of his own pocket. But now he is worried about what will become of the place in the future.
- “I’ve been maintaining this out of respect for my father-in-law and the history of the Lawrences,” Mr. Sheehan said. . . . The Queens Historical Society will be working with the City Council and Community Board 1 to assist Sheehan in helping to preserve the property for future generations.

Sources consulted RE: Lawrence Family Cemetery

Books

The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries by Carolee Inskeep
Munsell’s History of Queens County, New York, 1882
The annals of Newtown, in Queens County, New York
by James Riker, 1852
History of Long Island City, New York. by J. SKelsey; Long Island Star Publishing Company, 1896
Queens Borough, New York City, 1910-1920 by Chamber of Commerce, 1920

Articles

Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Jul 2, 1903 · Page 10
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Nov 3, 1870 · Page 3

Websites

https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/1966907/lawrence-cemetery
https://forgotten-ny.com/2010/10/bowery-baynorth-astoria-queens/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/nyregion/nyc-news-rikers-island.html
https://qns.com/2021/03/mayor-signs-queens-councilman-renewable-rikers-act-into-law/
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-rikers-covid-ruling-20210219-56juh2eccvb4jg7hxwxdfvnv34-story.html
https://qns.com/2021/03/mayor-signs-queens-councilman-renewable-rikers-act-into-law/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rikers_Island#COVID-19_crisis
https://newtownpentacle.com/tag/bowery-bay/
https://rihs.us/2020/09/09/wednesday-september-9-2020-wpa-architecture-found-in-unlikely-place/
https://www.qchron.com/editions/western/landmark-cemetery-owner-s-call-for-help-is-heeded-in-astoria/article_fd09df4b-c4cd-51ae-bf6b-c9905004501e.html
https://forgotten-ny.com/2012/01/north-astoria-queens/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2012/01/north-astoria-queens-part-2/
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/astoria-characters-the-ca_2_b_915833
Lawrence Cemetery Google maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lawrence+Cemetery/@40.7775676,-73.9056275,3a,75y,161.24h,99.51t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sCZw8qzAceYKfel0pAPXHsA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!4m5!3m4!1s0x89c25f643d061421:0xe5447ac8f6f12426!8m2!3d40.7773027!4d-73.9056237?hl=en
https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=162550
https://www.givemeastoria.com/2020/10/28/astoria-man-breathes-life-into-forgotten-family-cemetery/
https://www.brownstoner.com/history/a-look-at-lawrence-cemetery-astoria/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2020/10/lawrence-family-cemetery-astoria/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/emilio_guerra/5326285917/
http://www.neighborhoodpreservationcenter.org/db/bb_files/66—LAWRENCE-FAMILY-GRAVEYARD.pdf

Don’t miss past episodes:

Lent-Riker-Smith Homestead and Cemetery: Part 1 (Hidden Cemeteries)

A look at the Lent-Riker-Smith Cemetery, a hidden family graveyard tucked away behind one of the oldest homes in New York City, which is still a private residence.

This is part 1 of the history of the little-known Lent-Riker-Smith Homestead and Cemetery. This episode focuses on the history of nearby Riker’s Island, as well as the Riker family, and sets the scene for next week’s deep dive into the home and cemetery’s more recent history, and what they’re like now.

Highlights include:
• Spontaneously combusting garbage
• Gatsby’s Valley of Ashes
• A grim modern-day penal colony
• Exploring an off-the-beaten-path neighborhood

Links mentioned in the episode:

Donate to the Emergency Release Fund to get high-risk people out of Rikers

Tiffany Cabán for council district 22 (Astoria): https://www.cabanforqueens.com/

The Feminine Macabre Volume 1: https://spookeats.com/femininemacabre/

Pictures of Lent-Riker-Smith Cemetery

Episode Script for Lent-Riker-Smith Homestead and Cemetery Part 1

This week, I’m excited to talk about the Lent-Riker-Smith Homestead and Cemetery here in Queens, NY. The homestead is the oldest home in NYC that is still a home, and was originally built in the 1600s.
I realize that I’ve said that this cemetery is in Astoria before, but technically it’s in a neighborhood called East Elmhurst, which is a neighborhood that’s basically just east of northern Astoria, which I talked about last week, and just west of LGA airport.
To give it some context, here’s a quote from 2006 NYT article about the homestead:
- In a city virtually defined by real estate mania, it has had just a handful of owners. In a city where compact housing is the norm, it boasts a comfortable two-story house on a lavishly cultivated acre. In a borough known for sprawling cemeteries, it has a small one of its own.
I also wanted to read a bit from an amazing forgotten new york article about the house and cemetery, which situates it really well:
- “It’s almost maddeningly impossible to find. The closest subway is approximately 35 blocks away. It’s surrounded on 3 sides by a high school, stockade fencing and barbed wire. The nearest businesses are bail bonds joints. It’s situated on one of Queens’ oldest highways, most of which was demapped decades ago.
- It is arguably the most beautiful home in Queens, and one that has been rescued from total ruin by the passion and vision of one couple who gave the house a chance when no one else would. It was built in stages beginning in the mid-1600s and has undergone periods of ascendancy and ruin, passing through many families who kept it in various conditions of upkeep. It has had many names, but the one adopted by its owners is the Lent Riker Smith Homestead or Lent Riker Smith House.”
I actually biked to the homestead this weekend, and I passed Lawrence Cemetery on the way there.
It’s kinda a weird area. For one thing, the back of the homestead is basically directly across the street from the bridge to Riker’s Island, which I’ve talked about a lot in the past, including last week. It’s a very bad jail housing mostly people who have not been convicted of a crime. Especially in the Bronx, the court system is really backed up, so people suspected of crimes there are often deprived of their right to a speedy trial. There have been cases of people waiting in Rikers for 5 years or more while awaiting trial, only to go to trial and be acquitted. Only 15% of people who are imprisoned there have been convicted of a crime, and those are just people serving short sentences.
There are 10 jails on the island, which supposedly can house up to 15,000 prisoners, though it’s usually more like 10,000. It’s been called the world’s largest penal colony, and it’s a very bad place to be.
And if you want to help get high-risk people, like queer people, out of there, check out https://emergencyreleasefund.com/ which is a bail fund.
I’d looked at a map before leaving for the homestead, and figured I’d follow the signs to Riker’s Island and it should be pretty easy. Well, there aren’t really wayfinding signs to Riker’s Island, for I guess obvious reasons, but I did follow the Q100, the bus that goes to Riker’s, for a while.
I ended up having to look at the map again, but found the entrance to the Riker’s Bridge at Hazen Street and 19th avenue.
I will say, the road that goes across the bridge to Riker’s is very unassuming. I don’t really know what I was expecting, but the area just feels like a lot of other quiet industrial areas of Queens. According to correctionshistory.com, the 5,500 foot long bridge was built in 1966 and is three lanes plus a six-foot sidewalk. Before it was built, people had to take a ferry to Riker’s. The construction of the bridge spurred additional development of Riker’s Island, and a womens jail was built in 1967, some sort of jail for adolescents was built, as was a “power plant addition.”
However, right before the bridge to Riker’s there’s an enormous, billboard-sized sign that reminded me a bit of the signs you see outside roadside tourist attractions. It was a huge, well-maintained thing, and it felt really incongruous.
I want to pause here to talk a bit about the history of Riker’s Island, before it was a prison, since it has a bearing on today’s cemetery.
Riker’s Island has some similarities to Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island), which I’ve talked about in many past episodes, so if you’ve listened to those, some of this may sound familiar.
- Riker’s is named after a Dutch settler, Abraham Rycken, who took ownership of the island in 1664.
- As far as its pre-colonial history, according to native-land.ca, it looks like the Matinecock, Lenape, and Wappiner peoples lived in the general area, though I’m not super sure of the island’s history before Rycken came into the picture.
- The Rycken family became the Rikers.
- There was a bit of interesting information on correctionhistory.com about how some of the Rikers lived on the island in the 1840s; to read from that:
  - “Living on the island necessitated having both a boat and tools to build or maintain a boat, and it required being able to make as well as to repair iron ware and tools. The farm, or at least Abraham’s part of it, was an active one, in spite of his age; he raised hay, corn, and flax, and livestock included at least one cow, although apparently not a horse.
  - The household items are more surprising: eight bedsteads and twelve matresses together with twenty-four chairs suggest a large house or perhaps the means of sqeezing many people into a small house. Two bird cages and a quantity of books suggest that all was not work.”
And here’s another interesting anecdote from correctionshistory.com:
- “The remoteness of Riker’s Island appears to have made it irresistible in the 1850s as a site for what the area newspapers called the “disgusting spectacle” of prize fights which were seen as contrary to the public good, if not outrightly illegal.
- During the night of April 27, 1852, three chartered steamboats transported friends and others from lower Manhattan to Riker’s Island; the fight between Phil Clare and Englishman George Leese began after daybreak and lasted for nine rounds in 21 minutes; it ended with the latter being knocked out and with a resulting riot.
- The next year on the morning of March the first a 15 minute bout between Adams and Connaty, attended by several hundred, resulted in Connaty’s winning the $150 prize. It was noted that the authorities made no attempt to prevent or to stop the fight, but the following day Adams was caught and subsequently sentenced to six months in prison. This fight was arranged by one Robert Lees about whom nothing further has been learned.”
During the Civil War, the island was used by union soldiers as a military training ground.
In 1884, the Rikers sold the island to the city for $180,000 ($4.8 million in today’s money.)
- For comparison, you may remember from previous episodes that the Blackwell Family sold Blackwell’s Island to the city in 1828 for $32,000 $885,000 in today’s money.) I’m not totally sure why the city paid so much more for Riker’s, especially since Blackwell’s Island is more conveniently located, and they were both being purchased for a similar purpose, though I know I’m getting a little off track.
The idea behind purchasing Rikers was that it would be the location of a workhouse. In the 1920s, the city got the idea of building a jail on Riker’s, especially because of horrendous conditions at the jail on Welfare Island (a short-lived name that Blackwell’s/Roosevelt Island had).
You may remember from a previous episode that in 1932, the jail on Riker’s Island was opened.
The city expanded the size of the island through landfill. The island started off at 90 acres and ended up being 415 acres, so it basically quadrupled in size. And as the island got bigger, they built more and more jail facilities.
Now, if you listened to my episode about Socrates Sculpture Park, or if you’ve read The Great Gatsby and remember the bit about the Valley of Ashes, you know that Queens has a penchant for dumping garbage, both legally and illegally.
- In 1922, the was city banned from dumping garbage in the ocean, so they did the next best thing, and dumped garbage on Riker’s Island. (Which, while I guess it technically isn’t Queens, it’s close enough.)
- At the time that the city was banned from throwing garbage in the ocean, Riker’s Island already had 12 mountains of garbage that ranged from 40-130 feet tall. Eventually, the island ended up with 1.5 million cubic yards of additional garbage, which is more volume than the amount of dirt displaced from the World Trade Center’s construction.
- I’m just gonna read a particular evocative bit of the wikipedia page here:
  - Since much of the garbage was composed of ash from coal heating and incinerators, there were frequent spontaneous phosphorescent fires, even in the wintertime, in the snow. One warden described it in 1934: “At night it is like a forest of Christmas trees – first one little light … then another, until the whole hillside is lit up with little fires. … It was beautiful.” The island was also plagued with rats, which at one point were so prevalent that after “poison gas, poison bait, ferocious dogs and pigs” failed to control them, one New Yorker tried to organize a hunting party to kill them off.
- The 1939 World’s Fair was held in Queens, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Valley of Ashes, and to clean things up for the world’s fair, the garbage was finally packed up and moved to Fresh Kills Landfill, in Staten Island.
- Oh, and another fun fact about Riker’s is that the island is so close to the runway at LGA that in the 1950s, a plane crashed on Riker’s right after takeoff.
So that’s a bit of Riker’s Island history. It’s an ugly history, but many of us in Queens and NYC in general are hopeful that Riker’s can be closed and the terrible jails can be replaced with something better. As usual in NYC, it was looked at as a possible place for–you guessed it–real estate developers to build some low rise housing, but since the base of the island is a landfill, toxic gas leaks out, and that would be an issue.
- There’s a way better plan that many people support, including my current city council representative, whose term ends this year, as well as by city council candidate Tiffany Caban, who Astoria residents can vote for on June 22 (check out cabanforqueens.com for more info.) That plan, which I mentioned last week, is to build infrastructure to generate green energy, which would be good for everyone, would create some good new jobs for people in the area, etc.
Alright, so that’s Riker’s Island. Let’s get back to the mainland, to the area around the Riker-Lent-Smith-Homestead, which I explored by bike this past weekend.
It’s pretty far from mass transit, so I get the feeling that everyone has a car there. It’s very quiet, aside from low-flying airplanes. It’s the part of Queens where it’s not unusual to see jet skis or a boat in someone’s driveway.
- Also, just something I happened to notice because I got a new bike this weekend and this was only the second time I’d ridden it, all the streets and sidewalks around there are totally strewn with broken glass. It just looks like someone decided to throw glass bottles everywhere, which is awesome. But I think my bike tires survived.
So anyway, the area near the Lent-Riker-Smith homestead feels very suburban, though many of the homes are attached, and there are still a number of small apartment complexes, like the very pretty Tudor that’s right across the street from the homestead.
I’ve mentioned the Riker family in past episodes and a little bit so far this time, but basically the Rikers were a really important Queens family. One of the sources I’ve used throughout this series on hidden Queens cemeteries is an 1852 book called The annals of Newtown, in Queens County, New York, which is actually written by a Riker, James Riker.
- Looking through Riker’s book, which includes the family histories of all of the important families of the area, there’s a great drawing of the Riker’s coat of arms, which I think is way cooler than the Lawrences’, which I talked about last week. It’s an azure shield with three golden stars surrounding a white rose, with ornate filigree at the top and tumbling down the sides, topped by a knight’s helm and horns with a rose in the middle. Apparently there was a later coat of arms, from 1225, which had bears on it.
- The Rikers could date their history back before the crusades. A Hans von Rycken, a knight, and his cousin, Melchior von Rycken, were part of the first crusade in 1096. They were part of a group of 800 crusaders who were part of Walter the Penniless’ army. Don’t know who he is, but that isn’t a very promising name. Hans died, but Melchior lived.
- The American Rikers descended from a branch in the family who lived in Amsterdam.

Sources consulted RE: Lent-Riker-Smith Cemetery

Books

The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries by Carolee Inskeep
Munsell’s History of Queens County, New York, 1882
The annals of Newtown, in Queens County, New York
by James Riker, 1852
History of Long Island City, New York. by J. SKelsey; Long Island Star Publishing Company, 1896
Queens Borough, New York City, 1910-1920 by Chamber of Commerce, 1920

Websites

https://www.yelp.com/biz/lent-riker-smith-homestead-east-elmhurst
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lent_Homestead_and_Cemetery
https://www.rikerhome.com/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2006/09/lent-riker-smith-mansion/
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/nycdoc/html/rispan2.html
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/nycdoc/html/buono.html
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/nycdoc/html/qnsboro2.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rikers_Island_Bridgehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rikers_Island
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronx_court_system_delayshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Island
https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1884?amount=180000
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw_units/html/rikersbook001.html
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw_units/html/rikersbook002.htmlhttp://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw_units/html/rikersbook004.html
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw_units/html/rikersbook005.htmlhttp://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw_units/html/rikersbook006.html
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw_units/html/rikersbook007.html
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw_units/html/rikersbook009.htmlhttp://genealogytrails.com/ny/queens/cem_rikers.html
http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~ryker2/ryker_coatofarms.htmhttps://untappedcities.com/2011/12/22/the-last-riker-house/
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/nyregion/11farmhouse.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/li-press-1968_large.htm
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/lisj-1941_large.htm
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/1930s.htm
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/sunday-news-1942_large.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/16/realestate/postings-little-paradise.html
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/queens_courier_mds_05-25-06.pdfhttps://www.thirteen.org/queens/map.html
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/queens_courier_mds_06-15-06.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/nyregion/11farmhouse.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/ny-daily-news-11-7-06.htm

Don’t miss past episodes:

Riker Home and Cemetery: Part 2 (Hidden Cemeteries)

A look at the remarkable Riker Home and Cemetery, or the Lent-Riker-Smith Homestead and Cemetery, which one woman’s dream and grit turned into a beautiful site with a secret garden.

Highlights include:
• A unique second date
• A collection of vintage ventriloquist dummies
• Fun historic home renovation details

Note: There’s discussion of chattel slavery and being held captive against one’s will near the end of this episode.

Pictures of the Riker Home and Cemetery

Episode Script for Riker Home and Cemetery

So, let’s talk about this homestead and cemetery.
The house is near the water, and I get the sense it used to be even closer. An old article from the 1930s that was posted on rikerhome.com, the home’s official website, talks about how in the old days, ships used to dock near the house, and during the War of 1812, local people gathered on the nearby shore to watch a naval battle on the Long Island Sound.
The house was built around 1656 by Abraham Rycken, who was a Dutch farmer. Or maybe it was actually built by a man named Harck Siboutsen–the story varies.
A lot of the stuff I’ve been reading from correctionshistory.org comes from a book called The Rikers: Their Island, Homes, Cemetery and Early Genealogy in Queens County, NY by an 11th generation Abraham Rijcken van Lent descendant, Edgar Alan Nutt. I wanted to read a bit more, but before I read, if you’ve listened to the last few episodes, you’ll be VERY happy that I’ve figured out how to pronounce the name spelled “Rapelye,” which I’ve been pronouncing all different wacky ways. According to Annals of Newtown, the family is descended from the de Rapalie or Rapalie family, so I think that must be how it’s supposed to be pronounced, though I don’t know what they were doing adding that weird y in the middle of the name.
So anyway, reading from correctionshistory.org:
- The quaint Dutch farmhouse on a one acre lot in Jackson Heights . . . is the oldest in Queens County and one of the oldest, if not the very oldest, private homes that remain in New York City, and it is known by various names reflecting several of the families that have owned it over the years.
- Members of the Lent family owned it and the farm that went with it for about seventy years, the Rapelye family for close to a hundred years, and a Riker estate for almost twenty years in the last century, and the three families were interrelated.
Reading more from the excerpts of Edgar Alan Nutt’s book:
- The house, in its current condition, is distinctive with its three dormer widows and with its swooping roof that projects eaves far beyond the walls; however, none of those features is original. One exterior wail is field stone, the others are shingled.
And just to interject, those dormers are really cool and beautiful, and one of them has a really nice stained glass pattern on it. I’m not totally sure when it’s from but it feels 19th century to me.
And back to Nutt’s book:
- Inside there are now four rooms downstairs and four upstairs. The original house, whether or not it remains a part of what now exists, was a one story, single room, primitive structure . . . The bedroom and kitchen are the rooms of Abraham Lent’s 1730 house while the other two rooms are 18th century additions. A small entrance room, utilizing the depth of the eaves, was added late in the last century.
- The second floor space under the roof may have early been used for storage, or it may have been used as the sleeping quarters for children, but the addition of the dormer windows allowed for the creation of four bedrooms upstairs.
If you want a very great, detailed history of the house’s different owners, you can check out Edgar Alan Nutt’s book or correctionshistory.org, but it’s too much history for me to go into here. But eventually, a man named Michael M. Smith rented the house, and he ended up buying it in 1975, 1978–or maybe 1965, I’ve read all three dates, though I think the 1965 one is wrong.
Apparently the owner of the house, Michael Smith’s landlord, wanted to move the house to a different location, but put it up for sale after her learned it was illegal. So Smith bought it, though apparently he only lived there a few years, and then moved to the city. (Btw, I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before, but for non-NYC people, FYI: even though I technically live in NYC, like many outerborough residents, I tend to call Manhattan The City. It’s kind of a funny habit since I obviously also live in a very urban area here in Astoria, and I try to say Manhattan here when I remember, but I thought it was worth mentioning in case that confused anyone.)
So after Michael moved to the city, he basically just used the house for storage, and local kids thought of the home as the local abandoned haunted house.
I wanted to read a great bit from a quote from the current owner, Marion Duckworth Smith, from her website:
- “The first time I saw the house it was a cold. Desolate night in November, 1979. I had known Michael for a month. We were on our second date.
- “Where are we going?” I inquired. “How would you like to see my cemetery?” he said.
- His house stood abandoned in Jackson Heights, Queens. It had been unoccupied for almost four years. It was known as the “haunted house” of the neighborhood and it had repeatedly been burglarized and robbed.
- “And he really did have his own cemetery, behind the house. It was the burial ground for the once prominent Riker family, among the first Dutch settlers in this area…I stood shivering in the middle of the neglected cemetery, surrounded by broken, toppled and shattered headstones, shaking my head, not believing a place like this could still exist in New York City. The house itself was dark, cold, cluttered, and sagging; it seemed shrouded in mystery and ready to cry…”
One note: I know I’ve called this area Astoria, Jackson Heights, and East Elmhurst at different points. That’s just Queens for you. I used to live a bit south from here, and I couldn’t tell you what the neighborhood I lived in was called (I had a Woodside address but no one in Queens would have called where I lived Woodside.)
And another detail I read about Marion’s first visit to the homestead: the electricity to the building had been turned off, so Michael had to light candles to show her around.
So anyway, after Marion and Michael got married, Michael asked if Marion wanted to live in the city, or in the old house. She asid the old house, of course, so they got to work restoring the house. The home had been vandalized and robbed while it had stood empty, and Michael had been storing stuff in there that had to be moved out. It took Marion 6 months to clear out everything and clean up the house enough so they could move in.
They started in the attic, which hadn’t really been disturbed in more than a century at that point. The Riker family had told their tenants not to go into the attic–it was a forbidden area.
- Marion spent 3 months sifting through the materials in the attic and reading everything.
- There were estate records dating back to the 1880s, including 54 hardcover financial directories, as well as ephemera and household objects like a potbelly stove, wooden blinds, bottles, and cabinets. There were also letters, a will, and things like receipts for animal feed from when it was a farm.
- Marion spent days cleaning everything out of the attic once she finished going through it all, and she got so tired walking up and down the stairs so many times that she ended up opening the window and throwing debris out.
I want to read a bit more from Forgotten NY, which is where I found the quotes from the Old-House Journal. This includes more quotes from Marion Smith:
- “We were lucky enough to find a retired neighbor, Mr. Osso, [who did the] sanding, painting, fixing and stripping. I didn’t mind hard work either, so he and I developed a great working arrangement. He did most of the stripping while I pushed, pulled, dug, scribbed, crawled and said goodbye to my fingernails. I may have found my prince but I still felt like Cinderella, always down on my knees working while everyone else got to go to the ball.” Under the gold shag 1960s carpeting and linoleum, Mrs. Smith and Osso found the building’s 300-year-old wood plank floors.
The floors had apparently been painted black so they had to restore them
Here’s Marion on the kitchen:
- “The kitchen had a Formica countertop and linoleum on the floor…poor house, so humiliated, so misunderstood….it took a couple of months to find a scrubbed-pine sideboard just the right size to convert. We took off its wood top, selected tiles for the surface, bought a stainless steel sink. Voila, our piece de resistance.”
The dining room of the home was apparently used as a tavern by revolutionary war soldiers. Marion has decorated it with pastel drawings done by her mother.
- . . . How I wished I could go back in time to this very spot 300 years ago, and see the room as it was then! I knew that whoever was here then must have felt the same as we did now – full of the excitement and expectation of finishing a room, creating a home. Pete and Bill [two helpers] told me that the beams in the dining room originally come from a barn. This too filled me with images of those long-ago Rikers, razing a barn somewhere to begin the venture of building this homestead. Another missing piece to a puzzle, another bit of history retrieved…
Like all old buildings that I talk about here, it did catch fire at one point. The house was damaged by a fire during the 1950s, so a lot of the floors had been damaged and had been sloppily replaced, so Marion had to source new wood for the floors, when she found when an old barn was demolished in upstate NY.
There are a ton of cool antiques inside the home which Marion has collected, including chalkware figurines, which were carnival prizes given out during the early 20th century. Those are in the mudroom. She has an 1888 Steinway grand piano, chandeliers from the townhouse of the NYC ballet’s co-founder, and also random objects that once belonged to George Balanchine. She also has a collection of ventriloquist dummies. There’s a great article in untapped cities that has pictures of all of this, so I’ll include that in the shownotes.
So let’s go outside. The fences surrounding the property are covered in overgrown brambles and vines, which you’ll be able to see in the pictures I put in the shownotes and on instagram. It’s really hard to get a good picture looking in, at least on my cheap $50 smartphone; I should really bring my camera next time. But I bet that once the spring gets on and flowers start blooming and everything is green, it must be really pretty. It is in the pictures at least.
There’s a 2006 NYT article that talks about how a plant expert has said that wisteria growing on the archway outside the house appears to be over 300 years old.
Let’s go to another quote from Marion Smith:

“I decided to take a breather from the indoor work and start on the outside. Visions of a secret garden, gazebo and circular porch danced through my head. ‘Paradise Acre,’ that’s what I’ll call it.”

So looking in from the street, the property has a huge yard, even by suburban standards, with the cemetery in the middle, surrounded by a stone fence. Then all around it, Marion Smith has created a sort of Secret Garden. There’s also a Victorian-style gingerbread cottage, which is very cute but which I couldn’t get a great picture of.
Apparently for years, Marion and Michael would look for adornments to add to the garden on a weekly basis. It contains objects like urns from the Steinway Mansion (one of which I think I was able to see from outside), as well as a fountain.
There’s also a gazebo which was built to commemorate Marion and Michael’s 10th wedding anniversary; it’s partially constructed from spokes that Marion found in the attic.
There are plaques on either side of the front door designating the home’s historic nature. There’s also a large cow statue in the front lawn, which I saw through some overgrown brambles when I visited. According to Forgotten NY, it’s a leftover cow from the cow parade in NYC in 2000. You see those around sometimes; there used to be one on an awning at St. Mark’s Place in the city, and just the other day I saw a cow parade cow that had fallen over and was lying on its side in the lawn of a mansion in old Astoria, just north of St. George’s Church.
Then, of course, there’s the cemetery.
When Marion first moved in, the cemetery gate was missing the K in Riker, but she wasn’t sure where to get a replacement. After a 2006 NYT article about the home, she received a package in the mail containing the letter, which a Riker descendant had found on the ground when visiting the abandoned home, and taken when he thought it was going to be demolished. He sent it back when he learned that the home was being restored.
I’m sorry that I’m reading so much from Nutt’s book, but he describes all of this so well:
- Originally what is now the Riker Cemetery was simply an informal space for family burials close to a farm house in an area that was barely two generations removed from pioneer settlement.
- Now it is a walled sanctuary in a tiny island remnant of rural land and domesticity surrounded by the streets and buildings and activities of the modern industrial age, further removed than it had been from Bowery Bay and just several hundred yards from LaGuardia Airport.
- . . . There is no telling when the first burial took place or who the decedent was. In 1919 there were one hundred and thirty-two grave stones or markers, including one that was only a memorial cenotaph, but fourteen of these have no inscriptions whatsoever, twelve have only initials, and four are damaged leaving incomplete or unreadable inscriptions.
- In addition to the one hundred and thirty-two, and in addition to the markers for the several burials that have taken place since 1919, there may be markers that over the years have fallen flat and now lie covered and buried beneath accumulated soil, as has happened in many very old . . . graveyards.
It sounds like some people say the earliest burials there are from 1721, but it sounds like people have struggled to say for sure. The second Abraham Riker was buried there in 1746, and that was the first official, for-sure known burial.
A later Captain Abraham Riker was buried there in 1778, after dying at Valley Forge during the Revolutionary War, when he was 38 years old.
Apparently in the 1930s, several gravestones were stolen by vandals who used them for stepping stones. It’s unclear if they were ever returned.
At some point, possibly during the 1950s, an airplane parts factory was built just west of the cemetery, and the construction process for that damaged the cemetery a bit, though that may have been repaired.
So I know you’ve been wondering this whole time: Is this house haunted?
- Well, I found a delightful story in the Long Island Press from March 17, 1968, headlined “This House May Be Haunted: Ghosts Gambol in the Backyard”
  - The article does touch on some of the house’s darker history. It quotes Marion as saying, “There are chains in the basement that supposedly were used to imprison slaves.”
  - The article also says that there was supposedly a hidden passage from the basement to the bay, which was used for smuggling.
  - It also mentions that Captain Kidd’s widow, who ended up marrying into the Riker family, is buried in the cemetery, as is George Washington’s surgeon.
  - I’m a little confused of when the Smiths lived in the house, but the article says they moved in two years before, so that would’ve been 1966.
  - However, aside from the flashy title, the article does not mention ghosts, sadly, though I would be surprised if it wasn’t haunted.
Unfortunately, Michael Smith passed away in 2010. He’s buried in the cemetery, as is Marion Smith’s brother and mother. Some other non-Rikers are buried in the cemetery, including Rudolph Durheim, a Swiss pensioner who died in 1944 after being the cemetery’s caretaker in the 1930s and 40s.
Marion Smith wrote a book that was published in 2004 called “The Romantic Garden”, which features beautiful pictures of her secret garden. ANd before the pandemic at least, still gave tours of the house. I really, really want to go on one of those tours as soon as covid is over.
Marion wants to live there the rest of her life, and then she hopes it will be permanently opened to the public.
I wanted to close on what is apparently Marion’s favorite inscription in the cemetery:
- “Weep not my friends all dear, I am not dead but sleeping here. The debt is paid, my grave you see, Prepare for death and follow me. My flesh shall slumber in the ground Till the last trumpet’s solemn sound; Then burst the bands in sweet surprise, And in my savior’s image rise.”

Sources consulted RE: the Riker Home and Cemetery

Books

The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries by Carolee Inskeep
Munsell’s History of Queens County, New York, 1882
The annals of Newtown, in Queens County, New York
by James Riker, 1852
History of Long Island City, New York. by J. SKelsey; Long Island Star Publishing Company, 1896
Queens Borough, New York City, 1910-1920 by Chamber of Commerce, 1920

Websites

Untapped Cities article: https://untappedcities.com/2011/12/22/the-last-riker-house/
https://www.yelp.com/biz/lent-riker-smith-homestead-east-elmhurst
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lent_Homestead_and_Cemetery
https://www.rikerhome.com/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2006/09/lent-riker-smith-mansion/
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/nycdoc/html/rispan2.html
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/nycdoc/html/buono.html
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/nycdoc/html/qnsboro2.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rikers_Island_Bridgehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rikers_Island
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronx_court_system_delayshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Island
https://www.officialdata.org/us/inflation/1884?amount=180000
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw_units/html/rikersbook001.html
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw_units/html/rikersbook002.htmlhttp://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw_units/html/rikersbook004.html
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw_units/html/rikersbook005.htmlhttp://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw_units/html/rikersbook006.html
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw_units/html/rikersbook007.html
http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/cw_units/html/rikersbook009.htmlhttp://genealogytrails.com/ny/queens/cem_rikers.html
http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~ryker2/ryker_coatofarms.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/nyregion/11farmhouse.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/li-press-1968_large.htm
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/lisj-1941_large.htm
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/1930s.htm
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/sunday-news-1942_large.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/16/realestate/postings-little-paradise.html
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/queens_courier_mds_05-25-06.pdf
https://www.thirteen.org/queens/map.html
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/queens_courier_mds_06-15-06.htm
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/nyregion/11farmhouse.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/ny-daily-news-11-7-06.htm

Don’t miss past episodes:

Moore-Jackson Cemetery (Hidden Cemeteries)

The Moore-Jackson Cemetery, a colonial-era cemetery sits in a quiet residential part of Woodside, Queens, in New York City.

Forgotten for years, and even used as a dump for construction materials and other detritus, the Moore-Jackson Cemetery recently been transformed into a beautiful community garden. Here’s the story behind the cemetery and the people buried there.

Highlights include:
• Loyalists living in Revolutionary War-era Queens, NY
• The city trying to illegally seize the cemetery at the behest of a developer
• A hot-potato cemetery

Check out the Moore-Jackson Cemetery/Garden’s website for more info and historical articles: https://www.moorejacksonnyc.org/

Pictures of the Moore-Jackson Cemetery

Moore-Jackson Cemetery in Spring 2020

From the March 18, 1997, Landmark Preservation Commission report on Moore-Jackson Cemetery

Episode Script for the Moore-Jackson Cemetery

Back when I originally became aware of this cemetery, in 2012, this was a forgotten colonial cemetery easily mistaken for an empty lot, a few blocks away from my old apartment). Out of all of the abandoned cemeteries I’ve talked about so far for this series, this is the first one I learned about, totally by accident, and the one I spent the most time near. I walked by it twice a day 5 days a week on my way to and from the subway, since it’s on 54th street and 31st avenue in Woodside, a block or so away from the subway.
I remember shortly after I moved to Woodside, I was walking by what seemed like an empty lot, and then I realized there was a small sign on it that said Moore-Jackson Cemetery. It was completely overgrown, and it was really hard to see the headstones. It’s basically just sandwiched between some apartment buildings, and it’s really small, about half an acre.
Since then the cemetery has found a new life as a community garden and it looks really different–it’s great that it’s been cleaned up and is now both better maintained but also able to be a place for the community to have access to.
So let’s look at the history of this cemetery. First off, who were the Moores?
- You will have heard of the Moores because Clement Clark Moore, a member of the family, wrote Twas the Night Before Christmas. Clement C. Moore was famous for having lived on his family estate, Chelsea, in Manhattan, though. Clement C. Moorewas not a great dude–as a professor at Columbia, he argued against abolition. He became very rich selling off parts of Chelsea, which of course became the neighborhood we now know today as Chelsea.
- But the Moores we’re looking at today are the Queens Moores.
- According to the 1920 book Queens Borough, New York City, 1910-1920, the Moores built a house at Broadway and what was then known as Shell Road, in 1661. I think that shell road is now 45th Avenue, according to something I read in Forgotten New York. The house was built by Captain Samuel Moore, who was the son of Reverend John Moore.
  - Reverend John Moore was the great-great-great grandfather of Clement C. Moore, btw.
  - John Moore apparently laid out the area of Newtown–when I read that, I assumed that meant that he decided where the streets were, etc.
  - But it actually sounds like his “contribution” went beyond that. John Moore supposedly purchased the Newtown from the Mespeatches tribe, for whom the present-day neighborhood of Maspeth is named.
  - However, something to know here is that these sorts of “purchases” should be seen as very suspect. I’ve been doing some research on this and want to talk more about it on a future episode.
- But to get back to the Moore home:
  - As of 1920, it was still standing, and still owned by the Moore family, though the Board of Transportation bought it in 1930.
  - I wanted to read a bit from a Forgotten New York article about the site:
    - “In the Dirty Thirties, NYC was relentless about bulldozing or otherwise destroying historic properties before preservation laws were on the books, and the Moore homestead didn’t survive the construction of the new IND subway under Broadway in 1933. . . . Meanwhile, two Moore burying grounds survive: a hidden one in a playground at 90th Street and 56th Avenue, and the Moore-Jackson Cemetery on 54th Street between 31st and 32nd Avenues in Woodside.”
Out of the two cemeteries, the one we’re interested in is the 54th street site.
- The cemetery was established in 1733, and the final burial in the cemetery was in 1867. The Moores used to have a farm nearby, which Samuel Moore bought in 1684. The property had a farmhouse that stood from 1705-1901.
- It’s the Moore family cemetery, but it’s called the Moore-Jackson Cemetery because a man named John Jackson married into the family. It sounds like he owned a lot of land so it really increased the family’s land holdings. Jackson wasn’t actually buried in Moore-Jackson cemetery, however: he’s buried in Elmhurst, Queens, in the churchyard of St. James Episcopal Church.
There’s a great Forgotten New York article from 2008 about the cemetery; I remember reading it when I first discovered this cemetery back in 2012. I wanted to read a bit from that:
- “Moore-Jackson Cemetery’s condition has waxed and waned over the centuries. By the 1910s, Nathaniel Moore’s dictum that it not be sold was holding firm, but the burial ground had become a weed-filled dump.
- The Queens Topographical Bureau surveyed the cemetery in 1919 and was able to locate 42 identifiable monuments, which were inscribed on a survey map that you can find reproduced in Woodside: A Historical Perspective by Catherine Gregory (Woodside on the Move, 1994). When construction of the houses you see above began in 1924 the cemetery was used as a rubbish dump. The NYC Department of Health ordered it cleaned of weeds and litter, and by then it was so overgrown that workers were amazed to discover headstones within. The chain link fence was erected in 1956, but the cemetery continued to be plagued by neglect at times. By the 1990s a more concerted effort was made and the cemetery’s condition has stabilized.”
There are definitely a number of recognizable names buried in this cemetery, which you may remember from previous episodes, such as members of the Rapelye family, and the Hallett family (of Hallett’s cove and Hallett’s point fame.) There are also Blackwells and Berrians buried there. Also, after Nathaniel Moore, Jr, died in 1827, his son in law, Robert Blackwell, purchased the farm.
I wanted to read one inscription that I liked, from a brown stone that was listed as “poor” and “rotted” in a 1919 survey of the cemetery:
- —YTON,—this life—1803;—4 months, 20 days.
- Behold and see as you pass by
- As you are now so once was I
- As I am now so you must be
- Prepare for death and follow me.
There’s a great NYT article from September 17, 2000, when Sheehan, the man who owns Lawrence Cemetery, which I talked about a few weeks ago, has some choice words to say about the Moore-Jackson Cemetery. So to read a bit from that:
- “The Queens borough historian Stanley Cogan has a special interest in preserving family cemeteries, but he said he realized that obtaining financing for graveyard preservation was difficult. Several months ago, he got financing for a brief exploratory dig at the Jackson-Moore cemetery in Jackson Heights, which belonged to two wealthy families known for their loyalties to the English crown. When Mr. Sheehan heard about the dig, he was shocked. ”The Jackson-Moore cemetery is full of Tories,” he said. ”These people,” he added, gesturing to the tombstones in his graveyard, ”are American heroes.””
- In fact, the house I was talking about earlier, the one that was levelled and made into a playground, was actually used as the Long Island headquarters of British General William Howe. I also read that the British General Clinton had his headquarters there, and that from there, he planned the invasion of Manhattan.
- Also, Nathaniel Moore was accused of smuggling and stockpiling weapons that would be used against the Patriots.
- I read somewhere that the patriots in Newtown all fled .
- RE Maspeth (from a 1991 archaeological report prepared in order to build a sludge treatment plant in maspeth):
  - “During the Revolution considerable numbers of the people joined the loyalists, and the county was mostly in quiet possession of the enemy” (French 1860:545). “The village (of Maspeth] was of importance in the Revolutionary war; from the porch of the Old Queen’s Head tavern, which stood near the corner of Fifty-eight street and Maspeth Avenue, General Howe watched his troops embark triumphantly, after the Battle of Long Island, down Maspeth Creek for Manhattan” (WPA 1939: 579)
  - “In summer and in winter the soldiers [British] spent their idle moments at the local tavern called the Queens Head. The Queens Head Tavern was located at the Maspeth Town Dock, on the south East corner of Maspeth Avenue and 57th Avenue, which was then Old Flushing Avenue. The tavern was built by the Township of Newtown, about 1720, and was rented to various tavern keepers over the years. During the Revolution it was owned by captain Peter Berton, who sold’ it in 1783 at the end of the British occupation. It was owned privately thereafter and survived to become an Amoco Gas Station in the 19305 before it was finally demolished” (Stankowski 1977: 29)
What happened to the cemetery once the Moores abandoned it?
- To read from another Forgotten New York article, this one from 1999:
  - Over the years, the burial ground fell into neglect. By the 1920s it was no longer maintained and was being used as a garbage dump. In the Thirties, workers from a nearby greenhouse refurbished the cemetery, restoring fallen stones and installing a chain link fence. Later that decade, though, the plot again became neglected.
I’d read that it was a WPA project that cleaned up the cemetery some; WPA workers tidied up the lot, arranged the headstones, etc.
I wanted to read some of a NEW YORK SUN article about the cemetery’s discovery, from, JULY 28, 1931:
- “Down in an almost forgotten corner of Long Island City, overgrown with brush and tangled with ivy, William J. Reynolds of 31-18 Forty-second Street, recently uncovered a long-neglected family cemetery. The plot, which is hidden behind a greenhouse on the northwest corner of Fifty-fourth Street and Thirty-second Avenue, has lately become the receiving place for miscellaneous bits of rubbish, ranging all the way from broken flower pots to old automobile tires.
- In all there may have been twenty stones in the little graveyard when the last member of the family was laid to rest but the years have left only have a dozen standing while a few others are half buried in the debris with their inscriptions hopelessly undecipherable.
- The two earliest headstones, which were set in place a number of years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence see to tell a tragic story. They are two small, rough-hewn granite stones, not more than a foot high, one bearing the inscription, “A. M. Dy’d th, 23rd Nov’r, 1769” and the other, “M.W. Dy’d—1770.” Obviously the pair were children. The fact that the final initials of the names were different, and that the stones were placed side by side bespeaks romance. Unfortunately, one of the graves has recently been attacked by a ghoul.
- . . .
- A brown marker of more artistic workmanship than that of the Moores announces the resting place of Mary, the Wife of Abraham Berrian who departed this life the 13th of February, 1788. Below Mary begins to relate her woes. “Whereas I was blind and deaf…” Someone has broken off the bottom of the stone.
- . . . One peculiar thing about the cemetery is that while it was a fixed custom in Colonial days to make all graves face toward the east, every grave in this plot faces the west. It is generally believed that the custom came from the Bible verse in Matthew xxiv 27 “For as the lightning cometh out of the east and shineth even to the west…so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be.”
- All efforts to identify the Moore, Berrian, and Rapelye families have only gone to show that they came of gentleman farmer stock and were pioneers in the settlement of Long Island. It probably may be safely assumed that they were related in some way to Dr. John Berrian Riker, personal friend of George Washington and surgeon on his staff, who is buried less than two miles away in the Riker family plot on the corner of Steinway Avenue and North Beach. “
I gotta read from another article, which I found hilarious, which was printed in the LONG ISLAND DAILY PRESS, FRIDAY, APRIL 10, 1936. One note: Boulevard Gardens is a really nice condo complex right near the cemetery. So to read from the article:
- ““Oh yes,” say the people who live in Boulevard Gardens, the swell new Federal Housing apartments at 30th Avenue and 54th Street, Woodside. “There’s the funniest little old cemetery down the street from us. Why some of the stones are hundreds, actually HUNDREDS of years old! There’s one from 1769. Can you imagine that?”
- That and then some!
- The funny little cemetery is the Moore family cemetery and the first burial was probably made there before 1700!
- It doesn’t look the way it used to look, and the 20 neat gravestones in their neat little rows certain do NOT mark the graves of the early settlers whose names they bear, but the Moore Cemetery has been luckier than most of the small family burying grounds in Queens.
  The plot was neglected for many years. The stones were snapped off. Many of them lay on their faces in the mud among the few straggly pine trees that remained to guard them. But recently, at the suggestion of the Queens Topographical Bureau, the cemetery ground has been regraded so that it is now at street level instead of several feet below it, and the stones have been repaired and set up again.
  The fact that they aren’t where they used to be shouldn’t make any difference. There’s nothing left of a body after a couple of hundred years.
  The cemetery looks bare and ugly now because the work has just been finished but grass will be planted this summer and sooner or later there will be a fence. (We hope).
  It should be saved, not only for itself but because it is the only tangible thing left in its locality to remind the world that this was one of the most important places on Long Island during the Revolution.
  The dry land around the Moore Cemetery narrowed down a few yards away (near the car barns on Northern Boulevard) to a tongue of land called the Narrow Passage.
  On either side of the Narrow Passage were almost impassable swamps and the road across it was the only north shore route between the East River and the settlements at Newtown and Jamaica. Jamaica Avenue, of course, was the other important road connecting the Queens villages with the East River.
  The Narrow Passage was well guarded by the British and the Moore homestead, which stood a stone’s throw from the cemetery, became the headquarters of Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Clinton after the Battle of Long Island.
  The old stone house was torn down some time between 1887 and the present time.
  The last time it was mentioned in local newspapers was when William O’Gorman, columnist for the Newtown Register, paid it a visit in the summer of 1887. He said: “The old house bears the pressure of the years with difficulty.”
  The farmhouse was built in 1681 by Samuel Moore, son of the Rev. John Moore, first minister of Newtown and found of the famous Long Island Moore family. It had “solid sashed” windows, double doors, fine chimney piecs, and fireplaces,” but it was already falling to pieces 49 years ago.”
At one point, the city tired to illegally seize the cemetery at the urging of a developer who wanted to build something on the lot. To read from a New York Daily News article from July 12, 1956:
- “There were red faces in high places yesterday as city officials tried to explain how Pa Knick happened to take over Woodside’s historic Moore-Jackson Cemetery in a delinquent tax action on July 16, 1954. Queens records clearly show the old private burial ground has been tax exempt for more than 200 years.
- Children now play among the weed-grown and debris-littered graves of at least 42 members of prominent early Long Island families buried in pre-Revolutionary through Civil War days.
- Once lonely farmland carved from the wilderness, the cemetery now is highly desirable real estate in a wel-built-up area of homes and apartments.
- . . . “You can be assured workers from Queens Borough Hall will visit the property immediately and clean it up,” he tersely stated in ending the interview.
- Those city workers will have quite a job removing rusty cans, broken bottles and other junk, and clearing up the overgrown weeds.
- Through the years, most of the headstones have been destroyed or stolen by vandals and eroded by weather. Only 16 broken, badly defaced markers, some mere weather-beaten fragments of fieldstone, marble or brownstone, still stand.
- Sadly enough, even these are not above the graves they once marked. that’s because of “tidying up” done by WPA workmen in the mid-30s, according to two 30-year residents of the area.
- Both recall the workers carefully gathered headstones knocked down or broken by storms and ghouls, and neatly arranged them upright in a section about 40 by 50 feet in the cemetery’s southeast corner, adjoining 54th Street. This is about 132 feed north of the intersection of 54th Street and 32nd Avenue.
- . . . Several concrete posts then erected around this small section now bear traces of only a few rusty links to show they once were joined by a heavy iron chain.
- As a result, neighborhood residents gradually have come to regard the tiny corner area as the cemetery. Only a very few remember there are graves in all parts of the cemetery, since none now are marked. “
“City-Owned Graveyards Get Brushoff, Not Brush” PUBLISHED BY NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, SEPTEMBER 7, 1956
- “Pa Knickerbocker is stuck with two historic but neglected Queens cemeteries he doesn’t know whether it is the job of Sanitation or Park Department workers or perhaps highway maintenance men to clean these city-owned burying grounds. S, despite the city’s recent drive to have property owners clear rubbish and weeds from privately-owned vacant lots, the old tax-free private burial grounds seized by the city in delinquent tax actions in 1954 are eyesores today. . . .
- Last February, when The News called the weed-grown, littered condition of Moore-Jackson Cemetery to the attention of Benjamin Cymrot, executive director of the Board of Estimates’s Bureau of Real Estate, he ordered it cleaned up by Queens Borough workers. They mowed, rakes and hauled away junk until the cemetery looked as spic and span as the public parking lot opened right next to it last fall.
- But rumblings in Queens then indicated Cymrot might lack authority continually to assign borough workmen to care for Moore-Jackson Cemetery.
- Today children play among high weeds hiding 16 broken, badly defaced markers, some only pathetic weather-beaten fragments of brownstone, marble or fieldstone. Standing in the southeast corner of the old graveyard, these are all vandals and weather erosion have left of 42 headstones which in 1919 marked graves in all parts of the rectangular 100×200 ft. cemetery. “
In the 1950s, a chain link fence was put up around the cemetery to keep vandals out; I think that’s the fence that’s still there today.
Who Owns the Moore Cemetery? PUBLISHED BY LONG ISLAND DAILY PRESS, JUNE 15, 1966
- “Will the real owner of the Moore Cemetery in Woodside please stand up?
- So far, no one is standing, not even the City of New York. The last time the city put in a claim to the history family plot was in 1954 when it took over the cemetery because of non-payment of taxes.
- The only trouble is that taxes are not necessary on cemetery land.
- The search for the owners of the plot, covered by dense weeds and litter on 54th Street between 31st and 32nd Avenues, was begun after Boy Scout Troop 32 in Woodside volunteered to clear th grounds of the weeds and rubbish.
- “Look at that,” declared Troop Chairman Frank Mathieu, pointing to the land. “That should be cleared up and we would like to do it. But we first want to obtain permission and we don’t know to whom to turn.”
- A check of the files revealed the Department of Real Estate had taken over the property after it had illegally reverted back to the city for failure to pay the taxes.
- “But we don’t own it any more,” said a spokesman for the department. “Actually the city never took title to the property.”
- “Who owns it now?” he was asked. “Did it revert back to the Moore family that settled on Long Island in 1652?”
- “It’s possible,” he said, “but we really don’t know for certain.”
- The corporation counsel’s office, we were told, “has all the records.”
- “I’m not a walking encyclopedia,” remarked a spokesman for the corporation counsel’s office.
- “It would be a ticklish and painstaking job to track down the owners of the land,” he said. “It might even be impossible to come to a conclusion.”
- He said it is possible the Moore descendants now have a legal right to the land.
- The spokesman also declared that the Boy Scouts would be taking a risk if they choose to clean up the plot without permission.
- “They could be sued for trespassing,” he said. “They shouldn’t take that chance.”
- A spokesman for the State Division of Cemeteries said that someone has title to the plot.
- “But that doesn’t mean they’re identifiable,” he said. “It could be difficult tracking them down.”
- However, he did say that the Boy Scouts should not hesitate to clean up the grounds if they wish.
- “The risk would be minimal,” he said. Anyone wanting to sue them would have to prove that they are causing damage to the grounds,” he said. “And the only one who can chase them is the one who has a right to the cemetery.””
Nobody to Claim Woodside Burial Ground PUBLISHED BY LONG ISLAND PRESS, May 12, 1974
- “How do you turn a $150,000 piece of vacant property into a money-making proposition.
- If it’s a private cemetery, the answer is apparently you can’t.
- That is one reason why no one can find the owners of the Moore-Jackson Cemetery in Woodside. Not even the City of New York will lay claim to the land.
- . . . Since then, several searches and an extensive investigation by a history buff have failed to determine the record title or ownership of the property.
- According to Irving Saltzman, assistant corporation counsel in charge of the title bureau, the Moore-Jackson Cemetery has in fact been abandoned as a cemetery.
- The answer to what happens next to the land, however, has become lost in a morass of legal complexities.
- . . . For years the land was covered by brush and weeds, but recently a third-grade class from nearby P.S. 151 cleaned up the area. Last week the Department of Sanitation carted away 80 bags of rubbish.
- According to Saltzman, if a descendant of any of the persons buried there could be found and that descendant laid claim to the property, even if it was held that the descendant owned the property, it would still be for burial purposes only.
- “It is clearly established in this state that the ownership of a burial plot carries with it merely the right of interment and certain other collateral rights arising therefrom,” he explained in a memorandum.
- “Since the owner of a burial plot himself only takes an easement or license, and has no ownership right in the land on which the plot is located, it can hardly be argued that a descendant of the owner of such a plot can claim greater rights.”
- . . . Since it has been established that Nathaniel Moore had been found guilty of treason during the American Revolution and his land abandoned, the Moore-Jackson Cemetery, as part of that land, would revert back to the state, Saltzman concluded.
- “Should the state claim title to the land,” however, he added, “it would have the responsibility of maintaining the cemetery as such.”
- So far, neither the city nor the state has show interest in the tiny strip of land. Only a history buff and a group of third-graders, on the even of their country’s bicentennial, seem to care. “
Amateur digs out lost title of cemetery PUBLISHED BY LONG ISLAND PRESS, May 23, 1976
- “After almost four years of research, leg work and detecting, an amateur historian has concluded that the Penn Central Railroad most likely owns an overgrown but historic cemetery.
- Eugene Cafaro, 39, of Corona, has conducted a title search for four years to find the owners of the Moore-Jackson Cemetery in Woodside because he wants to have the cemetery—which dates back to at least 1733 and may go as far back as the late 1600s—declared a landmark. And according to a spokesman for the New York City Landmarks Preservation Committee, that can only be done when there is a clear title.
- The path to the title ownership of the cemetery was a convoluted one and Cafaro said that, even now, title is not fully cleared except in a negative sense. however, that may be enough.
- Cafaro followed several false leads before finding what now appears to be the right path. At first, he thought the property had been taken over by the state, since Nathaniel Moore, the first man who owned the property, was a notorious Tory during the Revolutionary War and much of the property held by Loyalists was confiscated following the British defeat.
- But that lead petered out and Cafaro went to work trying to find descendants of either the Moore or Jackson families in hopes that they might have papers showing title. That also produced no results.
- So Cafaro started the laborious process of searching through all the sales of property of the Moore farm, and found it was bought by Charles A. Kneeland. Kneeland, in turn, conveyed it to John A. Mecke in April, 1863.
- After Mecke’s death, his widow, Julia, sold the property to Henry G. Schmidt and Co. on Sept. 18, 1867. The land deed included a reference to “the burying grounds.”
- In 1871, the land was then conveyed to the Bricklayers Cooperative. But then came a huge gap in time.
- Cafaro began tracing the records, and finally found a reference to the original deed in the file of Stuyvesant Real Estate, which conveyed part of the property, but not the cemetery grounds, to the N.Y. Connecting Railroad in 1947.
- A search by the Corona man for records of the rest of the property proved futile, with no record existing that Stuyvesant ever divested themselves of the rest of the land.
- In 1955, Stuyvesant merged with a company called Manor Real Estate. And Manor Real Estate is one of the prime real estate holding companies of Penn Central.
- A spokesman for Penn Central said the giant railroad firm would have to conduct its own title search to determine whether it did, in fact, own title to the cemetery. The spokesman said that could take two months of more.
- The property is tax-exempt, but the 140-by-100-foot strip of land is listed as assessed as $40,000, and is worth at least $150,000 as a piece of real estate if used for development.
- But if Cafaro has his way, the cemetery between 51st and 54th Streets will remain a cemetery. He said that, unless otherwise prevented, the owners of the property could get permission to exhume the remains and then do whatever they wished with the land.
- “I want to see the cemetery declared a landmark,” Cafaro said. And he is prepared to take the Landmarks Preservation Commission to court, if necessary, to get the land so designated.
- If the cemetery is declared a landmark, by law it must be maintained in the state in which it currently exists. Responsibility for maintaining the property falls on the title-holder and if Penn Central does in fact own title it would have to take care of the cemetery.
- The only problem the 39-year-old amateur historian and title-searcher has now is getting the Landmarks Preservation to accept the cemetery for designation.
- Beverly Moss Spatt, chairman of the commission, said it would be happy to consider the cemetery, provided there was a clear title and it is in good condition. But the cemetery—the object of only occasional cleanups by local schools and volunteer groups—is now in a state of disrepair.
- “In its present state, we would be unable to consider it for designation,” Mrs. Spatt said. . . .
- Cafaro, asked why he has so singlehandedly pursued his search for the missing title holder to the cemetery for four years of his life, said, “I guess I owe the cemetery.”
- In fact, he probably does. A high school dropout at age 15, his interest in the cemetery got him interested in history, and in further education. After becoming involved in the cemetery title search, he received a high school equivalency certificate and went on to LaGuardia Community College to study for a degree in history.
- “It’s something I have to do,” he said. “
In 1997, the cemetery became a New York City landmark.
According to the 1997 landmark report, someone had an herb garden near the center of the cemetery in the late 90s and found tombstone fragments while creating that garden. So least in the 1990s, there were paving stones, a bird bath, and a little garden in the cemetery, but by the time I moved to the neighborhood in 2012 that seemed to be gone, or so overgrown that you couldn’t actually see it.
Today, the cemetery is owned by the Queens Historical Society, and it’s maintained by a grassroots group that’s turned it into a beautiful community garden in 2017-2018. I think the idea is that the growing areas are where the farmhouse once was on the property.

Sources consulted RE: the Moore-Jackson Cemetery

Books

“All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker
The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries by Carolee Inskeep
Munsell’s History of Queens County, New York, 1882
The annals of Newtown, in Queens County, New York
by James Riker, 1852
History of Long Island City, New York. by J. SKelsey; Long Island Star Publishing Company, 1896
Queens Borough, New York City, 1910-1920 by Chamber of Commerce, 1920

Websites

https://www.moorejacksonnyc.org/
Landmark report:
http://www.neighborhoodpreservationcenter.org/db/bb_files/1997Moore-JacksonCemetry.pdf
Archaeological report about Maspeth from 1991: http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/arch_reports/584.pdf
https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/moore-homestead-playground
https://forgotten-ny.com/2017/08/maspeth-1852/
https://archive.org/details/queensboroughnew00chamrich/page/n3/mode/2up
https://www.shinnecocknation.com/shinnecock/
The archeological history of New York by Parker, Arthur Caswell, 1881-1955: https://archive.org/details/archeologicalhis02parkrich/page/476/mode/2up
General archaeological report page: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/lpc/about/archaeology.page
“A Seventeenth-Century Fireplace at Maspeth, Long Island” Solecki: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24531641?seq=1
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/17/nyregion/neighborhood-report-astoria-an-aging-custodian-worries-about-a-historic-cemetery.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Clarke_Moore
https://boulevardgardens.nyc/history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Moore_(bishop)
https://forgotten-ny.com/2008/12/moore-jackson-cemetery/
https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/moore-homestead-playground/history
https://forgotten-ny.com/2013/03/state-historical-markers-in-new-york-city-part-2/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2020/09/hellgate-ferry-road-part-2/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2018/05/astoria-sweep/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2018/02/woodside-1852/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2018/07/maspeth-elmhurst-1852/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2013/06/the-old-shell-road-elmhurst/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2013/03/state-historical-markers-in-new-york-city-part-2/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2010/08/woodside-tour/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2009/01/broadway-in-queens-part-2/
https://forgotten-ny.com/1999/01/hidden-cemeteries-dead-reckoning/
https://sites.google.com/view/moorejacksoncemetery/home?authuser=0
https://queenshistoricalsociety.org/moore-jackson-cemetery/
https://sites.google.com/view/moorejacksoncemetery/home?authuser=0
https://sites.google.com/view/moorejacksoncemetery/cemetery/historical-timeline?authuser=0
https://sites.google.com/view/moorejacksoncemetery/cemetery/documentspublications?authuser=0#h.p_zkfUAuCmWSYE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore-Jackson_Cemetery
https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20171011/woodside/moore-jackson-cemetery-cleanup-queens-historical-society/
https://www.scoutingny.com/the-cemetery-on-the-old-farm-in-queens/
https://history.pmlib.org/longislandhistory/longislandindianhistory
https://www.newsday.com/long-island/long-island-our-story-1.27833558

Don’t miss past episodes:

Weird Medieval Creatures

A look at some weird medieval creatures from legend and lore. Plus some stories about some recent cemetery visits in Queens, New York, including Houdini’s grave.

Highlights include:
• An ancient, impenetrable European forest
• A magical glowing bird
• A dragon with a rooster’s head

Episode Script for Weird Medieval Creatures

This is a just-for-fun kind of episode–to be honest, things have been really hectic at work and I’ve been too exhausted to do one of my real deep-dive episodes, even though I’ve been doing research for more cemetery episodes and also some Hellgate stuff as I have time.
Though in theory I took a whole semester of college just learning about medieval history, theology, art, and literature, like I’ve said before, I’m not an expert in anything, and I definitely am not very well positioned to give a very intelligent historical context for these creatures, though I’ll give whatever context I can.
- But to be honest, I literally just love looking at old medieval bestiaries and find the animals funny. I haven’t talked a ton about medieval stuff on the podcast, but if you follow the podcast on instagram, I repost a decent number of medieval accounts on my stories, and have mentioned my love of the Met Cloisters, which is maybe my favorite museum. It’s in upper Manhattan, in the middle of a really cool park with a view of the NJ palisades and the Hudson River. It’s basically a big medieval cloister full of tapestries, stained glass, and other medieval art and artifacts, but it’s really immersive. It’s a cloister that was brought over from Europe, and they have medieval-type plants growing everywhere, including a garden of magical plants. Also, pre-pandemic, they had an annual renaissance fair that I went to once, which was really cool, it had fencing and stuff. I have my problems with the Met museum as an institution, but I can’t stop loving the cloisters, it’s just so cool.
- So while my knowledge of actual medieval history is iffy, I have a lot of enthusiasm for the aesthetic, and a lot of the time I zone out and unwind by going through scans of medieval manuscripts on the internet and trying to find weird medieval creatures. We all have our hobbies, I guess.
So last weekend I was really exhausted and relaxing by going through some cool medieval manuscripts and ended up googling some animals and got wrapped up in reading about different medieval beasts. I want to go into them here.
- But before I get into that, sidenote, if you’re into medieval stuff at all, google Black books of hours–there some medieval manuscripts where they dyed the vellum black before illuminating them. There aren’t many of them–I think there are only 7–but they look so cool. Unfortunately, I guess the ink they used to dye them was corrosive so the surviving manuscripts are in bad shape, but still, they’re wild looking/
The main source I used here is bestiary.ca, which lists a bunch of creatures and has information about each one.
- I went through their list, which has a one-line description of each critter, which is very funny to me because some of them are real animals and the description is hilarious, at least to me. So I’m gonna go through some of the animals that I found most interesting or funny.
- And I guess a final sidenote before I get into these creatures: some of the descriptions of what these animals can do are very metal. I’ve had several people mention that sometimes they listen to this with their kids around, and this is generally a lighthearted episode, but if anyone’s listening with their kids, just make sure they aren’t scared of deadly animals.
Seps
- Description: The poison of the seps consumes both body and bones
- In Bestiary.ca, the illustration of a Seps looks like a snake with a cat, or maybe a mean looking bunny head.
- This is a legendary, imaginary creature
- Basically, this was a little snake with a big power: it was very deadly when it bit you, and it’s poison literally dissolve your body and bones
- There’s this amazing description from a Roman poet named Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, or Lucan, which I wanted to read:
  - Clinging to his skin / A Seps with curving tooth, of little size, / He seized and tore away, and to the sands / Pierced with his javelin. Small the serpent’s bulk; / None deals a death more horrible in form. / For swift the flesh dissolving round the wound / Bared the pale bone; swam all his limbs in blood; / Wasted the tissue of his calves and knees: / And all the muscles of his thighs were thawed / In black distilment, and file membrane sheath / Parted, that bound his vitals, which abroad / Flowed upon earth: yet seemed it not that all / His frame was loosed, for by the venomous drop / Were all the bands that held his muscles drawn / Down to a juice; the framework of his chest / Was bare, its cavity, and all the parts / Hid by the organs of life, that make the man
Next up is another imaginary serpent, the Scitalis
- Descrip: A serpent with such a marvelous appearance that it stuns the viewer
- That reminds me a bit of a basilisk, though for the scitalis, it’s these beautiful and strange markings that run along their back and transfix people. It was supposed to be very slow moving, so it relied on people being stupified so it could get them.
- Also it apparently was a very warm-blooded snake, so even during the winter it had to shed its skin.
Wether
- The description of this made me crack up: The wether is named from the worms in its head
- They were supposed to stronger-than-average rams that head butted each other because they were agitating by the worms in their head, because I guess they were itchy
- The accompanying drawing just looked like a normal ram to me.
Sea-pig
- Just the name of this made me laugh
- The description: Sea-pigs dig up the ground under water
- The drawing is like a fish with a pig snout, and the idea was that I guess like regular pigs, they would use their snout to dig around in the sand to find food
- There is a real animal called a sea pig that’s a deep-water sea cucumber that digs around in the sediment and eats stuff that it finds there, but I doubt the medieval people knew of it, since the real sea big is found around 1,200-5,000 meters under water
Cerastes
- Description: An exceptionally flexible serpent with horns
- These were supposed to be so flexible that they had no spine, yet they had either four horns, or two horns like a ram’s. They would bury themselves in sand, and when animals would gather around the exposed horns, it would strike and kill them instantly.
- They came from Greek lore, but even in the Renaissance it seems like people were still talking about them. Here’s how Leonardo da Vinci described their behavior:
  - This has four movable little horns; so, when it wants to feed, it hides under leaves all of its body except these little horns which, as they move, seem to the birds to be some small worms at play. Then they immediately swoop down to pick them and the Cerastes suddenly twines round them and encircles and devours them.
- In the drawing that accompanies that one, it has little front feet
- The Cerastes actually comes from Greek lore that was said to reside in the desert.
- I guess it was supposed to be small–the largest animals they could attack were mice and small lizards
- People suppose that this mythical creature was based on the real horned viper, which ended up with the scientific name cerastes cerastes because of the legendary creature
Echeneis
- The description of this one is: This fish clings to ships and holds them back
- The idea was that this was a 6-inch-long fish in the Indian sea that could suction onto the bottom of a boat and delay its voyage. Even storm winds couldn’t move a boat when this fish decided to anchor it in place.
- Pliny the elder, who always has funny things to say about animals, plants, and magic, talked about some of the fish’s metaphysical properties:
  - “It is also the source of a love-charm and a spell to slow litigation in courts, and can be used to stop fluxes of the womb in pregnant women and to hold back the birth until the proper time. This fish is not eaten. Some say this fish has feet; Aristotle says it does not, but that its limbs resemble wings.”
- This seems obviously inspired by the real-life fish the remora, and from what I can gather, it seems like Pliny the Elder uses remora and echeneis interchangeably. Pliny the Elder told stories about how the remora was responsible for Mark Antony’s death during battle, as well as Caligula’s.
- The real fish, the remora, in case you don’t know, has a suction cup sort of thing on it, and it usually attaches to a shark, sea turtle, whale, or ray. They’re supposed to have a symbiotic relationship, where they get rid of their host’s dead skin and ectoparasites, and they’re also protected by being attached to the larger animals.
Hercinia
- Description: A bird with brightly glowing feathers
- My favorite kind of medieval critters: a bird
- These were supposed to be found in the forests of Germany. Specifically, they lived in an ancient German forest called the Hercynian Forest (hence the name hercinia). It was a huge forest that spread across Western Central Europe, though it’s kinda unclear exactly how far it stretched. Basically, it was the northern edge of the part of Europe that writers in antiquity were aware of.
  - The forest was basically impenetrable. For example, during Julius Caesar’s time, the forest blocked the Roman Legions from going further into Germania. Caesar wrote in his book De Bello Gallico, he said that it would take more than 60 days to walk its width.
  - I guess he was fascinated by the forest, including old stories of unicorns. He also wrote about elk with no joints so to sleep they would lean against the ancient trees
  - Pliny the Elder was also fascinated by the ancient, deep forest, and its legends, and he talked about the glowing birds with feathers that “shine like fires at night”
  - The forest also contained real, though now extinct animals, the aurochs, which were huge cattle that lived in Asia, Europe, and North Africa, but which died out n the 1600s, when the last of them died in the woods
- While this deep, dark forest doesn’t exist anymore, there are some remnants of it, like the Black Forest and some other woods in the area.
- The idea was that they were so bright that even on the darkest night, their glowing wings would light the way ahead.
- Some manuscripts adorned depictions of them with gold or silver leaf, since they were shiny.
- The 7th century writer Isidore of Seville wrote a really poetic description:
  - “Their feathers sparkle so much in the shade that, however dark the night is with thick shadows, these feathers, when placed on the ground, give off light that helps to mark the way, and the sign of the glittering feathers makes clear the direction of the path.”
- I found a poem by the 18th/19th century Irish poet Thomas Moore that had some cool glowing bird imagery. This is a bit from his poem A Dream of Antiquity:
  - “And now the fairy pathway seemed
  - To lead us through enchanted ground,
  - Where all that bard has ever dreamed
  - Of love or luxury bloomed around.
  - Oh! ’twas a bright, bewildering scene–
  - Along the alley’s deepening green
  - Soft lamps, that hung like burning flowers,
  - And scented and illumed the bowers,
  - Seemed, as to him, who darkling roves,
  - Amid the lone Hercynian groves,
  - Appear those countless birds of light,
  - That sparkle in the leaves at night,
  - And from their wings diffuse a ray
  - Along the traveller’s weary way.”
Apparently there’s a question of whether this creature, or a version of it, ever existed. Some birds have iridescent features that reflect moonlight, and it’s possible that people were seeing birds with bioluminescent fungi or bacteria
Ichneumon
- Description: Another enemy of the dragon
- This was a creature that, when it saw a dragon, would burrow into the mud, cover its nostrils with its tail, and then attack and kill the unaware dragon. Some people also claimed that it could also kill asps and crocodiles in the same way
- It sounds like this was maybe a mongoose, or something rodent-like
- One of the ichneumon’s special powers was that it could look at a medieval creature called the cockatrice without turning to stone
So let’s talk about the Cockatrice, also known as the basilisk
- The description of a basilisk is: Its odor, voice and even look can kill
- On the bestiary.ca page, the basilisk, or cockatrice, is shown a two-legged dragon with a rooster’s head. Though it can also be just a crested snake–it doesn’t necessarily need to have a rooster’s head, or be a rooster with a snake tail.
- Pliny the Elder said that the basilisk was a foot long (though some people said 6 inches), and it had white markings on its head that looked like crown
- The smell of the basilisk could kill snakes. It breathed fire out of its mouth, or beak, I guess, which could kill birds. Some accounts said that no matter how far away a bird was, if a basilisk looked at a bird, it would die.
- And a human could be killed if the basilisk looked at them, or maybe if the human sees the basilisk’s eyes, depending on who’s telling the story. Pliny the Elder tells a story about the basilisk’s poison being so strong that a man speared a basilisk and then was killed when the poison travelled up his spear and got to him. The poison also killed his horse.
- It can also kill just by hissing. So a very deadly creature.
- The basilisk could only be killed by a weasel. You get the weasel, throw it into a basilisk’s den, and then basilisk is killed by the smell of the weasel at the same time as the weasel dies from the smell of the basilisk.
- If you’ve ever been to Belvedere castle in Central park, there’s supposedly a cockatrice in the window over the doorway to that, though it looks more like a two-legged dragon, like a wyvern
- some stories say that the basilsik was created by a rooster laying an egg and a toad incubating it, and it seems like they may have been seen as the same thing
- There was also an ancient Egyptian story about how the eggs of the ibis should be destroyed because otherwise the poison of the snakes that ibis ate would create a hybrid snake-bird
- Apparently you could prevent a cockatrice from hatching by tossing a cock’s egg over the house so it lands on the other side of the house without the egg hitting the house
- And I looked it up, a cock egg is basically like an egg with no yolk, which younger chickens sometimes lay before they can lay normal eggs, but back in the day people assume that cocks were laying the egg
- The cockatrice could kill people by looking at them, touching them, or breathing on them
- Though the living basilisk is extremely deadly, the basilisk’s ashes were apparently very useful in alchemy, when transforming metals

Sources consulted RE: Weird Medieval Creatures

Websites

https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/fantastic-beasts-of-the-middle-ages/xQKCn9wmjCVVJg
https://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/ms24/f57r
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caladrius
http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast270.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_books_of_hours
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hours,_Morgan_MS_493
http://bestiary.ca/prisources/psdetail964.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seps_(legendary_creature)
http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast271.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scitalis
http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast552.htm
http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast417.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotoplanes
http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast532.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerasteshttp://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast422.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echeneis
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D9%3Achapter%3D41
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remora#Mythologyhttp://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast539.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercinia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercynian_Forest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs
http://bestiary.ca/articles/anne_walshe/index.html
https://internetpoem.com/thomas-moore/a-dream-of-antiquity-poem/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Moore
http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast541.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichneumon_(medieval_zoology)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yolkless_egg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockatrice
http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast265.htm

Don’t miss past episodes:

The Caladrius (Weird Medieval Creatures)

A look at the caladrius, a fancy legendary bird that could supposedly diagnose and heal illnesses. Plus weird info about medieval bestiaries, and more.

Highlights include:
• A weird supposed cure for blindness
• A visit to the Cloisters
• A video game that makes you feel like a wizard
• A bit of unicorn lore

Other stuff I mentioned:
The Last Unicorn youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M57VN_b9FRM
Atlas of the Mysterious in North America by Rosemary Ellen Guiley: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1460616.Atlas_of_the_Mysterious_in_North_America
Waltz of the Wizard: https://www.aldin.io/waltzofthewizard/

Episode Script

Cloisters
- Unicorn tapestries
- Narwhal/unicorn horn cup
The Last Unicorn: Death and the Legacy of Fantasy youtube video by chromalore
- Unicorn lore
- The movie
- 80s fantasy movies in general
- And in speaking of unicorn lore, I read a fun little description of a unicorn in a bestiary translation I read while preparing this episode; this is from an 1887 lecture I’ll talk more about later:
  - “The unicorn is a beautiful animal, with the
  - body of a horse, the head of a stag, and the feet of an elephant, having on its forehead a straight sharp horn, four feet long. In the Psalms (Ps. cii, 10) it says, “My horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of an unicorn.” The unicorn is so fierce that the elephant hates it, but the claws on the feet of the unicorn are so sharp that it pierces the elephant’s body with them and kills it.
  - The horn of the unicorn is so powerful that the hunter dares not go near it, but the animal can be caught by stratagem in the [346] following manner. A pure virgin of great beauty is sent on alone in front of the hunters into the wood where the unicorn dwells, and as soon as it sees her immediately it runs towards her and kneels down and lays its head on her lap quite simply. Whilst the unicorn sleeps there the hunters seize it and hasten off with it to the royal palace.”
More about bestiaries:
- Lecture VI: The Medieval Bestiaries from Early Christian Symbolism in Great Britain and Ireland before the Thirteenth Century (The Rhind Lectures in Archaeology for 1885) by J. Romilly Allen, 1887:
- “It is not known who wrote the original bestiary, of which all subsequent versions are only variants. The earliest MS. copies are in Latin, and do not date back beyond the eighth century, and by far the greater proportion of the illustrated editions belong to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The bestiary differs fundamentally from all modern treatises on natural history, and is really more like a children’s picture-book of animals. The zoologist of the present day dissects all his specimens, and classifies them according to species, as revealed by minute investigations as to the structure of the body. The mediaeval naturalist was a theologian first, and a man of science after. His theories were founded partly on texts of Scripture, rightly or wrongly interpreted, partly on the writings of Pliny, and partly on the supposed derivations of the names, mixed up with all kinds of marvellous stories such as are found in the folk-lore of all nations . . .
- Traces are also shown of a belief in the arts of magic, as in the story of the Woodpecker, who knows of a herb that can unlock all things closed with iron or wood, and is able to unloose all things that are bound,—recalling the legend in the Speculum Sancte Marie Virginis, of the worm whose blood has power to break glass and allow the young ostrich to escape from the vessel in which it was imprisoned by Solomon.
- The history of the whale in the bestiary is related in the story of Sindbad the Sailor in the Arabian Nights, and also occurs in the legendary Life of St. Brendan. The narratives of the Syren, the Centaur, Argus the Cowherd, with his hundred eyes, in the bestiary are of purely classical origin, adapted subsequently to Christian purposes. So much for the sources whence the writers of the bestiary drew their inspiration, now as to the book itself. The number of beasts, including birds, fish, insects, and fabulous creatures, varies from 24 to 40 in the different versions, but they are in all cases treated in a similar fashion: first, there is a miniature of the animal, then a description of its appearance, habits, stories connected with it, and lastly, a moral, pointing out the spiritual significance and its application to the Christian life. It must be admitted that this eternal moralising becomes extremely tedious, and the writers of the bestiaries evidently found it so them-selves, as they are continually telling their readers to pay attention, and not to allow their thoughts to wander from the subject, and are never tired of insisting on the importance of the good to be derived from the concluding moral.
- . . . The merit of the different stories and their application varies greatly, some being extremely forcible, such as that of the whale, whose sudden plunge into the depths of the ocean is dramatic to a degree, and sends a thrill of horror through the mind. Some are very poetic and beautiful, such as the eagle flying up towards the sun; some are revolting and indecent; others far-fetched or absurd, as when one learns that the pretty little hedgehog, knocking down grapes off the vine and carrying them away on its spines, is the Devil robbing men of their souls.”
- The lecturer goes on to say that there are two reasons why bestiaries are what they are: 1) there are animals mentioned in the bible, and there was a need to comment more on those animals, and 2) people loved moralizing.
- Also, just for the record, I feel like half the animals in the bestiary represent Christ in some way. Like the unicorn, the phoenix, etc. A lot of creatures have myths about dying and coming back to life, or about being pure and getting killed, etc. And then the other half of animals represent the devil, like many of the deadly serpents I talked about last time.
The lecturer also talks about how bestiaries got so silly:
- “The bestiary contains many mistakes, due to mistranslation, the result of sheer ignorance, or confounding together words of similar sound; (2) confusing one animal with another from want of zoological knowledge; and to a wish to identify certain animals mentioned in the Bible with fabulous creatures of classical origin, such as centaurs, syrens, dragons, etc.”
In this 1887 lecture, I also found a bit more fun info about the basilisk or cockatrice, which I talked about last time:
- “The basilisk is hatched from the egg of a cock. When the cock has lived seven years an egg grows in its inside, and it suffers the greatest agony. It then scratches a hole with its feet in which to lay the egg. The toad is of such a nature that it can tell by the scent the poison which the cock carries in its inside. The toad watches the cock, so that it cannot enter its nest without the toad seeing it, and when the cock goes to lay its egg the toad follows to find [390] out whether the laying has taken place, because it is of such a nature that it takes the egg and hatches it. The animal which comes out of the egg has the head, neck, and breast of a cock, and the remainder of its body behind is like a serpent. As soon as this beast can it seeks out some secluded spot in an old cistern and hides itself so that no one can see it, for it is of such a nature that if a man sees it before it sees the man, then it will die, but if it sees the man first, then the man will die. Its poison proceeds from its eyes, and its gaze is so venomous that it kills birds who fly past it. This animal is king over all the other serpents, in the same way that the lion is king over all the other beasts. If it touches a tree it will lose its virtue and never bear fruit. If anyone wishes to kill the basilisk he must take a transparent crystal vase, and when the animal lifts its head its gaze is arrested by the crystal, and the venom thrown back, which causes its death.
- The basilisk signifies the Devil, that same Satan who deceived Adam and Eve in Paradise, and being expelled, was cast down into hell. Thus, for 4,000 years all who came from Adam were poisoned by him, and would fall into the pit with the basilisk, that is, into hell with the Devil. The son of a king then was grieved that the beast was so venomous, and that it would kill everybody, so he determined that it should live no longer or do harm. Therefore the king placed his son in a vessel of the purest crystal, that is to say, that the Son of God entered the body of Our Lady, the Virgin Mary. When the basilisk looked on the vessel which contained the Son of God, his poison was arrested, and he became powerless to harm. When the son of the king, Jesus Christ, was laid in the sepulchre, he entered into the pit and took hence His friends whom the basilisk had fascinated and killed with his poison, that is to say, that God despoiled hell of those who love Him.”
Caladrius, aka the charadrius
- I stumbled across this one when I was looking through the Aberdeen Bestiary, which as the name suggests, is a 12th century bestiary at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Finding the caladrius was actually what made me decide to do this little mini-series on medieval creatures.
- The bestiary has a illustration of a king in bed, sort of languidly shrinking away from a slinky, large white bird with a long neck.
- I don’t love the accompanying text in the bestiary, because it’s very religious and moralizing, which is normal for bestiaries, and also kinda anti-Semetic, but the drawing really struck me, and I looked up this weird creature, the caladrius.
- From THE CALADRIUS AND ITS LEGEND, SCULPTURED UPON THE TWELFTH-CENTURY DOORWAY OF ALNE CHURCH, YORKSHIRE By GEORGE C. DRUCE, F.S.A. Originally published in Archaeological Journal (Royal Archaeological Institute of London) Volume 69, 1912 :
  - Latin text of MS. 12. F xiii, of the early thirteenth century, in the British Museum
  - “The Caladrius or Caradrius, as the Natural Philosopher says, is all white like the swan, and has a long neck. The dung of its inside cures blindness (caliginem oculorum). This bird is found in the courts of kings. If anyone is ill, by means of this caladrius it can be found out if he will live or die. For if the man is destined to die, it turns its face away from him, and by this sign people know that he is going to die. If he is destined to live, it directs itself towards his face, and as though it would take all the illness of the man upon itself, it flies into the air towards the sun, burning up as it were his infirmity and dispersing it; and so the sick man is cured.”
  - thirteenth-century illustrated manuscript of the first version in the British Museum (Sloane 278):
    - “If (the sick man) is destined to get better and be cured, the caladrius addresses itself intently to him, and approaching, puts its beak upon the man’s mouth, and by its breathing draws out all the man’s sickness into itself, and flying into the air towards the sun, burns up his sickness, and disperses it, and the sick man is cured.”
Some versions of the lore seem to suggest that sometimes the caladrius gets sick and dies instead of the human dying.
Picardy prose bestiary (MS. 3516) of the thirteenth century in the Arsenal Library, Paris:
- “If a man should have his eyes running or rolling the caladrius has such a nature that it can cure the eyes by the divine virtue which it possesses; it is in its thigh, if one applies it; such virtue has the thigh of the caladrius.”
Philip de Thaun says:
- “The bird has a great bone in its thigh; if the man who is blind has the marrow of it, and will anoint his eyes, he will immediately recover (his sight).”
Here’s what Plutarch had to say about the bird, around 80 AD:
- “we know how often those who suffer from jaundice are healed by looking at the bird charadrius. This small animal seems to be endowed with such a nature and character, that it violently attracts to itself the disease, which slips out of the body of the sick man into its own, and draws off from his eyes as it were a stream of moisture. And this is the reason why the charadrius cannot endure to look at jaundiced persons nor help them at all, but turns itself away with closed eyes; not because it grudges the use of the remedy which is sought from it, as some consider, but because it might be wounded as by a blow.”
A 12th centuy author named Suidas said:
- “They say that this is a disease [jaundice] producing paleness, which arises from anger, so that it makes the eyes of those who are overpowered by it pale and sometimes black, like (the eyes) of kites, from which also it takes its name. They say too “that those who suffer from jaundice are easily cured by looking at a bird, the charadrius.” The charadrius is a bird of such nature that if those who are suffering from jaundice look at it, as report goes, they more easily get rid of that disease. For which reason also the sellers (of the bird) hide it, lest those who are suffering from jaundice should be cured for nothing.”
ANother MS says:
“Caladrius is the name of a bird, which we find without any doubt to be entirely white: it is shaped as a seagull; in the book of Deuteronomy it is [388] said that it must not be eaten; that very dear is the bird.11 And Physiologus says that the caladrius ought to be in the court of a king, and about one thing is learned.”
One unusual description of the caladrius says that it has “straight horns like a goat” though it doesn’t seem that many sources say that.
It turns out that the caladrius came from Roman mythology, and the idea was that it was this white bird that lived in the king’s palace. When someone was sick, the caladrius could absorb the illness and fly away, which would cure the sick person, and the caladrius would be fine too–some places suggested that the illness would be burned up by the sun as the caladrius flew up high.
Medieval bestiaries focused not as much on the idea of the caladrius taking away sickness; instead, they talked about how the caladrius could diagnose illness. When someone was sick, the caladrius would perch on the bed, and if the bird looked at the sick person, then they would live. But if they looked away, then the person would die.
- Oh and the caladrius was supposed to represent Christ, even thought it was also seen as an “unclean” bird
Some people say that the caladrius may have been inspired by a real bird, like a dove, thrush, heron, or plover. It seems that it was thought of as a sea bird, at least. Other places, it’s suggested that the caladrius maybe had curly feathers.
There was also a SNL sketch in the 70s called Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber that you can find on youtube, which features a caladrius.
Crow
- http://bestiary.ca/etexts/douglas1928/douglas%20-%20birds%20and%20beasts%20of%20the%20greek%20anthology.pdf
Lion
- I didn’t know this until reading it at the Cloisters on Friday, but apparently lions were connected with Jesus and the divine because they had three natures, one of which was that they were born dead and then came to life three days later, like Christ rising from the dead.
To read a bit more from the 1887 essay Lecture VI: The Medieval Bestiaries:
- “The third nature of the lion is, that when the lioness brings forth a cub it is dead,23 and in this state she guards it until upon the third day the father comes and brings it to life by breathing in its face.”

Sources consulted RE: the Caladrius

Websites

https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/fantastic-beasts-of-the-middle-ages/xQKCn9wmjCVVJg
https://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/ms24/f57r
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caladrius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberdeen_Bestiary
http://bestiary.ca/etexts/druce1912/druce%20-%20caladrius%20and%20its%20legend.pdf
http://bestiary.ca/etexts/
http://bestiary.ca/etexts/allen1887/allen%20-%20medieval%20bestiaries.pdf
http://bestiary.ca/etexts/collins1913/collins1913.htm
http://bestiary.ca/etexts/collins1913/symbolism%20of%20animals%20and%20birds%20-%20collins.pdf
http://bestiary.ca/etexts/collins1940/collins%20-%20some%2012th%20century%20animal%20carvings%20and%20their%20sources%20in%20the%20bestiaries.pdf
http://bestiary.ca/etexts/douglas1928/douglas%20-%20birds%20and%20beasts%20of%20the%20greek%20anthology.pdfhttp://bestiary.ca/etexts/druce1912/druce1912.htm
http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast143.htm
http://bestiary.ca/etexts/druce1912/druce%20-%20caladrius%20and%20its%20legend.pdf
http://bestiary.ca/etexts/evans1896/evans1896.htm
http://bestiary.ca/etexts/james1931/james%20-%20bestiary%20-%20eton.pdf
http://bestiary.ca/etexts/james1932/james1932.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charadrius
http://bestiary.ca/etexts/druce1912/druce%20-%20caladrius%20and%20its%20legend.pdf
http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beastgallery143.htm#
http://bestiary.ca/etexts/allen1887/allen%20-%20medieval%20bestiaries.pdf

Don’t miss past episodes:

Weird Medieval Creatures

Fortune Telling Teacups

A look at the fortune telling teacups, which were popular in the early 20th century, and were adorned with symbols meant to aid in interpreting tea leaves.

Highlights include:
• The different varieties of fortune telling teacups
• An attempt at a tea leaf reading

Episode Script for Fortune Telling Teacups

• I sort of randomly stumbled upon this topic, as I often do. I of course knew of tasseography, or fortune telling using tea leaves; I’ve known about it ever since reading the Harry Potter books back in the 1990s.
○ But I had never heard of using special fortune telling cups to facilitate tasseography. I’ve mentioned that I go down wormholes pretty often–I was reorganizing my tea cabinet, and realized that I wanted to buy some more empty tea tins from Harney and Sons, which is a tea company, so I go to their website, and the tea tins are sold out, but while I was clicking around their website, I saw these weird, fun, extremely expensive goth teacups produced by a company called Miss Havisham’s Curiosities. And while I wasn’t interested in buying a $65 tea cup that said witch on it, I really liked the vintage style design of the cups, so I searched for Miss Havisham’s Curiosities and clicked around on that website. And I just so happened to click on something in their menu that said “Fortune Cups,” and ended up on a page of really cool vintage and vintage-style teacups, which looked almost like normal teacups, except that their insides were covered in symbols. Those symbols included things like rings, ships, keys, eyes, wagon wheels, anchors, hearts, sunbursts, etc. Objects that could have many different symbolic meanings and resonances for different people.
○ So when I realized that some of these tea cups were vintage, that really got me interested. They kinda reminded me of Ouija boards, since they’re divination-related consumer products.
○ For whatever reason, I’ve never been super interested in tasseography, but the idea of these weird little fortune telling cups really charmed me.
• Tea leaf reading history
○ Romany appropriation?
○ There’s a longish history to tasseography, but in the interest of time and staying on topic, I want to focus on tea-leaf reading in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In a cursory search, I saw many mentions of tea leaf reading in the 1890s, though wasn’t really seeing mention of cups specifically for that purpose.
§ Predictably, though, much like we saw with Ouija and planchette, the articles focused on women doing tasseography, and depicted women who were interested in that sort of divination as being unhinged, foolish, or frivolous. I also found a pretty racist description of a Black woman who was hired to attend a party on Long Island and read tea leaves for the rich white women there. That was in the May 17, 1890 edition of the Brooklyn Times Union.
§ The Aug 8, 1899 issue of the Wilkes Barre Semi Weekly Record ran a headline about tea leaf reading: “Fate in a Teacup: An Amusing, if Senseless, Diversion for Summer Afternoons” The article goes about how you’d think it would.
§ Basically, it sounds like tea leaf reading was popular because people sat around and talked and drank tea anyway, so why not try to interpret the leaves while you’re hanging out anyway.
○ According to a book called Tea-Cup Fortune Telling (author unknown), 1930, the wa that tasseography normally worked was a person would have a white teacup, and into that, they would pour coffee, or tea brewed with loose leaves that weren’t strained out. Then, you put the saucer on the cup, flip it over, drain out the liquid, and you’re left with the leaves or grounds. To read a bit from the book:
§ You must concentrate on the cup, and allow your imagination to have full play, in order to picture the leaves forming into emblems. The reader of the cup should allow her thought to rest upon the person who is waiting to hear his fortune. Do not expect the figures always to have an actual resemblance to the emblems; it is quite sufficient that the leaves suggest these things. Sometimes they are very distinct. Of course the more fertile the imagination of the person who is studying the cup the more will be discovered in it. . . .
§ It is impossible to lay down any definite rule as to interpretation; although every symbol has some general significance, it must have a particular significance in regard to each person. This is the case with regard to dreams, for instance. To dream of coal means very good luck to some people I know; while to others, even in the same family, it is quite the reverse.
§ . . . The handle of the cup represents the house, or the home. Time can be foretold more or less by the position of the leaves. Close to the brim the events are immediate; and the nearness or the distance from the home is judged according to the position of the leaves away from the handle.
§ Leaves at the bottom of the cup generally forebode ill fortune. The left of the handle can be interpreted as to events passed or opportunities thrown away; the right side of the handle as present and future, usually good, except when cloudy or thick.
§ Serpentine Lines indicate roads or ways. If they appear in the clear are sure tokens of some fortunate changes at hand; surrounded by many dots they signify the gain of money, also long life. At the bottom of the cup, or surrounded by clouds, they indicate reverses past or future.
§ Dots signify gain by money and must be interpreted by the surroundings.
§ Circles indicate completion.
§ Wavy Lines show unsettlement.
§ Straight Lines signify a straight course.
§ A Cross Within a Circle indicates imprisonment, detention, hospital or other form of enforced restraint.
§ Dashes generally indicate enterprises afoot, but time must be given for maturity.”
○ The book goes on to describe all sorts of symbolism related to tea leaves, and what it means when they appear in different parts of the cup. It’s all very intuitive, and kind of reminds me of dream interpretation meanings.
○ So that’s about fortune telling in a regular teacup. Somewhere at the very end of the 19th century, special fortune telling teacups were made, with symbols that aided in tea leaf interpretation.
• Types of fortune telling cups
○ First, want to acklowledge a major source for this: the website The Mystic Tea Room, which has extensive info about fortune telling teacups
○ There ended up being several types of fortune telling teacups: symbol cups, astrology cups, and cups that had playing cards printed on the inside called cartomancy cups.
○ I wanted to talk about a selection of cups that I thought were interesting or notable.
○ I found an article describing one from June 3, 1899 in The Standard Union, a newspaper in Brooklyn. It speaks pretty dismissively, opening with “A new addition for the afternoon tea table where maids do congregate is the future-telling tea cup. This latest addendum to the paraphenalia of the Soothsayer is wide and deep, with its inner surface covered with a network of lines and a border of stars, fishes, scorpions, lions and other signs of the zodiac.”
○ in a Feb 3, 1900 edition of the Knoxville Sentinel, which was surprisingly positive, maybe because it was an article about the cup, not about women performing tasseography. It had a nice description of the cup:
§ “The cup and saucer come, packed with tissue paper daintily in a box, with an accompanying book of explanation. The saucer is worked with circles and the cup is divided by geometrical lines, diverging from the center inside, i.e. the bottom, and crossed by circles like a globe. In the spaces thus formed are stars and the signs of the zodiac. The sun is indicated in the bottom of the cup, inside to shed light on the bank of tea leaves in whatsoever square they lie.”
§ Apparently the cup also came with an instruction manual, tho the author said it was unhelpful.
○ I think those articles were likely talking abut the Hanley’s Fortuna Cup, which was introduced in 1898 and which I think was the second fortune telling cup patented in the US.
§ The Fortuna Fortune Telling Cup has this sort of globe-like grid of lines, and the interpretation depended on a careful study of the accompanying booklet, which would explain how different placements of the tea leaves indicated different times of year, etc. It looks like it was very complicated, tho also very innovative, and a lot of future cups took inspiration from the Fortuna.
○ Aynsley Cup of Fortune Nelros (1904)
§ This was a cup made from bone china, with symbols and writing in red and black paint on the cup and saucer. It feels really Edwardian, with a sort of scalloped rim, curved edges, and a sort of pedestal-style base. Most of the versions of the Nelros have really nice, ornately curved handles.
§ My favorite feature of the cup was that it had a slogan written on the outside: If thou wouldst learn thy future with thy tea, this magic cup will show it thee
§ It was popular enough that there’s a whole chapter about it in the 1946 book Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves by Cicely Kent
□ However, while the book included a chapter about the cup, the book recommends only the cup, not the saucer that comes with it. The first page of the chapter says “I am not suggesting the use of the Nelros saucer, for the reason that its signs are somewhat obscure, and students who have no experience in the science of astrology would find it confusing, if used in addition to the cup, in which all needful signs are illustrated.”
□ I feel very seen in that description, because despite some very earnest efforts, especially over the last 4-5 years, I just barely grasp some astrological stuff.
§ The Nelros Cup of Fortune ended up influencing many future fortune telling cups, such as:
□ The Taltos Fortune Telling Cup, which was released in 1975. I don’t think the Taltos is as nice looking–it’s a pretty typical 1970s teacup with straight side, rather than the nicely curved Edwardian Nelros Cup of Fortune, and the illustrations are in full color with shading, and the words on the outside are a pretty 70s feeling script font. But despite the cosmetic differences, it’s basically the same cup in terms of content.
□ There was a 1980 version, the Taltos Fortune Telling Cup by Royal Kendal, which looks basically the same as the other Taltos Fortune Telling Cup
□ In 1985, there was the International Collectors Guild Zarka Fortune Telling Teacup Set, which also has, in my opinion, somewhat garish colors, though for some reason I find it a bit more charming than the Taltos cups which it’s basically a clone of. This was a Japanese cup that was sold for about 10 years, and you could send off for it from ads in tabloids, womens magazines, and gift catalogs.
□ Finally, in 2001, Barnes & Noble introduced The Cup of Destiny by Jane Lyle, which is basically a dupe of the Nelros Cup of Fortune, though it sadly does not feature the fun text on the exterior of the cup.
® The shape of the Cup of Destiny is more pleasing to me than the Taltos cups, because it’s curved with the little pedestal base type thing, and has the nice little scalloped edges.
® It also features black and red paint, with simple, outlined shapes rather than full color illustrations. As a result, it looks a lot more occult than the Taltos cups of the 70s and 80s, which kinda just reminded me of childrens book illustrations or something.
® Of course, instead of being made of delicate, translucent bone china from England, it’s restaurant-grade stoneware manufactured in China. But hey, it’s vegan!
® I started googling this and discovered, to my surprise, that the Cup of Destiny is still being manufactured and sold today. 20 years seems like a long time to be producing such a niche gift item, but it does seem to be coming back into vogue now. I found it for sale at Urban Outfitters, which really says a lot about the trendiness of divination and occult imagery right now. However, pro tip, you can find it for sale cheaper at Target. I ordered one from Target for like $19.
® Okay, enough about modern cups, for now. We’d been talking about the 1904 Nelros Cup of Fortune, so let’s get back to the timeline of fortune telling cups.
○ I saw a number of articles in society pages in the 1910s talking about fortune telling cups being used as party favors, or as placecards. This was interesting to me, because while I saw alarmist articles about women doing tasseography and that meaning they were foolish, there didn’t seem to be quite the same moral panic about these fortune telling cups as there were about ouija boards. You know, unlike Ouija boards, the Catholic church didn’t ask someone to write about how the devil works through fortune telling teacups, for example.
§ It seems like these were more of a novelty.
○ Aynsley also produced a Cup of Knowledge starting around 1924, it seems, and they ended up making about a zillion permutations of that cup. It differs from the Nelros Cup of Fortune in that it features playing cards on the inside, rather than symbols, and the exterior often featured more ornamental elements, like flowers, ribbons, or solid pretty colors, rather than the fortune telling slogan.
§ In 1924, an event called the British Empire Exhibition was held in Wembley, England, and at least five china manufacturers made special fortune telling cups as souvenirs of the event. Aynsley produced several versions of the Cup of Knowledge featuring roses on the sides.
§ In 1937, they produced a souvenir Cup of Fortune to commemorate the coronation of King George VI–he’s the guy who Colin Firth played in The King’s Speech
§ There was one made in 1939 for the royal visit to Canada
§ Aynsley wasn’t the only manufacturer to make these commemorative cups, but I’m using them as an example because there were SO many versions of the Cup of Knowledge
○ Zancigs Cup of Destiny (1926) manufactured by Anchor http://www.mystictearoom.com/wiki/Zancigs_Cup_of_Destiny
○ And now we get to the part where I need to give a disclaimer about cultural appropriation and racism when it comes to fortune telling cups and divination and witchy things in general.
§ This is a huge topic, one that I can’t do justice to here, but in general, if you run in occult or witchy circles at all, you know this is a big issue. And you’re probably very aware that people still constantly use the racial slur for Romani people when talking about witchy stuff–like for example, there’s plenty of that on instagram, or in etsy vendors shop names or product names, etc. It’s common enough that some people still may not be totally aware that it’s a racial slur–at least in the US, it’s considered a racial slur. I know this can vary from country to country, but there are about a million Romani people living in the US, and I live in the US, so in this context, it’s a slur. There are reasons behind that that are beyond the scope of this episode, but just google it if you want to know more.
§ Because of that, since the 19th century, the term Romani has been widely in use in English instead of the racial slur. But many people, I’d say in particular a certain type of witchy white, NON-Romani woman, still use the racial slur to describe themselves because they seem to think it means “free spirited” and “witchy” in an exotic way. You’ll also see that sort of language–either the slur, or the term Romany being used in an appropriative way, just to make a fortune telling product seem more authentic or exotic. So in a bit, I’ll talk some about the so-called “Romany” fortune telling tea cups that were produced in the 1930s.
§ Then, also, I saw this in both the Ouija board research that I did last year, and in the fortune telling cup research, but caricatures of Chinese people, and appropriations of Chinese culture, tend to be used for a similar purpose. I also saw a lot of that with Indian culture in the Ouija board. So. Not good.
○ I found a May 1931 article from the AP about a fortune-telling tea cup designed by a woman named Genevieve Wimsatt, the editor of one of the first English-language womens magazines in China. Her cup was adorned, supposedly, with Chinese symbols from antiquity, though I always find that kind of claim dubious. The article went on to describe how the teacup was used:
§ “When a fair bridge player drains her cup the other players look on with eager eyes to see if the tea leaves adhere to a duck, rabbit, or a piece of bamboo.”
§ I found an etsy listing for this cup, which was sold but you could look at the pictures, and it has a saucer with a yin yang in the center, where the cup goes, and then the saucer is edged with depictiosn of the animals of the chinese zodiac. The interior of the cup is covered in lots of little pictures, and the exterior shows a charactature of a chinese man holding something that looks like a narrow white flag or pennant.
§ I actually found her 1928 patent paperwork for the cup, and here’s the story behind the man on the cup:
On the outside of the cup is the figure of Lu Tung Pin, the patron genius of fortune tellers, with his famous sword, the demon slayer,
and his fly-whisk, the cloud sweeper, accompanied by the live red bats of happiness. The saucer is bordered with the twelve cyclical animals of Chinese geomancy.
§ The patent also explains exactly how to use the cup, which is pretty complicated, and has to do with where the leaves are, what animal on the saucer Lu Tung Pin’s fly-whisk points to, etc.
○ In the 1930s, there were a couple cartomancy cups called the Romany Cup of Fortune, one made in the US and one made in the UK.
○ In the course of researching all of this, I I ordered a fortune telling teacup, though it hasn’t arrived yet.
§ I got the Red Rose Cup of Fortune, which was made of bone china with 22K gold symbols, lettering, and trim, and was produced in England by Taylor & Kent in the 1964.
§ There are three versions of the Red Rose Cup of Fortune, which are numbered–I ordered set #1.
§ I’ve heard these cups described as promotional items, or “premiums” sold with Red Rose tea, so I’m assuming they were given away for free with some tea purchases.
§ You can find those pretty cheaply online–even with tax and shipping, the one I got was $30. As far as I can tell, these are some of the cheapest fortune telling cups you can buy these days.
• Weird fortune telling cup stories
Fortune telling cups today

Sources consulted RE: Fortune Telling Teacups

Books RE: Fortune Telling Teacups

Tea-Cup Fortune Telling (author unknown), 1930:
https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20200946
Tea-Cup Reading and Fortune-Telling by Tea Leaves, by a Highland Seer: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18241/18241-h/18241-h.htm
Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves 1946 by Cicely Kent: https://archive.org/details/TellingFortunesByTeaLeaves

Articles RE: Fortune Telling Teacups

15 Jul 1893, Page 32 – The Railroad Telegrapher at Newspapers.com
Asheville Gazette News Sat Jul 16 1910
Baxter Springs News Thu Nov 16 1911
Beatrice Weekly Times Thu Nov 8 1900
Brooklyn Times Union Sat May 17 1890
Buffalo Courier Sun Mar 8 1925
Buffalo Courier Wed Aug 3 1910
Buffalo Morning Express and Illustrated Buffalo Express Sat Feb 1 1896
Chattanooga Daily Times Sun Jan 8 1899
Evening Star Sat Aug 1 1896
Fall River Daily Globe Tue May 23 1899
Great Bend Tribune Wed Mar 6 1907
Knoxville Sentinel Sat Feb 3 1900
Logansport Pharos Tribune Fri May 27 1898
Monrovia Daily News Fri Jan 17 1913
Monterey Daily Cypress Fri Aug 26 1910
Oakland Tribune Wed May 6 1931
Saskatoon Daily Star Wed Jul 5 1922
Star Tribune Fri Dec 1 1893
The Bessemer Herald Sat Feb 17 1912
The Daily Republican Fri Jul 26 1918
The Daily Telegram Sat Nov 8 1919
The Decatur Herald Thu Feb 1 1923
The Evening Herald Mon Sep 30 1912
The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette Thu Feb 7 1895
The Honolulu Advertiser Thu Jan 7 1892
The Morning Astorian Sun Apr 19 1896
The Newcastle Weekly Courant Sat Jan 4 1896
The Ottawa Citizen Fri Aug 2 1901
The Ottawa Journal Mon Oct 24 1898
The Ottawa Journal Sat Dec 9 1899
The Ottawa Journal Sat Jan 26 1924
The Pomona Progress Sat Jul 15 1916
The Record Thu Aug 18 1927
The Standard Union Sat Jun 3 1899
The Winnipeg Tribune Thu Sep 13 1928
The Winnipeg Tribune Wed Sep 6 1922
Times Herald Fri May 20 1910
Wilkes Barre Semi Weekly Record Tue Aug 8 1899
Wilkes Barre Times Leader The Evening News Fri May 22 1908

Websites

http://www.mystictearoom.com/wiki/The_Museum_of_Fortune_Telling_Tea_Cups_and_Saucers
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fortune-telling-tea-cups
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/tea-room-police-raids-new-york-psychics-fortune-telling
https://blog.etsy.com/en/short-stories-aynsley-nelros-cup-of-fortune/
http://www.mystictearoom.com/wiki/Fortune_Telling_Postcards_by_Fred_C._Lounsbury
https://www.sipsby.com/blogs/news/the-history-of-tea-leaf-reading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasseography
Genevieve Wimsatt’s cup: https://www.etsy.com/listing/504597242/genevieve-wimsatt-chinese-fortune?show_sold_out_detail=1&ref=nla_listing_details
http://www.mystictearoom.com/wiki/Genevieve_B._Wimsatt
http://www.mystictearoom.com/wiki/Chinese_Fortune-Telling_Teacup
https://patents.google.com/patent/US1729235A/en
https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/antique-1931-chinese-fortune-telling-1863286616
1920 patent for fortune telling cup: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1342223A/en?q=fortune+telling+cup&oq=fortune+telling+cup&sort=old
Patent for disposable fortune telling cup, 2007:
https://patents.google.com/patent/JP2007030981A/en?q=fortune+telling+cup&oq=fortune+telling+cup
Combination scale and fortune-telling machine patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1774622A/en?q=fortune+telling+cup&oq=fortune+telling+cup&sort=old&page=1
Fortune telling game patent 1935: https://patents.google.com/patent/US2008357A/en?q=fortune+telling+cup&oq=fortune+telling+cup&sort=old&page=1
https://www.grimoire.org/teacup/
http://www.mystictearoom.com/wiki/Cup_of_Fortune_(1964)_Red_Rose
Cup of Destiny: https://www.urbanoutfitters.com/shop/the-cup-of-destiny-book-teacup-set?
http://www.mystictearoom.com/wiki/Zancigs_Cup_of_Destiny
http://www.mystictearoom.com/wiki/Taltos_Fortune_Telling_Cup_(1975)_Jon_Anton
http://www.mystictearoom.com/wiki/Taltos_Fortune_Telling_Cup_(1980)_Royal_Kendal
http://www.mystictearoom.com/wiki/Cup_of_Destiny_(2001)_Jane_Lyle_/_Barnes_and_Noble
http://www.mystictearoom.com/wiki/Courtney_Locke
http://www.mystictearoom.com/wiki/Aynsley_Cup_of_Knowledge_Art_Nouveau_Roses_Small
http://www.mystictearoom.com/wiki/Category:Cartomancy_Cups_and_Saucers
http://www.mystictearoom.com/wiki/Category:Cup_of_Knowledge_(2)_Aynsley
https://rogueandwolf.com/products/ouija-mug
https://us.killstar.com/products/zodiac-cup-saucer
http://www.mystictearoom.com/wiki/Killstar_Zodiac
https://us.killstar.com/products/cosmic-tea-cup-saucer
http://www.mystictearoom.com/wiki/Killstar_Cosmic
https://www.etsy.com/search?q=fortune%20telling%20cup%20vintage
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1004265916/antique-aynsley-nelros-cup-of-knowledge?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=fortune+telling+cup+vintage&ref=sr_gallery-1-22&organic_search_click=1&frs=1
https://www.etsy.com/listing/886884943/vintage-fortune-telling-cup-and-saucer?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=fortune+telling+cup+vintage&ref=sr_gallery-1-25&organic_search_click=1&sca=1
https://www.etsy.com/listing/601068536/vintage-fortune-telling-cup-saucer-tarot?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=fortune+telling+cup+vintage&ref=sr_gallery-1-24&organic_search_click=1&sca=1
https://www.etsy.com/listing/574694054/vintage-fortune-telling-cup-saucer?ref=shop_home_recs_2
https://www.etsy.com/listing/611875919/vintage-royal-kendall-fortune-telling?ref=shop_home_recs_3
https://www.etsy.com/listing/627658306/vintage-jon-anton-fortune-telling-cup?ref=shop_home_recs_4&sca=1
https://www.misshavishamscuriosities.com/store/p497/Vintage_Rosebud_Fortune_Cup_and_Saucer.html#/
https://www.etsy.com/listing/905492926/rare-authentic-aynsley-1920s-the-nelros?ga_order=most_relevant&ga_search_type=all&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_search_query=fortune+telling+cup+vintage&ref=sr_gallery-1-49&organic_search_click=1&frs=1&cns=1

Don’t miss past episodes:

Ghosts of Astoria, NY (Part 1)

A look at some female ghosts of Astoria, Queens, in New York City.

Note: There’s discussion of chattel slavery after the 26 minute mark.

Highlights include:
• The American president who was supposedly shot on his way to see a haunting
• A ghost who disappears if she stops knitting
• A lady in white and a hag who haunt the same block
• A shameful side of Astoria’s history

Episode Script

Garfield Ghost

“Garfield’s Ghost Hunt: Was About to Visit a Haunted House When Shot” The sun (New York [N.Y.]), January 14, 1900:
- So, for a bit of background, for those of you who, like me, forgot what president James A. Garfield’s deal was: he was the president who was shot by an assassin 4 months after his inauguration in 1881, and died 2 months later.
  - I’m not gonna get into a ton of detail about his assassination, though one fun fact is that the gunman purchased the gun specifically because he thought it’d look good in a museum. Back then, presidents weren’t guarded, so Garfield was taking the train to NJ from DC, so the assassin shot him in the train station in FC.
- Let’s get into this article. Basically, there once was a newspaperman name Eugene Virgil Smalley, who was notable because he looked exactly like Garfield and had lots of similar interests. The two of them became friends.
- To read from the article:
  - But the resemblance was not merely physical. They had many habits of mind and sympathies in common, a circumstance, among others, which made them warm friends. There was in Garfield’s rather poetic temperament a strong vein of mysticism, a fondness for the occult which needed little cultivation to have led Guiteau’s victim into paths which other men of great talent and strong imagination have followed until led by them into strange faiths and delusions. Theophile Gautier says there is in every man’s mind a certain dark chamber where bats of superstition lurk, only needing the right kind of prod to set them fluttering their uncanny wings, obscuring the reason with all sorts of dark shadows and queer phantoms.
  - In the case of Garfield this dark chamber was large and the door was easily opened, if a discreet and sympathetic hand touched the spring.
  - . . . At about the time of Gen. Garfield’s inauguration there was much stir among New York spiritualists over certain strange occurrences said to be taking place in a house in Astoria. The owner of this, a hard-headed business man who had amassed a large fortune in the distinctly material occupation of making pig iron, had had the misfortune the winter before to lose a very beautiful daughter whom he idolized. She died in Florida after a lingering illness. The shock utterly shattered her father’s nerves. He brooded upon his loss until it became the fixed idea of his life.
- The article goes on to say that the man tried to distract himself with work, but as soon as he got home every day, he felt devastated again.
- However, one day, he was absorbed in thinking about something work-related, and for once didn’t have his daughter on his mind when he got home. I’ll read some more of the article:
  - She was quite out of his mind when he walked into the large front parlor and started to go through the open sliding doors to the rear parlor, the windows of which overlooked the lawn reaching down to the river.
  - And by one of those windows in her favorite nook sat his daughter. So real, so true to life, in every detail of feature and pose was the vision, that, with his mind for the moment unburdened as it was from the sense of his loss, he for an instant felt no surprise at seeing her where he had seen her hundreds of times before. He advanced a step toward her, whereat she looked laughingly and brightly at him, but held up a warning finger which brought him to a standstill with, fr the first time, a realization of all that had befallen.
- The article continues, saying he told himself he must have imagined it. He closed his eyes, rubbed them, opened them again, but his daughter was still there. However, she was doing something strange:
  - “both her hands [were] now busy weaving a curious filmy lace which rolled slowly to her feet in a sort of fleecy spray which dimmed and melted out of sight.”
- I don’t know if this is ectoplasm or what?
- He tried to come closer, his daughter raised a finger in warning, and then kept creating this “ghostly lace” and it seemed like whenever she stopped making the lace, she started to dim, and when she restarted making it, she became more solid.
- So then word of this apparition got out, and Smalley heard of it, as did a bunch of spiritualist mediums. Tons of them came. To read from the article:
  - “Every night, there were seances at the Astoria house. Mr. Smalley was present at nearly all of them for several weeks. . . . He wrote column after column in his New York paper concerning the events at the Astoria house–each story very striking in its minute simplicity of detail and quite like a chapter out of “Spirite” in the delicate beauty of the manifestations.”
- Smalley became more and more interested, so of course he mentioned this ghost to his friend, Garfield.
- Garfield wanted to see the ghost, but now that he was president, there was no real way for him to visit. But Garfield was about to give a commencement speech at Williams College, and Smalley said that on his way back to DC, he could spend a night in NYC and come to the Astoria house in secret.
- So all the arrangements were made. A famous medium was hired for the evening, and supposedly Garfield was really looking forward to the visit. But on his way out of DC, at the train station, he was shot, and that led to his death.
- It was said that the haunted house in Astoria continued to be haunted. But now it was haunted not just by the daughter. There were supposed sightings of Napoleon, Shakespeare, and other famous people who fraudulent mediums tended to claim to see. But now the host of ghosts was joined by Garfield’s spirit.
- The man who lived there believed in the ghosts, who supposedly comforted him and made him feel less alone, until his eventual death.
I looked for the articles that Smalley wrote about this haunting, but couldn’t find anything after searching through multiple archives. However, I did find that there’s a lot of stuff about places that Garfield supposedly haunts, including the gothic castle that houses his remains in Cleveland, Ohio.

The White Lady of Astoria

First, a woman in white definition: White Lady – Wikipedia
The Newtown Pentacle, a great blog run by Mitch Waxman, reports stories of hauntings here in Astoria at 44th street between Broadway and 34th avenue. Here are some of the stories he’s documented:
- “My former neighbor, a sensitive “lifer”, when confronted with “Have you ever seen a Ghost?” related that there was an apparition on the entire block. A lady in white who moved from house to house. He continued on, saying that his mother, himself- and his tenants- had experienced apparitions. Indeed, the subject was well known amongst the generations of children that had grown up here, and that the phantom was called “The White Lady”. The following text is used with permission, and comes from that stalwart friend…
- My mother’s story is this:
- When my brother and I were very small, around 2 and 5 or 3 and 6 respectively, we both had high fevers and were sleeping in my mother’s bed. My mother said she heard someone walk down our hallway, and she assumed it was my father, as he worked late into the night. She then says she smelled very sweet perfume, and felt someone sit down on the edge of the bed (she was sitting with us, watching over us).
- She never saw anybody, but rather felt a presence. She said she knew it was the presence of a ‘lady’—with the resonance of the word being someone higher in society, graceful and composed. The presence let it be known to her–how I dont know– that she was there for a good reason; that she was there because she was worried about my brother and I, and would watch over us and protect us. My mother added that she thought the ‘lady’ was the wife of the person who owned the land way before our house was built, but Im not sure if that was heresay she might have picked up on in future years.”
- “My tenant’s story:
- My tenant stopped and asked me one day in front of the house. He asked me if we had a ghost living there, and before I told him, I asked him what he meant. He said he dreamt about a ‘lady’. I asked him to describe her, and he said her hair was done up in an old fashioned bun, she was older, her hair was white, and she wore a dress that was cinched around the neck, the way they wore in earlier years.
- He also said that he had once peered outside the backyard window, and saw someone looking up at him intently. He said that it was a spirit guide.
- My tenant has told me he is sensitive to phenomenon. He even described meeting a woman and immediately ‘knowing’ that the woman was pregnant. He in fact asked her, and she said yes.”
- “My ghostly experience, front bedroom 1st floor.
- Well, it was the first night staying in that apartment. I spent the day helping my girlfriend move the rest of her stuff in. And put a large mirror up at the foot of the bed facing north (toward broadway).
- So anyway, somehow I awoke between 2 and 3am (at least I feel like I was awake), and saw a kind of a dark shadowy figure move/walk from one side of the room toward the foot of the bed staring at me. Seemed like an older women or a deadly looking middle-aged women with long hair past shoulders staring me down as she crept toward the foot of the bed. She lowered down slowly as if she was going to go under the bed but went out of sight at my feet. Almost instantly I felt my feet tingle and begin to shake like I was shivering and then both legs entirely.
- I tried to kick my legs to make it stop but it only made it worse as my legs were basically shaking out of control and woosh it went up my trunk to my neck and my whole body was shaking and my head flexed backward hard into the pillow. I called out for my girlfriend, but my face muscles were very tight – “help… help… me…” which felt like I was wide awake- I know I was.
- I began to also feel a pull toward the bottom the bed and toward the wall that the mirror was on. And as soon as it felt like it was going to throw my body off the bed or across the room or through into the mirror, whoosh it left down through my body and out my feet and was standing at the foot of the bed staring at me smiling/kind of laughing at me, and turned toward the mirror and walked through.
- That’s it, I was wide awake for 2 hours trying to contemplate if that really happened or what. Nothing like that has ever happend before or since.
- The only other thing that happened was a couple of weeks later- a glass picture frame seemed to jump off the wall and shattered on the ground in the middle of the night at 3 or 4 am. The same day I put a 2nd mirror up in that bedroom.”
The Queens Chronicle reported the supposed explanation for this:
- “On this eastern Astoria stretch, several residents have reported spotting a woman wearing a high-collared dress with her white hair in a bun — she’s known as the White Lady of Astoria. Sometimes, according to those who have spotted her, she appears with a sick child, and witnesses often smell lavender when she’s spotted.
- The White Lady, Carter says, is believed to be Elizabeth Hallet.
- William Hallet, Hallet’s third husband, purchased land in Astoria after he and Elizabeth fled from Connecticut because she had divorced her second husband due to his being insane. Insanity, though, wasn’t a legal excuse for separation back then so Elizabeth was technically guilty of polygamy, which was punishable by death.
- Hallet’s descendants were later killed by slaves who were not allowed to go to church — it’s believed the slayings were Queens’ first capital murders.”
DoNYC has this claim about the white lady:
- ” This spirit, known as “White Lady of Astoria” was killed by her two slaves around 1705. Her ghost is said to haunt the 44th Street block to this day, and can sometimes be spotted with another ghost-like figure of a small child.”
The NY post did a writeup of the White Lady as well, based on Mitch Waxman’s research:
- According to Andrea Janes, founder of the Boroughs of the Dead walking tours, the “White Lady of Astoria” is a Mrs. Hallet, whose family was killed by their two slaves around 1705. The pregnant mother, after finding her husband and two children murdered, ran away and ended up drowning while trying to cross a marsh.
- While the Hallet farmhouse is long gone, her ghost is said to haunt the row houses that were erected on a 44th Street block in the early 20th century — though she’s seen as a benevolent spirit.
- “One friend, who described [the ghost] sitting with her and her brother when they were ill, described it as a comforting experience,” said Waxman, who runs the history Web site the Newtown Pentacle and lives a block away from the homes. Waxman said that residing in a haunted neighborhood is preferable to living on top of a chemical factory. “I’d rather have the White Lady of Astoria than benzine.”
I’ve talked before about the dark history of slavery in NYC. I think I talked about that in the episode I did talking about Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel, and their hauntings. And the reason why I felt it was important to talk about it was that it’s essential context when thinking about the history of an area from a paranormal perspective. NYC–the city, its wealth, etc–was built by enslaved people.
Slavery existed in NYC until 1827, which is way longer than many other places in the northeast. There was even a literal slave market in the financial district, at Wall Street and Pearl Street, which was open for 51 years and which sold black people and indigenous people of all genders and ages.
- History of Long Island City, New York by J. S Kelsey; 1896:
  - “Negro whippers were appointed in various towns. April 4, 1729, the town of Newtown appointed William Tallier “general whipper ” for the town. Besides being whipped, slaves were often branded in the forehead with a hot iron. On the night of Januarj’ 24, 170S, William Hallett, jr., wife, and five children were murdered by an Indian named “Sam” and a negress, who were slaves of the family. The motive was to secure possession of the land. This extraordinary tragedy absorbed popular attention for a long time, and was influential in legislation for the suppression of slave conspiracies. Speedy, though terrible, punishment awaited the perpetrators of the crime, who were burned at the stake at Jamaica, February 2, 1708. The Hallett home was in the vicinity of what is now known as the “German Settlements.”
  - January 27, 1753, three children and a negro of John Parcells were drowned in the East River.
  - . . . It was many a day after the English and Dutch had selected new homes in a new world — in fact generations passed, before there was a store within the present precincts of this city. Domestic wants were simple and few, and were readily supplied by industry. What was desired beyond home production was found across the river in New York. Purchasers thither went without money, and in place thereof took along for exchange produce, tobacco, beer and negro boys.”
John Jay college has a database you can search to find records of enslaved people and enslavers. I looked up records for Newtown, Queens, which is pretty much present day Astoria, and found 11 pages of results, featuring a bunch of familiar names who I’ve talked about before. I will say, too: not all the records are tagged with Newtown, and some may have been tagged with typos, so these numbers are actually artificially under-representing the number of people these families enslaved.
- Also, as a sidenote: I wish that I could highlight the stories of the enslaved people, rather than just ordering this as a inventory of enslavers and the numbers of humans they owned. However, the records of people who were enslaved are extremely incomplete. For example, when I search for enslaved people’s records in Newtown, Queens, I only get 4 results, and only three of them have names attached: Tom, born in 1754 and enslaved by a man named Charles grant; Nero, no birth year listed, enslaved by a man named William Garden, and Andrew, no birth year, enslaved by a man named Andrew Springsteen. They have no last names. Andrew’s information comes from the records of the New-York Manumission Society, and while I can’t read the manuscript (because it’s handwritten and crossed, which makes it illegible to me), I’m hoping that means that he may have been freed, since that’s what the society’s goals were.
The records I found started in 1735, with the record of an unnamed enslaved person who was owned by one Paul Burtus. In most of these records, only the enslavers names are listed.
So I wanted to talk about some of the families I’ve discussed who were enslavers.
- First up, we’ve got a 1790 record of Abigail Alsop, who owned 8 humans. It sounds like the household was made up of 10 non-enslaved people and 8 enslaved people, though it’s unclear to me how many, if any, of the non-enslaved people may have been household servants rather than enslavers.
- In the 1810 census, John Alsop is listed as owning 4 enslaved people.
  - You may recognize the Alsop name from the episodes about Calvary Cemetery, because the family once had a farm where Calvary Cemetery stands today. And their family cemetery is actually inside Calvary Cemetery. I actually found it a month or so ago–it’s a weird little family cemetery tucked into a chain link fence in the middle of the separate, larger, Catholic Calvary Cemetery. From what I could tell, the headstones in the cemetery only marked the graves of the slave owning family members. I’m not sure where the enslaved people in the household were buried.
- In the 1810 census, there’s an entry for Cornelious Berrien, who owned 4 enslaved people.
  - I’ve talked about the Berrien family cemeteries, which have been demolished, and then the Berriens also had an island named after them, which is now connected to the mainland and the site of a Con Edison power plant.
- In 1810, there’s a record of two Blackwell households, enslaving one person per household.
  - You’ll recognize the Blackwells from many episodes–the used to own Blackwell’s Island, now called Roosevelt Island, the former site of the NY Lunatic Asylum, and the current site of the ruins of the old Renwick Smallpox Hospital.
- Next up, there’s the Hallet family.
  - I couldn’t find the numbers from the early 1700s, when Elizabeth Hallet was supposedly killed, but I found some later census numbers.
  - The 1790 census shows 7 Hallet households, owning between one and 8 enslaved people each, for a total of 21 people who were enslaved by the Hallets of Newtown, Queens.
  - In 1810, there was one Hallett household listed, which enslaved 2 people.
  - You’ll recognize the Hallet family from Hallet’s Cove and Hallet’s Point, which I’ve mentioned many times.
- Now we’ve got the Lawrence family, of Sarah Lawerence fame. I talked about their family cemetery, which still stands near the north shore of Astoria.
  - According to the 1790 census, their households housed between 1-9 enslaved people each.
  - In 1810, there were 3 Lawrence households, each enslaving between 2-4 people.
- Now we’ve got the Moore family, who enslaved between 1-8 people per household in 1790.
  - In 1810, there were 6 Moore households, each enslaving between 1-6 people.
  - I talked about the Moore family in the Moore-Jackson Cemetery episode.
- Next up is the Rapelje family, who I’ve mentioned in a bunch of my episodes focused on local history. The Rapeljes enslaved between 1-7 people per household in 1790.
  - In 1810, there were 7 Rapelye households, each enslaving 1-5 people
Then there’s the Riker family. I talked about them in the Riker-Lent-Smith cemetery episodes. In 1790, Jacobus Rycker owned 7 enslaved people.
- In 1810, there were two Riker households, one which enslaved 3 people, and one which enslaved 5 people.
- Sidenote, there was also a 1790 entry for a enslaving Lint, though the name was spelled differently, so not sure if it was the same Lent or not. However, in 1810, there’s a correctly spelled entry for a Lent household that enslaved 3 people.

Sources consulted RE: Ghosts of Astoria

Books RE: Ghosts of Astoria

Articles RE: Ghosts of Astoria

Brooklyn Times Union Sat Sep 4 1869
Another Haunted House in Astoria. Evening Post (published as The Evening Post.) (New York, New York)November 23, 1858
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Sun Jul 18 1886
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Wed Dec 27 1893
Brooklyn Times Union Sat Mar 7 1925
Brooklyn Times Union Thu Nov 22 1934
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Sun Jul 11 1937
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Thu Nov 22 1934
The Courier Fri Feb 2 1900
Image 18 of The sun (New York [N.Y.]), January 14, 1900
Evening Post published as The Evening Post. November 23 1858
New York Tribune published as New-York Tribune. November 23 1858
Brooklyn Times Union Mon Oct 25 1909
The New York herald (New York, N.Y.), February 13, 1921, (SECTION 6)
Brooklyn Times Union Thu Jun 28 1888
GOLD GHOST WALKS IN ASTORIA HOUSE: Psychic Expert, Called to Old … New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 21, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 2
POLICEMEN’S QUEST FOR GHOSTS FUTILE: Three Carloads Go to Astoria’s … New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 22, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 1
The evening world (New York, N.Y.), December 30, 1889, (EXTRA 2 O’CLOCK)
The Appeal Sat Feb 24 1900
The Inter Ocean Sun Jan 21 1900
The Evening World Wed Nov 29 1893
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Thu Apr 19 1928
The Tonganoxie Mirror Thu Jul 19 1883
Reading Times Mon Jan 20 1896 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Sun Nov 8 1885 (1)
The evening world (New York, N.Y.), December 30, 1889, (EXTRA 2 O’CLOCK) https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030193/1889-12-30/ed-1/?sp=3&q=astoria+ghost&r=-0.026,0.482,0.453,0.19,0
The times (Washington [D.C.]), December 19, 1897: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85054468/1897-12-19/ed-1/?sp=8&q=astoria+ghost&r=0.109,0.598,0.884,0.371,0
Image 18 of The sun (New York [N.Y.]), January 14, 1900: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030272/1900-01-14/ed-1/?sp=18&q=astoria+ghost&r=0.489,0.945,0.683,0.365,0
Image 8 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]), January 7, 1919: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1919-01-07/ed-1/?sp=8&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.385,0.216,0.487,0.205,0
Image 7 of The sun (New York [N.Y.]), February 17, 1919: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030431/1919-02-17/ed-1/?sp=7&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.569,0.553,0.276,0.116,0
Image 10 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]), February 10, 1906: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1906-02-10/ed-1/?sp=10&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.719,0.853,0.417,0.223,0
Image 4 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]), September 30, 1905
Image 21 of The New York herald (New York, N.Y.), May 27, 1921: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1921-05-27/ed-1/?sp=21&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.342,0.678,0.311,0.166,0
Image 16 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]), October 5, 1904: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1904-10-05/ed-1/?sp=16&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.323,1.204,0.323,0.173,0
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Nov 22, 1934 · Page 8: https://bplonsite.newspapers.com/image/576215460
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Sun, Jul 11, 1937 · Page 8: https://bplonsite.newspapers.com/image/52695146
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Nov 22, 1934 · Page 24: https://bplonsite.newspapers.com/image/59991092
https://www.qgazette.com/articles/pages-from-the-long-island-star-journal-9/
Image 18 of The sun (New York [N.Y.]), January 14, 1900: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030272/1900-01-14/ed-1/?sp=18&q=astoria+ghost&r=0.555,0.033,0.321,0.148,0
Buffalo Morning Express and Illustrated Buffalo Express Tue Nov 13 1894

Websites

Records of enslaved people in Newtown, Queens: https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/search/?appSession=5MCUK448ECO579156B8UL5N69FD4FP9HR01OXX509Z67L48DL4CAXL8EEI52U669I1O38XF12FE61JXWM4Y10N2Z9JAN9LHJU8BN2285018P4549838QC2RQ2L4EH2QX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Garfield#Assassination
http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/33/v33i01p029-034.pdf
https://kellykazek.com/2018/06/25/bet-you-didnt-know-about-this-haunted-american-castle/
https://time.com/96533/thieves-break-into-james-a-garfields-tomb/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborg
https://newtownpentacle.com/2009/06/13/a-big-dig-in-queens/
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/who-really-ran-the-underground-railroad/
https://www.6sqft.com/15-underground-railroad-stops-in-new-york-city/
https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/search/?appSession=1WXJ2370QHI6H9C815459UHS4F9AVG7ZNZ5RH7T39B21KWP081R95709VQVLNQPWX8M9A7IO8M3W22FY550M360BW077FZ21H52A90IQ93SZZS0A870A6XT8EJ4V78I8
https://www.6sqft.com/search-over-35000-records-of-slavery-in-new-york/
https://www.6sqft.com/before-nycs-slave-market-freedmen-from-africa-were-allowed-to-own-farmland/
https://www.6sqft.com/in-the-1700s-there-was-an-official-location-for-buying-selling-and-renting-slaves-on-wall-street/
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/1873_Beers_Map_of_Astoria,_Queens,_New_York_City_-_Geographicus_-_Astoria-beers-1873.jpg
https://oana-ny.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/old_astoria_map_1873_bg-1024×666.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1873_Beers_Map_of_Astoria,_Queens,_New_York_City_-_Geographicus_-_Astoria-beers-1873.jpg
https://shop.old-maps.com/new-york/towns/kings-queens-cos-ny-1859-town/astoria-new-york-1859-old-town-map-custom-print-queens-co/
https://cdn2.bigcommerce.com/n-zfvgw8/wkatj7/products/109812/images/126869/LongIslandCity_Astoria_MiddleVillage_1873_web__84173.1548088614.1280.1280.jpg?c=2
https://www.mapsofantiquity.com/store/Antique_Maps_-_United_States/Northeast/New_York/Long_Island/Astoria,_New_York,_verso_Woodside,_Maspeth,_East_Williamsburg,_Newtown/inventory.pl?id=NYO016
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/medny/astoria.jpg
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/medny/halsall7.asp
https://forgotten-ny.com/2002/02/astoria-necrology/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2002/02/astoria-necology-continued/
https://cdn6.picryl.com/photo/1903/12/31/queens-vol-2-double-page-plate-no-30-part-of-ward-two-newtown-trains-meadow-6c7e10-1600.jpg
https://www.qchron.com/qboro/stories/you-ain-t-afraid-of-no-ghost-we-ll-see-about-that/article_010ee09d-001f-5505-a643-147da790ecbf.html

Don’t miss past episodes:

A Smuggler’s Ghost and Tunnels in Astoria, NY (Haunted Astoria)

A smuggler’s ghost in Astoria, NY, stories about tunnels in Astoria, NY, as well as more of the neighborhood’s grim history.

Note: There’s mention of chattel slavery around the 15 min mark, and more details after the 18 minute mark.

Highlights include:
• A haunted cave that’s disappeared
• Horrific deeds done by a famous Astorian
• Some awful deaths in a tunnel under the river
• A manmade island
• The spooky Hell Gate

Episode Script for A Smuggler’s Ghost and Tunnels in Astoria, NY

Smugglers at Halletts Cove:

Hallets Cove is right next to the Socrates Sculpture Park, which I talked about n a hidden cemetery episode. It’s the park that has a wall made of tombstones.
I found some interesting stuff in the book History of Long Island City, New York. by J. S Kelsey, which was published in 1896 about a possible smuggler’s cave and who supposedly haunts Hallet’s Point. For reference, Hallet’s Point today hosts the Astoria Houses, a NYCHA building.
This is from the book Old roads from the heart of New York : journeys today by ways of yesterday, within thirty miles around the Battery by Sarah Comstock, and it’s talking about Jones Wood at first, which is now part of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, across the river from Astoria:
- “Two remarkable cousins, Samuel and David Provoost, have passed into history. The former was the first bishop of New York, and the president of Columbia College. But David was famed in a widely different way. He was one of the most dare-devil smugglers known, and a rocky hole once existing on the shore of this wood was known as “The Smuggler’s Cave.” Here, and in another cave across the river at Hallett’s Point, he hid his treasure, and the boys of the early eighteen-hundreds used to shiver and tell delicious, creepy stories of the old rascal whose ghost haunted these two black caverns. Not until he was ninety years old did David yield up his law-defying, rollicking, money-scattering career.
I’m having trouble confirming whether there was any kind of smuggler’s tunnel or cave there for real, and haven’t found other mentions of ghost stories in that area. Though I know that when the Hallets Point reef was blown up in 1869, tunnels were dug there, radiating underneath the reef and the river, and then blown up. This was to make the area more navigable for ships, since as I’ve talked about before, the Hell Gate was extremely treacherous.
- I don’t know of anyone who died during that excavation, but I do think it counts as trauma to the surrounding area which is something I look at when it comes to hauntings and the paranormal:
  - History of Queens County, New York, with illustrations, portraits, & sketches of prominent families and individuals (1882):
  - https://archive.org/details/historyofqueensc00newy/page/274/mode/2up?q=belmont+tunnel
  - Hallett’s Point Reef was a particularly dangerous obstruction in the east channel, as it did not leave sufficient seaway for vessels floating down with the ebb and steer- ing clear of Flood Rock. It also created dangerous eddies at either tide. The reef was of semi-circular form, 720 feet across and extending 300 feet into the channel. Since surface blasting had proved of so little avail it was determined to sink a shaft down into the rock and cut diverging lateral tunnels that should pene- trate the rock in all directions, something like the work- ings in a coal mine. The walls of the tunnels were then to be charged with explosives, these to be connected with an electric battery, the water admitted, and the charges fired.
I have been able to find more information about David Provoost, however.
- “Merchant and smuggler David ‘Money Ready’ Provoost (1691–1781). The 90 acre site, Louvre Farm, on the eastern side of Manhattan, was owned by the Provoost family and had a cave where David hid his money.[18][19][20] It was later said that David’s ghost haunted the woods.”
I fond a bit more in a book called A Loiterer In New York by Helen Weston Henderson, 1917:
- “The bishop had a cousin, David Provoost, a Revolutionary solider with a rare talent for smuggling which won him the nickname of “Ready Money Provoost.” He used to hide his booty in “Smugglers’ Cave” on the shore of the bishop’s farm, or in a cave at Hallett’s Point, Astoria.”
Apparently the Provoots had a cemetery in Jones’ Wood, and The book Old New York, from the Battery to Bloomingdale. by Eliza Greatorex (1875?), which is sort of a nostalgic look at disappearing landmarks in NYC, has a description of the area. It sounds like the Riker and Lawerence families had properties there in Manhattan, in addition to their Queens homesteads, which makes sense. But then it mentions the smuggler as well:

“The what walks and nutting expeditions the children remember into Jones’ Woods, whose long avenue opened to the south, and where they could visit the old tomb of the smuggler in the rocky and shady ground near the wood! But the city has destroyed the beauty of all that region; the Riker HOuse and Lawrence homestead and the lively Arch Brook are hardly to be discerened, and have all long ago passed from the possession of the families who made them such charming homes for long happy years.”

Then the book describes the life of David Provost, and closes with his death and what happened to his supposed tomb:

“He died in 1781, at the age of ninety years, and his name was inscribed on the tomb where Johannah, his most loving wife, had long reposed. Three-quarters of a century after his death, the tomb was opened and in it were found three or four coffins. The lid of one of these measured over seven feet, and a few vertebrae, of a size which would correspond to a frame of such magnitude, were near. A woman’s skeleton and a child’s were also discovered. Since then the tomb, or rather the place of the tomb, has been left open, empty and ruinous; but when we last saw it (October, 1875) the hill remained, and the doorway and enough of the original structure to identify it.”

Belmont tunnel (steinway, worker deaths, etc): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Thant_Island
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/u-thant-island
- Basically, in the 1890s, William Steinway, of Steinway piano fame, whose company town was located in Astoria, wanted to build a tunnel under the east river for trolleys (the 7 train uses the tunnel now.)
- According to an article called “Four Lose Their Lives in Tunnel Disaster” in the Los Angeles Herald, Volume 33, Number 108, 17 January 1906, there were some deaths during the construction of a tunnel under the East River.
  - Two workers died of suffocation and caisson disease, or the bends, two drowned, and two were badly injured.
  - It sounds like all four of those workers were Black. A white foreman and assistant were also injured.
  - The accident was caused by a compressed air pipe which burst in the tunnel under the east River, beneath Man O’War Reef, which was even with 42nd Street in Manhattan. At the time that the article was written, the day after the accident, the two drowned men were still stuck underwater in the tunnel.
- The landfill from the tunnel’s construction became a tiny island in the East River called U Thant Island, which at 100×200 feet is the smallest island in Manhattan. It has a cool little metal structure on it, and it’s closed to the public and acts as a bird sanctuary. A colony of cormorants lives there.
About a month ago, I was at Astoria Park, and I overheard a group of men in their 50s talking about how supposedly we were right near an area with tunnels that had been used by famous Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman. I haven’t been able to confirm that, but my ears perked up because we were less than a 10 minute walk away from Halletts Cove, where I had heard about smugglers tunnels.
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., wrote an article that was posted on PBS and The Root debunking some myths about the Underground Railroad, and he said that there weren’t as many tunnels used as people seem to think there were:
  - “Those tunnels or secret rooms in attics, garrets, cellars or basements? Not many, I’m afraid. Most fugitive slaves spirited themselves out of towns under the cover of darkness, not through tunnels, the construction of which would have been huge undertakings and quite costly. And few homes in the North had secret passageways or hidden rooms in which slaves could be concealed.”
- However, that being said, if there was an existing smuggler’s tunnel, it makes me wonder if it may have been used? They also could have existed but then been blown up when the Army Corps of Engineers tunneled under the East River and detonated bombs to clear out the most tretcherous parts of the Hell Gate.
  - Though sidenote, I will say that the Hell Gate is still awfully weird. The other night, my friend and I went to Astoria Park and hung out watching the Hell Gate for a while. We saw tons of whirlpools, some small, some at least several feet wide.
But to get back to smugglers tunnels, as I was working on this, I remembered that I read an article about the Riker-Lent-Smith homestead, which mentioned possible smugglers tunnels there.
- After some digging through my extremely disorganized mess of sources that I used for my episode on the cemetery at the old Riker homestead, I found what I was looking for: A March 17, 1968 article in the Long Island Press called “This House May Be Haunted.” So to read from that article:
  - “There are chains in the basement that supposedly were used to imprison slaves,” said Mrs. Rica Smith with a shudder. And there’s also a rmor that a hidden passage, once used for smuggling, runs from the ancient basement to the bay.”
- I remember at the time that I did that episode, a few months ago, I was wondering why there were a few offhanded mentions of slavery, but not details about it. To be honest, I’d read this article near the end of preparing my notes for the Riker-Lent-Smith Cemetery episode, and hadn’t had time to follow up. But last week I started to remedy that, and today I want to continue.
- While I haven’t been able to find more information about the smuggler’s tunnels, I have found some really dark stuff about the Riker family.
So content warning on this, I’ll be talking about some disturbing stuff RE: chattel slavery, including stories about free black people in NYC being kidnapped and forced into slavery.
I was doing some more reading on John Jay College’s website about slavery in NYC, and learned something that I had no idea about regarding one of the Rikers of Newtown, Queens.
- I wonder if this is something that people raised in New York, who I assume learn New York history in school, learned about? I can’t say since I grew up in Texas and had two years of Texas history.
- But I was reading about the timeline of when chattel slavery ended in New York, and there was a 1799 Gradual Emancipation Law, which basically meant that current enslaved people had to remain enslaved, but the children of enslaved mothers born after the law was passed would be freed. Then in 1817, there was another emancipation law that applied to people who were still enslaved, which took effect in 1827, though apparently as late as 1830, there were still 75 enslaved people recorded in the census.
- So while slavery in NY supposedly ended in 1827, there were still loopholes.
  - First, even after 1827, if an enslaver was visiting NY for nine months or fewer, they could bring enslaved people into NY and that was legally fine.
  - Second, slave ships were allowed to anchor and restock in NY, as long as they weren’t planning to sell any enslaved people within NY. There was even a court case in 1838 about it, which confirmed that a ship was allowed to do this in NY Harbor.
  - Third, if you’re American, I’m sure you’re somewhat familiar with the fugitive slave laws, which were really screwed up. And basically what could happen was agents representing southern slave-owning plantation owners could come to states like NY, where slavery wasn’t legal, and, to read directly from the website kidnap “black persons resembling fugitives.” While I obviously think it’s screwed up that enslaved people couldn’t come to states where slavery was illegal for safe asylum, but also, enslavers from the south could come up to the north and just kidnap random Black people, claim that they resembled a fugitive enslaved person and then bring them down south and enslave them. If they didn’t want to just spirit them away, though, they could also bring their victims to the Court of Special Sessions, which, to read again from the website, was “presided over by former slave holder Richard Riker and his associates known as the ‘Kidnapping Club.’”
    - So of course I read that and was like, yep, there’s no way that’s not one of the Newtown Rikers, and I went to wikipedia and of course saw that that was correct. He was the son of Samuel Riker, a congressman, and Anna Lawrence Riker, of the Lawrence family.
    - Richard Riker was a lawyer who had attended the College of New Jersey, now known as Princeton University, then was a NY assemblymember and district attorney. Also, and I’m reading from Wikipedia now:
      - “He served three non-consecutive terms as the Recorder of New York City between 1815 and 1838. In this position, Riker abused the Fugitive Slave Act to send free blacks to the South to be sold into slavery. By the 1830s, abolitionists considered Riker a member of the “Kidnapping Club”,[3] along with Daniel D. Nash and Tobias Boudinot, who “boasted that he could ‘arrest and send any black to the South.’””
    - I found a really good, but extremely upsetting, article in the Smithsonian Magazine, called “The So-Called ‘Kidnapping Club’ Featured Cops Selling Free Black New Yorkers Into Slavery” about the kidnapping club, that I wanted to read from:
      - “The Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause required northern free cities like New York to return the self-emancipated to their southern enslavers, and the NYPD and officers like Rynders were only too willing to comply, conveniently folding their hatred of black people into their reverence for the nation’s founding document. Armed with the founders’ compromise over slavery, Rynders and his fellow officers, men like Tobias Boudinot and Daniel D. Nash, terrorized New York’s black community from the 1830s up through the Civil War.
      - And, even worse, it often mattered little whether a black person was born free in New York or had in fact escaped bondage; the police, reinforced by judges like the notorious city recorder Richard Riker, sent the accused to southern plantations with little concern and often even less evidence.
      - Thanks to Rynders, Boudinot, and Nash, the New York police department had become an extension of the powerful reach of southern slavery, and each month—and often each week in the summer months—brought news of another kidnapping or capture of a supposed runaway. Black New Yorker John Thomas, for example, was claimed by an enslaver from Louisville, Kentucky. Thomas purportedly fled slavery along the Ohio River, then travelled through Canada, and ultimately found a job as a porter in a Manhattan hotel. In late 1860, Thomas was arrested as a fugitive by the Manhattan police. While in prison, Thomas hastily drafted a note, dropped it out his cell window, and asked a passing boy to give the note to his employer, who submitted a writ of habeas corpus.
      - Unfortunately, the marshal on duty was none other than Rynders, who produced a different black man in response to the writ, and the judge declared the writ satisfied. In the meantime, Thomas’ employer and friends learned, too late, that one of Rynders’ deputies had taken the real John Thomas to Richmond, where he would be transported to Kentucky, lost in the darkness of American slavery, like untold numbers of other kidnapping victims.”
The article also talks about about what happened after the Civil War:
- “Boudinot became a captain in one of the city’s main wards and Rynders became a Democratic elder statesman during and after the war. In fact, New York City, always ready to defend the cotton trade with the South, voted against Lincoln in 1860 and harbored racial conservatives like Wood during the war and after. Embodied by newspapers like The New York Weekly Caucasian, one of the nation’s most prominent promulgators of white supremacist ideology, the city remained an unfriendly place for African Americans.”
There’s a book that came out last year called The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War by Jonathan Daniel Wells, which I’m reading right now. But I wanted to read an excerpt of it that was published on crimereads.com, which relates to Riker, and some of the people he harmed, or tried to harm.
- On a Saturday in March 1834, seven-year-old Henry Scott sat at his desk in the African Free School on Duane Street in Manhattan, practicing his letters as his teacher Mrs. Miller watched. African Free School Number 5 had just opened in 1832 under the direction of African American teacher Jane Parker, and like the other Black schools Number 5 had been absorbed into the public school system. Abruptly the classroom door opened and in walked two men Henry had never seen before. One was a well-dressed southerner, the other a New York sheriff, and they had come for Henry.
- Richmond industrialist Richard Haxall had built a fortune in the 1820s and 1830s by serving as the president of railroads and other businesses, including running his family-owned flour and milling operation, and like other southern businessmen he traveled frequently to New York. Haxall’s daughter would marry the youngest son of Robert E. Lee, connecting one of the region’s most prominent merchant families to one of its leading military families. But the blood and business ties between Wall Street and slavery were too intertwined to untangle. In fact, Haxall’s brother made the city his home, and on this March morning he had come to the school for Black children on family business: he claimed that Henry was Haxall family property, and he intended to take Henry back to slavery.
- Announcing to the teacher and school superintendent that Haxall and the New York sheriff would be arresting Henry as a runaway, the school immediately erupted in chaos. Henry screamed and cried, while his young classmates shouted, “Kidnappers!” and “Let him alone!” and tripped over each other to run out of the school. Some children ran to their parents, while others chased Haxall and his police escort as they left the school with Henry. Pandemonium and disbelief at the brazen arrest of a schoolchild created enough chaos that Haxall could make off with his prey.
- The Black and white abolitionist community in New York sounded the alarm bells and mobilized for the legal battle that everyone knew would now ensue. Haxall and the sheriff dragged Henry before New York City recorder Richard Riker, who sat on the bench in City Hall just blocks from the Duane Street school where Henry had been studying. Black activists like David Ruggles came into all-too-frequent contact with Riker because, as the city recorder, Riker also served as the main judge in the Court of Common Pleas.
- Just blocks removed from Ruggles’s home on Lispenard Street in the middle of Lower Manhattan, but a world away in terms of wealth and privilege, Riker presided over criminal cases in a stately judicial building. The son of a US congressman and the descendant of a prominent Dutch family, Riker had been a district attorney, a second in a number of duels, a member of the New York State Assembly, and a prominent Democratic lawyer in a long and distinguished career. Bald except for a fringe of hair around his ears, with a pointed nose and small chin, “Dickey” Riker as he was known looked more like a clerk or bookkeeper than a distinguished politician. In his early days, he had fought a duel on the shores of Weehawken, just months before Alexander Hamilton would be killed in a duel with Aaron Burr on the same spot. Shot in the leg during the duel, Riker was taken to his home on Wall Street where a surgeon gave him only a one-in-ten chance of saving the leg. “I accept the chance cheerfully . . . do what you can, and by the aid of the Almighty and a fine constitution I may yet save both limb and life.” Though he walked with a limp for the rest of his life, Riker went on to serve the city and the state in a number of important political and legal roles, from a committee on the completion of the Erie Canal to the position of recorder.
- By the time Henry Scott appeared before him, Riker had already been serving as the city’s recorder for more than five years. Unfortunately for the city’s Black residents, one of the chief responsibilities of the recorder’s office was to hear cases of people accused of being runaways from southern slavery. Dragged before Riker at all hours of the day and night, accused runaways found themselves before a judge known to sympathize with the South and slaveholders. In fact, Ruggles had publicly named Riker as a key cog in what Ruggles had branded the New York Kidnapping Club in a newspaper editorial. With little more than the word of a white person, and with little concern as to whether the accused was actually a runaway or had been born free, New York’s Black men, women, and children fell prey to kidnapping.
- Riker served his southern masters well, always eager to promote the Union by reaffirming New York’s willing participation in the return of suspected runaways. He was well aware that the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution required so-called fugitives from service (which could only mean escaped slaves) to be handed over to their owners. Many northern states and cities acquiesced reluctantly to the constitutional compromise over slavery, returning runaways only after every attempt to keep them free had been exhausted. Not so in New York City. Although a dedicated band of Black and white activists, lawyers, and politicians stood ready to join the fight to keep an accused fugitive from being returned, the city’s legal and political system was rigged against them.
- Riker made his pro-South stance clear toward the end of one cold November day in 1836 when an alleged runaway was brought before him. An agent representing a southern slave owner had claimed a fugitive and appeared before Riker to make his case. The recorder had a message for the southern agent: “Tell your southern citizens that we Northern Judges damn the Abolitionists—we are sworn to abide by the Constitution. Tell your Southern citizens that the great body of the northern people are all right.” As Riker knew, the city teamed with pro-South and even proslavery Democrats, many of them Wall Street merchants, Irish laborers, members of Tammany Hall, and others who actively sought ways to entrap Black residents in the web of the kidnapping club. Riker unabashedly positioned himself near the center of the web. . . .
- As a sobbing and terrified Henry sat before Riker at the start of the hearing, it became quite clear that Riker intended to live up to his reputation as the friend of southern masters. Richard Haxall claimed that Henry actually belonged to his mother, Clara Haxall, and that he had entered the courtroom to claim Henry on her behalf. New York law required that agents acting on behalf of owners had to present proof that they were an official and documented representative of the slave owner, but Haxall had no such proof. Riker could have released Henry then and there, but instead, unsure about what course to take since he was convinced that Henry was in fact a fugitive, he ordered the young child to jail while Haxall was given time to produce his father’s will. In the meantime, Henry’s classmates had begun raising money for his legal defense. By gathering pennies from parents and the Black community, the children in the city’s public schools helped to release Henry from the clutches of the New York Kidnapping Club, one of the few to escape from the long and powerful reach of Boudinot, Nash, and Riker.

Sources consulted RE: Smuggler’s Ghost and Tunnels in Astoria, NY

Books RE:

Articles RE: Smuggler’s Ghost Astoria

Brooklyn Times Union Sat Sep 4 1869
Another Haunted House in Astoria. Evening Post (published as The Evening Post.) (New York, New York)November 23, 1858
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Sun Jul 18 1886
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Wed Dec 27 1893
Brooklyn Times Union Sat Mar 7 1925
Brooklyn Times Union Thu Nov 22 1934
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Sun Jul 11 1937
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Thu Nov 22 1934
The Courier Fri Feb 2 1900
Image 18 of The sun (New York [N.Y.]), January 14, 1900
Evening Post published as The Evening Post. November 23 1858
New York Tribune published as New-York Tribune. November 23 1858
Brooklyn Times Union Mon Oct 25 1909
The New York herald (New York, N.Y.), February 13, 1921, (SECTION 6)
Brooklyn Times Union Thu Jun 28 1888
GOLD GHOST WALKS IN ASTORIA HOUSE: Psychic Expert, Called to Old … New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 21, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 2
POLICEMEN’S QUEST FOR GHOSTS FUTILE: Three Carloads Go to Astoria’s … New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 22, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 1
The evening world (New York, N.Y.), December 30, 1889, (EXTRA 2 O’CLOCK)
The Appeal Sat Feb 24 1900
The Inter Ocean Sun Jan 21 1900
The Evening World Wed Nov 29 1893
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Thu Apr 19 1928
The Tonganoxie Mirror Thu Jul 19 1883
Reading Times Mon Jan 20 1896 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Sun Nov 8 1885 (1)
The evening world (New York, N.Y.), December 30, 1889, (EXTRA 2 O’CLOCK) https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030193/1889-12-30/ed-1/?sp=3&q=astoria+ghost&r=-0.026,0.482,0.453,0.19,0
The times (Washington [D.C.]), December 19, 1897: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85054468/1897-12-19/ed-1/?sp=8&q=astoria+ghost&r=0.109,0.598,0.884,0.371,0
Image 18 of The sun (New York [N.Y.]), January 14, 1900: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030272/1900-01-14/ed-1/?sp=18&q=astoria+ghost&r=0.489,0.945,0.683,0.365,0
Image 8 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]), January 7, 1919: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1919-01-07/ed-1/?sp=8&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.385,0.216,0.487,0.205,0
Image 7 of The sun (New York [N.Y.]), February 17, 1919: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030431/1919-02-17/ed-1/?sp=7&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.569,0.553,0.276,0.116,0
Image 10 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]), February 10, 1906: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1906-02-10/ed-1/?sp=10&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.719,0.853,0.417,0.223,0
Image 4 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]), September 30, 1905
Image 21 of The New York herald (New York, N.Y.), May 27, 1921: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1921-05-27/ed-1/?sp=21&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.342,0.678,0.311,0.166,0
Image 16 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]), October 5, 1904: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1904-10-05/ed-1/?sp=16&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.323,1.204,0.323,0.173,0
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Nov 22, 1934 · Page 8: https://bplonsite.newspapers.com/image/576215460
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Sun, Jul 11, 1937 · Page 8: https://bplonsite.newspapers.com/image/52695146
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Nov 22, 1934 · Page 24: https://bplonsite.newspapers.com/image/59991092
https://www.qgazette.com/articles/pages-from-the-long-island-star-journal-9/
Image 18 of The sun (New York [N.Y.]), January 14, 1900: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030272/1900-01-14/ed-1/?sp=18&q=astoria+ghost&r=0.555,0.033,0.321,0.148,0
Buffalo Morning Express and Illustrated Buffalo Express Tue Nov 13 1894

Websites consulted RE: Smuggler’s Ghost Astoria

“The So-Called ‘Kidnapping Club’ Featured Cops Selling Free Black New Yorkers Into Slavery,” Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/so-called-kidnapping-club-featured-new-york-cops-selling-free-blacks-slavery-180976055/
https://crimereads.com/the-kidnapping-club-that-terrorized-african-americans-in-19th-century-new-york/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Riker
https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/dating-the-start-and-end-of-slavery-in-new-york/
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/li-press-1968_large.htm
https://www.geni.com/people/David-Provoost-II/6000000002766404071
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Provost
https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/2021/01/02/jones-woods-cemeteries/
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-0c20-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Los Angeles Herald, Volume 33, Number 108, 17 January 1906 https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=LAH19060117.2.18&e=——-en–20–1–txt-txIN——–1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Thant_Island
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/u-thant-island
Records of enslaved people in Newtown, Queens: https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/search/?appSession=5MCUK448ECO579156B8UL5N69FD4FP9HR01OXX509Z67L48DL4CAXL8EEI52U669I1O38XF12FE61JXWM4Y10N2Z9JAN9LHJU8BN2285018P4549838QC2RQ2L4EH2QX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Garfield#Assassination
http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/33/v33i01p029-034.pdf
https://kellykazek.com/2018/06/25/bet-you-didnt-know-about-this-haunted-american-castle/
https://time.com/96533/thieves-break-into-james-a-garfields-tomb/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborg
https://newtownpentacle.com/2009/06/13/a-big-dig-in-queens/
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/who-really-ran-the-underground-railroad/
https://www.6sqft.com/15-underground-railroad-stops-in-new-york-city/
https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/search/?appSession=1WXJ2370QHI6H9C815459UHS4F9AVG7ZNZ5RH7T39B21KWP081R95709VQVLNQPWX8M9A7IO8M3W22FY550M360BW077FZ21H52A90IQ93SZZS0A870A6XT8EJ4V78I8
https://www.6sqft.com/search-over-35000-records-of-slavery-in-new-york/
https://www.6sqft.com/before-nycs-slave-market-freedmen-from-africa-were-allowed-to-own-farmland/
https://www.6sqft.com/in-the-1700s-there-was-an-official-location-for-buying-selling-and-renting-slaves-on-wall-street/
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/1873_Beers_Map_of_Astoria,_Queens,_New_York_City_-_Geographicus_-_Astoria-beers-1873.jpg
https://oana-ny.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/old_astoria_map_1873_bg-1024×666.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1873_Beers_Map_of_Astoria,_Queens,_New_York_City_-_Geographicus_-_Astoria-beers-1873.jpg
https://shop.old-maps.com/new-york/towns/kings-queens-cos-ny-1859-town/astoria-new-york-1859-old-town-map-custom-print-queens-co/
https://cdn2.bigcommerce.com/n-zfvgw8/wkatj7/products/109812/images/126869/LongIslandCity_Astoria_MiddleVillage_1873_web__84173.1548088614.1280.1280.jpg?c=2
https://www.mapsofantiquity.com/store/Antique_Maps_-_United_States/Northeast/New_York/Long_Island/Astoria,_New_York,_verso_Woodside,_Maspeth,_East_Williamsburg,_Newtown/inventory.pl?id=NYO016
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/medny/astoria.jpg
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/medny/halsall7.asp
https://forgotten-ny.com/2002/02/astoria-necrology/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2002/02/astoria-necology-continued/
https://cdn6.picryl.com/photo/1903/12/31/queens-vol-2-double-page-plate-no-30-part-of-ward-two-newtown-trains-meadow-6c7e10-1600.jpg
https://www.qchron.com/qboro/stories/you-ain-t-afraid-of-no-ghost-we-ll-see-about-that/article_010ee09d-001f-5505-a643-147da790ecbf.html

Don’t miss past episodes:

Haunted Houses in Astoria, NY (Haunted Astoria)

A look at some 19th century tales of haunted houses in Astoria, NY.

Highlights include:
• A ghost spider
• Debunkings
• A runaway horse

Episode Script for Haunted Houses in Astoria, NY (Haunted Astoria)

• First, let’s look at a story from Long Island City, which is adjacent to Astoria.
• The original article was printed in New York Daily Herald (New York, New York) · Thu, Jan 29, 1874 · Page 8, but I also found parts of it reprinted in the Mower County Transcript (Lansing, Minnesota) · Thu, Feb 12, 1874 · Page 1, in an article called A Long Island Ghost.
• Let’s get into it, I’ll read a bit of the Mower County Transcript article:
§ Long Island City has a new sensation, in the shape of a haunted house, situated on Jackson Avenue.
• Sidenote, the Daily Herald article says that the house was on Dutch Kills road, two miles from Hunter’s point.
§ The landlord, until a couple of weeks ago, has been unable to rent the building for a nominal sum.
• According to the herald, the family said “they were not afraid of ghosts or the Old Boy himself.” Old Boy is capitalized and I assume it means the devil. The family consisted of 5 people, and the house was small, so there were people occupying every room except the parlor and kitchen.
• The residents heard a low moaning sound and the father, Mr. Daley, got up and went into the hall, thinking that someone had a cold because it was a bitterly cold night.
• It seemed like the sound was in the kitchen, but when he went there, he heard it in the parlor, and when he went to the parlor, he heard it in either the kitchen or parlor.
• It sounds like he gave up and went to bed then, since he couldn’t locate the source of the sound.
• A little later, he heard a body fall down the stairs, and he heard “deep sepulchral groans” which apparently came from the garret and the hall. The crockery was thrown out of the cupboards, onto the floor.
• Apparently, the next day, there were more sounds, including someone crying murder and scaring people. One dark thing that the Daily Herald article says “One of the children was so thoroughly frightened that it was thrown into spasm and its life is now despaired of,” and the Mower County Transcript article sadly says says that “One child was so frightened that it was thrown into convulsions and has since died.” WTF?
• Then it says that the premises were “overhauled” but they couldn’t solve the mystery. The Daley family moved out on Wednesday, saying that “they weren’t afraid to stay, but they couldn’t sleep at night.”
New-York Tribune. November 23, 1858
• This was a reprint from the New Jerusalem Messenger, a NYC religious newspaper of the Swedenborgian denomination.
• That religion was started by Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish inventor, scientist, theologian, philosopher, and mystic who experienced dreams and visions and claimed that after a spiritual awakening, he developed the ability to visit Heaven and Hell to talk to angels, demons, and ghosts at will.
• So with that context, let’s get to the article, which was headlined “The Haunted House in Astoria”
• It tells the story of a haunted house that can’t be rented out because it’s so haunted. The former owner was burned to death in the house, and since then, the ghost visited the house every night, making noises opening and closing locked doors without unlocking them, opening windows and tossing plates onto the grass outside, while leaving some of the plates still in the cabinets, and scaring the watchdog so much that he would run to his owner, thinking he was in danger.
• This has real poltergeist vibes.
• The story was relayed by a former tenant, a military man, who had to leave because whenever he hired servants, they would quit. Though I bet he was freaked out too.
• Over the previous summer, the house had stood empty, and the newspaper sent reporters to investigate the house. They encountered nothing, and theorized that maybe rats were making the noises.
• Since the house was unoccupied, the owner found a poor family to live there for free. At first, housekeeper–which I assume was the wife of the family–said there was no haunting. But then she told a neighbor that “Sure enough, there is a ghost in the house.”
§ She then produced evidence by fastening strong black thread to a large needle, sewing it to a pincushion on the table, and then having both the needle and thread disappear. She looked for them, and eventually found them. I’ll read from the article which reports that she saw:
- - “high up, the needle still fastened to the thread, but suspended and hanging downwards, while the rest of the thread was most curiously woven together, and adhered to the shutter, without anything to hold it. This supernatural work could not, of course, be done by any one but a ghost. Ellen Green, an intelligent young woman, after attentively listening to her neighbor, went with her to the haunted house to examine this mysterious thread and needle. Sure enough there were the thread and needle as described. But anxious to solve the mystery, she picked up the thread from the shutter, and perceived that it had adhered by means of a spider’s web, and just above she beheld the ghost in the shape of a hideous large black spider–a most fitting representative of all ghost stories, as spiders’ webs correspond to falses and treachery.”
I also wanted to talk about some ghostly false alarms, as a reminder that these sorts of stories should be taken with a large grain of salt. So let’s look at a story from the same day in The Evening Post:
- “Another Hanted House in Astoria” The_Evening_Post.___November_23_1858
  • This story begins: “Astoria seems to be full of ghosts. We yesterday published the story of the haunted house in Astoria. Today we have another from the same correspondent.
  • This article tells the story of a roadside inn, where a landlord had died. Then, if a guest tried to stay in the room where he died, his ghost would “shake him out.” Not totally sure what that means, but to read a bit of it: “Several having tried and got a good shaking, the use of the chamber had to be abandoned.”
  • But then, on one cold night, a weary traveler stayed in the room, since it was the only vacant one. I’ll read a bit more:
  • “As he was very tired, he determined that no ghost should shake him out. But he had no sooner dropped asleep than the whistling of the wind, the creaking of rusty hinges, and a violent shaking of his bed awoke him. Nothing daunted, but with the right spirit of inquiry, he concluded that the natural results must have natural causes.”
  • And to make a long story short, he decided that the shaking and creaking came from the inn’s swinging sign, which was attached to a loose beam that went into the room. And that the bed rested against. So he moved the bed to the middle of the room and wasn’t awoken again.
- Seems like a false alarm:
  Ghost Horse
  • The June 28, 1888 issue of the Brooklyn Times Union has a story headlined “It was a White Horse And something that Looked like a Red-headed Ghost Leading it”
  • It relays the story of one John Thompson, who was apparently a well-known figure in Astoria, and who resided near “Cook’s training stables”
  • I can’t quite say where Cook’s training stables are, though I assume they’re in Astoria. I looked at a map of old Astoria in 1873, and there were several livery stables near the water, so perhaps it’s one of those, though it could also just not be on that map
  • One night, Thompson heard a horse moving around the yard, and he started to get dressed so he could catch the horse and bring it back to the stable.
  • When he went outside, he saw the horse quietly eating grass in near an Alderman Gibson’s house. He was about to lead the house away, when he heard a window open and a woman yell: “Take that horse out of this yard, sir. How dare you bring your horse in here to eat our grass?”
  • Then the horse turns around, the woman sees the man in a white robe, and supposedly yelled to her husband that “there was a red-headed ghost in the yard leading a white horse.”
  • I’m sharing this story for several reasons. One, it shows what kind of anticlimatic nonsense newspapers used to print back then. It almost feels like they were just trying to fill column inches. Two, it shows how easily people can mistake very normal things for the paranormal.
One thing I meant to mention last week but forgot to put in the correct section of my notes:
Hermit Cave
- • I found a Brooklyn Daily Eagle article from October 22, 1899, that detailed historic homes in the area of Elmhurst, which is just east of Astoria, and it mentions an old hermit cave in Trains Meadow, which was a swampy part of the area: “A near neighbor of the Morrel house is the old Sackett residence, since modernized into a mansion. It was a spacious structure and the rooms were exceedingly well finished. A circular mound in the woods opposite is, according to tradition, the remains of a hermit’s cell, whose story was the subject of a romance.”
  The article doesn’t say what this story was.

Sources consulted RE: Haunted Houses in Astoria (and the Haunted Astoria series)

Books RE: Haunted Houses in Astoria

Articles RE: Haunted Houses in Astoria

Mower County Transcript (Lansing, Minnesota) · Thu, Feb 12, 1874 · Page 1
New-York Tribune. November 23, 1858
“Another Hanted House in Astoria” The Evening Post.. November 23, 1858
“It was a White Horse And something that Looked like a Red-headed Ghost Leading it.” June 28, 1888 Brooklyn Times Union
New York Daily Herald (New York, New York) · Thu, Jan 29, 1874 · Page 8
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Jan 29, 1874 · Page 3
POLICEMEN’S QUEST FOR GHOSTS FUTILE: Three Carloads Go to Astoria’s … New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 22, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 12
GOLD GHOST WALKS IN ASTORIA HOUSE: Psychic Expert, Called to Old … New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 21, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 21
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Nov 22, 1934 · Page 24
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Sun, Jul 11, 1937 · Page 8
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Nov 22, 1934 · Page 8
Brooklyn Times Union Sat Sep 4 1869
Another Haunted House in Astoria. Evening Post (published as The Evening Post.) (New York, New York)November 23, 1858
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Sun Jul 18 1886
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Wed Dec 27 1893
Brooklyn Times Union Sat Mar 7 1925
Brooklyn Times Union Thu Nov 22 1934
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Sun Jul 11 1937
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Thu Nov 22 1934
The Courier Fri Feb 2 1900
Image 18 of The sun (New York [N.Y.]), January 14, 1900
Evening Post published as The Evening Post. November 23 1858
New York Tribune published as New-York Tribune. November 23 1858
Brooklyn Times Union Mon Oct 25 1909
The New York herald (New York, N.Y.), February 13, 1921, (SECTION 6)
Brooklyn Times Union Thu Jun 28 1888
GOLD GHOST WALKS IN ASTORIA HOUSE: Psychic Expert, Called to Old … New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 21, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 2
POLICEMEN’S QUEST FOR GHOSTS FUTILE: Three Carloads Go to Astoria’s … New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 22, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 1
The evening world (New York, N.Y.), December 30, 1889, (EXTRA 2 O’CLOCK)
The Appeal Sat Feb 24 1900
The Inter Ocean Sun Jan 21 1900
The Evening World Wed Nov 29 1893
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Thu Apr 19 1928
The Tonganoxie Mirror Thu Jul 19 1883
Reading Times Mon Jan 20 1896 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Sun Nov 8 1885 (1)
The evening world (New York, N.Y.), December 30, 1889, (EXTRA 2 O’CLOCK) https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030193/1889-12-30/ed-1/?sp=3&q=astoria+ghost&r=-0.026,0.482,0.453,0.19,0
The times (Washington [D.C.]), December 19, 1897: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85054468/1897-12-19/ed-1/?sp=8&q=astoria+ghost&r=0.109,0.598,0.884,0.371,0
Image 18 of The sun (New York [N.Y.]), January 14, 1900: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030272/1900-01-14/ed-1/?sp=18&q=astoria+ghost&r=0.489,0.945,0.683,0.365,0
Image 8 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]), January 7, 1919: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1919-01-07/ed-1/?sp=8&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.385,0.216,0.487,0.205,0
Image 7 of The sun (New York [N.Y.]), February 17, 1919: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030431/1919-02-17/ed-1/?sp=7&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.569,0.553,0.276,0.116,0
Image 10 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]), February 10, 1906: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1906-02-10/ed-1/?sp=10&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.719,0.853,0.417,0.223,0
Image 4 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]), September 30, 1905
Image 21 of The New York herald (New York, N.Y.), May 27, 1921: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1921-05-27/ed-1/?sp=21&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.342,0.678,0.311,0.166,0
Image 16 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]), October 5, 1904: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1904-10-05/ed-1/?sp=16&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.323,1.204,0.323,0.173,0
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Nov 22, 1934 · Page 8: https://bplonsite.newspapers.com/image/576215460
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Sun, Jul 11, 1937 · Page 8: https://bplonsite.newspapers.com/image/52695146
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Nov 22, 1934 · Page 24: https://bplonsite.newspapers.com/image/59991092
https://www.qgazette.com/articles/pages-from-the-long-island-star-journal-9/
Image 18 of The sun (New York [N.Y.]), January 14, 1900: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030272/1900-01-14/ed-1/?sp=18&q=astoria+ghost&r=0.555,0.033,0.321,0.148,0
Buffalo Morning Express and Illustrated Buffalo Express Tue Nov 13 1894

Websites consulted RE: Haunted Houses in Astoria

“The So-Called ‘Kidnapping Club’ Featured Cops Selling Free Black New Yorkers Into Slavery,” Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/so-called-kidnapping-club-featured-new-york-cops-selling-free-blacks-slavery-180976055/
https://crimereads.com/the-kidnapping-club-that-terrorized-african-americans-in-19th-century-new-york/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Riker
https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/dating-the-start-and-end-of-slavery-in-new-york/
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/li-press-1968_large.htm
https://www.geni.com/people/David-Provoost-II/6000000002766404071
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Provost
https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/2021/01/02/jones-woods-cemeteries/
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-0c20-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Los Angeles Herald, Volume 33, Number 108, 17 January 1906 https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=LAH19060117.2.18&e=——-en–20–1–txt-txIN——–1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Thant_Island
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/u-thant-island
Records of enslaved people in Newtown, Queens: https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/search/?appSession=5MCUK448ECO579156B8UL5N69FD4FP9HR01OXX509Z67L48DL4CAXL8EEI52U669I1O38XF12FE61JXWM4Y10N2Z9JAN9LHJU8BN2285018P4549838QC2RQ2L4EH2QX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Garfield#Assassination
http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/33/v33i01p029-034.pdf
https://kellykazek.com/2018/06/25/bet-you-didnt-know-about-this-haunted-american-castle/
https://time.com/96533/thieves-break-into-james-a-garfields-tomb/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborg
https://newtownpentacle.com/2009/06/13/a-big-dig-in-queens/
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/who-really-ran-the-underground-railroad/
https://www.6sqft.com/15-underground-railroad-stops-in-new-york-city/
https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/search/?appSession=1WXJ2370QHI6H9C815459UHS4F9AVG7ZNZ5RH7T39B21KWP081R95709VQVLNQPWX8M9A7IO8M3W22FY550M360BW077FZ21H52A90IQ93SZZS0A870A6XT8EJ4V78I8
https://www.6sqft.com/search-over-35000-records-of-slavery-in-new-york/
https://www.6sqft.com/before-nycs-slave-market-freedmen-from-africa-were-allowed-to-own-farmland/
https://www.6sqft.com/in-the-1700s-there-was-an-official-location-for-buying-selling-and-renting-slaves-on-wall-street/
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/1873_Beers_Map_of_Astoria,_Queens,_New_York_City_-_Geographicus_-_Astoria-beers-1873.jpg
https://oana-ny.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/old_astoria_map_1873_bg-1024×666.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1873_Beers_Map_of_Astoria,_Queens,_New_York_City_-_Geographicus_-_Astoria-beers-1873.jpg
https://shop.old-maps.com/new-york/towns/kings-queens-cos-ny-1859-town/astoria-new-york-1859-old-town-map-custom-print-queens-co/
https://cdn2.bigcommerce.com/n-zfvgw8/wkatj7/products/109812/images/126869/LongIslandCity_Astoria_MiddleVillage_1873_web__84173.1548088614.1280.1280.jpg?c=2
https://www.mapsofantiquity.com/store/Antique_Maps_-_United_States/Northeast/New_York/Long_Island/Astoria,_New_York,_verso_Woodside,_Maspeth,_East_Williamsburg,_Newtown/inventory.pl?id=NYO016
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/medny/astoria.jpg
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/medny/halsall7.asp
https://forgotten-ny.com/2002/02/astoria-necrology/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2002/02/astoria-necology-continued/
https://cdn6.picryl.com/photo/1903/12/31/queens-vol-2-double-page-plate-no-30-part-of-ward-two-newtown-trains-meadow-6c7e10-1600.jpg
https://www.qchron.com/qboro/stories/you-ain-t-afraid-of-no-ghost-we-ll-see-about-that/article_010ee09d-001f-5505-a643-147da790ecbf.html

Don’t miss past episodes:

The Gold and Ghost Haunted House in Astoria (Haunted Astoria)

When a series of dangerous paranormal events plagues a home, famed psychical researcher and author Hereward Carrington is called in to investigate the “Gold and Ghost” haunted house in Astoria

In 1934, a 30-year-old man and his 80-year-old housekeeper supposedly experienced a series of paranormal events at their home in Astoria, NY. One of their tenants was strangled (non-fatally) in bed, the housekeeper and her German Shepherd were thrown to the ground hard enough to break limbs, and the man was visited in the night by a shadow person-type ghost who told him that there was gold buried underneath his basement. The story just gets weirder from there, and even famed researcher Hereward Carrington wasn’t able to untangle the details. To this day, questions remain about this story full of strange contradictions and puzzling details.

Highlights include:
• An abandoned secret passageway
• Psychics confirming a ghost’s claim
• A stumped paranormal investigator
• Buried treasure

Episode Script The Gold and Ghost Haunted House in Astoria (Haunted Astoria)

This is probably most famous haunted house type case in Astoria, which actually involved famous psychical researcher Hereward Carrington coming to Astoria. He was actually the head of the American Psychical Research Institute.
I read an article in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Sun, Jul 11, 1937 that had more background info on him. This article, funnily enough, was printed right next to a huge advertisement for a chain of funeral homes in Brooklyn.
It had a striking description of him:
- Dr. Hereward Carrington . . . A keenly intent man with magnetic gray eyes and a shock of graying hair, leaned forward it his chair and revealed fascinating ghostly data. He believes in ghosts, though he has exposed as many fraudulent spirits as he has made friends with honest-to-goodness spooks in years of psychical research.
It goes on to talk about how he’s been doing a survey of haunted houses, and “The search for haunted houses gravitated Dr. Carrington towards Astoria some time ago, where he spent considerable time in the famous ghost and gold house. Even now, three years later, he is reluctant to speak much about that adventure. He is inclined to be modest about frauds he has shown up and more reticent to boast about the ghosts who are his friends. There is too much of this tongue-in-your-cheek attitude about ghostly things in this country, he feels. Whereas abroad, especially in his native England, the subject of psychic phenomena is taken seriously.”
The article goes on to say that Carrington was born in England, but went to the university of Iowa. He got interested in the paranormal bc of his interest in amateur stage magic. He said that he wasn’t a spiritualist, and was a normal person who liked to play bridge and tennis. His interest in the paranormal came from scientific interest rather than an emotional loss.
Here’s what he was quoted to say about the paranormal:
“[I] don’t believe there is any such thing as the supernatural. Rather it is the supernormal. There are countless sources of nature that have not yet been discovered and every now and then give some indications of their being. In England, for instance, the subject of psychic phenomena is respectable. Groups study it at Oxford and Cambridge. But that is not so, here.”
The article goes on to describe his philosophy: “People who don’t believe in ghosts, he admitted, are afraid of them. People who do believe, are actually fond of their ghostly friends. At least, they are interested in them. He will scoff down traditional ghost stories that crop up and point out how the power of suggestion has worked.”
I kind agree with that. The article also says:
- “No astronomical genius has ever seen Mars with the naked eye, yet science readily accepts Mars as something that actually exists.”
Then the article turns back to the Astoria story:
- “But that Astoria ghost story was just the old power of suggestion theory, Dr. Carrington revealed. A young Sicilian and his housekeeper, an elderly Irish woman, reported to Dr. Carrington that they heard footsteps on the Astoria shack they wished to fix up for renting purposes. A woman tenant in the house was strangled one night in bed. The misty figure on the stairway appeared one night and admonished them: “Don’t be afraid; there’s a fortune buried in the cellar.’”
The Sicilian man apparently used to own a beauty parlor, and apparently his las name was Basulca.
A NYT article from 1934 said that the woman who was strangled–who did not die, btw–had fingerprints on her throat after. The article also claimed that the original owner of the house had supposedly strangled his daughter in the room where the boarder lived.
- “One night, as the Italian beauty specialist lay asleep, something awakened him. Sitting on his bed was an indistinguishable shape–not the conventional ghost of fiction, all draped in white–but something dark. He knew from its voice that it was the shade of the woman who had been murdered.
- “‘Do not be afraid of me,’ it said. ‘Go on with our digging. There will be no rest for me until you find what you seek.’”
That detail is interesting. Doesn’t it sound like maybe her body was buried in the basement, and that was why she couldn’t get rest until the “treasure” in the basement was found? Wouldn’t you lie to someone to get them to dig up your body, if you were a ghost who was concerned with that sort of thing.
To go back to the Brooklyn Daily eagle article, the man dug a lot:
“He dug and dug so deep that the dirt completely filled the cellar. He struck a cement wall, broke through that, but found no treasure. Dr. Carrington brought three mediums to the scene and each one told of the buried treasure. Then the ghost story really became exciting. A big dog was picked up and thrown down, one day, and limped forever after. The elderly housekeeper was knocked down by the ghostly body.”
“‘As events finally turned out,’ Dr. Carrington said, ‘the ghost proved to be a myth. The building department made the young man stop digging. He eventually moved away and the house was done over and there haven’t been any tales of ghosts lately.’”
- I don’t understand what “done over” means in this context, but I think it must mean examined, because according to tax records from 1940, the building that stood there had been there since 1908.
- Also, the article doesn’t explain why Carrington thought this story was fake. It doesn’t refute the things that happened, it just ends. And Carrington said some things that made it seem like he thought the haunting might be real. So let’s get into it.
This story supposedly takes place at 30-35 31st Street in Astoria, though I’ll talk a bit about how descriptions of the home make it seem like maybe it happened elsewhere. However, articles in both The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and Brooklyn Times Union published on Nov 22, 1934, which were written after police visited the home and gave the address, both say that’s the address, so I’m inclined to believe t.
Today, the N/W trains run on an aboveground track right on 31st street, and the elevated train was there back in the 1930s as well. The building was off of 30th avenue (as you can tell by the 30 before the dash in its address)
- Nowadays, there’s a decent sized apartment building there that was constructed in 2006, where you can currently rent a 1 bedroom apt there for $1,750/month, with the first month free. That’s a pretty middle of the road price for the neighborhood these days, though it’s pretty cheap by NYC standards. I think the interior of the apartment is not the best looking, but it’s in a big building and they allow pets.
- I did find an old 1939-1941 tax photo of the building that used to be there, which was built in 1901.
  - The old building looks like it was 2 stories, with a basement with windows that start at the level of the sidewalk. There’s a brick stoop of 3 steps that leads up to the front door, which looks really cool: it’s like a double door that opens in the center, has windows inset in them, and some nice octagonal molding. There’s a driveway in the side, with a garage behind it, which I suspect maybe held carriages or horses or something before cars were popular.
  - The building is continually described as a shack, but it looks nice in the 1940 picture. I think that they likely added the details of it being rundown to add to the ambiance of the ghost story.
- So let’s go back to 1934, when this story took place.
There’s a book called New York City Ghost Stories by Charles J. Adams III, which was published in 1996, that has a chapter on this story. He seems to draw mostly from the NYT’s accounts of the hauntings.
I found the two November 1934 articles that it cites:
- POLICEMEN’S QUEST FOR GHOSTS FUTILE: Three Carloads Go to Astoria’s ‘Haunting House’ Only to Get a Cold Reception. New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 22, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index
GOLD GHOST WALKS IN ASTORIA HOUSE: Psychic Expert, Called to Old … New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 21, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 21
The articles are written somewhat sensationally, and it talks about the woman’s “police dog” which NYC Ghost Stories says was a German shepherd.
NYC Ghost Stories says a NYT article that I couldn’t find described the house as “huddled in the growing dark like some sinister prehistoric monster.” However, I found part of that article paraphrased in a syndicated piece printed in the January 1, 1940, issue of the Standard-Speaker in Hazleton, PA.
- This article is interesting to me because it shows the sensationalism that crept into the story to make it interesting news copy. After all, supposedly in 1937, Carrington disavowed the haunting, and here a news service is digging up the story again and embellishing it. The article says:
- “In a certain street in the Borough of Queens in the City of New York, there is a century-old house reputed to be haunted by poltergeists–the German name for ghosts with a mean disposition and a bad temper; spooks that would just as soon crown you with a flat-iron as look at you.”
- So, first, that’s kinda a funny description of poltergeists. Second, it says the house is a century-old, which is not true. Since it was built in 1908, it was only 32 years old in 1940.
- Then it describes a reporter being sent to “this house in Queens, haunted by such totalitarian spooks. He arrived just at dusk. The setting was perfect for a ghost story. Sagging and weather beaten, badly in need of paint, it huddled in the growing dark like some sinister prehistoric monster. The porch was warped. Loose boards creaked under the tread. The Bell sounded deep and hollow somewhere inside. The door opened about two inches and a gray old face, barely distinguishable in the old gloom, and partly hidden by tangled gray hair, peered out. A big shepherd dog growled somewhere behind the old woman’s skirt. When the reporter said he had come from Dr. Carrington, the door opened a little wider and he was admitted into a dark hall. No lights anywhere. He was led into the front room, where furniture, oddly shaped and grotesque in deep shadow, seemed to crowd in upon him and the old woman.”
- The woman then begs the reporter not to use her name or mention the street name, and the reporter asks her if the story is true, and then the woman nods, “her old eyes wild with fear.” Then, basically, it gets dark, she doesn’t turn on the lights, and the reporter leaves and the woman locks the door after him. But it’s written in a way to sound really sinister.
- So there are a few things wrong with this story. One is that the building, based on the 1940 tax photo, looks like it’s a sturdy brick building, like many buildings around here built around that time are. It looks not unlike a building I used to live in that was about the same size and built in the early 1910s, which is has a brick exterior that is in great condition today. So if it’s brick, how can it be sagging and in need of paint? Also, the tax photo shows a stoop, but no porch. Either 1) the address I found in an article for this house is incorrect, or 2) the house’s appearance was made up and exaggerated for effect. My guess is that the second is more likely.
- The article also had a very dramatic description of what happened in the house: “the little old woman was going about her affairs on the lower floor of the house, her big German shepherd dog at her heels. All at once something–something–lifted the dog six or seven feet in the air and slammed it back to the floor with terrible force. As it lay there whimpering, unable to get up, the old woman knelt down on her knees by its side. She found that both its hindlegs were broken. Six weeks later an invsible malevolence lifted the little old woman off her feet and violently hurled her to the floor, breaking her left leg and left arm.”
- The article doesn’t mention the Sicilian man at all, the gold in the cellar, or other parts of the haunting that other articles mention, which makes me think even more that this one is mostly highly embellished/somewhat fictional.
But to return to the 1934 NYT article I was able to find, that described three carloads of cops showing up at the house at 9 am. It also mentions that the house was “an ancient mansion” and it mentions the “sagging boards of the porch” though the article is embellished enough that it seems like that could just be a creative flourish. Though in another 1934 NYT article, I also saw the house described as a 100 year old frame house.
- But basically, the cops said they’d read about the case in the newspaper, and had heard that she dug up the cellar. NYC Ghost Stories claims that the cops visited not to investigate the ghost story, but because they didn’t have a permit to dig for gold in the cellar.
- The cops asked about the pit, which had supposedly been dug 20 feet deep and 10 feet wide, in the search for gold. The old woman denied everything and said there had been no ghost, and Carrington had never visited. She said she had the hole dug to have a cool place to store vegetables during the summer.
- They went to the basement and “encountered great mounds of earth that had been taken out of the pit. There were large boulders that had obviously been lifted out with back-breaking effort. And then, finally, there was the pit itself, a deep, yawning hole. All around the inner walls of it were huge plants, apparently used for shoring. Near by was a pail and a shovel, as if the digging were either still in progress or only recently abandoned.”
- Then it describes how a reporter who had come along with the cops “stopped dead in his tracks, startled. ‘There’s a man hanging from that beam,’ he said, pointing.”
- Apparently “‘the man’ was only a curious mannikin made of accordion tissue. No one explained THAT, not even the woman proprietor. She and the growling dog stayed upstairs.”
- The cops continued going through the basement, and encountered a tunnel, obviously of great antiquity. This, it is understood, was originally a passageway leading from the old house to a near-by church which has long since been torn down.”
- That detail is really interesting to me, because if there was supposedly gold hidden in your basement, you’d probably think it’d be hidden in the already existing tunnel, not randomly under the floor?
- The cops questioned the woman some more, and she eventually admitted that Carrington had visited, but she claimed there were no ghosts. The cops then demanded that she have the hole filled in, because it could damage the foundation of the house.
- When the NYT contacted Carrington for a statement, he said that the American Psychical Research Institute had no connection to the investigation–he said it was a personal investigation. The way he said it made it sound like the investigation had happened a while before, maybe even years before? So that’s sort of interesting. I guess the story took a while to get out.
  - Carrington basically then said that he wasn’t able to do a proper investigation because the owners wanted it to be conducted under “absolute secrecy” so it sounds like he wasn’t able to confirm or deny the hauntings. He did mention that several mediums who he brought, who hadn’t been told about the supposed gold in the basement, all confirmed that there was gold buried beneath the house.
- But apparently Carrington and his wife had visited the home 3 times to investigate, and at least according to the NYT, “Nothing that occurred during the visits of the Carringtons indicated that the forces behind the tricks that disturbed the household were of human origin. They were unable to explain the happenings.”
The closing line of The Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Nov 22, 1934 · Page 8 says: “Whether there is gold or ghosts in the Astoria home will probably remain a mystery because Mrs. Sheehan’s big police dog does not like visitors.”

Sources consulted RE: Haunted House in Astoria (and the Haunted Astoria series)

Books consulted RE: Haunted Houses in Astoria

Articles RE: Haunted House in Astoria

POLICEMEN’S QUEST FOR GHOSTS FUTILE: Three Carloads Go to Astoria’s … New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 22, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 12
GOLD GHOST WALKS IN ASTORIA HOUSE: Psychic Expert, Called to Old … New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 21, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 21
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Nov 22, 1934 · Page 24
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Sun, Jul 11, 1937 · Page 8
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Nov 22, 1934 · Page 8
POLICEMEN’S QUEST FOR GHOSTS FUTILE: Three Carloads Go to Astoria’s … New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 22, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index
Standard-Sentinel (Hazleton, Pennsylvania) · Mon, Jan 1, 1940 · Page 6
Mower County Transcript (Lansing, Minnesota) · Thu, Feb 12, 1874 · Page 1
New-York Tribune. November 23, 1858
“Another Hanted House in Astoria” The Evening Post.. November 23, 1858
“It was a White Horse And something that Looked like a Red-headed Ghost Leading it.” June 28, 1888 Brooklyn Times Union
New York Daily Herald (New York, New York) · Thu, Jan 29, 1874 · Page 8
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Jan 29, 1874 · Page 3
POLICEMEN’S QUEST FOR GHOSTS FUTILE: Three Carloads Go to Astoria’s … New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 22, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 12
GOLD GHOST WALKS IN ASTORIA HOUSE: Psychic Expert, Called to Old … New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 21, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 21
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Nov 22, 1934 · Page 24
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Sun, Jul 11, 1937 · Page 8
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Nov 22, 1934 · Page 8
Brooklyn Times Union Sat Sep 4 1869
Another Haunted House in Astoria. Evening Post (published as The Evening Post.) (New York, New York)November 23, 1858
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Sun Jul 18 1886
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Wed Dec 27 1893
Brooklyn Times Union Sat Mar 7 1925
Brooklyn Times Union Thu Nov 22 1934
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Sun Jul 11 1937
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Thu Nov 22 1934
The Courier Fri Feb 2 1900
Image 18 of The sun (New York [N.Y.]), January 14, 1900
Evening Post published as The Evening Post. November 23 1858
New York Tribune published as New-York Tribune. November 23 1858
Brooklyn Times Union Mon Oct 25 1909
The New York herald (New York, N.Y.), February 13, 1921, (SECTION 6)
Brooklyn Times Union Thu Jun 28 1888
GOLD GHOST WALKS IN ASTORIA HOUSE: Psychic Expert, Called to Old … New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 21, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 2
POLICEMEN’S QUEST FOR GHOSTS FUTILE: Three Carloads Go to Astoria’s … New York Times (1923-Current file); Nov 22, 1934; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index pg. 1
The evening world (New York, N.Y.), December 30, 1889, (EXTRA 2 O’CLOCK)
The Appeal Sat Feb 24 1900
The Inter Ocean Sun Jan 21 1900
The Evening World Wed Nov 29 1893
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Thu Apr 19 1928
The Tonganoxie Mirror Thu Jul 19 1883
Reading Times Mon Jan 20 1896 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Sun Nov 8 1885 (1)
The evening world (New York, N.Y.), December 30, 1889, (EXTRA 2 O’CLOCK) https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030193/1889-12-30/ed-1/?sp=3&q=astoria+ghost&r=-0.026,0.482,0.453,0.19,0
The times (Washington [D.C.]), December 19, 1897: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85054468/1897-12-19/ed-1/?sp=8&q=astoria+ghost&r=0.109,0.598,0.884,0.371,0
Image 18 of The sun (New York [N.Y.]), January 14, 1900: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030272/1900-01-14/ed-1/?sp=18&q=astoria+ghost&r=0.489,0.945,0.683,0.365,0
Image 8 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]), January 7, 1919: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1919-01-07/ed-1/?sp=8&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.385,0.216,0.487,0.205,0
Image 7 of The sun (New York [N.Y.]), February 17, 1919: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030431/1919-02-17/ed-1/?sp=7&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.569,0.553,0.276,0.116,0
Image 10 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]), February 10, 1906: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1906-02-10/ed-1/?sp=10&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.719,0.853,0.417,0.223,0
Image 4 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]), September 30, 1905
Image 21 of The New York herald (New York, N.Y.), May 27, 1921: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83045774/1921-05-27/ed-1/?sp=21&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.342,0.678,0.311,0.166,0
Image 16 of New-York tribune (New York [N.Y.]), October 5, 1904: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030214/1904-10-05/ed-1/?sp=16&q=astoria+sanatorium&r=0.323,1.204,0.323,0.173,0
Brooklyn Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Nov 22, 1934 · Page 8: https://bplonsite.newspapers.com/image/576215460
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Sun, Jul 11, 1937 · Page 8: https://bplonsite.newspapers.com/image/52695146
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) · Thu, Nov 22, 1934 · Page 24: https://bplonsite.newspapers.com/image/59991092
https://www.qgazette.com/articles/pages-from-the-long-island-star-journal-9/
Image 18 of The sun (New York [N.Y.]), January 14, 1900: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030272/1900-01-14/ed-1/?sp=18&q=astoria+ghost&r=0.555,0.033,0.321,0.148,0
Buffalo Morning Express and Illustrated Buffalo Express Tue Nov 13 1894

Websites consulted

https://notjustopera.com/steve/vital/nyctaxphotos.php?year=1939-1941&borough=&number=30-35+&street=31st+Street&block=&lot=
https://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet/detail/NYCMA₉9₁₂₆₃₃₂953053:3035-31-Street?sort=borough%2Cblock%2Clot%2Czip_code
https://bplonsite.newspapers.com/image/576215460 Downloaded on Jun 1, 2021
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereward_Carrington
Carrington’s Books: https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Hereward+Carrington%22
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/5832
https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20161028/prospect-lefferts-gardens/creepy-halloween-bridewell-prison-van-cortlandt-manor-astoria-willowbrook/
“The So-Called ‘Kidnapping Club’ Featured Cops Selling Free Black New Yorkers Into Slavery,” Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/so-called-kidnapping-club-featured-new-york-cops-selling-free-blacks-slavery-180976055/
https://crimereads.com/the-kidnapping-club-that-terrorized-african-americans-in-19th-century-new-york/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Riker
https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/dating-the-start-and-end-of-slavery-in-new-york/
https://www.rikerhome.com/press/li-press-1968_large.htm
https://www.geni.com/people/David-Provoost-II/6000000002766404071
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Provost
https://nycemetery.wordpress.com/2021/01/02/jones-woods-cemeteries/
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-0c20-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Los Angeles Herald, Volume 33, Number 108, 17 January 1906 https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=LAH19060117.2.18&e=——-en–20–1–txt-txIN——–1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Thant_Island
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/u-thant-island
Records of enslaved people in Newtown, Queens: https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/search/?appSession=5MCUK448ECO579156B8UL5N69FD4FP9HR01OXX509Z67L48DL4CAXL8EEI52U669I1O38XF12FE61JXWM4Y10N2Z9JAN9LHJU8BN2285018P4549838QC2RQ2L4EH2QX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Garfield#Assassination
http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/33/v33i01p029-034.pdf
https://kellykazek.com/2018/06/25/bet-you-didnt-know-about-this-haunted-american-castle/
https://time.com/96533/thieves-break-into-james-a-garfields-tomb/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborg
https://newtownpentacle.com/2009/06/13/a-big-dig-in-queens/
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/who-really-ran-the-underground-railroad/
https://www.6sqft.com/15-underground-railroad-stops-in-new-york-city/
https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
https://nyslavery.commons.gc.cuny.edu/search/?appSession=1WXJ2370QHI6H9C815459UHS4F9AVG7ZNZ5RH7T39B21KWP081R95709VQVLNQPWX8M9A7IO8M3W22FY550M360BW077FZ21H52A90IQ93SZZS0A870A6XT8EJ4V78I8
https://www.6sqft.com/search-over-35000-records-of-slavery-in-new-york/
https://www.6sqft.com/before-nycs-slave-market-freedmen-from-africa-were-allowed-to-own-farmland/
https://www.6sqft.com/in-the-1700s-there-was-an-official-location-for-buying-selling-and-renting-slaves-on-wall-street/
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/1873_Beers_Map_of_Astoria,_Queens,_New_York_City_-_Geographicus_-_Astoria-beers-1873.jpg
https://oana-ny.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/old_astoria_map_1873_bg-1024×666.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1873_Beers_Map_of_Astoria,_Queens,_New_York_City_-_Geographicus_-_Astoria-beers-1873.jpg
https://shop.old-maps.com/new-york/towns/kings-queens-cos-ny-1859-town/astoria-new-york-1859-old-town-map-custom-print-queens-co/
https://cdn2.bigcommerce.com/n-zfvgw8/wkatj7/products/109812/images/126869/LongIslandCity_Astoria_MiddleVillage_1873_web__84173.1548088614.1280.1280.jpg?c=2
https://www.mapsofantiquity.com/store/Antique_Maps_-_United_States/Northeast/New_York/Long_Island/Astoria,_New_York,_verso_Woodside,_Maspeth,_East_Williamsburg,_Newtown/inventory.pl?id=NYO016
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/medny/astoria.jpg
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/medny/halsall7.asp
https://forgotten-ny.com/2002/02/astoria-necrology/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2002/02/astoria-necology-continued/
https://cdn6.picryl.com/photo/1903/12/31/queens-vol-2-double-page-plate-no-30-part-of-ward-two-newtown-trains-meadow-6c7e10-1600.jpg
https://www.qchron.com/qboro/stories/you-ain-t-afraid-of-no-ghost-we-ll-see-about-that/article_010ee09d-001f-5505-a643-147da790ecbf.html

Don’t miss past episodes:

An Acrobatic Ghost in Woodside (Haunted Queens)

In 1893, a strange, acrobatic ghost dressed all in white appeared in a forest in Woodside, Queens.

The entity that was seen in the 19th century didn’t seem to communicate verbally, though he made strange, chilling sounds. He was able to move on all fours as quickly as an ordinary person could run, and had a penchant for acrobatic stunts like handsprings. It is unclear what happened to this entity, but more than 100 years later, other stories about ghosts in the Woodside seem to be centered in the same area. . . .

Highlights include:
• A UFO sighting
• Ghost hoaxes in Victorian Australia
• A creepy ghost of a 19th century child

Episode Script for An Acrobatic Ghost in Woodside (Haunted Queens)

Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, The Evening News (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania) · Fri, Jul 28, 1893 · Page 4
- This story harkens back to an early episode of this podcast, which was about people dressing up and pretending to be ghosts in Australia, and then ppl chasing after them and trying to shoot them.
- The headline of the article is “Hunting for a Ghost: Long Island Villagers Turn Out with Shotguns: A Gaunt Sheeted Specter Seen: This Particular Goblin Haunted an Old Spring, Where It Scared Children–If the Ghost is Caught he Will Get a Coat of Tar and Feathers”
- It sounds like a group of people who lived in Woodside, which is a neighborhood near Astoria that I used to live in, set off to look for a ghost who had been hanging out around the old town spring and scaring children and chasing women and girls. Very similar to the stories of ppl “playing the ghost” in late 19th century Australia.
- The location of the spring was in some woods near Betts Avenue and Greenpoint Avenue, which according to Forgotten NY, are now 58th Street and Roosevelt Avenue. (However there is still a Greenpoint Avenue near Calvary Cemetery.)
- To read from the article:
  - “This old spring dates back beyond the recollection of the oldest inhabitants, and it is said that it never runs dry. It is the center of a network of paths that lead in from the avenues. The brush around it is taller than a man’s head. During the recent drought more than half the village of Woodside has obtained water from this spring. All day long until late at night groups of children, girls, and women could be seen in all directions with pails in their hands, going to and fro from the spring.”
- So it’s a very old spring, but also very much in use.
- A few days before the article was written, a group of kids were scared away from the spring; it happened a few times the next day, and the children were so frightened that they didn’t even want to go back to the spring to get their pails. A group of women were also scared away from the spring.
- Here’s what apparently happened to everyone:
  - “While bending over drawing water they were stealthily approached from behind by a tall, gaunt individual, dressed entirely in white, who suddenly sprang upon them. The children say he got down on all fours and crawled after them like a ravenous animal. He chased 14-year-old Annie Robinson, whose father keeps a grocery store in Greenpoint avenue, more than a mile before she escaped.”
- The article goes on to list a bunch of different people who saw this entity. One man saw him and chased after him, but, according to the article,
  - “he was not fleetfooted enough and in the dense woods he lost the trail. A search was made by some of the men that night. They discovered a sort of bed and shelter constructed deep in the woods, which was thought to be the rendezvous of the person they were hunting. A watch was left at the place, but no one came.”
- One man from the neighborhood was walking home around midnight and “saw a figure sheeted like a ghost float out of a clump of brush and cut fantastic capers in the road, moving about as silently as a shadow. [The man’s] heart came up in his throat. He says he didn’t make any outcry, but every now and then the ghostly dancer would give utterance to an unearthly shriek that caused his hair to stand on end and made the cold sweat trickle down his back. Then the dogs began to bark, and persons disturbed by the shrieks came to their doors, and the phantom turned a few handsprings and disappeared as suddenly as he came.”
- The article then says that the residents of Woodside were determined to hunt down this person or entity, because the wouldn’t feel safe otherwise. The idea was that they were going to shoot him, or coat him with tar and feathers and beat him.
- There’s also an article headlined “This Ghost is an Acrobat” in The evening world (New York, N.Y.), July 28, 1893, (LAST EDITION) about the Woodside ghost, which calls it “the ghost of the spring.” It quotes people from the neighborhood as saying:
  - “Our ghost turns handsprings and cart-wheels, and it is very long and slender and white, and it makes no noise among the brittle sticks in the woods, except that it screeches with a blood-chilling, unearthly, piercing yell that makes our knees shake and our hair to stand up.”
- - It also talks about the girl who the ghost chased on all fours, and the article says that the entity was almost as fast on all fours as a 14-year-old girl was running, which is odd.
  - It also mentions the man who chased him, and it says that when the ghost screeched while it was running away, the sound momentarily paralyzed the man’s legs so he couldn’t chase it, and then it disappeared into the woods. Maybe that was just out of fear, but is it possible that something else was going on there, something paranormal?
- I didn’t find other articles about the story, though I’m saying this with the caveat that I guess within the last day or two, my NYPL library card expired, which means I couldn’t access the different newspaper databases I usually search. So I searched the LOC newspaper archives, which aren’t as extensive, but they’ll have to do till I can go to Manhattan next to renew my card in person.
- So, a couple things for this story. First, it’s possible that this is the story of an unhomed person who took up residence in the woods. That’s probably the most likely explanation, especially bc they found where this person was apparently living. But there’s some weird stuff in here too, and some aspects of the story that make me think that it’s fairly possible that it could have been something supernatural.
  - For example, why would a random unhomed person be dressed all in white? It doesn’t seem like the most practical color for a person who lives in the woods to be wearing, especially if he’s crawling around and doing handsprings, and if this person was wearing white but covered in mud, I kinda feel like the article may have mentioned that the man’s clothes was filthy, or something similar.
  - Also, why on earth would this person be doing handsprings? That’s a difficult move for anyone but a gymnast to be doing. Like I do a lot of yoga and stuff and can’t even do a cartwheel. Could this person be someone who once worked at the circus? Or was the person who wrote the article just exaggerating, and did this person not do any feat of acrobatics.
- It’s maybe a long stretch to try to claim that this person was actually some sort of supernatural entity, but there were a few interesting things about this story that kinda light some lightbulbs in my mind that I thought might be interesting to talk about.
- One interesting thing is that, like I mentioned, this wood was near present day 58th street and Roosevelt Avenue. There’s a church called Saint Sebastian Roman Catholic Church at Roosevelt Avenue and 58th Street, and the church’s rectory is a block or so away from there. This is just some rando on the internet, but a commentor at ghostsofamerica.com recounts a story about something that happened there, which I wanted to read:

Does anybody know any history background on the field that is near the Saint Sebastian Rectory on 57th Street? There used to be a house, but now it’s just an open field. Many years my sister and I were passing by and we saw a girl standing there. She had a blank stare on her face; she was really pale with long black hair, and her dress looked like it was from the 1800s.

She was there for a second and the she disappeared.

There wasn’t anyone saying anything about the history of the spot, but one commenter said:

Say what you will but I live on 58th and I have a ghost. This ghost has an obsession with ornaments. Every time I come home from work I find ornaments rearranged. It’s like this ghost just wants me to know he or she is there.

I have been trying to figure out if the ghost is trying to tell me something. Is there a way to communicate with this entity. Is there a way I can do this on my own or should I get a hold of an expert. Are there any ghost experts in this area.

I’ll be checking this site for a reply. Thanks.

Again, these are random people on the internet. But there weren’t other accounts of hauntings in Woodside on the site, though there was a link to UFOsentinel.com which has a one story from Woodside, which was an October 2014 UFO sighting. The entry reads:

I have lived here in Woodside on 61st Street since 2000 and have never witnessed anything like I did in October last year. I was with a brother and our dog Jenny. As we were near a church Jenny stopped frozen for about almost a minute.

Then she started to run around my brother like crazy. Then she stopped and stared at these 4 balls of lights. They were flashing yellow and blue and were flying or actually hovering on top of the empty field right by the church.

They were looping around the field for almost 5 minutes. My brother and I (and Jenny) were in shock. We didn’t know what to do. We didn’t have our phone with us, otherwise we would have taken some pictures to prove that theses lights were there for real.

This story leaves a lot of questions hanging: one, while the person lives on 61st street, what street was the empty field on? Could it have been the field by Saint Sebastian’s Rectory? Could the person have mistaken the rectory for a church? (If this is a young person especially, they may not know the difference between a rectory and a church.)
- I couldn’t remember churches near fields in Woodside, since there aren’t many empty fields in Woodside, but I did a google maps search of churches in Woodside, and was’t seeing other church buildings near empty fields, so it seems likely to me that it was the rectory of ST. Sebastian’s church.
- I did look up St. Sebastian to see if he has any relevant associations, and the answer is not really. He’s a pretty famous saint who’s often depicted as being tied to a tree and shot full of arrows. One interesting thing I saw online was a Hartford Currant article from 1997 that told the story of the Sicilian population of Middletown, Ct, who come from a town in Sicily with a real devotion to St. Sebastian, and who have a custom tied to wearing white when honoring St. Sebastian:
  - “Hundreds of men and women dressed in white, called “e nuri” or “the nude” for their bare or sock- covered feet, run through downtown Middletown before the Sunday Mass to thank and honor St. Sebastian for answering their prayers.”
- I only mention that detail because I try to point out coincidences, and I thought the parallel between the white clothes of entity seen in 1893, near the site of today’s ST. Sebastian’s Church, and the present-day devotees of St. Sebastian wearing white and walking around barefoot, was interesting. The barefoot aspect especially interests me, because that’s a very back-to-nature type of thing to do, and we’re talking about a person or entity who lived in the woods. All that being said, there’s likely no connection between the two, aside from the idea that some people wear all white for religious reasons, so that feels like one possibility for why a person might run off to the woods and live alone and dress all in white–could it be a religious thing?
- Oh, also, in case you’re wondering: St. Sebastian’s church was founded in 1894, the year after this article, though it’s only been in its current building since 1952 (the current building apparently used to be the Loew’s Woodside theater, which I wouldn’t have guessed from looking at it.)
So that’s some paranormal stories about Woodside centering around St. Sebastian Church. I’ll pick up next week to talk about some of my more outlandish theories about this Woodside ghost story.

Sources consulted RE: An Acrobatic Ghost in Woodside

Books consulted RE: An Acrobatic Ghost in Woodside

Where the Footprints End: High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon, Volumes I and II by Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner

Articles RE: An Acrobatic Ghost in Woodside

Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, The Evening News (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania) · Fri, Jul 28, 1893 · Page 4
Image 6 of The evening world (New York, N.Y.), July 28, 1893, (LAST EDITION)

Websites consulted

http://www.ghostsofamerica.com/1/New_York_Woodside_ghost_sightings.html
http://www.ufosentinel.com/15/ufosighting_15001130.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Sebastian
https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-1997-02-09-9702090123-story.html
https://occult-world.com/sebastian-st/
https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-2004-11-08-0411080014-story.html
https://forgotten-ny.com/2005/10/woodside-queens-part-1/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2005/10/woodside-queens-part-2/
http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/6406
http://saintsebastianwoodside.org/
http://saintsebastianwoodside.org/about-the-parish/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_man

Don’t miss past episodes:

An Acrobatic Ghost in Woodside: Part 2 (Haunted Queens)

A look at the elements of high strangeness in the 1893 story of a strange, acrobatic ghost in Woodside, Queens.

This episode delves into the Snake Woods and Rattlesnake Spring, the now-vanished wilderness of the New York City neighborhood of Woodside, and looks at the odd parts of the news reports of a ghostly figure. Though it’s possible that the entity was just an unhomed person wandering the dangerous, snake-infested woods, there are enough unusual elements in the story to bear looking at from a perspective of high strangeness.

Highlights include:
• Bigfoot
• Women in White
• Creepy reptiles

Episode Script for An Acrobatic Ghost in Woodside: Part 2

I left off last time talking about St. Sebastian’s Church, the catholic church in Woodside that was located nean of this weird ghost story.
- As a refresher, this was a story from July 1893, about an acrobatic ghost, or maybe an unhomed person, dressed in white and/or wearing a sheet. I’m really torn about whether I think this entity is a ghost or not, and I’m not totally convinced that it was, but I want to explore this topic some more and also go down a bit of a wormhole in terms of whether this ghost fits into the wild man archetype, etc.
- As a reminder, here’s the description of the ghost from The evening world (New York, N.Y.), July 28, 1893:
  - “our ghost turns handsprings and cart-wheels, and it is very long and slender and white, and it makes no noise among the brittle sticks in the woods, except that it screeches with a blood-chilling unearthly, piercing yell that makes our knees shake and our hair to stand up”
- The article also talks about the ghost running around on all fours.
Another reminder from last time is that there were some more recent ghost stories online about the same area where this ghost had been sighted back in the 19th century, and one of which was right near St. Sebastian’s Rectory. The recent sighting (when I say recent, I mean in the last decade or so), described seeing a girl in the empty field near the rectory: “She had a blank stare on her face; she was really pale with long black hair, and her dress looked like it was from the 1800s.” There was also someone online who encountered a UFO type sighting, also possibly in the same area, though it’s a little harder for me to pinpoint that location. St. Sebastian’s Church was founded the year after the ghost was sighted, in 1894, right around where the ghost was seen as well.
I was reading about the history of St. Sebastian’s Church on their website, and it mentioned that in the early days of colonial Woodside, there was a location called “Rattlesnake Spring” near 58th Street in Woodside, which was located either in or near “Snake Woods”.
- Obviously I found that interesting, since the article about the Woodside ghost mentioned that “this old spring dates back beyond the recollection of the oldest inhabitants.”
- So I searched Rattlesnake Spring Woodside and it turns out the Wikipedia page for Woodside mentions this place, so I wanted to read a paragraph from wikipedia about the early years of Woodside:
  - “”For two centuries following the arrival of settlers from England and the Netherlands, the area where the village of Woodside would be established was sparsely populated. The land was fertile, but also wet. Its Native American inhabitants called it a place of “bad waters” and it was known to early European settlers as a place of “marshes, muddy flats and bogs,” where “wooded swamps” and “flaggy pools” were fed by flowing springs.” Until drained in the nineteenth century, one of these wet woodlands was called Wolf Swamp after the predators that infested it. This swamp was not the only place where settlers might fear for the safety of their livestock, and even themselves. One of the oldest recorded locations in Woodside was called Rattlesnake Spring on the property of a Captain Bryan Newton. The vicinity came to be called Snake Woods and one source maintains that “during New York’s colonial period, the area was known as ‘suicide’s paradise,’ as it was largely snake-infested swamps and wolf-ridden woodlands.”””
- More info in another book: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Historical_Guide_to_the_City_of_New_York/v4cGmMe6_okC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Captain+Bryan+Newton+woodside&pg=PA292&printsec=frontcover
- So . . . Sounds like snake woods is not really somewhere you’d want to be hanging out, and it makes sense that the townspeople of Woodside only resorted to returning to the spring during a drought. Also, one thing worth mentioning: I’ve never seen a snake in NYC, but just the other day I was at Mt. Zion Cemetery in Maspeth, which is close to Woodside, and I encountered a family of lizards that lived in a grave and were slithering in and out. So the snakes may be gone, but there are still reptiles around there.
Alright, so I’ve managed to say a lot of weird stuff about this possible haunting, and now I want to stretch your credulity a little further. So, first, I feel like it’s not too much of a stretch to say that this ghost, entity, or person in the woods fits into the wild man archetype.
From wikipedia, here’s the definition of a wild man:
- “The wild man or wild man of the woods is a mythical figure that appears in the artwork and literature of medieval Europe, comparable to the satyr or faun type in classical mythology and to Silvanus, the Roman god of the woodlands.”
There’s also a link between the wild man archetype and bigfoot. So, I’ve mentioned Timothy Renner’s work on this podcast before, but it’s been a while. He’s the host of the podcast Strange Familiars, which if you’re listening to this, you probably already listen to, and he’s also the author of a number of really great books, some of which are about bigfoot.
- I’m going to be honest, bigfoot and cryptids in general aren’t my favorite topic–I’m much more interested in ghosts, for example–but the way Timothy Renner talks about bigfoot is really fascinating. There’re several schools of thought when it comes to bigfoot, and the dominant one, for a long time, was the “flesh and blood” bigfoot hypothesis, basically the idea that there’s an animal living out in the woods, and that animal is what people are seeing during bigfoot encounters. However, there’s also a school of thought that ties bigfoot into high strangeness and that links it to all sorts of paranormal phenomena, including poltergeists, fairies, ghosts, magic, witches, women in white, etc. And Timothy Renner’s work is focused in that second school, and boy does he have some interesting stuff to say about all of that.
- He cowrote two books about this with Joshua Cutchin, called Where the Footprints End: High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon, Volumes I and II, and if any of this sounds even remotely to you, you should buy them and read them, they’re great.
- But when I was thinking about this ghost story, something sort of rang a bell for me, and I thought it was making me think of some anecdotes from these books.
- First, there’s a term that Joshua Cutchin has coined called the wildnesgeist, or basically a wilderness poltergeist, so poltergeist activity out in the woods. In his chapter about the wildnesgeist in Volume I, he quotes a definition of poltergeist activity that paranormal investigator and author once wrote: “rock-and-dirt throwing, flying objects, loud noises, strange lights, and other apparitions, terrible smells, rapping, physical and sexual assaults, and shrieks.”
  - I think it’s worth nothing that the Woodside entity shrieked (and his shrieks maybe had an affect on people’s ability to run away or run after him), and, interestingly, years later in the 2010s, we have that random account of the UFO type lights seen somewhere nearby, as well as some other haunting stories, one of which sounds poltergeist-y. I’m not really trying to make a solid connection between these things, they could just be coincidence and mean nothing. But they’re interesting b/c they fit into a possible pattern and make me wonder if there’s something odd over in that part of Woodside.
- The chapter also talks about how poltergeist “infestations typically begin and end abruptly, rarely exceeding a few months.”
  - We don’t know for sure when the interactions with the entity ended, but they certainly started suddenly, and had only been going on for a few days at the time that they were reported.
- Also, I think most people know that poltergeists are often associated with adolescent girls, or kids going through puberty in general. To read from the wildnesgeist chapter: “Typical poltergeist agents” (people who poltergeists are attracted to) “are young and female, a data point resonant with bigfoot lore. Legends universally describe the creature’s keen interest in young women and children. . . . Poltergeists attach to female youths; youth and females attract bigfoot.”
  - One thing worth noting is that our Woodside wild man attacked children and women, but ran from men. In particular, we know that two 14-year-old girls, Annie Robinson, the daughter of a grocer, and her friend Josie Canton, were chased by the ghost. It seemed like a lot of the kids who the entity scared were around that age or a little younger.
- Volume I has a whole chapter on women and white and white bigfoot sightings, so kinda an intersection between the woman and white and wild man archetypes. So I reread the chapter and wanted to share a few passages. This story about two brothers who’d experienced bigfoot sightings was first recounted on the podcast Sasquatch Chronicles , so to read from the book (258-259):
  - “The brothers lived near each other, in a wooded section of Tennessee. . . . Mick and Matt believed the bigfoot inhabited a wooded ridge line behind their homes. . . .”
- One thing worth noting: a lot of bigfoot sightings happen in kinda small woods near where people live, so not necessarily in the deep darkness away from civilization. That made me think of Snake Woods in Woodside.
- To continue reading:

“‘the two brothers’. . . Had been seeing an old woman in the neighborhood who they thought to be homeless. The brothers described this woman as appearing to be in her 60s, very tall, about 6’5″, and dressed in ragged, dirty white clothes that appeared too small for her frame; and old white shoes that appeared much too big . . . On one particular evening the brothers could hear the bigfoot creatures screaming on the ridge and they saw the old woman crossing their property, heading in the direction of the screaming sasquatches. They assumed the woman was insane and would be killed or injured by the creatures. In the morning, however, they saw the old woman heading back from the ridge. One of the brothers approached her, curiously, and asked her to stop. He wanted to ask her some questions and see if she needed help. The woman ignored him, so he asked again, but she still did not respond. He repeated his request multiple times, raising his voice: ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’ but the old woman walked on as if he was not there. Finally, the brother said ‘I command you to stop!” At this, the old woman stopped, turned to the brother, cracked a sinister, evil grin, and disappeared into thin air. Both brothers witnessed the old woman vanish. The brothers consulted a medium and asked about the old woman. The medium said that the woman was not human, but an entity that appears human. The medium said that the bigfoot creatures were coming out of the earth and that this entity, which appears as an old woman, has control over the bigfoot creatures.”

So, I’m not saying that this man in white is exactly like the archetypal woman in white, or like the archetypal wild man.
There are a lot of standard bigfoot things, like wood knocks, or wild man things, like someone being really hairy and dirty, that just don’t seem to appear in the two articles I was able to find about the topic. And at least for me, the acrobatics that this person did don’t seem to ring a bell for something bigfoot, wild man, or woman and white related to me–the acrobatics stuff seems weird and unlikely, but not definitively paranormal. But I wanted to go into all of this because for whatever reason, I couldn’t stop thinking of some of the stuff I’d read or heard about these other archetypes (even the idea of him being near a spring made me think of bigfoot sightings near running water, for example.)
So maybe this entity was just an ordinary unhomed person, maybe a circus or vaudeville performer who knew acrobatics. Or maybe he was something more paranormal, and had some connection to all the stuff I’ve been talking about. Like most mysteries in both history and the paranormal, I don’t really have a satisfying answer for you.
But I hope you enjoyed hearing about this weird ghost story as much as I enjoyed researching it. I’d thought that I’d end up talking about several different ghost stories in the area of western queens today, but I got so into this one that it became the whole episode.

Sources consulted RE: An Acrobatic Ghost in Woodside

Books consulted RE: An Acrobatic Ghost in Woodside

Articles RE: An Acrobatic Ghost in Woodside

Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, The Evening News (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania) · Fri, Jul 28, 1893 · Page 4
Image 6 of The evening world (New York, N.Y.), July 28, 1893, (LAST EDITION)

Websites consulted

http://www.ghostsofamerica.com/1/New_York_Woodside_ghost_sightings.html
http://www.ufosentinel.com/15/ufosighting_15001130.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Sebastian
https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-1997-02-09-9702090123-story.html
https://occult-world.com/sebastian-st/
https://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-xpm-2004-11-08-0411080014-story.html
https://forgotten-ny.com/2005/10/woodside-queens-part-1/
https://forgotten-ny.com/2005/10/woodside-queens-part-2/
http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/6406
http://saintsebastianwoodside.org/
http://saintsebastianwoodside.org/about-the-parish/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_man

Don’t miss past episodes:

Ghosts of Mount Beacon (Beacon, NY)

A look at the ghosts of Mount Beacon, a mountain named for its role in the Revolutionary War, which once housed a hotel and tourist attractions, and now is a beautiful, ruin-filled place to hike.

The town of Beacon lies about an hour and a half from Manhattan by commuter train. The area, which once brimmed with factories, is now a quiet, small town, full of crumbling ruins of its past, spooky cemeteries, and deep woods.

This episode focused on Mount Beacon: its history, the reminders it holds of the past, and a experiment to test out a solo version of the Estes method, a popular paranormal investigation technique, on the mountain’s peak.

Highlights include:
• The remains of a mountaintop train, hotel, and casino
• Wild speculation about some Estes session results
• Some of Beacon’s history

Note: the Estes session contains some brief expletives.

Script for Ghosts of Mount Beacon

Mount Beacon

Atlas Obscura has a page with things to do in Beacon, and out of the 6 attractions they list in Beacon, I did 5 of them over the course of 2 pretty strenuous days. I managed to go on three hikes to ruins, a boat ride to ruins, three cemeteries (and I tried to visit a fourth but couldn’t find it), and went to the art museum there–in 2 days. I was very tired.
- Both days, I woke up around 4:30 am so I could go out around sunrise, or a little before. On Day 1, I went to an extremely spooky cemetery, and on Day 2, I went to the top of Mount Beacon, where the ruins of an old casino, hotel, and railroad, are, and I did a solo Estes session.
I want to talk about Mount Beacon today, and my Estes session up there, but first, a little history about Beacon, NY.
- Today, Beacon is where (wealthy-ish) residents of NYC go for vacation. It’s an hour and a half train ride from GCT, on a commuter train, not Amtrak. So it’s really easy to get there.
- It’s a very popular destination, and is rapidly gentrifying, and has a real Brooklyn vibe. There’s literally a bakery there where everything is gluten free, and either vegan or vegetarian. Which since I eat plant-based, that was good news for me, but that really belies some of the town’s history.
- That being said, there’s also a large population of veterans there, and plenty of folks who seem like they’ve been there a long time. People in Beacon seem pretty friendly–it was pretty normal for locals to say hello to me when I was walking around town.
- There was also a fairly sizable population of homeless people, at least on our most recent trip in August 2021. I was a little surprised by that, though maybe I shouldn’t have been, since it’s such a rapidly gentrifying area. For reference, I looked in at the windows of real estate offices in the area, out of curiosity, and 1-bedrooms cost more than they do in my area of Queens at least–I saw 1-bedroom apts that cost as much as our 2-br here in Queens. And houses for purchase look like they start around half a million dollars. So it seems like it’s as expensive, if not more expensive, to live there as it does to live in NYC itself.
So let’s get into Beacon’s history.
- We know that, back in the 1600s, the Wappinger tribe lived on the land where Beacon is now. Land was purchased from them by fur traders from NYC in the 1680s, and I’ll give my usual land deal caveat here. I don’t know the details of the land deal, but many of the deals that colonizers did with indigenous people were suspect at the very best, and I expect that’s the case here.
- Before Beacon existed, there were two towns called Matteawan and Fishkill Landing. Later on, in 1913, the towns were incorporated into a single town called Beacon. The name came from the beacon fires that patriots lit on top of Mount Beacon during the Revolutionary War.
- Historically, Beacon had lots of mills and factories.
  - Early on, flour mills were a big thing there. During the Revolutionary War, arms were manufactured there.
  - In the early 19th century, hat production became huge there. It was known as “The Hat Making Capital of the US,” though I believe it was technically the #2 hat making town in the US. But at one point, there were 50 different hat companies in the area.
  - I actually visited the ruins of an old hat mill, which is right near some nice hiking trails, one of which leads to the ruins of a brick factory out on a peninusla called Denning’s Point. Brick manufacturing was big in the area, in part because they could build factories on the water, and then boats could pull up and load up on bricks, and then carry their cargo down the Hudson to NYC, where they always needed more brick for building new construction.
- There was also plenty of tourism in the area. Atop Mount Beacon, at different times, there was a hotel called the Beaconcrest, a casino, and restaurant, and an incline railroad to take people up to the mountain. People could take the train or a boat from the city or elsewhere, take a trolley to the mountain, and then take the train up the mountain. (Nowadays, if you want to go there, you have to walk 45 mins or so from the station, and then hike up the very steep mountain yourself.) There was also a ski area nearby, which closed in the late 1970s.
- The incline railway opened in 1902, and was designed by the Otis Elevator Company; it was half a mile long, rose more than 1,500 feet, and had an average grade of 64%, which made it the steepest railroad in existence, at the time.
- The Beaconcrest hotel could hold 100 guests, and the casino wasn’t for gabling, but it had a balcony that ran all the way around it, as well as a rooftop observatory with telescopes and a powerful searchlight.
- An article published last year in a local paper, the Times Herald-Record, describes the top of the mountain:

“The top of Mt. Beacon was laid out like a park with fountains, walkways and summer houses, a large casino and hotel (in place by 1926), a roof observatory which housed powerful telescopes and one of the largest search flights manufactured, to light up the Hudson River at night. The 75-mile panoramic views from the summit and its natural setting would be the lures to get tourists.”

The most popular time for the destinations atop Mt. Beacon was the 1920s. However, on October 16, 1927, a fire destroyed the Beaconcrest Hotel and the Casino, atop Mt. Beacon. The powerhouse for the railroad was luckily spared, and the casino was rebuilt in 1928. However, before the hotel could be rebuilt, the great depression hit, stopping progress.
The tourism trade was hit by the great depression in the 1930s, the war in the 40s, and, according to the Mount Beacon Incline Railroad Historical Society, as more and more people got cars, tourist attractions took a hit. The idea was that when people relied on trains and trolleys, they ended up getting funneled into major tourist attractions. But once people had cars, popular destinations started to decline. I’d never read that before, but it makes sense. Also, meanwhile, since the 1930s, there’d been a number of fires on the railroad, destroying parts of the track, and it sounds like maintenance was getting more expensive. The railroad was sold in the 1960s, and while there’d been plans to redevelop, those plans fell through, and the railroad got older and more decrepit. When a fire broke out in 1967, the lower power station for the railroad, as well as one of the two railroad cars, was destroyed. In the 1970s, the railroad, which had had more and more sporadic service, finally closed. They parked the two cars in the middle of the track, hoping to avoid vandalism, and, as the historical society put it, it “awaited better times.”
In 1982, the railroad and powerhouse were put on the national register of historic places, which was a promising development. But, unfortunately, in September 1983, a huge forest fire broke out, destroying every part of the railroad. The fire was suspicious, probably the work of vandals. Today, if you hike around the area, you can see some bent, twisted parts of the track, some of the heavy metal cords, and the very picturesque ruins of the powerhouse at the top of the mountain.
This story reminds me a bit of the tales of Coney Island in Brooklyn–there was this cool vacation destination that included some cutting edge technology, but was destroyed by fire and allowed to decay.
So that’s the history of the spot. I visited a few weeks ago, for the second time.
- I woke up really early, so I reached the peak at 7something am. It was an extremely foggy day–the mountaintop was in the clouds, and mist was literally swirling across the paths. It was also extremely hot and humid; I struggled a lot during the hike, because it was literally hard to breath the air.
- The reason why I got out so early was that I wanted to be alone and to have the mountaintop for myself to try out an estes session. I saw very few other people, and no one else on the peak for the first 45 mins or so that I was up there, and even after that it was pretty empty. So my strategy of getting up there really early during terrible weather worked. Lol.
- So I found a trail leading down the main part of the casino and hotel ruins, and that led to a bunch of boulders going down the side of the mountain, and so I climbed down until I got to a somewhat flat boulder that I could sit/lay down on. The view from the top of the mountain was generally obscured by the clouds and fog, but I could see part of the other peak of the mountain, so it was basically just trees as far as I could see.
- As I set up my stuff, I heard something chewing loudly in the trees below me. I think it must have moved on when I started my session, but I was a little freaked out by it initially because I had no idea if it was a deer, or bird, or something like a bear. I remembered belatedly that bears were a thing. I don’t get out of the city much.
- Also, there were tons of bugs on all the hikes I went on in Beacon, and I’d originally forgotten bugspray so I had to buy some on my first day there. So I unpacked my stuff, coated myself in some more of my DEET-free essential oil bugspray, and then, because there were still too many bugs, I sprayed some on the rock around me until I realized I was maybe being too high maintenance, and stopped.
- I’m hoping to do a whole episode on the solo estes session method I’ve been trying out, but since I’ve only done it a couple times, I’m not ready for that yet. The mountaintop time was the second time I did it, and I’d gotten some really intense and troubling responses during the first time, which was just an initial test in the apartment. The session on mountain Beacon felt pretty chill, and relaxed, and peaceful. I was certain I wasn’t getting anything, but then when I listened back, there were some interesting parts which I’ll share. Nothing too conclusive or dramatic, but still there were moments when its responses made sense and it felt like there was a conversation.
- So here’s the solo estes method I used:
  - I pre-recorded over 150 questions, which have pauses of varying lengths built into the end of them. Those are each in their own track, and there are also tracks of different lengths of silence. I used an excel formula to randomly assign each track a unique number, which is the only way to identify it. Then I loaded the tracks onto the music player on my phone and hit shuffle so they play at random. I set the recorder down next to the phone so it can pick up the questions as well as the answers I get. Meanwhile, I’ve put on my Vic Firth headphones, plugged into the spirit box, and do the Estes session as usual, as if another person is asking the questions.
  - Since I have the headphones on, I can’t hear the questions. In a traditional Estes session, the receiver would wear an eye mask to block their vision, but since that isn’t safe when you’re in public and alone, I didn’t do that. At any rate, there were no lips for me to read (not that I can read lips anyways), and if for some reason I saw the track name on my phone, all I’d see was a random number, so there’s no way for me to know what question’s being asked. And there are so many questions that it’s not like I’m going to guess which question’s being played.
  - One important caveat here is that if you’ve listened to the episode I did on the Hawthorne Hotel, you’ll have noticed that I alluded to having some hearing problems. I have auditory processing issues, which means that often I have trouble distinguishing words–like I can hear a word, but I may think it’s either X or Y, or I may hear the wrong thing initially and then understand it a few seconds late. It means that at loud bars and restaurants, I can’t follow conversations at all, and even in regular conversation, I sometimes have to ask someone to repeat themselves, and then suddenly I realize what they said right after I finish asking them to say it again. A lot of my verbal understanding comes from context clues.
    - That presents some interesting challenges in an Estes session.
    - Many times, I heard voices, but couldn’t tell what they were saying. In those cases, I said nothing.
    - At other times, I heard something, said what I thought I heard, and then realized it could have been a different phrase. Typically, in regular conversation, when there are two different possibilities to what I may have heard, I try to use context clues. But often, my second understanding of what someone said is the correct one, bc that’s when my brain has had a chance to catch up to what was said.
    - So when I heard two possibilities, I said them both. On listening to the audio back later on, I allowed both as possible answers, but tried to think of which would make the most sense in context, because that’s how I would usually operate in a regular conversational setting.
    - I know that’s a little weird, but I’m not neurotypical, so welcome to my world! I’m sure a neurotypical person with no auditory or sensory processing issues would have an easier time doing this, but I’m still pleased with myself and happy with the results I’ve been getting doing this method. I feel like it’s really opened up new possibilities for me for doing solo investigations.
    - One interesting thing was that there was a moment where I thought I heard either augment or mountain, and I said I wasn’t sure, and it clarified by saying “mountain” again.
  - So that’s how I did the Estes session. I’m not aware of other people doing solo estes sessions like this, but if you’ve heard of folks doing that, please lmk. I’d love to talk to other ppl attempting this.
  - I’ll put a bit of the audio in here, and maybe I’ll post the full session as a bonus episode or something in this feed. A couple notes before we get into the edited session audio:
    1. You can hear a lot of train noise in here, because Beacon has a train station, which is far below the mountain, on the Hudson, but really it’s only a few miles away from the mountain.
    2. If you hear clicking noises, that’s me adjusting the spirit box.
    3. If you hear mechanical whirring noises, that’s my camera, which is a little loud. I took a few pics during the session.
    4. You might also hear my phone vibrate once or twice bc I forgot to put it into DND.
    5. I cut out the long silences but didn’t delete any questions or answers, or reorder anything. But cutting out the silences between answers brought it from 28 to 13 mins long.
  - My questions are pretty quiet. I’ll put a transcript of the session on my website.
  - The question that came up was do you have a message for me, and I got back “you’re under Beacon” (or possibly “you’re under again”). I think it meant “you’re under Beacon” as in under the peak of Mt. Beacon, tho maybe it could be referrring to being “under” as in in the Estes session. Like a lot of the answers, this one started off feeling on track and making sense and then seemed to veer off an make less sense.
  - The second question, you can’t really hear, but it’s “where do you work?” I don’t really think I got much of an answer to that.
  - Also worth nothing, I forgot to do the table setting before the session and address whatever spirits I might be speaking to etc, so you’ll hear me do that in the middle of the session.
  - When the question “did you ever live through a pandemic?” came up, I thought the answer was interesting. I got the answer: “many happening yeah”–I couldn’t tell if it was someone talking about past pandemics and living through them, or for some reason I can’t get the interpretation out of my head that maybe it was a hint at the future, and more pandemics? That may just be me being morbid tho?
  - When the question “do you want to hurt anyone?” came up, I got a few interesting responses:
    - “morning temperature”–funny bc it was so hot. I almost to the sense that the entity was joking around with me.
    - Then it said “I do” which would be slightly chilling if the vibe wasn’t so generally positive.
    - Then a bit later, it said “I don’t kick” which was kinda funny
  - “if you once lived, did you die from illness”
    - “there’s no coffin” was an interesting answer, and then I heard “yeah” and “standard”–a lot of ppl used to die from illness
  - “how many of us are there” <–can’t really hear this question
    - “you are only one”<–pretty clear initial answer
    - And then a few responses later, I got “and then I lead”
    - Then I got the very funny “I want it your hat”
    - I wasn’t wearing a hat, but my baseball cap was attached to my backpack which was sitting right next to me
  - “do you ever feel trapped, or confused, or lost?”
    - While the question was playing, I got “hey”
    - And then “find me” which seemed pretty relevant
    - And then “air down follow maybe ow” and remember I was sitting on the side of the mountain looking down
  - “how many entities are speaking to me right now?”
    - I pretty quickly got “hive mind” (while that’s being said you can faintly hear flies or some other kind of bug buzzing in the background, and then it intensifies a bit over the next few responses)
  - The question “are you lost” came up, and I part of the response I got was:
    - “no fuck that”
    - Then it almost seemed to be having a conversation, because then it said “is it the same I know”
    - And the “schadenfreude” (which I can never pronounce right, but I mean the german word for feeling pleasure at someone else’s pain)
    - Then it said “home phone” and during the session when I said that all I could think of was ET phone home, which ties in with the idea of being lost. If there were multiple entities, maybe one was lost and the other wasn’t, and the non-lost one was somewhat rudely gloating?
    - Then I got “check this out” “wild” and “you’re gonna miss me”
  - “why are you here”
    - This q gets spoken over

Transcript of solo Estes session

For the full context of the session, listen to the episode.

Do you have a message for me?
You’re
Under
Again [or “Beacon”]
And I
A
Will
Looking at

Where do you work?
They [or “they are”]
Hoagie
Bereft

Do you ever have dreams in which you die?
[wasn’t hearing much, switched the headphone from being plugged into the spout to the headphone jack, clarified that I wanted to speak to nearby spirits or entities]
You
Are my [or “oh my”]

Did you ever live through a pandemic? What was that like?
Many
Happening
Yeah

DO you wish I would try to communicate with you another way? If so, how?
You’re

Is there anything you want to tell me?
I
Am [or “and”]
I [or “hi”]
Valiant [or maybe “valley”]
And [or “Annie”]

Is there something you think I should do, or that you want me to do?
Do you usually go here
Looking back
10 in the morning
[changed sweep rate to 150 ms]
Crowd
Frozen
You
I
Augment [or “mountain”]
Near me
The empire

Where were you born?
What [or “I”]
I
Crash [or “trash” or “craft”]
It
More to come [or “motorcycle”]
Eats [or “Keats”]
How you doin’

What is your location?
How are you
Ready
I
Need [or “wanted”]
Work
You
That’s it
No

How do you feel at this moment?
Ha
It’s short
Hey
Austin
Yeah [or “Yeats”]
Federal Hall [or “alcohol”]
Check that
Just
Snake [or “think”]

If you are dead, how did you die? And who was responsible for your death?
Hole
It’s just
Weekend
Weekends
Out back all day
Just that
Monster
Choice down
Baby
Yo

Do you have a favorite possession?
That hurt
Casualty
Where [or “wear’]
Water [or “at water”]

What do you think of me?
It’s here [or maybe “Jen’s here”]
Cruel [or “cruel lake”]
Out
It’s
It’s just [or “at dusk”]
300
Hi
What

If you were once human, what was your occupation?
Lie
I know
So [or “someone”]
Who
Effort

Do you want to hurt anyone?
Morning
Temperature
I do
There’s no
Keep
David [that was whispered]
Everyone
Moment
Enjoy [or “join us”]
End up
Every
I don’t kick
Anyone

If you once lived, did you die from illness?
No one
There’s no conference [or “there’s no coffin” or “there’s no coffee”]
Yeah
Standard
Flank
Further
Full mac
Trio [or “freedom”]
You need this

How many of us are there?
You are
Only one
You missed it
Hurt
And then
A leaf [or “I lead”]
I want it
Your hat [I wasn’t wearing my hat, but it was sitting next to me]

Do you ever feel trapped, or confused, or lost?
Hey [spoken while q was being asked]
Find me
Air
Down
Follow
Maybe
Ow
Tractful
Power night
Driftwood [or “stretch goal”]
Uncle
I know

How many entities are speaking to me right now?
Hive mind
No
I
Need a break
Beacon
The amount
And I
Vulgar
Apple
You get

Are you lost?
Out
Timing whispered
No
Fuck that
Is it the same I know
Schadenfreude
Home
Phone
Check this out
Wild
You’re gonna miss me

Why are you here?
Why [or “choir”]

[started to end session, then got one more response:]
It’s wrong

[ended session]

Sources consulted RE: Ghosts of Mount Beacon

Videos consulted RE: Ghosts of Mount Beacon

1957 home video of the Mount Beacon Incline Railway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmnqR7SEzoM
1902 video of Mt Beacon Incline Railway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLYS838WTAs
1946 video of Mt Beacon Incline Railway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muPQze1x6kE
1974 video of Mt Beacon Incline Railway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cLmMl1DG0I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fETVs_MGNnw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fzJHlQF0lk

Websites consulted RE: Ghosts of Mount Beacon

Don’t miss past episodes:

Haunted Bannerman Castle (Haunted Beacon, NY)

A look at the creepy stories surrounding the mysterious ruins of Haunted Bannerman Castle, which lies in the middle of the Hudson River.

About 50 miles away from Manhattan, the ruins of a castle lie on a small island in the Hudson River. Travelers pass the ruins on the train, and the only clue to the history of the destroyed castle are the words “Bannerman’s Island Arsenal,” emblazoned on the side of the structure. The island, and the area, has a long history of hauntings, from its pre-colonial times, to the superstitions of Dutch sailors and stories of a legendary goblin king.

Highlights include:
• A ghost ship
• A poem about the goblin king
• An amateur architect
• Exploding steamships
• Old-timey sailor hazing

Episode Script Haunted Bannerman Castle

Bannerman’s Castle / Pollepel Island
- About 50-60 miles away from Manhattan
- Visible from train
- I saw from train, wanted to visit
- It’s this big, crumbling, Scottish style castle that says “Bannerman’s Island Arsenal” on the side
- steamboat races, sunken ships, not on maps
Chen, David W. “Long Abandoned, an Island in the Hudson is Restored.” New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast) ed., Nov 28 1999, p. 1, 45:3. ProQuest. Web. 13 Sep. 2021 .

“The portcullis and drawbridge have vanished. The pith helmets and cannonballs are gone. But the crumbling Scottish castle remains, cryptically adorned by the chiseled words ”Bannerman’s Island Arsenal.”

Ever since it was abandoned in the 1950’s, this island, one of the Hudson River’s most incongruous and inaccessible ruins, has fascinated history buffs. Once the private warehouse of Frank Bannerman VI, an eccentric Scottish immigrant in the military supplies business, the castle has deteriorated so badly that the island has been declared hazardous and off limits by its current owner, New York State.

But now, Pollepel Island is becoming more than just a place of mystery and memory. . . .

Situated only 50 miles north of the George Washington Bridge in the town of Fishkill, Pollepel Island had a colorful history even before the Bannermans arrived at the turn of the century. American Indians believed that the island was haunted. Dutch sailors feared goblins who, legend had it, whipped up squalls, dooming many a vessel.

And the name itself is said to have two possible sources: One is a Dutch word meaning ”pot ladle,” referring to the drunken or boisterous sailors who were deposited on the island while their vessels cruised the Hudson, then picked up after they sobered up. The second is a girl named Polly Pell, the object of two gentlemen callers and the subject of a dramatic tale of love, honor and rescue — on the island.

In the Revolutionary War, American colonists installed chevaux-de-frise — a kind of underwater fence of sharpened logs — between the island and Plum Point, on the western shore. The idea was to sink British vessels. But the British weren’t fooled: no ships were sunk.

By the end of the 19th century, the uninhabited island, owned first by the Van Wycks, then by the Tafts, was used sparingly as a picnic ground and fishing spot. Then came Frank Bannerman, whose Manhattan business traded surplus military goods — including, at one point, 90 percent of the equipment from the Spanish-American War, Mr. Caplan said. The problem was that New York City officials prohibited the storage of such combustibles. So Mr. Bannerman bought this island in 1900 to build his own warehouse-cum-billboard, visible from the trains humming along the Hudson.

Mr. Bannerman designed seven buildings for the island — three warehouses, two workers’ houses, a family residence and the signature six-story tower — in homage to his Scottish roots, complete with turrets, crenelated towers, a drawbridge and a moat.

Mr. Bannerman even invented a family coat of arms, said his grandson Frank Bannerman VIII. . . .

The island was not immune to accidents. In 1920, a powder house explosion injured three people and catapulted a 25-foot-long piece of stone wall onto the eastern shore of the Hudson, where it landed on the railroad tracks. And once, a cannon mistakenly shot a shell over a mountain and through a barn. No animals or humans were injured.

Still, the island, equipped with amenities like telephone service and indoor plumbing, often possessed a comforting, members-only kind of rhythm, as the Bannermans used the island primarily on weekends and a small group of employees lived there full time.

Visitors would gather at a spot on the eastern shore directly across from the island, and ring a brass bell that would echo across the 1,000-foot distance. Then, the island’s employees would board rowboats to pick up the visitors — who often carried jugs of drinking water, since the river’s water was not potable.

After Frank Bannerman VI died in 1918, two of his sons, Frank VII and David, took over the business, which also published a well-regarded military supplies catalog. In 1959, the family moved the business from Manhattan to Long Island, and emptied the island of its remaining supplies. In 1967, the family sold the island to New York State, and by 1969, when a suspicious fire gutted many of the buildings, Mr. Bannerman’s island had fallen into desuetude.

The castle is visible from West Point, about four miles to the south. But to many drivers, train passengers and boaters, the castle may resemble something mistakenly plucked from Robert the Bruce’s Scotland. The Dutchess County Tourism Promotion Agency fields more phone calls about Bannerman’s Island than about any other place.

”Because it’s sort of unexpected,” Ms. Arena said, ”people ask, ‘What is that?’ ‘Did I really see it?’ ‘Was it a movie set?’ ‘Are there romantic or tragic stories behind it?’ ” (According to Mr. Caplan, the castle did appear in ”North by Northwest.”)

On a recent tour of the island, Jim Logan and Thom Johnson, two members of the Bannerman Castle Trust, noted how Mr. Bannerman had used recycled bedsprings, bamboo spears and bayonets as building materials. The tower, they explained, was actually designed to create an optical illusion, with top floors wider than the lower ones to make the building look imposing. And none of the buildings contained right angles.

Unfortunately, vandals have sullied the place in recent years, security cameras and No Trespassing signs notwithstanding. There is fresh graffiti, done in tribute to Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock and teenage romance. Nature has asserted itself, too, as evidenced by the spread of poison ivy and sumac.”

Bannerman island trust restored the castle and island

Bischof, Jackie. “Preserving a Hudson River ‘Castle’; Trustees of the Bannerman Castle are Trying to Preserve what’s Left.” Wall Street Journal (Online), Jan 13 2014, ProQuest. Web. 13 Sep. 2021 .

- “The castle was built as a summer home for the Bannermans and to house the inventory of the family business, which dealt in military goods such as firearms, uniforms and cannons, according to Mr. Gottlock.
- The business was started in the 1860s in New York City. After the end of the Spanish-American war, neighbors became alarmed at the idea of Mr. Bannerman stockpiling explosive materials in the middle of Lower Manhattan and he was “more or less leaned on to leave,” Mr. Gottlock said.
- In 1900, he purchased the 6½-acre island, known officially as Pollepel Island and located between Beacon and Cornwall-on Hudson.
- Over the next 17 years, Mr. Bannerman proceeded to build a summer residence, a superintendent’s house and five buildings, including the tower. He based the architectural design of the buildings on castles in Europe, particularly in Scotland and Belgium.
- Mr. Bannerman emblazoned the side of the main building with “Bannerman’s Island Arsenal” in four-foot letters for passing boats and trains to see and which are still visible today. He planned to continue building on the island when he died in 1918.
- Since then, the castle has suffered a series of misfortunes. In 1920, a powder house on the island blew up with a boom that was heard in the far reaches of the Hudson Valley and shattered windows. In 1969, two years after the Bannerman family sold the island to New York state, a massive fire raged for three days, devastating its buildings.
- And in late 2009 and early 2010, stormy weather conditions are believed to have caused the collapse of a number of its walls. The island also suffered at the hands of vandals, scavengers and trespassers during years of neglect before the trust took over care for the island in 1993.
- Visitors today aren’t permitted to come within several feet of the island’s buildings, but their dramatic architectural design and dilapidated state draw thousands of snap-happy tourists each summer.”
Frank Bannerman, who built the castle, made his money from dealing surplus arms. He started in that line of work when he was 14, buying surplus ordnance I think from the Spanish American War
He was scottish, and a lot of the castle is a tribute to his scottish roots
Dunlap, David W. “A Restoration on the Hudson: [Metropolitan Desk].” New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast) ed., May 22 2011, ProQuest. Web. 13 Sep. 2021 .

“FIRST-TIME travelers along the Hudson River might have been forgiven for thinking, upon first astonished glance, that they had seen Brigadoon emerging midway between Beacon and Cold Spring, N.Y. For everyone else, the view of that mysterious Scottish castle known as the Bannerman’s Island Arsenal had grown more disheartening over the years.

Into the late 1960s, the fantastic confection was still pretty much whole, until fire gutted it in 1969. Just a few years ago, the ornate shell of the tower keep was largely intact, encrusted with turrets, crenels, merlons, oriels, corbels, loopholes and bosses that looked like cannon balls. Whatever providential force held the walls precariously upright expired in the winter of 2009-10, when much of the tower crumbled.

In April, however, signs of a modest revival could be spotted on Pollepel Island, as it is formally known, which is owned by New York State and managed by the nonprofit Bannerman Castle Trust. The trust, which offers guided tours to the public, has begun a $358,000 stabilization of an elaborate summer residence uphill from the castle, including a new roof and new floors.

The residence was built in romantically medieval style in the early 1900s by Francis Bannerman VI. Downriver, at 501 Broadway, between Broome and Spring Streets, Bannerman operated New York City’s premier army-navy store at a time when that meant more than warm jackets and sturdy boots. He dealt in real wartime ordnance and materiel, and was said to have cornered the market in surplus from the Spanish-American War.”

I tried to look into the haunted history of the island some more. There’s a great video by Full Dark Paranormal (confirm) on youtube that I recommend that you check out, that mentions shadow people.
There was also the dutch superstition. From a 1996 NYT piece, Rodell, Susanna. “Bannerman’s Folly: A Hudson Island, Haunted by Goblins.” New York Times (1923-), Jan 20 1996, p. 22. ProQuest. Web. 13 Sep. 2021 :
- “The early Dutch sailors who had to navigate the river believed this part of the highlands to be haunted by goblins who were responsible for the murderous and sudden squalls that came out of nowhere and often sank their ships. They believed that once past the island, a ship was safe. The name “pollepel” is said to be derived from the Dutch word for potladle, a reference to the drunkenness of sailors who were put ashore on the way upriver and picked up on the return journey once they were sober. A variation on this lore has it that old salts purposely got first-timers drunk and put them ashore on Pollepel to appease the awful Heer of Dunderberg (the goblin described by Washington Irving).
- “Another legend refers to a young farm girl named Polly Pell who lived nearby during the Revolution and was courted by her old schoolmate Guert Brinkerhoff and a refugee minister from British-held New York, Paul Vernon. Brinkerhoff took her for a sleigh ride on the ice and Vernon, fearing the ice was unsafe, pursued them. He was right. He reached the pair just as the ice broke up. As the tide turned and began sweeping them downstream, Polly, who was sure the end was near, confessed her love to Brinkerhodd. Vernon nobly married them on the spot, just before the current smashed their ice floe onto the island, which was named–when all were rescued–after Polly Pell. . . .
- “According to old river hands, during the awful squalls you can still hear orders being shouted by the captain of the Flying Dutchman, which like many other vessels sank south of the island in the early 1700s. In fact, the ruins as they now stand seem a fitting tribute to the highlands’ spooky legacy. Clearly any new human effort here will have to content with the Heer of Dunderberg.”
I’d never heard of this Heer of Dunderberg, but here’s what I learned about him:
- Apparently the legends about him date to the days of Dutch New Amsterdam, there were stories of a mysterious ship, not flying any flag that anyone could recognize, going up the Hudson, all the way from Gravesend Bay, to the Hudson Highlands.
- He was mostly seen in the highlands, and it was said that the ship was an omen or warning of death.
- If you tried to flag down the ship or get anyone to respond, you wouldn’t be successful. Some people attempted to shoot it with cannons, but the balls seemed to go right through without damaging the ship.
- Sailors would try to get close to the ship, which would disappear as soon as they got close.

SeaKayaker.com:

“During the black squalls that came in the spring, the old rivermen claimed to hear the shouted orders of the long-dead Captain of the “Flying Dutchman”, which was sunk on the flats south of the Island in the early eighteenth century.”

The ship was usually seen by moonlight, and usually a huge storm would accompany it or happen right after.
If the ship appeared, heading straight for yours, you were supposedly doomed.
I think the idea is that the ghost ship is the ghost of the Flying Dutchman, which sunk in a storm just south of Pollepel island. Other people say that it’s the ghost of the Halve Maen (which in English is Half Moon), which was the ship that Henry Hudson, whose ghost has also supposedly been seen further north, near the Catskills. Also, supposedly Henry Hudson saw ghostly figures in the area as well, when he was sailing.
A website called anomalien has a good description of this:
- “Many Dutch sailors believed that this was a ghost ship summoned by the Heer of Dunderberg to prey upon unwary vessels on the river. A ship summoned from their homeland in Europe where witches and goblins thrive.

The Heer of Dunderberg was told to be a goblin king and his army set about to bring his wrath of rain, wind, thunder and lightening to sailors making their way up and down the Hudson. Inexperienced sailors being the most likely victims. Dutch sailors would fasten horse shoes to their masts in an attempt to ward off the Dunderberg.

Most sightings would occur near the shadows of the Dunderberg, a large mountain thought to be the dwelling place of the Goblin King. This mountain also marked the southern gateway to the Hudson Highlands where the most treacherous encounters would occur. Sailors claimed to see a goblin-like figure when the biggest of storms hit.

He was a plump round fellow with a light colored sugar-loaf hat who was carrying a horn and would be seemingly shouting out orders, commanding the gales and lightening. Some would tell tales of seeing the sugar-loaf hat of the Storm King as he became to be known by some, blow in from nowhere and land in the rigging of the ship.

It would stay there until the ship passed out of the Heer of Dundenberg’s domain, then blow away as if by some unseen hand. Then the skies would clear. The northern boundary which marked safety was just beyond Pollepel Island.

Some sailors reported seeing the Storm Ship lingering in anchorage at Pollepel Island which led them to believe that island was the home harbor for the phantom ship. Some referred to this place as Dead Man’s Isle.

It became a ritual at one point, to leave a new sailor on the island on the voyage up the river, and then pick him up again on the way back. If he survived! If he did, then it was thought that the Heer of Dundenberg would leave him in peace during his future voyages up the river. Any attempts to inhabit this island have failed. The ruins of Bannerman Castle stand there as a testament to this.

There are those who believe that this ghostly ship is the Halve Maen, then vessel of Henrick Hudson and crew in an trans-morphed form. The ghosts of Henrick and his crewmen have been seen up river where it meets the Catskills on occasion. It is said that Henry himself happened upon ghostly figures when he and his crew grounded his ship.”

The American writer Arthur Guiterman, who published some books and poetry from the 19teens through the 1940s, and was known for writing funny poems, wrote a poem called “The Lord of the Dunderberg,” which I wanted to read a bit from. Basically, the poem describes a ship carrying rum being plundered by the goblins.:

“Goblin and kobold and elf and gnome

Riot and rollick and make their home

Deep in the Highlands, where Hudson glides,

Curving the sweep of his volumed tides

Round wooded islet and granite base

Down through the rush of the Devil’s Race.

Great is the prowess of Goblin might;

Dread is the malice of troll and sprite;

Chief of them all is the potent Dwerg,

Heer of the Keep of the Dunderberg!

Mountain and River obey his spell

E’en to the Island of Pollopel;

Brooding, he sits in the rugged glen,

Jealous of honor of sprites and men.

Ye who would sail his dominions through

Scatheless, withhold not the homage due!

Lower your peak and its flaunting flag!

Strike! — to the Lord of the Thunder Crag! . . .

Shrouding the vessel, before they wist,

Streamed from the Mountain a curdling mist.

Piercing the woof of that leaden veil

Pelted and rattled the heavy hail.

Hudson arose like a tortured snake,

Foaming and heaving; the thunder spake,

Rolled from the cliffs, and the lightning played

Viciously red through the pallid shade!

Oh! how the elements howled and wailed!

Oh! how the crew of the Geertruyd quailed,

Huddling together with starting eyes!

For, in the rack, like a swarm of flies,

Legions of goblins in doublet and hose

Gamboled and frolicked off Anthony’s Nose;

While on the shuddering masthead sat

Cross-legged, crowned with his steeple-hat,

Grinning with mischief, that potent Dwerg,

Lord of the Keep of the Dunderberg!

. . . Skippers that scoff when the sky is bright,

Heed ye this story of goblin might!

Strange the adventures of barks that come

Laden with cargoes of gin and rum!

When the Storm Ship drives with her head to gale

And the corpse-light gleams in her hollow sail —

When Cro’ Nest laughs in the tempest’s hem

While the lightnings weave him a diadem —

When Storm King shouts through the spumy wrack

And Bull Hill bellows the thunder back —

Beware of the wrath of the mighty Dwerg!

Strike flag to the Lord of the Dunderberg!”

From Myths and Legends of Our Own Land — Complete by Charles M. Skinner:
- “Dunderberg, “Thunder Mountain,” at the southern gate of the Hudson Highlands, is a wooded eminence, chiefly populated by a crew of imps of stout circumference, whose leader, the Heer, is a bulbous goblin clad in the dress worn by Dutch colonists two centuries ago, and carrying a speaking-trumpet, through which he bawls his orders for the blowing of winds and the touching off of lightnings. These orders are given in Low Dutch, and are put into execution by the imps aforesaid, who troop into the air and tumble about in the mist, sometimes smiting the flag or topsail of a ship to ribbons, or laying the vessel over before the wind until she is in peril of going on beam ends. At one time a sloop passing the Dunderberg had nearly foundered, when the crew discovered the sugar-loaf hat of the Heer at the mast-head. None dared to climb for it, and it was not until she had driven past Pollopel’s Island—the limit of the Heer’s jurisdiction—that she righted. As she did so the little hat spun into the air like a top, creating a vortex that drew up the storm-clouds, and the sloop kept her way prosperously for the rest of the voyage. The captain had nailed a horse-shoe to the mast. The “Hat Rogue” of the Devil’s Bridge in Switzerland must be a relative of this gamesome sprite, for his mischief is usually of a harmless sort; but, to be on the safe side, the Dutchmen who plied along the river lowered their peaks in homage to the keeper of the mountain, and for years this was a common practice. Mariners who paid this courtesy to the Heer of the Donder Berg were never molested by his imps, though skipper Ouselsticker, of Fishkill,—for all he had a parson on board,—was once beset by a heavy squall, and the goblin came out of the mist and sat astraddle of his bowsprit, seeming to guide his schooner straight toward the rocks. The dominie chanted the song of Saint Nicolaus, and the goblin, unable to endure either its spiritual potency or the worthy parson’s singing, shot upward like a ball and rode off on the gale, carrying with him the nightcap of the parson’s wife, which he hung on the weathercock of Esopus steeple, forty miles away.”
To go back to hauntings at Bannerman Castle and the island itself, supposedly the explosion that ruined a lot of the castle was caused by a lightning strike, adding to the mythos of the island maybe being cursed.
The website anomalien also has this story of a haunting, which I hadn’t seen many other places:

“The property was protected by breakwaters, which were formed by the sinking of old barges and boats. There is a legendary tale that the tugboat captain of one of the boats requested that his prized vessel not be sunk in his presence, but before anyone knew it, the boat was sinking right before the former captains eyes. The captain cursed Bannerman and swore revenge. It has been said that employees in the lodge often heard the ringing of the boat’s bell at various times signifying that the captain had returned to make good on his promise.

Just as the tugboat captain experienced a devastating loss that would condemn him to Bannerman’s castle for an eternity, Bannerman would also experience loss.”

To flesh out the timeline a bit more, and elaborate more on the island’s potential curse, there was the explosion of 200 lbs of shells back in 1920 that ruined part of the warehouse. SeaKayaker.com has a good description of some of the island’s disasters:

The cannon being tested against the mountain jumped and its shell went over the mountain and through a nearby barn. The workman melting scrap put live ammunition in the melting pot with resultant disaster. The castle was often known to have as many as fifteen flags flying about it; however, lightning struck down the flag poles so frequently that it became impractical to replace more than a few of them. Then, on a hot august day in 1920, a tremendous explosion wrecked the arsenal. Two hundred pounds of powder and shells stored in a powder house exploded, heaving a barrage of brick, munitions and equipment high into the summer sky. A twenty five foot section of high stone wall was blown to the mainland, blocking the New York Central railroad tracks.

The castle was considerably damaged, while the tower, along with a corner of the Island itself, were blown far out into the river. Cities and villages along the river between Hudson and Peekskill were shaken by the explosion and hundreds of window panes were smashed.

though it stayed in operation, sales declined as the 20th century wore on. In 1950, the Pollepel, the ferry boat that took people from the shore to the island, sank, and after that the island was basically vacant. In 1967, NYS bought the island, and they started giving tours in 1968. Then, in 1969, there was a fire that happened under suspicious circumstances (I’d guess vandals, but who knows), which ruined the floors and ceilings of the structures. Then the island was closed to the public. It was’t reopened until the 2000s.
In 2009, a bunch of the castle collapsed–about 40% of the front wall and 50% of the east wall.
So basically now the castle part is just what’s left of the outer walls, with the inner walls and floors and stuff gone. You can still go into the family residence though, which has been restored a bit.
In April 2015, a woman and her fiancé kayaked out to the island, and when her fiancé didn’t return, she was charged with his murder, and plead guilty to negligent homicide.

Sources consulted RE: Haunted Bannerman Castle

Videos consulted RE: Haunted Bannerman Castle

Full Dark Paranormal Explorers episode about The Ruins of Bannerman Castle

Books consulted RE: Haunted Bannerman Castle

Myths and Legends of Our Own Land by Charles M. Skinner

Articles consulted RE: Haunted Bannerman Castle

Chen, David W. “Long Abandoned, an Island in the Hudson is Restored.” New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast) ed., Nov 28 1999, p. 1, 45:3. ProQuest. Web. 13 Sep. 2021 .
Bischof, Jackie. “Preserving a Hudson River ‘Castle’; Trustees of the Bannerman Castle are Trying to Preserve what’s Left.” Wall Street Journal (Online), Jan 13 2014, ProQuest. Web. 13 Sep. 2021
Dunlap, David W. “A Restoration on the Hudson: [Metropolitan Desk].” New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast) ed., May 22 2011, ProQuest. Web. 13 Sep. 2021 .
Rodell, Susanna. “Bannerman’s Folly: A Hudson Island, Haunted by Goblins.” New York Times (1923-), Jan 20 1996, p. 22. ProQuest. Web. 13 Sep. 2021 .
“F. BANNERMAN, ARMS DEALER, DIES: BROKE DOWN FROM OVERWORK IN SHIPPING HIS GIFT OF 50,000 GARMENTS TO BELGIUM. GAVE TO ALLIES $135,000 OWNER OF ISLAND ARSENAL IN HUDSON WAS CHARGED IN CONGRESS WITH ATTEMPT AT PROFITEERING.” New York Times (1857-1922), Nov 28 1918, p. 17. ProQuest. Web. 13 Sep. 2021 .
DePALMA, ANTHONY. “An Expert on the Hudson Seeks its Revitalization.” New York Times Sep 22 2005, Late Edition (East Coast) ed. ProQuest. 13 Sep. 2021 .

Websites consulted RE: Haunted Bannerman Castle

Don’t miss past episodes:

Haunted Cemeteries in Beacon (Haunted Beacon, NY)

A look at some supposed ghosts and haunted cemeteries in Beacon, NY, as well as some haunting aspects of the area’s recent history.

A feeling of uneasiness permeates the beautiful town of Beacon, NY. It’s a city of industrial ruins, cemeteries (including a terrifying abandoned one), and the memories of a sanatorium for the ultra wealthy and an old asylum for mentally ill criminals. Deep woods surround the city, and mountains loom, adding to a sense of natural beauty, or, possibly, of claustrophobia and a feeling of being watched.

Highlights include:
• A figure that my wife saw in my footage from an abandoned cemetery
• Supposed cemetery hauntings
• Zelda Fitzgerald’s stay in a sanatorium in Beacon

Bail fund to get vulnerable people out of Rikers Island: https://emergencyreleasefund.com/
More information about what’s happening on Rikers Island: https://theintercept.com/2021/09/16/rikers-jail-crisis-de-blasio-reforms/
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/9/15/headlines/a_humanitarian_crisis_new_york_officials_call_out_horrific_conditions_at_rikers

Script for Haunted Cemeteries in Beacon

I did a few newspaper searches and didn’t find that much about Beacon Hauntings. But on ghostsofamerica.com, a website where people can submit their stories of hauntings, there are multiple mentions of the graveyards in Beacon being supposedly haunted.
- Obviously this is not the most reputable source, and the accounts don’t say which graveyard these experiences occurred in, but here they are:
  - § “. . . The grave yards were very haunted and when you went in them you immediately felt spirits watching and following you and it was confirmed by the sounds in the woods walking with you as you were walking and you couldn’t get out of them fast enough. Beacon NY is a place of many haunting’s in many places.”
  - ” Okay my friends and I go walking throughout a graveyard every once in a while. We help take care of things and just goof off. So one time one of my friends was walking through and she noticed the grave of a little girl.
  - It was dusk and getting dark so she was going to go home. On her way out she heard giggling and walking behind her. She turned around and followed it and it led her back to the little girls grave. The other day it was her, my boyfriend, two other guys and I.
  - We were walking and being nonchalant and I noticed a little girl. I could only see from the middle of the bridge of her nose to the middle of her shins. She laughed. I’d seen her before but this time I wigged.
  - I ran out so fast that I almost passed out. My friends house is on the corner a few blocks away so I just hi-tailed it there. My boyfriend, his friends, and my girlfriend were all puzzled. Whilst running away I heard the little girl laughing.”
The Abandoned Dutch Reform Church Cemetery
- First off, if you visit this cemetery, you’re trespassing. Don’t want to encourage anyone to trespass, the whole place is covered in no trespassing signs and stuff, and I’m not totally convinced that it’s completely safe. I was very careful where I was walking, and at all times, I have an easy way to broadcast my location to my emergency contact if I ever get in trouble, but I found at least one place where it looked like a grave had partially collapsed or something–there was just a hole that looked like it went way down into darkness.
- In addition to the safety concerns here, this cemetery is off a busy road, near the train station, and it’s in between two different police departments. The train cops are about a block away, near the station, and the regular cops have a huge station about a block in the other direction. Also, while three sides of the cemetery are very wooded and you can’t see much through the trees and grass, at least in the summer, one side is pretty open and leads to a fancy apartment complex that I’m completely sure has surveillance cameras. So I don’t know how much people care about folks trespassing in the cemetery, but I do know that if someone wanted to prove that you had trespassed, it would be pretty easy. While I was there, I didn’t geotag any of my instagram stories or anything, just to be safe.
- Since, as you have probably already guessed, I’m an extremely cautious person, I woke up really early and left the airbnb before dawn, so that way not too many people would be around, since it was still dark. And in fact, aside from running into two deer that scared me half to death, and vice versa, the only other individual I ran into on the way to the cemetery was a middle aged man wearing a NYPD baseball cap who looked at me very suspiciously. So again–there’s a big police presence in town, and it is a small town so people know you’re a hiker from out of town.
- So the cemetery is located at the bottom of a hill, behind the oldest church in Beacon. It used to be called the Dutch Reform Church, though it has a new name now, and it’s a beautiful Victorian Gothic church from 1859. The Dutch Reform Church was originally built in 1813 in what was known then as Fishkill Landing, but it was demolished and replaced with the 1859 structure.
- So I went to this church, and walked around to the back. First thing I saw was a folding chair set up behind the church, facing the woods and cemetery behind it. No one was there, but that was really chilling, to just see that chair in the dark, as if as soon as I went down into the cemetery someone would sit there and watch me.
- The cemetery has yellow crime-scene-type tape around it on that side, but there was a clear gap in the trees for a path where people might go down the steep path.
  - I didn’t have my headlamp with me, because that had vanished on me right before the trip (I’ve since ordered a new one), and I just had my mini maglite flashlight, so there was no way I was walking down a steep decline in the woods in the dark without being able to see where I was walking, especially because I was just wearing running shoes. (Since this trip, I’ve ordered hiking boots that work in warm weather–I learned my lesson.)
  - So I figured I’d walk around the block and look at the cemetery from the other side, where the major road was.
  - By the time I’d walked around, the sun had risen, but luckily there still weren’t any cars on the road. I found a place that looked a little easier to scramble up from the sidewalk, and ended up in the cemetery.
  - Then when I got into the cemetery I saw that there was an easy way in and out, near the apartment complex I mentioned, so that’s how I ended up in the cemetery.
- The whole time I was in the cemetery, I had a really strong feeling of being watched. At the time, I thought it was just a combination of seeing the chair facing the cemetery (which I couldn’t see from inside the cemetery), the apartment complex where people could see me from their windows if they looked out of them, and just the knowledge that I was trespassing. And maybe that’s all it was, but I felt . . . Extremely uncomfortable in the cemetery. I didn’t attempt any paranormal investigation type stuff, and mostly just walked around, took some pics and video, and then left as soon as I could.
- Also, it was summer, and was extremely hot and humid, and it was extremely buggy in there. That’s when I realized that I’d forgotten to bring bugspray. So the whole time I was fighting off mosquitos and flies that were just swarming me, even though my only exposed skin was my lower arms, hands, and neck and face.
- Anyway, the Atlas Obscura article mentioned that there were human remains visible around the collapsed family vaults on the side of the hill, but I didn’t see any human remains there. I will say, though, the Atlas Obscura pictures looked like they’d been taken on a bright winter afternoon, and it was an overcast summer day right at dawn, so the vaults, which are arched brick structures built into the hill, looked totally dark, even when I shined my flashlight into them. I didn’t see any bones, but I also didn’t go inside, because of 1) the dark, and 2) I really don’t think it’s safe at all to go into them, because they were I the process of collapsing. Like the arched entryways were collapsing, it was very creepy and very obviously dangerous.
- I actually think some of the human remains I saw in pics online have been removed since; I read later on elsewhere that the remains from the vaults were relocated, including the remains of a Colonel William Few, who signed the US constitution on behalf of the state of Georgia. It sounds like his remains have been re-interred in Georgia, though there’s still a historical marker in front of the church announcing that he was buried there. Few’s remains were moved in the 1970s, but I get the sense that the other re-interments happened in the last decade or so, though I could be wrong.
- The burials in the cemetery range from 1813 to the early 20th century; I think the last burials were from the 1920s.
- All around the cemetery, there were tons of fallen tombstones and monuments. There was also a stone wall on the far side of the cemetery, that led to a part of the cemetery that wasn’t in the woods. It was a clearing, but because the cemetery is abandoned and it was late summer in NY, there was tall grass and other underbrush type stuff that was taller than I was. I could see some monuments through the grass, but there was no way I was venturing into the tall grass where I couldn’t see anything. Bugs, particularly ticks, were my main concern, but also it seemed unsafe and creepy. But looking over at that part of the cemetery, you could see a view of the Hudson river, which was really beautiful. I would have said that it was peaceful, but like I mentioned I was extremely on edge and uncomfortable there the entire time.
- So once I felt like I’d seen everything I safely could, I left.
- Later, that night, I made my wife watch the gopro footage I took of the cemetery. I think I’ve mentioned this before but she’s very sensitive, a lot more sensitive to paranormal things than I am, and the whole time she was watching the footage she was just like, “turn it off, I don’t want to watch this, there’s something off about that place.” And I was like, it’s just a few minutes more, I just want to show you where I went and hear what you think. Near the end, when I filmed a bit of the cemetery that’s closest to a thick stand of trees that are near the road, she was watching the video and was like, “who’s that?” And I was like, ” what do you mean who’s that, I was alone, it was really early on a weekend morning, there was definitely no one else there.” And she was like, “no, I saw someone.”
  - She didn’t want to watch the footage again, and I don’t blame her. I’ve watched it a handful of times now and haven’t seen anyone, though there’s a possibility that she saw movement from the wind blowing in the trees, or a car passing beyond the trees. We were watching it on the small screen of my gopro, after all. But even though I don’t see anything, I still think it’s notable and worth mentioning and worth me thinking about, just because my wife is more sensitive than I am and even if there wasn’t anyone there that I can see on the footage, she may have been sensing something non-visual or something. I don’t totally know how this stuff works, but I do think that two people can look at someone and see two different things, and I don’t think that means that one of them is wrong, especially when you’re talking paranormal stuff?
Methodist Cemetery + Afro American Union Burial Ground
- So that same morning, I went to another cemetery afterwards. I was so relieved to leave that abandoned cemetery, it felt awful there.
- Next I went to the Methodist Cemetery, which wasn’t too far away. Findagrave said it was well-maintained, though I’d debate that. A lot of tombstones were basically just stacked on top of each other, etc. There was also another hole that I thought might have been part of a grave having collapsed.
- Notable thing about Black interees
Info from beaconcemeterytrail:
- In 1851, James F. Brown along with Samuel Sampson, Edward Bush, Christian Reynolds, and Samuel Gomer purchased from John DeWindt, a portion of the land adjacent to the Methodist Cemetery to create a cemetery for the black community. The first burial was of J. Henry Roose on October 31, 1851.
- There are a few surviving stones: for Warren Gomer, who may have been related to Samuel Gomer and for two Civil War soldiers, one is for Jno Jones and the other, which is not legible, may be for Henry Sayles.
- The stone for Civil War veteran Spencer DeFreese, who was buried on July 18, 1875, must have fallen and moved at some point. It is now in the Methodist section.
St. Luke Episcopal Cemetery-near the hiking path to Mt. Beacon
Other strange stuff in Beacon
- I also visited the ruins of the old Beacon Hat Mill and Dennings Points Ruins (an old brick factory), both reminders of Beacon’s industrial past. I was bricks stamped with ____ at both our airbnb and at the ruins of the Mount Beacon Incline Railway, which were made at the brick factory.

Craig House

In 1859, a mansion was built on 60 acres of land in Beacon. Though the building was originally a home for a Civil War officer, it was purchased by Scottish doctor named Clarence Slocum. He renamed the mansion Craig House and turned it into basically a private sanatorium for the very weathy. To read a bit from the Atlas Obscura article about it, Slocum “believed that his patients could be cured by intensive talk therapy, coupled with fine dining and recreational pursuits like golf, skiing, and painting. For decades it was America’s most prestigious rehabilitation home, the perfect haven for patients to be cured.”
But a lot of really tragic stuff happened at Craig House. I did a couple episodes about Asheville, NC, last year, and one thing I talked about was how F. Scott Fitzgerald moved his wife Zelda to a sanatorium in Asheville because the hospital she was at in NY was too expensive. Craig House was where she was at in NY. At the time, 1934, Craig House cost $750/month, which is $15,311 today. So needless to say, it was extremely expensive, and as I talk about in the Asheville episodes, F. Scott Fitzgerald was’t exactly at the peak of his affluence in the 1930s. I go into more detail about the ends of both Scott and Zelda’s lives in the Asheville episode.
Another dark thing about Craig House is that Rosemary Kennedy was sent there after her lobotomy, which is a completely horrific story in and of itself that I won’t go into here. But needless to say, if there’s a Kennedy curse, it’s my belief that it came about because of what they did to Rosemary.
TW for suicide:
I found articles from April 15, 1950, about Frances Seymour Brokaw Fonda, Henry Fonda’s estranged wife and Jane Fonda’s mother, who killed herself at the Craig Sanitorium in Beacon. She was apparently depressed because Henry Fonda was marrying a 21-year-old woman. Francis Fonda was 42 years old when she died. One article I found mentioned that Henry Fonda was starring in a play, and he showed up for work to perform 12 hours after his wife’s death.
I did not visit Craig House, because it’s closed to the public and it sounds like the property is plastered with No Trespassing signs. Atlas Obscura said that someone new purchased the house in 2018, and apparently there are tons of cops around there.
But I’ll close this bit on Craig House with another quote from the Atlas Obscura article:
“Visiting today, it is a silent and haunting place. The inside remains perfectly preserved, as though the good doctor and his glamorous patients had suddenly just left the room. As Zelda at her most troubled wrote to her beloved husband, “The sense of sadness and of finality in leaving a place is a good emotion; I love that the story can’t be changed again and one more place is haunted – old sorrows and a half-forgotten happiness are stored where they can be recaptured.””

Prisons

I found some articles from July 1961, about 5 escaped inmates from the Matteawan State Hospital in Beacon. Two of the inmates were murderers. The cops ended up finding them hiding out in the woods a few miles away from the institution.
There was also a case in June 1953 where some inmates escaped, and there were others around that time.
The Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane was founded opened in 1892; technically another institution called the Asylum for Insane Criminals, was relocated there, and then renamed in 1893.
In 1899, another mental hospital for prisoners was opened at Clinton Correctional Facility, which was called the Dannemora State Hospital for the Criminally insane. Wikipedia describes it as “a massive insane asylum.” Apparently people call Dannemora “New York’s Little Siberia” because of how cold it gets, and how islated upstate NY is. BTW, I looked it up and Dannemora isn’t anywhere near Beacon; it’s a 4-5 hour drive away, pretty close to Canada. But anyway, Dannemora held male prisoners who went insane while serving their prison sentence, whereas Matteawan State Hospital held male prisoners who weren’t convicted yet, and both convicted and unconvicted female prisoners.
While Matteawan closed in 1977, its cemetery, where 1,000 patients are buried, is apparently just south of Beacon High School. And some of the buildings of the old Matteawan State Hospital are now part of the Fishkill Correctional Facility, which is a prison that is now in Beacon, which has both minimum and maximum security sections. One thing that seems worth mentioning is that in 1998, they built a maximum security S-Block Special Housing Unit (SHU) to hold 200 inmates. I usually think of the SHU as meaning solitary confinement, but I’m not totally sure if this is 100% solitary or not. But solitary confinement is torturous, and if you want to hear more about that, check out the recent Lunatics Radio Hour podcast episode about isolation–they have a whole episode basically about what happens to the human psyche when isolated. The Fishkill Correctional facility is less than a 10 min drive from the train station at Beacon, so like less than 3 miles.

Sources consulted RE: Haunted Cemeteries in Beacon

Articles consulted

Lake Charles American-Press. LAKE CHARLES, LOUISIANA. Saturday, July 29, 1961
The Indiana Gazette (Indiana, Pennsylvania). 29 Jul 1961, Sat. Page 2La Grande Observer (La Grande, Oregon). 15 Apr 1950, Sat. Page 1″
LAST FUGITIVE CAUGHT: MATTEAWAN INMATE SEIZED AS HE TRIES TO ESCAPE POLICE TRAP.” New York Times (1923-), Jun 13, 1953, pp. 6. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.nypl.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/historical-newspapers/last-fugitive-caught/docview/112803508/se-2?accountid=35635.
“MATTEAWAN SAFETY IS DOUBTED BY JURY.” New York Times (1923-), Sep 13, 1952, pp. 32. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.nypl.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/historical-newspapers/matteawan-safety-is-doubted-jury/docview/112487124/se-2?accountid=35635.
“Plea on Hospital Guards Studied.” New York Times (1923-), Sep 16, 1952, pp. 22. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.nypl.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/historical-newspapers/plea-on-hospital-guards-studied/docview/112458348/se-2?accountid=35635
.”MATTEAWAN PLAN URGED: MODERN SECURITY STEPS PROPOSED AT CRIMINAL HOSPITAL BY JURY.” New York Times (1923-), Sep 12, 1953, pp. 19. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.nypl.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/historical-newspapers/matteawan-plan-urged/docview/112559566/se-2?accountid=35635.
“3 FLEE MATTEAWAN; ROAD BLOCKS SET UP.” New York Times (1923-), Jun 08, 1953, pp. 18. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.nypl.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/historical-newspapers/3-flee-matteawan-road-blocks-set-up/docview/112573580/se-2?accountid=35635
.https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery-browse/USA/New%20York/Dutchess%20County/Beacon?id=city_99523

Websites consulted

Podcasts consulted

https://www.lunaticsproject.com/episodes/episode/4bf2d9ee/episode-83-the-history-of-isolation

Don’t miss past episodes:

Ghosts of Queen’s Court: Part 1 (Haunted Fordham University)

Pictures of Queen’s Court from the Fordham University Archives and Special Collections and A history of St. John’s College, Fordham, N.Y by Thomas Gaffney Taaffe, 1891. Also, maps showing Fordham University’s size and, for comparison, a similarly sized area around Washington Square Park.

A look at one of the most concentrated areas of hauntings in all of New York City: Fordham University in the Bronx. This is part 1 of a look at the ghosts of Queen’s Court, the oldest dorm on campus.

Ghostly priests, secret tunnels, black dogs, poltergeist activity, multiple burial grounds, housing in an old morgue, and more abound at Fordham University, at a campus in the Bronx that’s about half a mile wide. This is part 1 of a look at Queen’s Court, the university’s oldest dorm, which was built in 1845, was once a seminary, and has a number of hauntings and urban legends attached to it.

Highlights include:
• A groundskeeper ghost who still does his rounds
• The ghost of a 19th century seminarian
• A digression about Stone Tape Theory
• A theory about why Fordham’s ghost stories were kept quiet until the 1970s
• A conceited archbishop

Episode Script for the Ghosts of Queen’s Court

For this series, I’m going to talk an area that I would argue has one of the greatest concentrations of hauntings and dark history in all of NYC: Fordham University in the Bronx.
Fordham happens to be my alma mater, so I’m excited to look at the history, hauntings, legends, lore, and my own personal experiences of the paranormal there.
Fordham is known as one of the most haunted universities in the United States. For this series, I’ve identified at least 12 buildings on Fordham’s Bronx campus that have supposed hauntings
The Fordham hauntings are kind of bananas, and the campus has so many creepy elements in its history.
Despite the modest size of the area, here’s some of the stuff that happened in this area that I’m going to cover in this series:
- Many of them include encounters with ghostly priests, in many cases where the person didn’t realize they were speaking with someone deceased until someone told them later on.
- There’s a case of what seems like a ghost-priest possibly performing an exorcism.
- There’s an entire dorm on Fordham’s campus (which I lived in, and which most of my paranormal experiences on campus happened in) that used to be the medical school building, and contained a medical amphitheater for demonstrating operations and I assume cadaver dissections–and you can actually see where the amphitheater was by looking at the building in google satellite view. Also, cadavers were kept in the basement of that building, and the location of the building was supposedly even selected for ease of cadaver transportation.
- There’s a series of secret underground tunnels connecting the campus’s oldest buildings.
- There was an old hospital that was leveled to become the university’s parking lot.
- There’s black dogs, ghost children, poltergeist activity.
- There’s even a cemetery on campus where the bodies have been disinterred and moved not once, but TWICE, and now a dorm is built on top of one of the past locations.
- All the good paranormal and creepy stuff is here! Part of the Exorcist was even filmed here
- And lots more!
So, as an aside, I’d like to make a claim here that I don’t think has been made before: I believe that Fordham University is NYC’s most haunted half-mile mile.
- I’d like to challenge fellow NYCers to find an area of similar size that has a similar level of hauntings and creepy history.
- So, to explain my methodology here:
  - I went on google earth and measured Fordham’s campus using their measurement tool. The campus is shaped like a sideways triangle pointing eastwards, so I measured the longest part of the point, and the middle of the slanting sides. Its about .51 miles wide, and .33 miles tall. I’ll put the screengrabs of the measurements in the shownotes for this episode so you can take a look and see how I measured.
- I think that the Village, near NYU and Washington Square Park, might be able to give Fordham a run for its money, maybe, but I’m not convinced that there’s an area of the Village of a similar size to Fordham’s campus that has a similar number of hauntings.
- I will also include screengrabs in the shownotes measuring out the same distance in the area around Washington Square Park, so you can see what I mean in terms of scale.
- But if anyone would like to challenge me on what NYC’s most haunted half-mile would be, I’d really love to know of a similarly haunted area so I can research it, so please email me at buriedsecretspodcast@gmail.com or message me on instagram @buriedsecretspodcast if you have a different candidate you’d like to put forth for NYC’s most haunted mile.
- I would actually love to be refuted on this, because that would mean that there’s somewhere in NYC with even more hauntings in a small area than Fordham, so please, change my mind.
- But until then, I, a random podcaster, would like to declare Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus as the most concentrated area of hauntings and dark history in all of NYC.
In characteristic form, I’ve done an enormous amount of research, so I don’t know exactly how long this series will be. Right now, I have 9 episodes worth of notes, so this could end up as long as the Ouija board series I did last year, but I’m going to try to combine some episodes because with a biweekly publication schedule, 9 episodes will take a while.
- If you’re a longtime listener, you know that I’m not here to uncritically repeat ghost stories.
- I want ghost stories to be true when I hear them, but I’m somewhat of a skeptical believer. When examining hauntings, I like to look closely at the history of the area, of the building where it occurred in, and at any other factors that could have bearing on the story.
- So for example, if there’s a detail in an urban legend, I like to do everything I can to corroborate that detail. At the end of the day, you can’t really verify the veracity of a ghost story, so what you have to do is look at the story, look for holes, look for specificity and for details that you can confirm, which help to determine whether something is just a fun urban legend, or whether it’s something that might really be somewhat credible.
- So that’s a big part of why I have so much material here. I’m all about getting the context and looking at things from all angles, and looking for patterns, etc.
My goal is to present this in a way that will be interesting to anyone who’s into in university hauntings, or hauntings in general, but I also expect a number of Fordham ppl to listen to this.
So I wanted to address Fordham folks real quick, off the top:
- If you went to Fordham and had a paranormal experience there, and want to share it, please let me know! You can email me at buriedsecretspodcast@gmail.com.
  - So far, I’ve written this series is just using information that I was able to find that had been published online or in one of the university’s newspapers, or in a book, as well as my own experiences, but I’d love to incorporate any other encounters with the paranormal that people have had because I know there’s way more out there that just hasn’t been published.
- Also, if any current Fordham students are listening and are interested in paranormal investigation, let me know if you’re potentially interested in investigating anything at Fordham together.
At this point, I have been thinking about the Fordham hauntings for–I was going to say a decade, but at this point, I’ve really been thinking about this closer to 15 years than to a decade, which, I just realized, horrifyingly, is almost half my life.
- I didn’t start this more in-depth research until a year and a half ago. And to be fair, I’ve been researching many other paranormal and historical topics for the podcast during that time, so I’ve kind of picked up this research every few months, worked on it a bit, and then put it back down.
- But still, the research for this series has been a large undertaking.
- I can tell you that this is almost certainly going to be the most complete collection of Fordham ghost stories that you’ll be able to find as of right now.
- It seems that I have the dubious honor of being the person who cares about this topic the most.
So, with that out of the way: in this episode, I want to talk about the dorm I lived in freshman year, Queens Court. I’ll also mention the neighboring University Church, and the Honors program building, Alpha house. All three of these are some of the older buildings on campus, built in the 19th century.
But before I get to those specific buildings, let’s get to some background info about what Fordham University is, for folks who may not be familiar with the school:

Fordham Background Info

So, if you don’t live in the tristate area, or the northeastern part of the US, you may not have heard of Fordham University. But you have heard of its alumni, which include obviously the most important alumna, Lana Del Rey, as well as actors Denzel Washington, Alan Alda, Patricia Clarkson, and Taylor Schilling, authors Mary Higgins Clark and Don Dilillo, former Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi, and some politicians including disgraced former NY Governor Andrew Cuomo and also one Donald J. Trump, who attended Fordham for two years before transferring elsewhere.
- And there’ve also been a number of different famous faculty members and lecturers. The most interesting one for our purposes here is probably Carl Jung, who of course is hugely influential in the paranormal world, having written about tons of paranormal stuff including alchemy and UFOs.
- Jung gave a series of lectures at Fordham during a conference in 1912, where he argued against some of Freud’s theories: that’s supposedly the cause of their famous schism
So what is Fordham?
- Fordham University is a private, Catholic college that’s run by Jesuits.
- It’s the third oldest university in NY state (after NYU and Columbia), and it’s the oldest Catholic institution of higher education in the northeast
- Fordham was originally founded in 1841 by Archbishop John Hughes, aka Dagger John, who I talked a lot about in one of the Calvary Cemetery episodes.
  - As with many other things he had a hand in, Hughes named the school after himself, calling it St. John’s College. (At the time, St. John’s College was both a seminary for training new priests, and a college.)
  - A few years later, the college would be purchased by a group of French Jesuits from Kentucky, and from then on, it was a Jesuit university.
  - The name would be changed to Fordham University in 1907. Fordham is the name of the neighborhood its in, which was once the location of a farm called Fordham Manor.
- Fordham has a handful of campuses, including the one in the Bronx, called Rose Hill, which is the largest campus and the one I lived on, one at Lincoln Center in Manhattan near the southwest corner of Central Park. There are also some smaller campuses including one in London, which I think is new is the past few years, and one in the suburbs of NYC in Westchester County.
Most of Fordham’s ghost stories are centered around the Rose Hill campus, though later in the series, I’ll also share what I was able to find about Lincoln Center.
To set the stage a bit more, while Rose Hill is located in the Bronx, it doesn’t look like an urban campus: it has lots of green space and collegiate gothic buildings.
- It’s so pretty that it’s often used as filming locations, especially when the script calls for kind of an unnamed private northeastern fancy looking school.
- It was really normal to come across film crews around campus.
- But probably the three most famous movies filmed there were A Beautiful Mind, Love Story, and The Exorcist.
Fordham has a really lovely campus, which was one big attraction for me, and for many students. It’s great to be in NYC but to also have this beautiful green campus as your home base.
- But I was also very much drawn in by Fordham’s ghost stories, because it’s considered one of the most haunted colleges in America. And the creepiness of Fordham was a definite selling point for me.
- And while I did encounter some weird stuff, it wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d hoped to meet a friendly Jesuit ghost in the library late at night who could help me with my homework, but instead I got a pretty typical grab-bag of weird paranormal crap that I’m still turning over in my head and trying to decipher, without much success, even after all of this other research.
So that’s some basic background on the university.

Paranormal Legends on Campus

Fordham’s an interesting school, because it’s pretty proud of its hauntings. There are campus ghost tours, there’s a part of the library’s website dedicated to chronicling Fordham’s most famous hauntings, etc.
So if you search the Fordham newspaper archives, as I have, you’ll see 283 results for search term ghost. It’s really unfortunate that every year, there’s a mass of the holy ghost, so a lot of those results are just basic schedules of when that mass will be each year, or writeups of how the mass went.
So the first “real” mentions of the Fordham hauntings appear in The Ram, the Rose Hill student newspaper, in the 1970s. A lot of the best stories came from articles in the 70s and 80s.

Queens Court, University Church, and Alpha House

Queens Court was where I lived freshman year. It’s a sort of U-shaped building with a courtyard in the middle, made of three wings, called St. John’s Hall, Bishop’s Hall, and St. Robert’s Hall
- I believe that Robert’s is technically called St. Robert Bellarmine Hall, but everyone calls it Roberts. Robert Bellarmine is a saint from the 16-17th century who was big in the counter-reformation.
- He was a Jesuit cardinal
- He’s also known for adjudicating the Gallileo Affair. I guess he was like, “heliocentrism is fine as long as you treat it as a hypothetical theory and not a real thing,” and later he ended up delivering the inquisition’s injunction against Galileo, but it sounds like they maybe remained on good terms?
Anway, back to Queens Court: St. John’s Hall was built–I think–right around 1845, when St. John’s College was founded.
I wanted to read a bit from the book A history of St. John’s College, Fordham, N.Y by Thomas Gaffney Taaffe (1891) describing Queens Court–or, at the time, it was only St. John’s Hall, because I find the descriptions in the book delightfully romantic and fanciful in a very 19th century sort of way:
- “Turning your steps to the right, after a brief interval of flagged walk bordered by garden fence and shrubbery, you come to the most charming spot in this collection of noble buildings and picturesque surroundings. St. John’s Hall, the preparatory school for small boys attached to the college, is situated at the extreme northwest of the college grounds. Adjoining it is the parish church of Fordham, the Church of Our Lady of Mercy. Church and Hall were built in 1845 by Archbishop Hughes, the latter as a seminary for the education of priests in the diocese of New York, and the former as the seminary chapel. Both buildings are of stone quarried on the college property, but different from that used in other buildings.”
Just to pause a sec:
- first, I wish he had phrased “preparatory school for small boys” in a slightly less creepy way.
- Second, interesting to note that the stone for these buildings were quarried basically on site. I talked about this some in my islands about Roosevelt Island, the idea of stone being quarried right near the buildings were being built, but for whatever reason I find that detail really interesting about older buildings in NYC.
  - I don’t know, maybe it’s the idea of the close connection to a place, like there’s something being built but the materials are being ripped right out of the ground right there? Like the raw materials aren’t going far, etc. I can’t quite say why it interests me so much, but it may just be that it’s tickling something in the back of my mind about elemental or land spirits that I just can’t quite articulate. Idk, but mentioning it here.
Alright, I wanted to read a bit more from the book about St. John’s Hall, since its early history is easy to gloss over and I think it’s important to know when thinking about hauntings there:
- “The Hall is an imposing structure, the massive arched entrance, the old-fashioned latticed windows, the vine-covered walls, all combining to produce and effect at once grand and impressive. The seminary was moved in 1860 to Troy, N.Y., and the buildings sold to the college authorities. . . . For a long time the Hall was little used, the classes of Chemistry and Physics alone being held there, but in 1885 . . . It was thoroughly overhauled and fitted up to fill the requirements of the preparatory school.”
Some of the legends and ghost stories I was told about Queens court when I moved to campus alluded to the building’s time as a seminary, so I think it’s worth noting that it was a seminary for a very short time, 15 years, from 1845 to 1860.
- Though, sidenote: the seminary was called St. Joseph’s, and as the book
Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 by Thomas J. Shelley (2016) points out:
- The [seminary’s] name, like the name of the college, was selected by Hughes, which did not surprise one savvy New York Jesuit historian, Father Francis X. Curran, who pointed out that the bishop’s full name was John Joseph Hughes.
So basically, he named the college St. John’s and the seminary St. Joseph’s. He loved naming things after himself.
The book goes on to talk about how there are beautiful gardens and a fountain in front of St. John’s Hall, and it also describes the floorplan of the hall a bit more, which I think is worth mentioning:
- “From front to rear of the building runs a broad hallway. On either side and on the floors above are the study hall, class-rooms, and dormitories, and in the basement are the gymnasium and drill-room. At the rear, fronting the railroad, is the boy’s playground.”
I believe that where that playground was, there are now two dorms: Alumni Court North (now called Loschert) and South
So a lot of Fordham prep stuff is associated with Queens Court, in addition to the old seminarians.
So, as the passage I read mentioned, Queens Court is right next to the University church. At one point, they were even connected by what looks like a hallway.
So, one of the most famous legends regarding the University Church is Edgar Allen Poe. Because no collection of ghost stories would be complete without Poe, right?
Edgar Allen Poe moved to the Bronx in 1846, lived in the neighborhood of Fordham and used to walk over to campus and play cards and drink with the Jesuits.
The bells of the University Church supposedly inspired the Edgar Allen Poe poem The Bells. Poe wrote the Bells in 1849.
I wanted to read a bit about Poe at Fordham, which was then called St. John’s College, from Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition by Raymond A. Schroth (2009)
- “The poet found the new St. John’s College, especially under the direction of the Jesuits, a most congenial place. The campus was not more than a twenty-minute walk down the hill from the sparsely settled neighborhood where he and his ailing wife, Virginia, along with Virginia’s mother, Mrs. Maria Clemm, had settled into a small, white three-room cottage in the Kingsbridge section.”
So then Virginia died and he fell into a deeper depression:
- “Eventually he found solace in long walks. At four in the morning, he would stroll west to the aqueduct bridge, High Bridge, whose granite arches, 145 feet high, stretched across the Harlem River. Often Poe escaped to St. John’s.
- Passing no more than a few dozen houses and farms along the way, he could saunter down the gradual slope of what is now Kingsbridge Road, which then extended to the New York and Harlem railroad tracks. . . .
- When Poe came in the early evening, around six, he arrived in time for the Angelus. The great bells in the tower of the college church, which also served as the local Our Lady of Mercy parish, rung out in the traditional prayer: “The Angel of the Lord appeared unto Mary, and she was conceived of the Holy Ghost.” . . . With the bell tower just a few yards away, he would not just hear the bells but also feel their vibrations as their tolling fled the tower and sent some trembling shivers through his fragile frame. A glass of wine with the fathers would calm his nerves.
- There’s a large bell in the Fordham archives that once hung in the church and that, tradition says, inspired Poe’s famous poem “The Bells.” Unfortunately for the tradition, contemporaries and scholars have a list of competing churches, such as the Church of the Ascension and Grace Church, in lower Manhattan near the house of Poe’s friend Mrs. Schew, who claims he wrote the first two verses there. According to another tradition, this bell hung in the cupola of the mansion and called students to class and meals.
- Poe liked the Jesuits, as he told a friend, because they were “highly cultivated gentlemen and scholars, they smoked and they drank, and played cards, and never said a word about religion.” . . .
- After their walks, the fathers turned Poe loose in their library, where he sometimes lingered so late they would offer him a bed for the night. If—and this happened only rarely—he joined the fathers in a glass of wine and his symptoms began to appear, someone would gently offer an arm and say, “Come, Poe, we will go home now.”
So that’s Edgar Allen Poe and the university church.
Now, when I was a freshman, I was told a story, I believe by the RAs, about a priest, or maybe a student training to become a priest, who lived in St. John’s Hall, back when it was a seminary.
- Content warning for suicide here, just skip forward a minute or so if you don’t want to hear about that. I try not to give suicide details as a general rule, but is slightly more detail than I would usually give, just because the story doesn’t work if I don’t say how this person killed himself.
- The story goes that back when Queens Court was a seminary, it was extremely cold in the hall.
- One priest couldn’t stand it anymore, so he hanged himself. I was told that when they found him, his feet were banging against the radiator, so nowadays, when you hear the radiators banging, it just may be the ghost of this priest.
- Okay, that’s silly, because radiators are really loud, especially old ones, it’s a thing. A loud radiator, in and of itself, does not mean that a location is haunted. But it’s a fun, creepy story that RAs tell new students, whatever.
- It’s apparently so commonly told that the book Ghosthunting New York City by L’Aura Hladik (2011) even mentions that specific story and says that RAs tell it to scare freshmen.
- So I’ve always been like, eh, that story’s obviously BS made up to scare people.
- Here’s the interesting thing, though.
- In his 2016 book Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003, Thomas J. Shelley writes that after the first 4-5 years of the seminary’s history things were going pretty well. However, by around 1850, conditions had begun to deteriorate:
  - There were repeated complaints that the poor living conditions in the seminary were impairing the health of the seminarians. One of the professors, Father
  - Isidore Daubresse, admitted that the cold and dampness had led to the death of at least one student, but he claimed that the Jesuits had appealed to the diocese in vain for three years to rectify the situation.
  - Moreover, said Daubresse, many of the seminarians came to them in poor health. “At vacations outside the seminary during the past several years,” he explained to his own superior, “some of them contracted cholera and other diseases. Should one be surprised then,” he asked, “that they return to the seminary in poor health?”
The book doesn’t say if this death was a suicide, or not, but it is cagey and vague, and it seems weird that they weren’t like, “a student died of cholera” or similar.
I really do wonder if there’s some truth to the legend about the seminarian’s suicide. And it’s one of those things: when part of a seemingly baseless urban legend starts to sound like it may be true, the rest of it suddenly appears in a different light.
So, the story of a haunting from a priest early in the building’s history, despite the building having been used for many other purposes, like a prep school, leads me to a philosophical question, as well.
If you’re a longtime listener, you know that a preoccupation of mine is this question: why do some spirits or entities haunt a location, and not others?
- This is an interesting metaphysical question that I don’t expect to find an answer to, but embedded inside it are some other questions, which are easier to try to tease out and examine, I think.
- Those other questions are: why do some locations have certain legends attached to them and not others? Why do some stories survive, and others fade out? Why, when some people have paranormal experiences, do they ascribe their cause to one historical figure (or past resident of an area) and not another?
- The answers to these questions are obviously long and complicated and could yield many hours of healthy debate.
- But the thing I’ve noticed is that one major thing seems to inform legends of hauntings, and to me legends informed by this are less credible:
  - whoever had the greatest level of power and/or wealth in an area is more likely to be remembered than someone who had less power or wealth, and as a result, I believe that people are more likely to come up with an explanation behind their paranormal experiences that draw from the stories of the deceased people of the area who were best known
- I think it’s important to think critically about the stories we tell about hauntings, both from a historical analysis standpoint, but also from the standpoint of trying to assess what you think about the veracity of a claim.
- All this being said, I’m not trying to say that there’s any great injustice being done in this instance. I have no stake in whether ghost stories about Queens Court are about 19th century seminarians, students, or priests who died in the 20th century or later.
- And I don’t really think that a seminarian suffering in terrible living conditions is any more privledged than a student. In fact, I think the opposite is true.
  - So for me, this is a point, a small point, in favor of this haunting potentially having some truth to it, despite also being an urban legend. We do know that conditions were bad, we do know that someone died, and that person is unnamed and pretty forgotten, so not exactly exciting fodder for a story that you’re making up.
- I always feel that stories of hauntings about better known people are more likely to be fake (or wishful thinking), than stories that are about lesser known people. And of course, the more details someone comes out of an experience with, the more likely I am to think it’s true, versus vague urban legends, etc.
- Anyway, I know that’s a long digression, but one thing that I do think is interesting about Fordham hauntings is that there are a number of them about priests who the person experiencing the phenomena wasn’t necessarily familiar with previously, etc.
- Also, there are famous people who’ve been associated with Fordham’s campus who, surprisingly, don’t have ghost stories about them, which I think is great, and which I think lends to the credibility of the other ghost stories. One of those figures is George Washington, who supposedly used the old manor at Fordham as a headquarters. The other figure is, of course, Edgar Allen Poe. I mean, if you want to make up a ghost story and you’re told you live on a haunted campus, wouldn’t you make up a story about Poe? I’m really impressed that the two most famous historical figures associated with the university seem not to have haunted it at all.
So I’ve been going on for a while, and next episode will really focus a lot on these hauntings. But I wanted to tell one more short story of a Queens Court haunting.
There’s a mention of Alpha House in the bit I’m going to read next, so I want to explain what the heck Alpha House is.
- Today, it’s like a classroom/study lounge for the honors program, but it was originally built in 1864 at the campus entrance at 3rd ave and Fordham Road. (That’s right around where the Fordham metro north train station is now) For years after that, it was the college bookstore.
- It was a gatehouse built from locally quarried stone, and it was built to test out the stone’s quality.
- It’s since been moved to the middle of campus, near Hughes Hall, which I’ll talk about in a later episode.
So this come from The Ram, in an article that was published in 1983 and republished in 85 and 88:
- “Another ghost who likes to keep tabs on present-day Fordham is the spirit of the groundskeeper. When Alpha House was located at the Third Avenue gate entrance at the turn of the century, it was used to house Rose Hill’s groundskeeper and his family. One of his duties was to walk around campus at night to make sure all the buildings were secure. It’s said that one of his favorite tours was around St. John’s Hall, which he used to circle more than once swinging a small lantern. Reportedly he can be seen late at night circling the same building today, leisurely checking the doors and swinging his lamp.”
Alright, so that’s the groundskeeper ghost. I haven’t heard of this haunting mentioned outside of the pages of The Ram, but I think it’s a nice, cozy story to close on.
I’ve got a bunch of poltergeist activity to talk about in the next episode, as well as the most famous Queens Court ghost story, which involves a student talking to a ghost and not realizing it, AND a ghost performing a possible exorcism, so come back the week after next for that!

Sources consulted RE: the Ghosts of Queen’s Court

See sources page for the full source list for the series

Books consulted

A history of St. John’s College, Fordham, N.Y by Thomas Gaffney Taaffe (1891)
Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 by Thomas J. Shelley (2016)
Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition by Raymond A. Schroth (2009)
Haunted Halls: ghostlore of American college campuses by Elizabeth Tucker (2007)
The Big Book of New York Ghost Stories by Cheri Farnsworth (2019)
The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries by Carolee Inskeep (2000)
Ghosthunting New York City by L’Aura Hladik (2011)

Don’t miss past episodes:

Haunted Queen’s Court: Part 2 (Haunted Fordham University)

Forgotten human remains, a lingering entity monitored by a ghostly priest, mysteriously vanishing objects, strange sounds, and more abound at Fordham University’s most haunted dorm.

Haunted Queen’s Court: Forgotten human remains, a lingering entity monitored by a ghostly priest, mysteriously vanishing objects, strange sounds, and more abound at Fordham University’s most haunted dorm.

Here’s a deep dive into ghost stories from Queen’s Court, looking at both the reported stories as well as the connections between tales of weirdness.

Highlights include:
• A second, forgotten burial ground on Fordham’s Campus
• My own paranormal experience
• The entity that supposedly is trapped at the end of the hall of a dorm
• A ghostly priest who banishes and traps a strange entity
• Poltergeist activity

Got a Fordham haunting to report? Send it to buriedsecretspodcast@gmail.com.

Episode Script

Note: For this version of the script, I tried to censor students’ names. Everyone I mention by name was quoted and named on the record in publicly accessible articles, but many of the articles exist in PDF form in the university’s archives and are not indexed by search engines. I don’t want to screw up the SEO on anyone’s name, so if you want to see full names, check out the sources below or listen to the episode.

Last episode, I talked about the history of one wing of one dorm of Fordham, so you know, I’m really making good progress on getting through my look at the history and hauntings of this campus.
You’ll prob get more out of this episode if you listened to the previous one, which is more about the university’s history, but I think you’re fine listening to just this one if you prefer to get right into the ghost stories
So anyway, I’m talking about the dorm Queen’s Court, which is made up of three halls. The oldest, St. John’s Hall, which I talked about last week
I saved one tidbit of history from St. John’s Hall that I wanted to share this week.
So, Fordham University famously has a cemetery dating on campus from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and I’m going to talk about that in depth in another episode. However, what most people don’t know, and what I certainly didn’t know, is that there’s another known burial ground at Fordham’s campus.
Though actually, when I went back and did more research, I found that it was mentioned in the 1891 book A History of St. John’s College, Fordham, NY, but I must have skimmed over it when reading it in the past, bc the part in that book about Fordham prior to the seminary being founded is a little boring to me.
So, initially I stumbled across the story of this burial ground in a 2019 book called The Big Book of New York Ghost Stories by Cheri Farnsworth (2019):
- “During construction of St. John’s Hall, a private burial ground was discovered on farmland that had belonged to the Corsa family and is now occupied by the university. Andrew Corsa, for whom Corsa Avenue was named, was the same age as freshman and sophomore university students when he volunteered to guide George Washington, the Comte de Rochambeau, and the allied U.S.-France Army of five thousand troops to survey British defenses around Manhattan just prior to the Grand Reconnaissance on July 21, 1781. The circular garden behind St. John’s Hall marks the Corsa family’s burial grounds.”
I had never heard of the Corsa family burial ground, and was shocked to find this information. So I pulled out one of my favorite reference books, The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries by Carolee Inskeep (2000), and sure enough, there was an entry on the Corsa Family Burial Ground.
- There’s very little information about the cemetery, and I think that Cheri Farnsworth got her information from The Graveyard Shift, because it’s pretty much the same. The only additional info that I found in The Graveyard Shift was that the cemetery was discovered in the 1840s when they were building St. John’s Hall. We know that the burial ground was used prior to the 1840s, but that’s it.
- I tried to find more information about the Corsa family, but didn’t see a ton on Ancestry.com. I did find Andrew Corsa’s information on wikitree.com; he died in 1852, so wouldn’t have been buried in the family burial ground. He was buried at St. John’s Cemetery in Yonkers, but his parents may have been buried at the family burial ground, as well as his grandfather and other family members from the generations before him. Interestingly, Andrew Corsa’s father, Isaac, was apparently a loyalist who had to relocate to Nova Scotia after the Revolutionary War, but it sounds like at some point before his death, he likely returned to NY. It’s just interesting to me that the father was a loyalist and his son volunteered to help George Washington’s forces.
Here’s what the 1891 book A History of St. John’s College, Fordham, NY says:
- “Another tradition of revolutionary days, but one which lacks the color of probability, is that concerning the skeletons which were discovered in a mound at the rear of the old seminary. They were immediately pronounced the bones of soldiers who had fallen in some of the numerous skirmishes that took place in that vicinity during the revolutionary war. But there is nothing to confirm that belief; on the contrary, all the evidence in the case tends to contradict any such opinion. The skeletons were buried at regular intervals and in regular order, which would hardly be the case with those dying on a battlefield; there were no tokens, in the way of brass buttons, buckles, sabres and the like, such as would, in all probability, be found in the graves of soldiers; and finally, at the time the bones were discovered, a Mr. Corsa, who lived in the neighborhood, stated, it is said, that the place had been used in former years as a burying-ground.”
The additional two wings of Queen’s Court, Bishop’s Hall and Robert’s Hall were built about 100 years later, in 1940. Then it was called Our Lady’s Court, and then they changed it to Queen’s Court, which is what it’s still called today
- According to the book Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 by Thomas J. Shelley (2016), there’s an interesting story about how the university got the funding for Bishop’s and Robert’s Halls: Robert Gannon, the university president, was at a dinner party and he really charmed this rich lady who was hosting the party. As he was leaving, she gave him a check for $160,000. And then later she gave him another $50,000. For reference, $210,000 in 1940 is $4.1 million today.
- So yeah, how “charming” must Gannon have been, or how rich was this lady, that it made since to give him the equivalent of $3.1 million as he’s walking out the door and then another million? A very charming man. There’re lots of stories in the book about how charming Gannon was. It’s just wild.
- I’d always wondered why Queens Court is called QC, and I’m SURE it’s a reference to Mary, but I’m sure it was also a reference to this lady, kinda like how John Hughes named stuff after himself.
- Anyway, the other notable thing about the other two wing’s construction was that they were built from stones from what the book called the “old Lenox Library,” so I looked up the Lenox library, which was a fancy private library that ended up becoming one of the first branches of the NYPL. It was in the UES, and stood where the Frick museum is now, at 5th ave and 70th street. It was torn down in 1912, and then Henry Clay Frick built his mansion in that location. That leads me to so many logistical questions about how the stone ended up being used at Fordham, but the internet has been no help at answering my many questions. But I guess they repurposed the stone? And I guess the stone was a perfect match. I wonder if the fancy rich lady had anything to do with hooking them up with the stone?
So that’s the kind of odd story behind the expansion of Queen’s Court. Let’s get to the ghosts.
A 2017 article in The Observer, the newspaper of Fordham’s Manhattan campus, Lincoln Center, has some great firsthand accounts of Fordham ghosts. I just want to pause to applaud the writer, Zoe S—–, for doing actual reporting and interviewing people with ghostly experiences, instead of doing what I and everyone else on the internet does, and what I’m doing, which is just regurgitating stories printed elsewhere.
- https://fordhamobserver.com/33317/features/fordham-frights-the-ghosts-that-haunt-our-school/
- So anyway, the article recounts a story from John A—–, class of 89, who lived in St. John’s Hall, in Queens court. This story is from the late 80s. A—–‘s friend, Paul C—–, was at his desk, doing homework. I’ll read from A—–‘s account: ” His desk was against the wall, but he could look to the left out his window and see the courtyard. It was around 10:30-11:00 p.m. He looked out the window and saw this guy in a cape walking toward the statue in the center of the court. He had a candle extinguisher. He was walking toward the statue as if to extinguish the light.”
- However, the light was electric, so that was just weird. C—–went to the window and watched. Ten minutes later, his roommate walked in. C—– was really freaked out, and basically just kept saying “no legs” while pointing out the window. Eventually, he was calm enough to say that when he looked out the window, he saw that the figure he saw had no legs. To quote A—-: “He floated to the middle of the court, then floated out of the courtyard. Bizarre.”
Could this be the groundskeeper ghost, or someone else?
In the October 31, 1999 issue of The Ram, there are stories about possible poltergeist activity in Queens Court.
Thought first I wanted to talk about the definition of poltergeist activity. When I use the term, I mean a mischievous ghost or spirit that makes noises, moves things around, and generally causes annoying but mainly harmless household disruption.
- however, some paranormal investigators say that a poltergeist needs to have a certain person, usually a young person going through puberty, especially a young girl, who the activity is sort of associate with and spurred on by. but that’s not the definition I’m using here
- The article is called Boo! Are you Frightened Yet? You should be, and describes a student named Andy S—– class of ’99, who looked at a Beatles album cover right before going to bed, and when he woke up, the alum that had been hanging on his wall, was gone.
  - They ascertained that no one could have entered their room, because the door was still locked, they looked all over, couldn’t find it, and gave up. He was puzzled, though, so when he heard a story about someone else’s experience in Queens Court of a picture flying across the room, he kept looking for the album. Three weeks later, he found it behind a dresser on the adjacent wall, somewhere where he was sure that it couldn’t have fallen on its own.
  - He told The Ram: “I was so scared that I had trouble sleeping for three weeks,” and, sure that this was the work of a ghost, he started asking around for more stories of hauntings.
- He collected a number of stories, and presented the three most credible ones at his Knight Court (explain what Knight Court is).
- The three events he told at his Knight Court all happened on the second floor of Robert’s Hall, a wing of Queens Court (for reference, I lived on Robert’s third, and I did have one paranormal experience there, which I’ll talk about when I do the episode on my experiences.)
- Alison M—– was blow drying her hair when she thought she heard the phone ring. She turned off the blowdryer and looked at the phone, which was where it always was, on her roommate’s fridge. She kept blow drying her hair, and it didn’t ring again. Then, she looked up when her roommate Carin R—- came back from the bathroom, and Alison saw that the phone was no longer on the fridge: it was on her desk. She asked her roommate if she’s moved the phone, but she hadn’t. They were both freaked out by that. The article does not say whether the phone was still plugged in, or how close the fridge and desk were, which were my two questions when reading that.
- Their neighbor, Vickie V—-, had an experience a few days after moving into the dorm. She was talking to her roommate, who was cutting pictures out of magazines using scissors. The roommate put down the scissors for a moment, and then when she went to pick them up, they were gone. They looked for it for 15 mins, and even took the sheets of the bed, but couldn’t find them. Then, they looked at the desk, and the scissors were sitting there on a neat stack of papers. Weirdly, the desk had been cluttered and covered with messy papers before. They were really freaked out, so knocked on their neighbor’s door at 1 am. (Unclear if the neighbor was Alison M—– and Carin R—–, or not.) One of the girls called her mom (I assume also at 1 am, lol), and her mom said that as long as they had faith in Christ, the spirit couldn’t harm them. Later on, though, V—– was skeptical, and said: “Maybe we can do things unconsciously and then we try to attribute them to outside causes.”
- Down the hall, still on Roberts 2nd, Susan H—– and Sara H—- had an incident where they locked their door, turned off their stereo, and went to sleep. Sometime during the night, the stereo turned itself back on, and started playing a “strange CD” which hadn’t been in their stereo at all the previous day. (Not sure what strange CD meant, but I guess that’s just a flourish? It seems to be a CD they owned.) The CD they’d played right before going to bed was back in its case on the rack.
- S—– also told other, more minor stories that had happened. To read from the article: ” Residents blamed ghosts for unlocked doors, switched-off fans and missing jewelry that later resurfaced in odd places. Students also reported footsteps and strange noises coming from St. John’s Hall which was closed for renovation.”
- I don’t know what was being renovated in St. John’s Hall at the time, but I do know that according to an article in The Ram from September 4, 1983, there was a ceiling collapse in John’s that forced an evacuation, so it seems like it was falling apart for a while.
- St. John’s Hall is the oldest wing of Queens Court, and it was the original wing, before the other two were added on. It’s actually the oldest dorm on campus.
- So those incidents had happened in 95. In 96, S—– returned to Queens Court to talk at “Fright Court,” which is a Halloween event that the dorm does. There, he collected one new story, from Megan and Susan M—–, class of 2000, who said they’d lost a magazine while moving into their room on John’s 2nd. They couldn’t find it, went to dinner, and when they returned, it was sitting in the middle of their floor.
- S—– said: “My theory is if there were a ghost, it came as if an introduction to say, ‘Beware of me. You are not alone.”
Perhaps the most famous Queens Court haunting is one that’s retold in the book Haunted Halls: ghostlore of American college campuses by Elizabeth Tucker (2007), and the story also appears in The Big Book of New York Ghost Stories by Cheri Farnsworth (2019).
- During summer 2003, before students had moved in, five Ras and one residence hall director moved into Queens Court early to prep for students’ arrival. They had to fill out condition reports for rooms and get them prepped for the new students to move in. But a strange thing was happening on the first floor of Roberts. In one particular room, the mattresses kept ending up propped upright against the walls, even though the RA for the hall kept laying them back down every time he passed.
- He thought that someone was probably pranking him, so he would lock the door every time he put the mattresses back down to make sure no one could get in. But it didn’t do any good.
- One night, around 2:30, someone knocked on the RA’s door. He opened the door, and saw that his visitor was a priest.
- According to the Fordham library website, the priest said this to the RA:
  - “Someone must have been praying pretty loudly if they got me up at this hour. Sorry about that, it normally stays at the other end of the hall, but it must have gotten out. Don’t worry, I took care of it.”
The library continues the story, saying:
- “For the rest of the summer the mattresses stayed in their proper places. The RA later tried to seek out the Jesuit but when he described the elderly man who visited him in the night, he was told that the only Jesuit bearing that description had died 10 years earlier.”
Before I continue the story, I just want to pause on what I think is a really important part of the story. When the Jesuit says “It normally stays at the other end of the hall, but it must have gotten out,” what the heck is he talking about. Is there one room that is just understood to be haunted? Does the entity usually haunt the bathroom, at the end of the hall? Or another part of Queen’s Court? The priest didn’t say, “don’t worry, it’s gone back to the spirit realm,” or something. He implies that the entity’s home is within Queen’s Court. Not especially comforting.
I found some additional information about this story that I hadn’t seen elsewhere on a website called belitionlee.blogspot.com. I don’t totally know where this information came from, but it has my favorite thing, which is specific details. It claims to be an update/correct as of 2004, clarifying that it happened on the first floor of Roberts. And I’ll just read the rest from the blog:
- “But there’s more to the events that happened…in early November 2003, when the hall was full of 20-some residents, all of the lighting- main AND emergency, suddenly went out one night. The lights were out- inexplicably- for almost the entire day. By the time night fell, the floor was pitch black. During the day, the fire alarm lights flashed several times but only in the Robert’s first hallway- nowhere else in the building. The creepiest part was that night, when the two residents who live in “the room” that had the problem with mattress flipping earlier in the summer got locked in. The second roommate had come in and didn’t even shut the door all the way- suddenly it was shut and locked, and they couldn’t open it up. No one could get the door open. Finally, locksmiths had to be brought in- in the middle of the night, keep in mind- to climb in through the windows, and literally take the door apart, until it suddenly fell off its hinges.”
So now we come to the experience I had at Queen’s Court. It isn’t the most dramatic story, but it’s certainly a puzzler.
- When I was a freshman, I lived on the third floor of Robert’s Hall. Though Queens Court has a really fancy, Hogwarts-looking study hall on the first floor of Bishops, I didn’t like to study there at night after I had already showered, because I was young and vain and didn’t like to encounter people in my pajamas, and with my hair wet, and not wearing makeup.
- I also couldn’t really study in my room, because my roommate went to bed really early and was a light sleeper.
- So in those situations, when I needed to study late in the evening after I’d showered, I would sit in the stairwell, in between the third floor (which was the top floor) and the roof. This was an interior stairwell, positioned between Robert’s and Bishop’s halls, and it led up to the door to the roof, which was an alarmed emergency exit. It’s worth noting here that alarmed doors are very heavy, because you don’t want to risk a gust of wind opening it and waking up the whole building with the alarm, etc.
- If I’m remembering the geography of these stairs correctly, through the mists of time, there was a landing in the middle of the stairs, and I’d sit halfway between the landing and the third floor. I wanted to be high enough away that people walking by wouldn’t try to talk to me (and ideally, they wouldn’t see me at all, because it’s kind of weird to study in a stairwell.) But I couldn’t go up too high, because there wasn’t a light at the top of the stairs, by the roof, so the higher up you went, the more shrouded in darkness you were. And if I was too high, then I couldn’t see to read.
- One week, there was a weird thing where the alarms had briefly stopped working.
- And it was a big deal, because people were able to go up onto the roof and take pictures and stuff, so a lot of people were going up there. I didn’t, because I’m an extremely risk-averse person, and I regret that for sure.
- Fordham University is an extremely strict environment, and I remember the administration was not happy that people were going up on the roof, so they fixed the alarms really fast. I can’t remember exactly how long it took them, but maybe a couple days?
- On the day that this experience happened, someone had tried going back up onto the roof, and had set off the alarms, so it was confirmed that the roof was once again off limits. I remember being super bummed about that, because I had just about got up the courage to go up there.
- So that evening, I was sitting on the stairs, studying, and above me, I hear the door slam. It was really loud, because it was a heavy, alarmed door. I couldn’t see the door from where I was sitting, but I set down my book, went up the rest of the stairs, and saw that the door was very firmly closed. I kind of shrugged, was like, whatever, and went back down.
- But then I heard it slam again. I went back up, checked it, and of course it was closed and no one was there. I also didn’t hear anyone up on the roof, like walking around or talking or anything.
- Even if there was someone up on the roof, there was no reason for them to open and shut a door, unless they were going in or out, because it risked setting off the alarm. And no one could have gone in and out via that stairwell without passing by me. There was I believe one other stairwell with roof access, on the other side of the building, so someone could have gone out using that, but, again, there’s no reason why someone would have opened and then slammed the door above me shut without walking through it, especially because slamming a door risked alerting someone to the fact that you’re up there, trespassing. Also, I knew the doors had been alarmed again, someone had checked that day, so how could the door open without setting off the alarm?
- It happened a few more times, with the door above me distinctly slamming, and me checking and seeing that everything looked normal. I thought of sitting on the landing so I could watch the door out of the corner of my eye, but it was way too dark up there, and I wouldn’t have been able to read in the dim light. After a while, I remember just being creeped out, finishing up what I was doing, and going to bed.
- I don’t remember studying in that stairwell that often after that (I think it was fairly early in the school year and I switched to mostly studying elsewhere once I found somewhere I preferred), but I never had anything else like that happen in the stairwell.
- So what do I think happened? To me, it sounds in line with some of the poltergeist-type activity that other people have witnessed at Queens Court. I’m inclined to think I experienced something paranormal, but as with all things paranormal, there’s not really a way for me to prove it.
- Do I think the door was really slamming, or do I think it was just a noise that sounded like the door slamming? I don’t know, it’s too long ago now for me to remember if there had been a draft or not before I heard each slam. And I was really trying to concentrate on studying, rather than studying the circumstances of this phenomena.
- NOTE: I know that I made some additional connections about my experience in the final episode audio, but haven’t had time to add that to the transcript.

Sources consulted RE: Haunted Queen’s Court

See sources page for the full source list for the series

Books consulted

A history of St. John’s College, Fordham, N.Y by Thomas Gaffney Taaffe (1891)
Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 by Thomas J. Shelley (2016)
Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition by Raymond A. Schroth (2009)
Haunted Halls: ghostlore of American college campuses by Elizabeth Tucker (2007)
The Big Book of New York Ghost Stories by Cheri Farnsworth (2019)
The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries by Carolee Inskeep (2000)
Ghosthunting New York City by L’Aura Hladik (2011)

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Haunted Hughes Hall (Haunted Fordham University)

After a scene in The Exorcist was filmed in Hughes Hall, a former dorm at Fordham University, urban legends began to spring up about the building being haunted.

Haunted Hughes Hall: After a scene in The Exorcist was filmed in Hughes Hall, a former dorm at Fordham University, urban legends began to spring up about the building being haunted.

Rumors of “cultish” graffiti, tales of a young boy’s ghost, stories of a mysterious black dog, and more weird urban legends circulated about the building. This episode seeks to tease out why some of these legends may have grown up around the building, which began as the old prep school, was turned into a dorm as a “stopgap” measure that lasted for decades, and has since been completely gutted and turned back into an academic building.

Plus, a look at some of the weird connections that The Exorcist had to Fordham.

Highlights include:
• The Fordham University professor who was an influence on The Exorcist
• What it was like to be one of the last people to live in Hughes Hall (spoiler: it was bad)
• The ghost of a prep school student
• Satanic Panic-type urban legends

Episode Script

Hughes Hall (used to be called the Second Division Building or Junior Hall, because it was the prep school, until it was renamed in 1935) (built 1891)

So, before I get into the haunted stuff there, I want to talk a bit about what the living conditions were like there, since when it comes to haunted dorms, that has such a big impact on what kind of stories were told there.
I lived in this building for two summers; it was considered the worst or second-worst dorm on campus, and it was where students who were taking classes or working on campus over the summer were offered housing.
- So I mentioned that this was an undesirable place to live. It was also known as the party dorm for freshmen, because everyone lived at such close quarters.
- Each of the (pretty small) rooms housed 4 students, who slept on two sets of bunk beds. I remember when I lived there, the bunk beds were very tall and had no ladder or rails, so every night, I had to climb up the side beams of the bed, and every morning, before my roommate woke up, I had to climb down and collect the stuff from my bed that had fallen into her bed. (Usually my phone and book would have fallen down to her bed during the night, I don’t know why.)
  - It was a grim place to live.
  - Each student had a desk, and there were no closets, because the building was never meant to be a dorm, so each student had a wardrobe. The rooms were so small that the beds would usually be pushed up toward the windows, and the desks would be pushed together in an area between the wardrobes and the door.
- Each floor had a communal bathroom down the hall, and there was a single kitchen, down in the basement, but I think the first summer I lived there, there was something wrong with it so we didn’t have full use of it, so I remember my roommate had a contraband microwave in our room, and we only really ate things you could make in the microwave.
- The idea was that students living there had to be on the meal plan, but during the summer, that wasn’t really a thing, I think I worked something out where I could eat in the cafeteria maybe 3-5 times a week for the first summer. And then the second summer, I found myself walking down 4+ flights of stairs just to use the microwave. I have lots of memories of me carrying my pan and spatula and ingredients up and down the stairs, to use the stove, it was awful.
- When I lived there, they’d stopped maintaining the building, because they’d made plans to gut it and turn it into a shiny new business school building (which is what it is now.) So I remember the second summer, they started cutting holes in the walls in the stairwell and common areas, so everything was covered in a fine white powder from the paint and drywall debris. And the water pressure was screwed up in the showers, so it was painfully strong, to the point where it hurt my skin. So every time I took a shower, I had to bring a washcloth and rubber band, and I had to secure the washcloth over the shower head using the rubber band, to diffuse the water pressure enough so that I could shower. But also the ceiling over the shower had been cut open, so debris would fall on you in the shower, so often I’d get out and have to clean this gross dark stuff from the ceiling off my skin.
- The first summer, we possibly had bedbugs in the room we were assigned; my one roommate was covered in these huge bug bites all around her stomach and waist that ended up taking months to heal. They were like huge welts. The university sent exterminators, that didn’t seem to help, so then they moved us to a bigger, better room, because it looked pretty bad. And there weren’t that many students who lived there during the summer, so the 4th and 5th floors were empty (and I think there were also empty rooms on the occupied floors.)
  - So the room they moved us to was on a completely empty floor, the 4th floor. At the time, I remembered that part of The Exorcist had been filmed in the building, so I looked it up, and saw that the scene had been filmed on the 4th floor. At the time, I didn’t know what room the filming happened it, though while doing the research for this episode, I’ve seen that it was apparently filmed in room 417. I can’t remember what room they moved us to on the 4th floor, but it was a huge corner room on the far west side of the building (I believe it would have been the room on the far southwest corner of the 4th floor.)
  - The room was so big that we actually didn’t even have bunk beds; there was enough floor space to have all the beds standing on their own, which was wild. Also, remember this is NYC, so when I say the room was huge, I’d guess, from memory and comparing it to places I’ve lived since, that it was maybe 300 square feet?
  - Anyway, while we lived on the otherwise empty floor, I don’t think we had any paranormal stuff happen.
    - The vibe was very bad there, obviously, and usually I’d spent evenings reading outside on the quad and would just go back to the dorm to sleep.
    - Once I woke up during the night, hearing screams, but it was just my roommates trying to chase a rat out of our room and down the hall.
    - Most mornings I woke up and had spider bites on me, but that may have just been from being out on the quad the evening before (though my roommates often had bug bites, just not as bad as the scary ones my roommate had in our old room.)
    - Since there were four of us and we were always going in and out to use the restroom down the hall, as long as someone was home, we usually kept the door unlocked, so once someone came into our room. But I think it was just a drunk person, not a ghost. I remember my roommate got up and shoved them out.
  - The second summer that I lived in the building was less eventful. I think I lived on the 3rd floor, but can’t remember for sure.
    - I do remember that second summer, I once went up to the 5th floor and I remember at least some of the doors of the rooms were unlocked or open, and the rooms were full of weird old furniture? It didn’t really make sense to me, but maybe because we were the last people to live there, they’d just started using it for storage? I remember that floor creeped me out a LOT and if I recall correctly, it was in the mansard roof, so it had a real attic/garret vibe, with sloping exterior walls with windows. I only went up to the 5th floor once and then never went back.
- So it wasn’t a pleasant place to live, not at all. I know I lived there under extraordinary circumstances, being in the final cohort of people living there, but even under regular times, it was unpleasant and crowded with too many people.
Hughes Hall was originally called the Second Division Building; it was basically a boarding school/high school.
- From an article in the Ram, written in 1990, as well as Raymond Schroth’s book, Fordham: A History and Memoir, which I mentioned in previous episodes, apparently the building was completed and occupied by September 1890. Here’s what each floor was originally used for:
  - 1st floor: gymnasium (had an extra tall ceiling). There was also a billiard room, reading room, and restrooms
  - 2nd floor: VP’s office, study hall with a slanted floor that led to stage, and classrooms
  - 3rd floor: 8 large classrooms (which could hold 50 students each)
  - 4th floor: dorm (apparently it was one huge room with a sliding door that could divide it in half
  - 5th floor: wardrobe (later, it was converted into individual rooms for students to board in, who called it “Madison Avenue”
- According to Fordham’s website, the Second Division Building was renamed Hughes Hall, after the school’s founder, Archbishop John Hughes, who I’ve talked about enough already, listen to past episodes of you want to hear more about that guy.
  - The new prep school building was opened in 1972. So in June 1973, Hughes was turned into “into a multidisciplinary building, housing faculty offices, athletic facilities and conference rooms.”
  - And then by 1978, the building was mostly used for storage. In 1982, the “the first three floors are converted into a temporary dormitory for 180 freshmen.”
  - Then in summer of 1984, they converted the 4th and 5th floor to dorm rooms and added an elevator.
  - Their timeline of the building’s history and renovation doesn’t mention any additional changes to the building until 2012, when it opened as the new business school.
  - So The Exorcist came out in 1973. Principal photography started in August 1972 and went on for 200 days. I’m not sure when the parts that were filmed at Fordham happened, but it sounds like it probably happened between the building being vacated and it being turned into a “multidisciplinary building.” So much like the summers I spent there, the building would’ve been mostly empty then. Apparently, since the building didn’t have an elevator yet, they had to remove the windows so they could bring up the camera on a crane.
  - As far as I’m concerned, even before we get to the paranormal elements, the place is cursed and awful.
I found a reminiscence of Hughes Hall written by someone who went to Fordham Prep, a man named Joe B—-. Seems like he may have attended during the 1960s? This blog post was written in 2009, on his blog, warofyesterday.blogspot.com, but I thought it had a nice description of what the building used to be like:
- “Huge Hall was our name for the building Fordham Prep was in, Hughes Hall. It wasn’t that big. That’s why we called it Huge. We noticed that the steam radiators had a date in the 1880s cast into them, and being the youngsters we were, with our minds on the present, that seemed too impossibly old to be true. But it was. It was less than a hundred years ago at the time. Some of the classrooms still had the old iron desks attached to the floor, the wooden desktop equipped with a pencil groove and a hole for the ink bottle, the wood worn beautifully smooth by generations of boys. The walls had real slate blackboards. It was a great atmosphere. It reeked of tradition.
- “Hughes was too old to be a steel building. The support system was the external stone walls and a single row of iron columns down the center on the long axis, visible only on the ground floor where space was opened up for a gym. Yes, a gym with padded iron columns within it! Oof! The stone wall on the ground floor was three feet thick, making for nice window seats.”
So that was the building was like it’s prep school days.
The book, Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 by Thomas J. Shelley (2016) describes how Hughes Hall became a dorm:
- “Finlay [the university president at the time] sent a panic-stricken letter to the Jesuit community at the beginning of the summer, warning them that the university could not provide housing for more than 200 incoming freshmen. As an emergency measure, Finlay converted three floors of Hughes Hall (the former site of Fordham Prep) into student housing, but he admitted that it was only a stopgap solution.”
- While the university would build more housing, it seems like housing was always an issue, because that stopgap solution was still in place in the early 2010s.
- Also, while a bunch of new dorms have been built since the early 1980s, Loyola Hall and Faber are now both used for student housing.
- In terms of how they converted the building, they obviously just cut the classrooms in half (possibly thirds) and turned them into dorm rooms which slept four people each, in two bunk beds that were about 3 feet apart. And I guess they added showers to the existing restrooms. It was known as the party dorm, which is no surprise, because just entering your own tiny dorm room was basically like walking into a party.
- So enough background, let’s get into some ghost stories.
- In the October 14, 1982, issue of the Ram, an article mentions that: “The top floor of Hughes Hall is reputed to be haunted by an eerie unknown specter.”
  - I’ve also read that this ghost on the top floor seemed to potentially be a young boy’s ghost, which makes sense, since this was the prep school.
- An article that was printed in The Ram in 1983 (and reprinted a few times) has a very silly anecdote about Hughes Hall:
  - Before its renovation as a new form, Hughes Hall sparked several rumors of being haunted. Reportedly, bizarre Satan-worship ceremonies occurred on the fourth floor and strange “cultish” wall paintings, which depict burning flames against a heavenly sky, still survive to this day.
- To me, that just seems like typical 80s satanic panic stuff to me. To continue reading from the article:
  - While ‘The Exorcist’ was being filmed at Fordham, specifically in Hughes Hall, it’s said that a large, black dog came to set every day without fail. The animal didn’t bother anyone, but the crew could not chase it away, no matter how hard they tried.. It never returned after the film sequence was completed.
- The black dog is really interesting to me, since that’s something that comes up in lots of accounts of paranormal encounters.
  - I’m gonna read a bit from wikipedia about black dogs in folklore (I’m sorry to be that way, it just has a good summary):
    - “The black dog is a supernatural, spectral or demonic entity from English folklore. It is usually unnaturally large with glowing red or yellow eyes, is often connected with the Devil (as an English incarnation of the Hellhound), and is sometimes an omen of death. It is sometimes associated with electrical storms . . . and also with crossroads, barrows (as a type of fairy hound), places of execution and ancient pathways.
    - “Black dogs are generally regarded as sinister or malevolent, and a few . . . are said to be directly harmful. Some black dogs, however, . . . are said to behave benevolently as guardian black dogs, guiding travellers at night onto the right path or protecting them from danger.”
And because I feel guilty about quoting from wikipedia, I also went over to my bookshelf a cracked open some paper books that mention Black Dogs.
- The book Where the Footprints End: Hight Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon Volume1: Folklore by Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner, one of my favorite books about the paranormal, talks about familiar spirits that worked with witches and cunning men. To quote from the book: “Large black dogs are closely associated with witches and faeries, both as a guise for Satan and as familiars.” The book goes on to talk about black dogs that have been sighted near bigfoot, etc.
- And The Encyclopedia of Demons & Demonology by Rosemary Ellen Guiley talks about black dogs, and also says they’re often considered demons or the devil in shapeshifted form. Apparently in European witch hunts, people would claim that witches would “be visited by their master, the devil, in the shape of a black dog.” Also, this next fact isn’t relevant, but it is interesting: apparently in Arabian lore, djinn like to take the form of a black dog, in order to stay close to a person they’re attached to. So basically, the idea is that magical creatures like to masquerade as black dogs.
It sounds like black dog lore in the US is more prevalent in New England, which makes sense, since it came over with English colonizers. In particular, Meriden, Connecticut, has had black dog legends associated with an area called the Hanging Hills.
A ton of people at Fordham (at least while I was there) are from CT, since it’s so close, so it makes sense that the black dog story made its way to Fordham. Now the question is: Is it just an urban legend that came about because CT people were familiar with the myth, or did CT people just NOTICE the black dog and find it worthy of note bc they were familiar with the legend.
It is interesting to me that the Fordham legend doesn’t mention glowing red or yellow eyes, or the dog emitting creepy howls, which are parts of the black dog lore.
- I tried to figure out if a black dog was sighted elsewhere during the Exorcist’s production, but couldn’t find anything. I wonder if the black dog was some supernatural entity (friendly or not friendly) who had come to keep an eye on the production. A lot of weird lore is attached to The Exorcist so maybe some sort of entity in the area wanted to check it out while it was around. I haven’t heard of other black dog sightings in the area, though.
There’s one last line from this article I wanted to read:
- Hughes is also home for a deceased Jesuit novitiate who had perpetually haunted the top floors of the building after his death there several years ago.
- When I searched “novitiate dead hughes hall” in the Ram’s archives, I only found this article that I’m reading from. So while I’m not saying it’s false, I hadn’t really seen stuff about Jesuits living in Hughes (though I guess it’s possible) and I can’t find this story. Make of this what you will.
So let’s talk more about the filming of The Exorcist at Fordham:
Part of The Exorcist was filmed in Hughes Hall, and a Fordham-affiliated Jesuit, Father Bermingham, was involved in the production (he was a technical advisor, and had a bit part in the movie)
We need to pause on Bermingham real quick. He taught at both Brooklyn Prep and Georgetown, and coincidentally, he taught Exorcist author William Peter Blatty both places. In fact, while teaching Blatty at Georgetown, he suggested that Blatty do an oration project on demonic possession, and pointed him toward an article about Roland Doe, the case that inspired The Exorcist.
The fact that Blatty was close with a Jesuit suggests to me that maybe Blatty did know a bit about how the Catholic church handled exorcisms, and how Fordham may have been connected to exorcisms.
- This is complete hearsay, so take it with whatever sized grain of salt you want, but: When I was in school, I knew a couple guys who were considering becoming priests and were pretty close with the Jesuits.
- One of these guys told me that a Jesuit had told him that, from time to time, priests who were recovering from doing an exorcism would be housed in the Jesuit infirmary residences.
- Exorcisms are very emotionally draining, and it’s understood that priests are often in bad shape afterwards and need somewhere to recover in safety. Apparently Fordham is one of those places.
- It was definitely common to see different Jesuits appearing on campus: I have so many clear memories of walking around campus and seeing Jesuits I didn’t recognize sitting on benches around campus, relaxing.
Underscoring this for me is the fact that in 1969, Bermingham joined the Classics department of Fordham University. He lived and taught on campus until his death. He died in 1998 at the Jesuit residence where he lived, which I believe was Loyola Hall.
In the acknowledgements of The Exorcist, Blatty wrote: “I would also like to thank the Rev. Thomas V. Bermingham, S. J., Vice-Provincial for Formation of the New York Province of the Society of Jesus, for suggesting the subject matter of this novel.”
Blatty was the film’s producer, so approached Bermingham to work on the film as well.
Also, worth noting, that there was another Fordham Jesuit who was involved in the production of The Exorcist: William O’Malley, who played Father Dyer in The Exorcist. He was an adjunct professor at Fordham University until 2003, and he taught at Fordham Prep until 2012. He continued living on campus after retiring from teaching until 2019, when allegations of sexual abuse against him came to light.
A November 4, 1993, article in the Fordham Ram lists a few other suspicious events that I hadn’t really seen elsewhere:
- “The director wanted actress Linda Blair to say the Our Father in Latin. To help her memorize it, Bermingham asked a female Fordham student to record her voice. However, before she could do this, she slipped on the ice and broke her jaw.
- Another freaky event involved Bermingham. During a routine medical check-up, a lump was discovered under his arm. He claims that the tumor was not present before that appointment, even that very morning. Luckily, the tumor was benign, but the doctors kept it for further observation because its consistency was so strange; they had never seen anything like it before. In addition to these problems, there were two deaths around the set. Also, the son of Jason Miller, the leading actor, was seriously injured. The accident happened while Miller was about to reshoot the scene that was filmed in Hughes Hall.”
Things were so unpleasant on set that at one point, Friedkin asked Father Thomas Bermingham, a Jesuit who was a technical advisor on the film and who had a bit part in the movie, to exorcise the set. Bermingham declined, saying that there wasn’t enough evidence of demonic activity, and he didn’t want to cause even more anxiety on set.
Some people claim that the set burned to the ground the next day, though other people said it just caught fire. At any rate, afterwards, Bermingham blessed the set with the entire cast and crew present.

Sources consulted RE: Haunted Hughes Hall

See sources page for the full source list for the series

Books consulted

A history of St. John’s College, Fordham, N.Y by Thomas Gaffney Taaffe (1891)
Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 by Thomas J. Shelley (2016)
Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition by Raymond A. Schroth (2009)
Haunted Halls: ghostlore of American college campuses by Elizabeth Tucker (2007)
The Big Book of New York Ghost Stories by Cheri Farnsworth (2019)
The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries by Carolee Inskeep (2000)
Ghosthunting New York City by L’Aura Hladik (2011)
Where the Footprints End: High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon Volume1: Folklore by Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner
The Encyclopedia of Demons & Demonology by Rosemary Ellen Guiley

Don’t miss past episodes:

Haunted Duane Library and Dealy Hall (Haunted Fordham University)

A look at some stories of ghost priests in an old library and classroom building. Plus, something strange that supposedly happened in the cemetery while The Exorcist was being filmed nearby.

Haunted Duane Library and Dealy Hall: A look at some stories of ghost priests in an old library and classroom building. Plus, something strange that supposedly happened in the cemetery while The Exorcist was being filmed nearby.

Highlights include:
• A 1980s ghost priest who apparently knew computer programming
• A cemetery (and human remains) that was relocated twice
• Phantom voices heard by security guards
• Lightning striking a cemetery

Episode Script for Haunted Duane Library and Dealy Hall

I’m back, and continuing my look at the history and hauntings of Fordham University, my alma mater. If you haven’t listened to the first couple episodes in this series, that’s fine–feel free to jump in here if these ghost stories are most interesting to you.
I realized that I’ve unconsciously structured this series, or at least the first 5 episodes in this series, from light to dark, in a way.
As in, I’m starting out with the buildings and stories that I find less frightening, and that I romanticized because of their ghost stories before moving onto campus. And then, starting next episode, I feel like I’m delving deeper into the buildings, stories, and experiences that make me uncomfortable, uneasy, and/or upset.
This also mirrors my experience at Fordham, which started out pretty good and, by the end of freshman year, had taken a major nosedive, in terms of how much I liked it there and also my mental health. (Those two things were very connected, of course.) And as I became unhappier there, the paranormal experiences that I encountered became more upsetting to me.
But this episode, we’re still in the part of the Fordham hauntings that I find fun and charming and almost . . . Cuddly.
We’re still at the friendly ghosts, and this episode has some of my favorite stories of ghostly priests.
To take a look at where we’re going next, so you know what to look forward to:
- Last episode, I talked about Hughes Hall, which I lived in during my first two summers at Fordham. There was always something troubling to me about Hughes, and it wasn’t just that part of The Exorcist was filmed there.
- Then after Hughes, I’ll be talking about Finlay Hall, a place that in my memory is shrouded in shadow and, like, a film of menacing uneasiness. It used to be the medical school building on campus, and cadavers were dissected there. The scariest stories of hauntings are there, and that’s also where the most upsetting of my paranormal experiences occurred.
- After Finlay, I have a few more episodes worth of stuff about other hauntings on campus, as well as tales of perhaps not paranormal, but unpleasant stuff that’s happened on Fordham’s campus that I think might contribute to its status as a famously haunted campus.
So, with that out of the way, let’s get into the meat of this episode: charming ghostly tales of two classroom and/or office buildings on campus.

Fordham Cemetery (once called College Garden)

I mentioned this I think in the first episode of the series, but Fordham’s cemetery is famous for having been moved once, but in my research, it turns out that it was quietly moved a second time. Very interesting from a paranormal POV, since so many ghost stories tend to collect around stories about bodies being reinterred.
- There’s also a story about the city wanting to build a road through Fordham’s campus, and Fordham moving the cemetery to block that, but that may be apocryphal.
So let’s get into the history of the Fordham cemetery.
Today, the cemetery on campus, which at least in the 70s was also known as “College Garden” is a small plot on the western side of campus. It’s 20″ long x 50″ wide, and has a little brown picket gate with marble posts next to it.
- The cemetery is said to contain the remains of 68 Jesuit priests, 44 Jesuit brothers, 12 Jesuit scholastics, 3 Diocesan seminarians (priests in training), 9 students, and 2 workmen.
Fordham used to own the land that’s now the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Garden, so as people associated with the university died, their bodies would be buried on what’s now the grounds of the botanical gardens, or botans, as Fordham students call it. In the old cemetery, Jesuits’ graves were marked by wooden crosses, painted black.
- So the botanical gardens could be built, in 1890, the bodies that had been buried there were moved to a small plot of land right near the University Church. The last burial in that cemetery would be in 1909.
There’s a detailed account of what happened in Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 by Thomas J. Shelley (2016)
- “Farther east of the farm was the cemetery located on a hilly slope that is now part of the New York Botanical Garden. The first burial took place on July 11, 1847, one day after the death of Joseph Creedan, a twenty-six-year-old Irish-born novice brother who had entered the Society only two months earlier. New York City acquired the cemetery and some twenty-six surrounding acres by eminent domain in 1888 for $9,300. However, the Jesuits did not abandon their dead and were determined to keep them apud nos [which I think means “among us” in Latin], in the words of Father Isidore Daubresse. The following year they rejected the suggestion to establish a Jesuit plot in St. Raymond’s Cemetery and transferred the bodies of sixty-one Jesuits, nine students, three diocesan seminarians, and two workmen to the new cemetery adjacent to the church.”
Despite there seeming to be a clear line from the university, which is that the bodies were reinterred, there’s historically been a lot of debate about whether there are really bodies in the cemetery or not. (I remember that from when I was a student)
- I will say that there are reputable sources that claim that some of the bodies may be there, but not all of them. There’s a 1976 Ram article about the cemetery, where the author goes on a tour of the cemetery with Father James Hennesey, a historian and former professor. To read from the article:
  - “One of the earliest dates of those buried there was that of James Fennel who died in 1850 . . . Father Hennesey didn’t believe Fennel’s grave was actually still there. . . . Some graves were lost or moved in one of the relocations, and other have probably disintegrated by now.”
- A later article, from 2000, quotes what seems to be another Father Hennesey who was interested in in the cemetery? This time, it’s a father Thomas C. Hennessey (Hennessey’s spelled slightly differently from the other Father Hennesey), who has researched in the Fordham archives and said:
  - “It is not a phantom cemetery. No support has been found for the believe that there are no remains of the deceased found there.”
Here’s an example, from an article in The Ram, October 31, 1985:
- Close by John’s Hall is Fordham’s own cemetery, which would be a lot more realistic if there were actually bodies there. It’s said that this cemetery, consisting chiefly of young priests or men studying for the priesthood, was originally in the Botanical Gardens near the Bronx River (when Fordham owned that property). After the University allowed New York City to use the area for the gardens, the Jesuits reportedly just moved the stones onto campus but left the bodies in their original location. Other versions of this story say the bodies were re-dug and were in such disarray that whatever could be found of the skeletons was brought back to campus, but not many of the tombs are intact, It’s also said that the cemetery was not in the Botanical Gardens at all; actually it was under what is now the Old Gym.
So, my conclusion from all of this is that it sounds like many, though not all, remains of the deceased are in the cemetery.
In speaking of, some of the people buried in the cemetery include college presidents like Thebaud, Larkin, and Dealy, all of whom have buildings named after them. That’s interesting to me because Dealy Hall is a very haunted building, and there’s a ghost on campus who’s been nicknamed “Dealy’s friend,” because people believe he may have been a friend of the late college president.
An article by Joana C—- in the Fordham Observer, November 20, 2003:
- “In addition to the myths that have persisted for so many years, ghoulish rumors lurk around campus about the cemetery, in particular one that involves the 1973 horror film “The Exorcist.”
- “During the filming of ‘The Exorcist,’ the headstones started to crack, which is why they needed to be replaced,” Mohammed Q—– . . . reported.
- Holly C—- . . . offered a similar account of the rumor and said that while the scenes from “The Exorcist’ were being filmed on campus, “lightning struck and smashed the headstones.”
- However, Hennessy states in his book [How the Jesuits Settled in New York: A Documentary Account] that the marble tombstones, old and illegible, may have been damaged by vandals, or deteriorated because of acid rain over the years. They were replaced in 1999 with granite markers . . . The committee’s job was to find a way to secure the sacred character of the cemetery. All but 13 tombstones were replaced and can be found to the immediate right of the cemetery. Most are decaying, some chipped, and all losing their original marble white color, which makes them stand out from the rest of the brand new granite headstones. The remaining headstones were retained for historical reasons.”
I’m curious where the removed headstones ended up being relocated to?
I did want to read a bit from a Ram article from October 21, 1999, about the reinterring of the bodies:
- “The cemetery, which dates back to 1847, has not been significantly changed since 1959, when bodies were moved due to the construction of Faber Hall.”
There’s also a 1976 article that says it was moved in ’59 to make way for Loyola Hall–Loyola and Faber are connected. And I confirmed all of this in an article that I found from 59, which said that the cemetery move was finished in March 1959.
Here’s a passage from a 1954 issue of the Ram, describing what the cemetery’s intermediate location looked like:
- When the cemetery was reestablished behind Collins Hall, arrangements Included a path leading into it from the walk behind the building. More recently, plans had been made to restore the grounds and improve the appearance of the plot. They were hastened in the autumn of 1950 when a tree was up ended in a storm and fell across several rows of headstones, knocking them over. Soon all the stones were realigned and cleaned, a new lawn was seeded, a new hedge-row planted, gate hung, and a brick-and-stonewall erected at the old opening of the path. The new walk begins from the road. The stones, of course, still face Collins Hall to the south.
It’s kind of surprising to me that the campus still has a cemetery, since space in NYC is at such a premium. Apparently, at one point in 1970, a USG presidential candidate suggested that the cemetery be used as a lettuce patch.
The 1974 article about the cemetery closes with this:
- “Legend has it that the dead never rest till their graves are marked. In this case the markers are there but the graves are lost. Perhaps on Halloween the restless dead will appear to reclaim their tombstones and finally Rest in Peace.”
Obviously that’s just a fun signoff for the article, but also it’s a sort of interesting theory. Are some of the campus’s ghostly priests people who were buried in the cemetery? (Maybe some of the ones who weren’t identified as recently deceased Jesuits?)

Dealy Hall (1867)

Dealy Hall today is a classroom building, which also includes several floors of departmental offices upstairs. I remember going to office hours up there a number of times.
It was built in 1867. It was originally a 5-story building, built of stone in an ashlar pattern. Not 100% sure what type of stone it is, but I’m assuming it’s locally quarried Fordham gneiss, which is the stone that makes up the bedrock in the Bronx.
In the 1950s-60s, they added two limestone-clad stories to the top of the building, making it 7 stories tall. It’s not the most aesthetic addition. In old pictures, the building has a pretty mansard roof and a cupola on top, oh well.
I dug into the history of the building, and according to Untapped Cities, Dealy is a former armory, one of the last remaining armories in NYC, and it was built in 1838. However, the article has some factual inaccuracies and I haven’t been able to confirm the claim that it’s an armory.
The earliest mention of ghosts on Fordham’s campus that I was able to find in The Ram was, I believe, in the 1970s.
Ghosts of Duane, October 7, 1976:
- https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/13352
- The writer says that they couldn’t find a firsthand account of this story, but it was oft-repeated.
  - It talks about how “Last May” (either May 75 or 76), a student was at the Computer Center (capitalized, lol) in the basement of Dealy. He left and went upstairs to the faculty offices. No one was around because it was at night, and no one was in the building except for the student, and a security guard by the first floor door. The offices were all dark, and the doors were locked. All, that is, except for one door, which was open. Light from inside the office streamed into the hall.
  - The student went to see who was there, and found an old priest, who was mumbling to himself. The priest saw the student, and told him about his experiences teaching history at Fordham, and he told him his name. After they were done talking, the student left.
  - As he was leaving the building, the guard asked if he was the last one out, and the student said there was just the old priest still upstairs. The guard thought that was weird, because he hadn’t seen a priest come in that evening. So the guard went upstairs, and no one was there.
  - The next day, the student asked around, and found that the priest had died years before.
There’s an article from the Ram called The Ghosts of Duane Continue their Haunt, Oct 21, 1976
- https://fordham.libguides.com/ld.php?content_id=11270399
- https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/13404
- The article is a response to a recent letter to the editor (a response to their publication of the previous story, from October 7, 1976), about a grad student’s ghostly encounter, or, as he described it, “strange happening,” on the 5th floor of Dealy Hall.
  - Though the grad student, who in 1976 was a 1L at Fordham Law, asked not to be named, the writer interviewed the student, and here’s his story:
  - In January 1975, the week before exams for the graduate school of arts and sciences, the student was studying in a cubicle that the school had for econ grad students. It was a Thursday night, and there were two other people on the floor aside from him.
  - The two other people went downstairs to the Computer Center in the basement, and then closed the door.
  - Moments later, the student heard the door open again, and heard someone going through papers. He assumed that the others had decided to come back, and decided to take a break and talk to them. So he left the cubicle and went to the office, but no one was inside. He went back to the cubicle and kept studying.
  - The two people who’d been in the basement came back upstairs and commented on how the door was open now.
  - Ten minutes later, they went back down to the Computer Center and make sure the door closed when they left.
  - The student who was still studying in the cubicle heard the door open again. He looked around the cubicle wall and saw the door swing closed. So then the student opened the door (I think this was the door to the main hallway–at least when I was a student, there was a main hallway with departmental offices along the hall, and then once you went into the main office door, there were small offices within the larger departmental ones which were for 1-2 professors each.)
  - So anyway, the student sees an old priest round the corner down the hallway, toward the elevators. He followed the priest, and, to quote the student: “In the corridor between the two wings in Dealy a physical plant man was washing the floor. I asked him if someone had just walked by, and he said no. I took a quick walk around the floor and there was no one to be found.”
  - The next Sunday, the night before the student’s exam, he was studying in the cubicle again. After 7 pm, he was alone on the floor.
  - He heard footsteps, went out to see who it was, and saw the priest he’d seen 3 days before. The priest turned around suddenly, and the student said hello. The priest asked why he was in the building so late, and the student said he was studying for his econ exam. The priest, who introduced himself as Father John Shea, said he taught in the econ department, but he hadn’t taught a class in three years.
  - They had a whole conversation, with the priest asking what level of econ he was taking, the student said graduate level, the priest asked if he was getting his PhD, and the student said no, he was going to law school. The priest asked where he’d applied, and the student said he’d heard back from Georgetown. The priest said, “Good school, I got my doctorate there.” After talking for about 10 mins, they said goodnight and the student kept studying.
  - The next day, the student told the departmental secretary that he’d met Father Shea the previous evening. The secretary said that wasn’t possible, because–you guessed it–Father Shea had died two or three years before.
  - The student asked around some more, and was shown an old course catalog with Father Shea’s name in it, which also said that he’d gotten his PhD at Georgetown. He was also told by some econ faculty that Father Shea had died very suddenly during exams week, the day before he was due to give an exam. Supposedly, on the day he died, another Jesuit went through his room, found the exam, and administered it to Father Shea’s students.
  - The student was also shown a yearbook with a picture of Father Shea, and sure enough, he was the priest he’d seen.
  - The reporter asked around, and found a faculty member who vouched for the student who told this story, and said he was a “credible person.” The reporter also spoke to the secretary, who said the student seemed “sincere,” though she said that she herself didn’t believe in ghosts. She also confirmed that the student gave Father Shea’s name himself (before he was told about Shea’s death.)
  - The student himself said: “I wouldn’t say I saw a ghost. But I wouldn’t discount it.”
- For the record, I think this story is very credible and I definitely believe it. I can’t really find anywhere to poke holes in the story.
I found this article in The Ram, October 31, 1985:
- While you’re in Dealy Hall’s Computer Center be on the lookout for a benevolent Jesuit waiting to give you a hand with your program. This reportedly happened to a young student who was frantically working throughout the night to finish a program. Although he was the only per son there and was laboring in complete silence, he just couldn’t concentrate and was getting nowhere.
- All of a sudden an elderly priest came in and asked him if he needed help. They conversed for a while (including exchanging names),while the Jesuit successfully completed the task. The two parted and the student handed in his project, later receiving an A for a grade. Being a good soul, the young man went to Loyola-Faber hall to thank his after hours friend. After giving the Jesuit’s name, and getting a few funny looks, he was informed that his mentor had died several years before.
The Ram, in an article that was published in 1983 and then republished in 1985 and 88, has a story that I really have no idea what to do with, and which I’d never heard of until doing this research:
- “Probably the strangest natural phenomenon on campus is the so-called “Jesus Tree.” Situated near Dealy Hall, opposite Edwards’ Parade, the tree bears a striking resemblance to the crucified Christ.
- The allusion was reportedly discovered in 1979 when a coed noticed it as she was sitting on the steps of Freeman Hall. Rumor has it that the young woman could not stop screaming when she saw it, and it’s said that practically all of the residents of Walsh Hall came running out to observe the figure.
- A few nights later, it’s said that a freshman living in Robert’s Plaza woke up in the middle of the night yelling “they’re hurting him, they’re hurting him!” The young man lept out of bed and ran across campus in his pajamas, with his roommates, in various states of dress ,in close pursuit. Reportedly, he arrived at the “Jesus Tree” just in time to catch a group of students painting the tree red. This paint remains on that tree to this day.
- These are just some of the eerie tales surrounding the legends of Fordham. It should be made clear that this story is fiction, not fact. After all, we all know ghosts don’t exist in real life.
- Or do they?
Jesus tree forgotten, pg 7: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/24344

Duane Library (1926)

Duane used to be a library, until 1997, when a new library was built. After that, it was left “locked and obsolete” as the architecture firm that worked on the building later on described it. Then, in 2004, it was converted into the admissions office. It’s a really cool building, which I believe was briefly featured in the film Love Story
The story I always heard about Duane Library was that it was haunted by the ghost of a Latin professor, who appeared on the top floor and enjoyed helping classics students out with their homework. However, I almost think that’s just an evolution of the more credible story I found from the 1970s, which had a bunch of details, etc.
an article called Ghosts of Duane, The Ram, October 7, 1976:
- Talks about how creepy Duane Library is, in particular the third floor north stacks. That’s where a lot of religious texts were held, so it’s very quiet and not many people go there. The article also says, “Another factor in its somewhat chilling mood is that the library keeps most of its few texts on exorcism there.”
- The article goes on to talk about how security guards have to go there, at night, in the dark, to turn off the two alarm boxes, which have to be turned on and off every two hours throughout the night, using a special key, at 12, 2, and 4 am. There are security boxes at the front entrance, and near the door to the third floor of the stacks (there’s only one door there)
- This story comes from a student security guard who wanted to stay anonymous, who had a weird experience:
  - This takes place in late April (it says during “last spring,” not sure if that means spring 76 or 75.) At 2 am, the student security guard opened the door to the 3rd floor north stacks. I’ll read from the article a bit:
    - “Some light from the stairwell filtered in. He paused before putting the key into the box which was immediately to the left of the door. The room was pitch dark, with virtually no light from outside lampposts coming through the windows. Then . . . ‘I heard voices. They came from the area of the table near the bay windows. The voices were low, but not distinct. It was as if two people were having a conversation, whispering. Then I heard the pages of a book being turned. The voices continued.’ Frightened, he put the key in the alarm box quickly and tore down the lighted stairwell after the alarm stopped ringing.”
  - So when the student went back next, he brought a friend. They didn’t hear anything. The student didn’t encounter those voices again, though he once heard a voice from “the upper tiers of the central hall” another time, though he was less confident about that. He was VERY confident about hearing voices on the third floor, though. The student started singing to himself whenever he was on guard duty, to feel less creeped out.
    - Just a sidenote, that detail really stuck with me because when I was in college and was walking around late at night, either on or off campus in the Bronx, I always sang because I was kinda creeped out by the silence. (That was back before everyone always had headphones in and was listening to music.)
The Ram, October 28, 1983:
- The wandering ghost-priest is a prominent motif at Rose Hill. The well-known specter “Duane’s friend,” who was most likely a companion of Rev. William J. Duane, S.J., University president from 1924 to 1930,can be seen floating around the Theology section on the third floor of Duane Library. He is known to have sent late-night custodial workers screaming from the room.
2002: supposedly people saw figures in the windows while the building was closed for renovation: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/27048/itemsearch/ghost
- “It is also rumored that at night you can see ghosts in Duane Library’s windows, though this made much more sense three years ago when Duane Library was completely empty and abandoned and it was strange to walk by and see lights on in the windows.”

Sources consulted RE: Haunted Duane Library and Dealy Hall

See sources page for the full source list for the series

Books consulted

A history of St. John’s College, Fordham, N.Y by Thomas Gaffney Taaffe (1891)
Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 by Thomas J. Shelley (2016)
Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition by Raymond A. Schroth (2009)
Haunted Halls: ghostlore of American college campuses by Elizabeth Tucker (2007)
The Big Book of New York Ghost Stories by Cheri Farnsworth (2019)
The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries by Carolee Inskeep (2000)
Ghosthunting New York City by L’Aura Hladik (2011)
Where the Footprints End: High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon Volume1: Folklore by Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner
The Encyclopedia of Demons & Demonology by Rosemary Ellen Guiley

Don’t miss past episodes:

Haunted Finlay Hall (Haunted Fordham University)

Chilling urban legends and ghost stories about people who lived in an old medical school building, which featured a morgue and a large operating theater.

Chilling urban legends and ghost stories about people who lived in an old medical school building, which featured a morgue and a large operating theater.

From 1905-1921, Fordham University had a medical school. After its short, troubled existence, the medical school was mostly forgotten. One of the few reminders of the school is Finlay Hall, the old medical school building that was converted into a dorm in the 1980s.

Since students have begun living there, haunting stories have emerged: some people claim to see ghostly students looking down on them during the night, as if they’re a cadaver being dissected. Others wake to being choked by cold hands. This episode looks at the stories and seeks to sort out urban legend from credible paranormal experiences, and to corroborate or debunk popular stories.

Highlights include:
• Carl Jung giving lectures at the medical school
• Cadavers being kept in the basement
• Secret tunnels

Episode Script for Haunted Finlay Hall

Last time, I said that I wanted to talk about some of my own paranormal experiences in Finlay Hall, my most hated building on Fordham’s campus, where I lived my sophomore year of college. But I realized that that would have been too long of an episode, so I split this into 2 sections: in this episode, I’ll talk about the history of the building and Fordham’s doomed medical school, and I’ll talk about some of the most common ghost stories and urban legends associated with the building. I’ll also share some of the research I did when trying to verify or debunk some claims and urban legends tied to what different parts of the building were used for. And I’ll also talk about Fordham’s infamous tunnels, which go between different buildings on campus.
Fordham had a short-lived, ill-fated Medical School.
I think that Thomas J. Shelley, author of Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003, said it best when he described the Medical School thusly:
- “Fordham Medical School was like a corpse that had been buried in quicksand and periodically threatened to make an unwelcome appearance by bubbling to the surface.“
I won’t talk much about the attempts to revive the medical school after it closed, but once it closed, it closed for good, and Fordham still doesn’t have a medical school

Thebaud Hall (previously called the Science Building) (1886)

The medical school was housed in a building called Thebaud Hall when it first opened in 1905.
There was also a pharmacy school that opened in 1912, and moved to Thebaud Hall in 1914 (the pharmacy school would close in 1972).

Finlay Hall, also previously known as Old Chem, the Old Chemistry Building, and New Hall (1911)

The medical school at Fordham operated from 1905-1921.
In 1911, a new medical-school building was built, and the med school moved there in 1913.
- One notable thing about the new medical school building was that it was built right on the edge of campus, by what’s now the Bathgate entrance, and that was supposedly to facilitate discrete delivery of cadavers. More on cadavers later.
When the medical school first opened, it operated in Collins Hall, and then it moved to the Science building, or Thebaud Hall.
- Thebaud Hall was built in 1886.
- There was also a pharmacy school that opened in 1912, and moved to Thebaud Hall in 1914 (the pharmacy school would close in 1972).
- I’ve found some vague mentions of hauntings in Thebaud Hall, but nothing super concrete.
Also notable about the Fordham medical school, for those of us interested in the paranormal: Carl Jung did a lecture series at the Fordham medical school in 1912.
- I believe the lecture series was part of a conference called “The International Extension Course in Medical and Nervous Diseases,” which was held Sept. 9 through 28, 1912
- Jung’s Fordham lecture series was notable because it was where he publicly broke with Freud, who was his friend, and who he’d used to agree with more.
- Jung also got an honorary degree from Fordham.
The medical school grew pretty quickly: it started with 6 students in 1905, and but 1916, it had 259 students and 111 faculty members. Students were getting experience at 10 different hospitals in the area, including Fordham hospital.
- One interesting thing about the Fordham Medical School was that unlike many schools at the time, there was no quota system for Jewish students, so a lot of the student body was Jewish. (Same went for the Pharmacy school.)
However, things were not fated to go well for Fordham’s medical school. I don’t quite understand why, but for whatever reason, the medical school just doesn’t seem like it was a priority.
- The first dean of the medical school didn’t want to leave his private practice, so the next year, he was replaced.
- The medical school always had money problems, and it lost its class A status from the AMA in 1911, only 6 years after the school opened. (The school was downgraded to a class B by the AMA because when they inspected, they felt that Fordham fell short in clinical training and in full time faculty members. Fordham declined to fix the issue, so that’s why they got the downgrade. Getting a class B status basically meant that Fordham had a third-rate medical school.)
- After the AMA downgrade, the next med school dean resigned, and then the next dean that came in apparently tried to save the school, but didn’t get financial support from the administration, so he resigned in 1917.
- A new dean started after that, but by 1919, it was clear that Fordham couldn’t afford to make the changes that the AMA said they needed, and the school shuttered in 1921. Apparently the school had a deficit of $342,863. In today’s dollars, that’s $5.2 million.
As a sidenote: There was once a hospital called Fordham Hospital. It was a public hospital that opened in 1892, but in 1907, it moved to a 4-acre location northwest of the intersection of Southern Boulevard and Crotona Avenue, right next to Fordham’s campus, on an area that is now part of Fordham’s Campus.
- While the Fordham medical school was open, med students would intern at the hospital.
- For at least a bit in the 19teens, the hospital president was also the dean of Fordham medical school, so there were some connections between the school and the hospital.
- IN 1976, NYC Heath + Hospitals decided to close the hospital. The community protested, there were sit ins, even the borough president and the community board were opposed. Obviously, having a hospital is really important in a community.
- However, the city closed the hospital anyway, and tore down the building.
- Fordham University bought the 4 acres that Fordham Hospital had been on in 1978, and that is now the campus parking lot.
Once the med school closed, the med school building became the chemistry building.
Ram Newspaper – 05/25/1980
- https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/14725/itemsearch/duane%20library
It went by several names: Old Chemistry Building (or Old Chem), New Hall, and then, in 1990, it was renamed Finlay Hall, which is what it was called when I lived there.
In my opinion, Finlay Hall is the creepiest building on all of Fordham’s campus. It was definitely the place where I experienced the most unsettling things.
But first, lets get to other people’s ghost stories, and urban legends about the hall.
- The biggest ghost story about Finlay Hall has to do with cadavers, of course.
- It’s said that cadavers were kept in the basement for dissection.
  - For the record, I believe that this is true. The laundry room was in the basement, which tbh, was one of the most unpleasant places I’ve ever been in my life. Unbelievably, there are actually a few rooms down there where students live, in addition to a lounge and some other mysterious off limits rooms. But anyway, I remember walking down the hallway in the basement and seeing at least one, but I think several, tall narrow doors that were always locked. And I remember thinking, “ah, yes, this must be where the cadavers were,” because they seemed like the perfect height and width for a stack of shelves to hold bodies. I could be wrong, but that’s my impression.
  - Also, one important thing to know here is that Finlay dorm rooms are extremely strange: each one has a loft with a spiral staircase leading up to it. Typically, one student would sleep in the loft, and two would sleep down below.
- So, anyway, cadavers were kept in the basement, and cadaver dissections were said to have happened upstairs.
- It’s said that the students would stand upstairs, in the lofted area, and watch as cadaver dissections would happen down below.
I’m going to read a bit from the Fordham library website, which has a bit about paranormal happenings on campus:
- “Finlay, before becoming a dorm, was the location of Fordham’s Medical School. In the lofted rooms students could observe dissections of cadavers and the basement served as the holding place for the lifeless bodies.
- “More than once students have woken up in the middle of the night, feeling as though someone is grabbing at their throat making it difficult for them to breathe or feel a tugging on their toe as if they were a cadaver being tagged.
- “They also sometimes see what looks like students peering down on them from the loft”
Okay, so while I had paranormal experiences at Finlay, and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a dark and bad place, I’ve been trying for YEARS to substantiate the claim that the rooms were set up as operating theaters, etc. YEARS, literally since I lived in Finlay in the late 2000s. I’ve gone through the Fordham library’s photo archives maybe 5-6 times looking for any photographic evidence of this setup. And maybe just no one took a picture of it? Since the library website claims that the medical school was set up that way, they’re may be right. But if you’ve been listening for a while, you’re probably familiar with how urban legends form and get echoed and repeated etc., and the Finlay paranormal stories are so delightful and chilling and morbid.
- But here’s what I have been able to glean from looking at medical school photos and other sources:
  - First I wanted to read this bit from the Fordham website; this is from the page about student housing and what Finlay’s like to live in, etc.
    - It then became a residence hall, adding lofted apartments where classrooms and offices had once been and a fourth floor with copper-clad roof and facade. The five-sided eastern face of the building at one time housed an operating theater. Finlay Hall’s facade features beautiful examples of cut stone ornamentation and lower floors terrazo from the era of its design and construction.
  - So this operating theater thing was new to me. Idk how I hadn’t heard of that before or not, but I went to the google maps satellite view, and sure enough, Finlay is a rectangular building with this over obvious bit jutting out. Don’t know why I never wondered about that, but maybe that was just cause I was thinking of it from inside, rather than from a bird’s eye view.
    - I wasn’t in the part of Finlay that had the operating theatre; I was right next to that part so I could see the jutting out part from my window, but never really thought to wonder why it was there.
  - I had found a picture of an operating theater, with either a cadaver dissection or operation going on.
    - I hadn’t read about the operating theater in Finlay before, so for years I thought it couldn’t be Finlay Hall, because the windows behind the assembled students don’t really look like the Finlay windows to me. But maybe the windows in that part of Finlay are just different.
    - Tbh, now that I think of it, I can’t imagine that there was another room on campus set up to house an operating amphitheater.
    - The picture I’m thinking of is captioned “Amphitheater at Fordham Medical School” and it really does look like a purpose built room.
  - Also, I found a picture of a bunch of students in a class with telescopes and textbooks and stuff, and I think that picture was definitely taken in Finlay Hall. The windows are correct, and you can see a spiral staircase on the far right of the picture. That being said, there isn’t a loft arrangement to the room. The floor goes from wall to wall, and there’s basically a small cutout for just the staircase. So maybe later on they converted this room by cutting out part of the floor to make a loft, and the subdividing it into a few different rooms?
- However, this does suggest an inaccuracy with the story that students stood in the lofts of what are now dorm rooms and looked down at cadaver dissections below. I would imagine that would happen in the amphitheater, whereas the other rooms were regular classrooms and offices, just like the Fordham housing website says.
  - So if you lived in Finlay in the five-sided protrusion where the amphitheater was, then maybe students really did look down at operations and cadaver dissections there, though it wasn’t from a loft with a spiral staircase, it would have been from a more lecture hall/stadium seating type vantage point.
  - And if they had an operating theater, they may not have done dissections in the other rooms? Though I could be wrong about that.
So, there are some creepy stories attached to Finlay’s basement, so I wanted to pause and talk about the Fordham tunnels, one of which connects to the Finlay basement
- When I was a student, I remember lots of stories about the tunnels. Some people said they were used for transporting cadavers (some websites still claim this) while others say that the Jesuits used the tunnels to get between buildings during particularly cold weather.
- After doing some research, I don’t really think I believe these stories. It seems that these tunnels were used for steam/electricity and were dug sometime in the 1880s.
- I read about that in the book Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 by Thomas J. Shelley (2016), and confirmed it in a story on the Fordham website, which had some interesting information about the electrification of Fordham:
- https://news.fordham.edu/science/fordham-brightened-the-bronx-with-early-electric-light/
- “Nearby, lower Manhattan was lighting up with a new kind of illumination powered by electricity. But electrical lines ended below 59th Street, and it would be more than a decade before they reached the Bronx, where the tenebrous 19th-century night was lit only by the feeble glow of oil lamps, gas lights, and candles.
- So the college’s Jesuits made their own power instead. With the installation of a generating plant on the site (then named St. John’s College), they powered light bulbs across the campus and quite possibly inaugurated the Electric Age in their rural region, according to research by two Fordham professors.
- “It could be this is the first electrification in the Bronx. We don’t know that anybody else beat us to it,” said Allan Gilbert, PhD, professor of anthropology and coauthor of an article on the project . . .
- Its appeal was evident at Fordham. Candles and fuel-burning lamps provided only a dim, flickering light and emitted heat, smoke, haze, or particulates, which made for hard studying during the long nights of fall and winter.. . . Most simply did without and spent the evening in shadows.
- . . . Finished in 1886, Science Hall would later be named Thebaud Hall; today, it houses administrative offices. It had a generating plant in the basement where Freeman installed a Weston dynamo, bought from the United States Electric Lighting Company for $3,154. It was powered by a steam boiler, which heated campus buildings via newly dug tunnels that were also used to extend electric wires across campus.
- By November 1889, electric lights were installed in most outdoor areas and in all the principal campus buildings, where they usually hung from the ceiling. They were turned on for about six hours a day, ending at 9:15 p.m.
- It was seen as wondrous. “The whole campus was lit up, and you could see your way from building to building,” said Wines. He said one student quipped “‘It’s even easier to study Greek with electric light.’”
- The college generated its own power until connecting to the city’s expanding power grid in 1908.”
When I was a student, I was told that the tunnels connected the older buildings on campus, including Queens Court, Alpha House, Hughes Hall, I think Dealy, and Finlay. (Can’t remember if Keating was on the list or not.) Since Fordham was connected to the power grid in 1908, it seems strange that the electric tunnels would be built for those buildings, but it seems possible that maybe the tunnels were still used for steam.
- I do remember that when I was at student, there were weird patterns of melted snow, for example I could see a large, long patch of melted snow from my window in Queen’s Court, down into the courtyard, and the theory was that the stretches of melted snow were there because the ground was warmer in the tunnels so melted the snow from below. Especially if those were steam tunnels, and if it’s possible that Fordham still generates its own steam, that makes sense to me.
- https://fupaper.blog/2018/10/14/what-is-fordham-hiding-in-those-underground-tunnels/amp/
I found some other Finlay ghost stories in The Ram, The Haunted History of Fordham’s School Spirits, October 25, 2017 by Julia B—– (https://thefordhamram.com/58141/culture/haunted-history-fordhams-school-spirits/):
- “Last, but certainly not least, is Finlay. Before Finlay became known for its cool lofts with the spiral staircases, it was home to Fordham’s Medical School. Up in the lofts, students could observe dissections of cadavers, and the basement was home to these lifeless bodies. One student, Mike C—- . . . had a great uncle who allegedly died in the building. “Keep your eye out for a man named Jack G—-,” he said.
- Students have reported waking up in the middle of the night feeling as though someone is grabbing at their throat or they feel tugging on their toes as if they were a cadaver being tagged. Erin F—–. . . , has had her own scary encounter. “I felt a hand gently resting on my shoulder twice while I was sitting at my desk. I was freaked out because it happened so close to my bed.”
- Also, I just have to share this because it’s delightful, but my favorite part of this article is that it closes with a warning:
  - With all this knowledge, please use your discretion, folks. Try to not to disrupt any ghosts. Let us all hope that, if Fordham does have ghosts, they are friendly.”
- The other famous Finlay story claims that a security guard was taking a break in the basement of Finlay, where there’s a lounge, when suddenly all of the doors slammed shut by themselves, and the chairs started banging themselves against the walls. The story goes that he ran out of there and quit on the spot. Some people say that this happened in another building on campus, Keating Hall, though my guess is that it was Finlay because that basement is just awful.
- A commenter on college confidential told this story about their Finlay experience:
  - “Finlay, I lived on first floor and friend lived in basement. Actually I was going to write this to essentially say, I went [to Fordham], lived in various buildings, heard the stories, its all talk. I think my friend in the basement did sleep with the light on occasionally. As I’m typing this, I now do remember this ONE time, my roommate was with me in our room on the first floor. We were on our laptops. It was evening time and we heard running/stomping right above us. The weird thing was that we were friends with the people right above us and knew they had gone away for the weekend. We called them and asked if anyone was in their room and they verified no. Needless to say, we were a little scared and slept with a lamp on.”

Sources consulted RE: Haunted Finlay Hall

See sources page for the full source list for the series

Books consulted

A history of St. John’s College, Fordham, N.Y by Thomas Gaffney Taaffe (1891)
Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 by Thomas J. Shelley (2016)
Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition by Raymond A. Schroth (2009)

Don’t miss past episodes:

Finlay Hall Ghosts - Personal Experiences (Haunted Fordham University)

A look at my own paranormal experiences living in Fordham University’s former medical school building.

Finlay Hall Ghosts: A look at my own paranormal experiences living in Fordham University’s former medical school building.

My time in Finlay Hall was uneasy, permeated by the feeling that I was always being watched. Though there were reasonable explanations for why I may have felt that way, I don’t think that’s all that was afoot. I tell the stories of an uneasy possible encounter with an entity in the laundry room in the basement (near where cadavers were once kept), a mysterious bell that seemed to ring throughout the building, and an unusual, regularly occurring gibbering sound that only my roommate and I seemed to be able to hear.

Highlights include:
• Conspiracy theories and the paranormal
• A primal scream
• My attempts to debunk my own experiences
• A bizarre experimental college

Episode Script for Finlay Hall Ghosts

So I’ve been thinking a lot about how to present the personal stories in this episode. That’s, in part, because I’ve been thinking about sort of philosophical things about how we talk and think about the paranormal.
I listen to a podcast about conspiracy theories (link with info about that podcast) It’s an extremely popular podcast, you may have heard of it.
- They mostly focus on the one particular conspiracy theory, covering it in detail, analyzing it from a sociological and political perspective, and disproving elements of the theory, but in their patreon episodes, they branch out more, and they cover a lot of paranormal topics. They’ve done topics on Atlantis, the Mothman, Ed and Lorraine Warren, etc.
- Of course, as someone who’s into the paranormal, I naturally bristled at first when I started listening to the paranormal topics, but the episodes are really good and really well done, and I think it’s extremely valuable to look at the paranormal through the lens of not just skeptics, but people who have made a living out of studying conspiracy theories. They come at it from a really different POV than just a regular paranormal believer OR skeptic.
- And one thing that really struck me is that the way we tend to think in the paranormal–looking for patterns, following our feelings, connecting disparate but potentially linked things, searching for hidden knowledge–has a LOT in common with the way that conspiracy theorists view reality.
- That being said, I obviously believe in paranormal phenomena, and I don’t think that all conspiracy theories are false, so I am definitely not trying to paint folks who are interested in the paranormal with the same brush as someone who believes in a harmful conspiracy theory, for example.
- But I think it’s really, really important to use critical thinking when talking about the paranormal. I mean, obviously that’s a big part of what I’m doing with this podcast, and that’s why this Fordham series is so darn long–because I’m really trying to dive into the paranormal stories and urban legends and sift through what sort of supporting information, etc, I can find about them.
- But I wanted to take this time to explicitly say all of this, and say why I look at the paranormal from such an analytical and non-dogmatic POV, because I think it’s really important to take any source about the paranormal–including me–with a grain of salt.
- I never want you to believe that an experience is paranormal because I said it is, or because I said I think it is. And I’ve been trying to tease out how that works philosophically.
- Take, for example, my experiences in Finlay Hall.
  - I genuinely believe that I was experiencing something paranormal, and I don’t really imagine being able to come across something that would convince me otherwise, no matter how logical that explanation might be. I feel less sure about some of my other paranormal experiences, but my experiences in Finlay feel more solid to me. And that’s just a feeling that I have.
  - However, like I said, I don’t really want you to take my word for it. Or, rather, I’d of course be happy if you also thought I experienced something paranormal, but as always, I wouldn’t blame someone for disagreeing.
  - The worst case scenario, for me, is for someone to believe something just because I said it, if that makes sense.
  - Like I said, I hate dogma and I favor ambiguity when thinking about the paranormal.
  - So if you believe me, in this episode or any other, I hope that’s because when I’ve talked about something, examined it from different angles and looked at possible debunkings and complicating factors–I hope that once I’ve done all that, and you’ve thought through it all, you came to either a logical or emotional/intuitive conclusion, whether you think it’s something paranormal, or something ordinary, or you just aren’t sure.
  - It’s true that in the paranormal, not everything is logical and rational; it’s normal to come to conclusions based on a more emotional or intuitive sense. And that’s okay. But I want to take this time to caution you against believing things just because someone you like or trust said it.
  - And please do periodic reality checks. In the paranormal, it’s common (and . . . I think fine?) to make some weird connections, follow synchronicities, etc.
  - But if you start to find yourself doing that in the mundane areas of your life, you might want to pull back and question some things, think more deeply on them, etc.
  - I know this is a digression, but listening to stories about the paranormal from that other lens, really was a wake up call for me.
  - I don’t think that I tend toward conspiratorial thinking, but I suddenly could see how that could potentially happen very easily. So for myself, I’m trying to find a way to separate the really great habits that I’ve developed doing paranormal research and investigation–this sense of wonder, feeling like the world has hidden meanings and messages, etc–and making sure that doesn’t seep into other areas of my life, belief system, etc.
I’ve really struggled with how personal to get in this episode, because there are some things that were going on in my personal life that I do think had a bearing on my feelings about Finlay Hall, and which may have even influenced, to some degree, my experience of the place as being full of dread and ominous intention
I mentioned this a couple times before, but I was very sick when I was living in Finlay Hall (swine flu hit while I was living there, which colored the experience for sure), and I also I think that between getting swine flu + being extremely worn down, that caused what seems like a recurrence of mono (b/c once you get it, you can get it more than once if your immune system is compromised etc.)
- A lot of my memories of that place are through a sort of unpleasant, feverish, and very gothic haze of illness.
There were also a few other things going on.
- There was a bad situation with my roommate who lived in the loft, she was doing some pretty creepy stuff that included eavesdropping on me and passing off things I’d said to our other roommate as her own ideas in class, and starting to dress like me. Also, I mentioned this last time but the room was arranged so that I couldn’t tell if she was in the loft by looking up, but she could see everything that our other roommate and I were doing downstairs, so there was a feeling of being surveilled by this person who was being pretty creepy.
I was closeted because I didn’t feel safe coming out at Fordham. Hopefully stuff has gotten better there since the 2000s, though I don’t really know. I did find a 2016 article in the Fordham Ram about how some roommates in Finlay Hall, who were all queer, got a homophobic comment written in sharpie on the door on their whiteboard, so I don’t have super high hopes for what it’s like these days: https://fordhamram.com/2016/09/07/students-in-finlay-hall-find-harassing-comment-on-door/
- - But there was a girl I liked a lot, but I couldn’t ask her out without coming out, so I was doing a lot of sort of pathetic, silent pining.
- I was also very depressed.
So I think that whole situation was a perfect storm for weird paranormal stuff, for me. College is already this really liminal time, but being extremely sick, feeling watched and imitated constantly by my bad roommate, being closeted and having an unrequited love situation, and being really depressed, really heightened everything.
My Finlay experiences
- Finlay general creepiness
  - I always felt like I was being watched
- Entity behind me + tunnel entrances
  - I mentioned last time that Finlay Hall is right next to an entrance to campus. It was supposedly placed there to make it easier to subtly transport cadavers to be dissected when Finlay was still the medical school building.
  - Back when I was a student, its proximity to the edge of campus made it ideal for students who lived off campus to bring their laundry to the building to do it there. Laundry was included in room and board, so sneaking into FInlay was a way for students living off campus to get free laundry.
  - The university didn’t like that people were doing that, even though from my POV it wasn’t an issue, so they decided that they were going to require that the laundry room, in the basement, be closed and locked at all times.
  - That didn’t prevent people from off campus doing their laundry there; I had a friend who I still let in, I just unlocked the door for him so he could get into the laundry room and do his laundry there.
  - But the door to the laundry room was very sturdy and heavy, and having it closed and locked the whole time weirded me out while I was doing my laundry.
  - Think about it: you’re down there in this really creepy basement, which doesn’t have cell service, doing laundry in a room next to areas where cadavers used to be stored. There’s also an entrance to Fordham’s tunnels nearby in the basement, so it’s just generally an uneasy place to be.
  - Also, the machines were industrial washers and dryers so they were really loud, so I always felt like someone could easily sneak up on me or something. But, and this is kind of weird, the university apparantly had thought of that, because in the corner of the room there was one of those big, round mirrors that you usually see around tight corners in the subway or on bike paths or by ATMs or whatever; the idea is that it’s like a fisheye mirror so no one can sneak up on you from any direction.
  - Why on earth did a laundry room need that? I have no idea. And I never felt great about it being there, like, that’s just weird. (For the record, I can’t remember if any other laundry rooms at Fordham had those mirrors, I can only remember the Finlay one.)
  - So, one afternoon I was doing my laundry.
    - I was in there alone, and I felt kind of uneasy and unsettled, so I was rushing a little bit as I put a load into the washer, choose the cycle, and started it.
    - When I finished, I remember feeling so relieved, like an unusual amount of relieved, that my clothes was in there and I could go back upstairs.
    - And right before I hurried out of there, I had this thought, “thank god I can get out of here, it would have been terrible if I had selected the wrong cycle and then had to stand here and advance the cycle to fix it.”
    - And right as I was thinking it, I looked at the washer and saw that I had, in fact, accidentally chosen the wrong cycle, which was weird. I’d selected the really hot setting, which would damage my clothes if I left it in. (I’d had a problem with my clothes shrinking in the wash at Fordham, jeans in particular, which of course are relatively expensive to replace, so I was careful about the settings.)
    - The way the washing machines worked there was you couldn’t just stop or switch a cycle once you started it. Instead, there was this button or switch that you had to hold in that would advance the cycle. Basically it would speed through the cycle in somewhere between 30-120 seconds, instead of 30 mins, and then you could start a new cycle once it was done. But you had to be standing there pressing it the whole time for it to work.
    - So I start advancing the cycle, and suddenly I started smelling a sort of weird sulfur smell.
    - This was weird, because I’d never smelled sulfur before down in the laundry room, and I spent a time down there every week.
      - And I will say that while I was typing out my notes for this, I had to ask myself whether it’s possible that I was smelling natural gas.
      - I definitely knew what natural gas smelled like and I didn’t think that I was smelling natural gas.
      - But to be totally honest, I don’t know how I would differentiate the rotten egg/sulfur smell of natural gas vs. a sulfur smell. Something about it just smelled somehow different from natural gas to me, but I don’t know how to explain how.
      - However, PSA: If you ever smell a rotten egg or sulfur smell indoors, it’s way more likely to be a natural gas leak than something paranormal. Do not assume it’s a ghost. If you smell natural gas in a room where you are, get out of there immediately. And don’t do anything with anything electronic, don’t even turn lights on or off, just go outside and call 911 and tell them you think you have a gas leak. Natural gas leaks are extremely dangerous and can cause explosions and fires really easily.
      - In the interest of being thorough, in case you’re wondering, I did look up side effects of exposure to natural gas, and there are no side effects related to paranoia or hallucination etc.
    - I remember looking over at some of the pipes along the wall and ceiling and I was kind of wondering if the smell was coming from one of those pipes. But I thought about it and realized they were probably only steam pipes for heating, and water and exhaust for the washers and dryers, so it didn’t really make sense for any of that to smell like sulfur.
    - As I’m standing there, advancing the cycle and looking at the pipes, I suddenly get the sense that someone is standing right behind me. Like someone’s standing really close, almost close enough to be pressed against my back, but not quite.
    - I tried not to panic, and told myself I was just freaking myself out. I look up at the fisheye type mirror and confirm that I’m definitely alone in the laundry room. There’s no one behind me.
    - But then I start thinking about lore about demons (and sulfur and brimstone smells) and I start thinking about creatures like vampires (who can’t be seen in mirrors.)
    - So, still pressing the advance cycle button, I turn around, and of course, I don’t see anything. There’s no one there.
    - I turn back around and face the washing machine, though really I’m just looking at the mirror, watching it, and of course there’s nothing in the mirror, just me standing in an empty room.
    - But I’m still feeling someone right behind me. I look again, and of course no one’s there.
    - At this point, I’m thinking maybe I should just run and go upstairs, but then I thought about how the washer would probably damage my clothes if I did that. And I tell myself it won’t be long, maybe a couple minutes, and I just need to get through the cycle and restart it.
    - But the whole time, I’m just aware of someone very close to me, behind me.
    - I had this really strong mental image of this male entity who was much shorter than me, but which was hovering several feet over the ground so that his face was either level with my shoulders, or slightly above that. And I had a strong sense of this entity’s face being distorted by this huge, creepy, almost gloating smile. And I felt like this entity was just staring and me smiling like some sort of deranged clown.
    - Now, that could have just been my imagination. But I’d been intentionally trying not to think about it, and this image kept popping into my head.
    - After what felt like forever, but was just a few minutes, I finished advancing the cycle, started it again on the right setting, and got out of there.
    - I went back upstairs to my room, and when I returned to the laundry room half an hour later to put the wash in the dryer, I didn’t smell sulfur at all (that’s another reason why I really don’t think it was natural gas–I didn’t smell it at all before this experience, and I didn’t smell it again, even 30 mins later.) I was obviously still shaken from earlier, and I felt like I was being watched, but nothing new happened.
    - I never felt comfortable in that basement, but nothing like that happened to me in the laundry room again.
  - I didn’t totally know what to make of this.
    - At the time, my sense of the paranormal was less nuanced, so I kind of jokingly referred to it as a demon when I told other people the story.
    - But I don’t really know what this entity was.
    - This story relies a lot on my own feeling about things, so I definitely don’t blame folks if they disagree with me and think that I didn’t experience anything, but my own opinion is definitely that something paranormal occurred there. This wasn’t an instance where I was like, “oh, maybe something happened, maybe I was just freaking myself out.”
    - No, I definitely felt like there was a threatening presence in there with me. And I did feel legitimately afraid, it was not a good experience.
    - I haven’t heard other stories like this in finlay, though.
- Bell ringing in Finlay
  - My nice roommate and I both noticed that we’d hear what sounded almost like a bell ringing.
  - We heard it all over the building: in our room, on the ground floor by the dorm entrance, in the hallways, in the basement.
  - It wasn’t a loud bell, but it always sounded close.
  - It definitely didn’t sound like a ringtone chime, or like a radiator banging or anything, it sounded like a fairly thick metal bell being rung.
  - This really weirded me out, because it always sounded like it was the same volume, no matter where I was. But if it was something like, say, an elevator chime or a phone’s ringtone (which it wasn’t, but that’s just an example,) it would have been louder or quieter depending on how close or far we were away from it.
  - But it always sounded like the same volume to me, which doesn’t make sense.
  - I asked around to other people I knew in the building but never found anyone aside from me and my good roommate who heard this bell.
  - I haven’t found anything in the dorm’s history to suggest a reason why I might have been haunted by a phantom bell, and I also haven’t thought of a way to debunk the sound.
- Gibbering sound in Finlay (and how it relates to primal scream, looking for residual explanations for this)
  - My nice roommate and I started to hear, on a regular basis, a really loud noise from outside of Finlay Hall. I would call it almost a gibbering sound. It was extremely loud, and echo-y. The school was next to the Bronx Zoo, and I remember the first time I heard it, I wondered if a bunch of monkeys had escaped and were howling through the streets, until I realized that was highly unlikely, and also I didn’t think monkeys were that loud.
  - We asked other people in the building if they could hear it, and like with the bell, everyone we asked said no.
  - I wish I had written down all of the details, but like I said it was a regular occurrence. It seems to me that it may have been weekly, and it always happened at the same time at night (in the evening, but well before I would have gone to bed.) But I can’t say for sure what the day of the week or time was.
  - Now, there may very well be a mundane explanation for this. If you’ve never lived in that part of the Bronx, it’s worth keeping in mind that the neighborhood is very loud.
    - When I lived off campus, during the summer when everyone had their windows open, it was normal for me to hear a bunch of different people’s radios blaring, and usually it was so loud that there wasn’t much point in me listening to my own music in my room, unless I was wearing noise cancelling headphones, because it’d just be overpowered by the music from outside. It sounds annoying, maybe, but it was actually kind of nice, especially in the summer, when everyone’s outside, hanging out with friends and family, etc. It just felt really wholesome and comforting.
    - And even while living on campus, I spent a couple years living in some buildings along a different edge of campus, and it was really normal to hear music blasting from a car repair shop that was right off campus.
    - So all of this to say that it’s possible that the sound I heard was noise from off campus. But the thing is, when things were loud, you could usually identify what it was: like it was music, or a noisy car, or a preacher at Fordham Plaza with a megaphone.
    - But this didn’t sound like anything I could identify, and it was always weird to me that I couldn’t find anyone aside from my roommate who heard the noise, when it was such a regular occurrence. People usually noticed and remarked upon loud noises.
    - So, while there may be a perfectly reasonable mundane explanation for this sound, I haven’t really been able to identify anything stronger than “well, the Bronx is loud sometimes.”
      - So I’ve also looked for potentially paranormal explanations.
      - I haven’t got anything super super clear, but I have found some instances of loud noises that would have happened in the past in the area.
      - You may have heard of residual hauntings before; I’ve talked about them, and explained stone tape theory earlier in this series. It’s this idea that things from the past can be recorded into the environment and replayed in the future. Most of the time, this is tied to ghosts, the ghosts of past inhabitants of an area leave behind traces of their emotions, forms, etc, to be replayed in the area where it’s been “recorded.”
      - So I’ve been thinking, why wouldn’t a noise, or screams, from the past be able to be recorded somewhere (in the “stone tape” if that’s a real thing) and replayed? It’s a long shot, but I found three things: two more plausible, and one that’s more of a wild card, that are potential candidates for something residual that could have been hanging on around the area.
  - - Primal Scream: This is something that an alumni told me about when I was at Fordham, but during the 1980s, the Primal Scream was a tradition on campus. Every Thursday night at 10 pm, people in a number of dorms, including Finlay, would stick their heads out of the window and scream. Some of the Jesuit scholastics who lived on campus would also participate.
    - The Observer, November 17, 1982:
      - “On Fordham’s uptown campus in the Bronx, however, the flow of student energy is not always so productive. Instead of politics and human rights, the most popular and organized student movement at Rose Hill is the Thursday night “Primal Scream.” At 10 pm each Thursday, about one-fourth of the dormitory residents (including some people who attend the College at Lincoln Center) drop what they’re doing to crane their necks out their windows and yell themselves silly.
      - The overall effect sounds something like the Bronx Zoo at feeding time, but the happy students have, as they say, “a good time.”
      - https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/OBVR/id/159
    - To read from a September 4, 1983, story in The Ram (https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/16247/itemsearch/primal%20scream):
      - Faced with these problems and academic pressures, students initiated a ‘primal scream’ on Thursday nights at 10 p.m. to relieve their frustrations by yelling simultaneously out dormitory windows. One boarder described the weekly event as the “most extreme form of relief a student can experience after a day of diligent study. It expresses a feeling of solidarity between Fordham students.”
    - And you might wonder what sorts of things students were upset about. Let me read a bit more from that article:
      - “For some Rose Hill residents, however, Fordham was falling apart. Although no one was injured, a ceiling collapse forced the evacuation of the campus’ oldest dormitory, St. Johns’ Hall.
      - Sewage backups, elevator failures, a water main break, and a lack of heat and hot water caused problems in others. A steadily deteriorating brick facade on Walsh Hall is forcing the University to bring the building in line with New York City’s local law #10.
      - Maintenance problems seemed to contradict administrators’ view that Fordham had one of the”most well-maintained campuses in the country,” a view put forth in an advertisement on the editorial page of the New York Times entitled “Husbandry.”
      - “They said they’d clean it,” said one resident concerning a sewage backup in her bathroom. “There are maggots and it leaked out into the closet. After what we saw I can’t imagine even taking a shower in there.”
      - “Much of my property has been damaged,” said another when a ceiling collapsed in his room. “The room is filled with dust and debris. It has covered books, desks and shelves.”
      - “By the middle of the night, it’s absolutely freezing,” stated a Walsh resident whose floor did not receive heat in December and January. Problems extended beyond the dormitories, also. Between October and April, 18 students were mugged both on and off the Bronx campus at gunpoint or knifepoint. Although no one was seriously injured, students wanted to know how campus security had let intruders into its gates, including a mental patient from Bronx State Hospital who created a commotion on the roof of a Jesuit resident hall.”
    Walsh Hall/555 noise, September 22, 1972:
    - I also find a 1972 article about how upon the opening of the dorm next to Finlay Hall, Walsh Hall, or 555 as it was called then, there was an issue with students behaving badly. They were making noise, throwing stuff out of dorm windows, and creating a real disturbance/disruption. It was so bad that local residents had to stand outside the dorm, which was right at the edge of campus, at 9:30 am on a Sunday and bang on garbage cans to wake up the students and show them what it was like to be woken up when sleeping. It sounds like after that, things got a little quieter, though to be honest, I didn’t do a lot of legwork tracking down this story and seeing what the resolution was. I was more focused on the fact that there was this historical disturbance, which to be was a really big act of disrespect toward the community.
    https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/11583/itemsearch/cemetery

Sources consulted RE: Finlay Hall Ghosts

See sources page for the full source list for the series

Books consulted

A history of St. John’s College, Fordham, N.Y by Thomas Gaffney Taaffe (1891)
Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 by Thomas J. Shelley (2016)
Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition by Raymond A. Schroth (2009)

Don’t miss past episodes:

Fordham’s Haunted Dorms (Haunted Fordham University)

Creepy ghost children, a man disappearing into walls, priests blessing haunted dorms, and more, about in these haunted dorms at Fordham University in the Bronx, NY.

Fordham’s Haunted Dorms: Creepy ghost children, a man disappearing into walls, priests blessing haunted dorms, and more, about in these haunted dorms at Fordham University in the Bronx, NY.

This episode is a look at some of Fordham University’s “less haunted” dorms: meet the ghosts of Loschert Hall (formerly called Alumni Court North), O’Hare Hall (formerly called Millennium Hall), Martyrs’ Court, and Loyola Hall.

Highlights include:
• Thoughts about hauntings based on recent deaths
• Some debunking attempts
• Sleep paralysis
• A dorm built on the former site of a cemetery

Episode Script for Fordham’s Haunted Dorms

Alumni Court North (now called Loschert, renamed in 2008) (1987)

I mentioned a 2017 Observer article by Zoe S—-, which had some great accounts of Fordham hauntings, so here’s another story from that article:
- The article recounts another story, from Tiffany K—-, class of 07, whose friend lived in a rare single room in Alumni Court North, a dorm right next to Queens Court. The friend called her, shaken, and said he head a knocking sound in the room. K—- said it was just his imagination and that he should go back to sleep. I want to read the next paragraph from the article:
  - “But, K—-’s friend couldn’t go back to sleep, “He calls me again later in the night, saying his bed shook and that he was going to sleep next to the guard that night.” The next day, K—- and her friend looked for clarity in one of the priests, “The priest was like ‘Oh, that’s so and so. I guess he moved to your dorm. Come let’s go to your room.’ So, the priest grabs some holy water, the Bible, and candles. We head over to the dorm, and we light the candles, and he opens the door and starts praying.” Unlike the other stories, K—-’s story has a happy ending, ‘All the freshmen around us must have been so freaked out, but whatever he did worked. Nothing ever happened again after that.’”
    https://fordhamobserver.com/33317/features/fordham-frights-the-ghosts-that-haunt-our-school/
- A commenter on collegeconfidential related this story:
  - “I think it was North, on Thanksgiving break, everyone went home except for me and two other girls on my floor because we all had this one philosophy professor who assigned a 10-15 page paper 1st semester Freshman year. Granted my floor was deserted and I hung out with one of the girls all the time during that break. She was out getting McD’s. I lived near the stairs and I was in my room when I heard laughing and running down the hall. I ran to my door and looked out in the hall way to catch my friend or the other girl to see if they wanted to hangout and no one was there. Also, no slamming of a door down the hall like they had run into their room(s). I just chalked it up to people in the building really bored. “

O’Hare (2000)

A website called theramrealm.com had a 2014 article that mentioned the O’Hare Hauntings:
- Tragedy supposedly struck O’Hare when a worker fell from the roof back while it was being built — though no legitimate source has verified this. Still, rumors ran rampant when students started hearing weird sounds that reminded them of construction, on the upper floors. One current resident who was familiar with the tale still lets it get to her, and “refuses to take the stairwells at night.” She said she hears weird sounds late at night, and being afraid of ghosts as is, she said she’s “let the tale get in her head, and [doesn’t] take any chances.
So, this article says that no legitimate source has verified the death of the worker: that’s not true, but I don’t blame the author for not knowing, because I’ve only been able to find one source anywhere on the internet that mentions the construction worker by name.
The Fordham library website mentions him, though not by name, in their write up of the haunting:
- Though one of the newer dorms on campus (built in 2000) O’Hare has a ghost of its own.
- One of the construction workers had a heart attack while working on the roof and fell tragically to his death. Students have reported the sound of hammering in the walls as if the spirit of the man is still trying to finish the job.
There’s an article in The Ram from 03/23/2000, called Construction worker dies in tragic accident.
- This is a really sad story. I feel like the ghost story about O’Hare gets repeated ad nauseum, but no one talks about the man who died, and what his story was, so I wanted to share some of the details of who this person was.
- A 42-year-old man from Wallkill, NY, was on the scaffolding between the 4th and 5th floors, near where the north and west wings of the building connect. He fell face down on a pile of rocks on Friday, March 10, 2000. When the student EMS service and the fire department arrived, they pronounced him dead.
- After his death, a Jesuit named Joseph Currie, said a prayer and recited Psalm 23. One of the man’s coworkers said the Our Father, and another coworker said the Serenity Prayer.
- That afternoon, Fordham’s head of security, John Carroll, Currie, and Sean C_—-_, one of the man’s coworkers, went to the his family’s home. He was married and had kids, so he left behind his wife a 20-year-old son, a 14-year-old son, and a daughter who had just turned 12.
- The man’s hobbies including fishing and acting in local plays: he was involved with the local Gilbert & Sullivan Theater Society, and was in Kismet, Sweeney Todd, The Most Happy Fella, and other plays.
- 250 people attended his funeral.
- At the time of this article, it sounds like had been discussion of memorizing him in some way; the priest, Currie, suggesting naming the wing of the building that he had been working on after him. I don’t believe that happened, though I never lived in O’Hare so am a lot less familiar with that building, but I read about O’Hare on Fordham’s website and couldn’t find any mention of him on that page, or on a search of Fordham.edu.
- When I searched The Ram’s archives, I couldn’t find any other article mentioning him. I also googled his name and Fordham and couldn’t find any information about him.
  - NOTE: I say the deceased man’s name in the episode, and you can find it in my sources, but I kept it out of the shownotes in case his name is intentionally not easily findable online.
I don’t know. The O’Hare haunting story really sits poorly with me. I think part of it may be that it’s a recent haunting. I feel like it’s maybe a bit closed-minded to say something like, “ghost stories about recent deaths are in bad taste,” because it is possible that someone may have experienced real phenomena that could be attributed to the spirit of someone who’s recently deceased.
But this whole thing, to me, smacks of turning a pretty recent death into a “spooky story,” which . . . I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel right to me. I think also that there’s something that seemed really cruel to me, in reading that article: there’s that mention of the priest floating the idea of naming a wing of the building after him, but I don’t think that actually happened, and there’s basically no mention of him online? I don’t know, if you lived in O’Hare Hall and know of any kind of plaque or anything mentioning his death, definitely let me know, I’m curious if that exists.

Martyrs’ Court (1950-1951)

https://www.unexplainable.net/ghost-paranormal/the-haunted-tales-of-fordham-university.php
Supposedly the ghost of a little girl haunts Martyrs. There are stories of students pulling back a shower curtain to find a little blonde girl standing in the shower, staring straight ahead. Some people have claimed to hear children’s laughter echoing from the walls.
- In the past, I found this not credible at all. Sounds like the preoccupation of folks who’ve watched a lot of horror movies with creepy kids. I can’t imagine what a little kid might be doing on a college campus–I’m not familiar of any stories about young girls on campus. (there’s a boy’s prep school called Fordham Prep on campus, but they don’t admit girls.)
- However, there’s at least one firsthand account that I found, with specifics and with a named person going on the record to talk about it, so I am reconsidering, though I still have no idea who that little girl would be.
- It’s been bothering me for years, but I found a possible theory for who the girl might be in The Big Book of New York Ghost Stories by Cheri Farnsworth (2019). To read from the book:
  - “Who the child was is anyone’s guess. She was too young to be a former university student. But she might be a deceased descendant of the Corsa family. The subtitle of a New York Times article dated June 9, 1899, said a “Descendant of Andrew Corsa Claims Some of the Property on Which St. John’s, Fordham, Stands.”
  - According to the article, a Mrs. Davensport Bolsbridge claimed that her first husband, John H. Corsa, the grandnephew of Andrew Corsa, had refused to sign a release for a man who had purchased the property from Andrew’s widow, Ann. Because of financial difficulties, she was seeking the property on behalf of her children, who, she said, were “in sore need of any property which may be rightfully theirs.” Do her children, the direct descendants of Andrew Corsa, now inhabit the Fordham grounds?”
I can’t tell you how excited I was to come across a possible explanation for the haunting.
I also found two stories about Martyr’s Court hauntings that were in The Ram, The Haunted History of Fordham’s School Spirits, October 25, 2017 by Julia B_—-_ ( https://thefordhamram.com/58141/culture/haunted-history-fordhams-school-spirits/):
- “Martyr’s is known to have a little girl ghost. This blonde spirit has been seen in the bathrooms and is said to like to lurk behind shower curtains. Bella W—-, FCRH ’20, had a dorm room freshman year was located directly next-door to the communal bathrooms. “Our bedroom door would open and close on its own on several occasions,” she said.
- Monica F—-, FCRH ’18, had an even eerier Marytr’s experience her freshman year. “What happened was I woke up one morning around Halloween with sleep paralysis and I couldn’t move. I tried yelling my roommate’s name but I felt something like hands choking me. Above me was this floating, translucent figure-like girl with long hair that didn’t have a face but was still looking at me. When she finally disappeared I got this really calming feeling like nothing had happened but I was confused because I was sweating and shaking. I got really freaked out and couldn’t sleep the next few nights but got over it when our floor had our infamous bathroom blessing a few days later,” she said.”
I hadn’t heard of this apparently infamous bathroom blessing, but sounds interesting.
I also found this story about Martyr’s Court, which I found reposed from elsewhere on College Confidential:
- Residents have reported seeing a young, blond-haired girl standing in the shower, behind the curtain, staring straight ahead. The dean’s response when they wanted to move was “It’s March. This sort of thing happens all the time, and worse, so just try to turn the other cheek.” They also report seeing a man walking by their rooms, in the direction of a wall at the end of the hall. When they would go out to see who it was, he’d be gone, also hear children’s laughter in the walls of their apartment.
- I also found another person, commenting on that thread on College Confidential, who shared their own story about Martyrs:
  - I’m not sure if this is the same ghost…but I did see a blonde girl sitting on the toilet in the toilet stalls in Martyrs’…when I went back and checked, there was no one there. A couple weeks back I also saw someone sitting in one of the lounges but there wasn’t anyone there when I turned around. Of course, it might be my mind playing tricks on me but I think it’s much cooler to say that I saw ghosts rather than I was imagining things
  - https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/t/haunted/245728/8
- From unexplainable.net
  - “Known as one of the larger dormitories on campus, Martyr’s Court has at least two ghosts haunting the grounds. First, residents have come in contact with a young girl with blond hair who has been seen standing behind the curtains of the shower. She always seems to be staring straight ahead. Another ghost is that of a man who has been reported to walk by the rooms of residents, heading towards a wall located at the end of the hall. When attempting to investigate his identity, he has vanished before curious students had a chance. In the apartments, some students claim to hear the laughter of children in their walls.”

Walsh Hall / 555

In the 11/7/02 issue of The Ram, a student named Alycia M—- recounts some of her paranormal experiences when she was living Walsh 605:
- On the first week of school, she and her roommate set their clocks together, and a week later, her roommate’s clock was 15 mins ahead of hers. The roommate synced up their clocks again, and then M—-‘s clock was 15 mins ahead.
- She also used to hear their shower running at night, and their doors slowly opening and then slamming shut. Her roommate verified the sounds as well.
- One of her suitemates had a small table fan, which would turn on and off, on and off, by itself. They checked the plug and the switch and everything seemed normal.
- The student talks about some other stories she’d heard, like a friend of hers who was at Rodrigue’s, the student-run coffee shop, which has a narrow sort of catwalk ledge thing around its interior. The friend heard someone walking above him, but no one was there.
- Sidenote, here’s the story behind Rodrigue’s:
NYC Landmarks describes it as a “small Greek Revival house” and says its original purpose was unclear. It may have been the home of William Rodrigue, John Hughes’ brother-in-law. Rodrigue was an architect who was involved with designing the University Church and St. John’s Hall. He was also a math and engineering professor at the school.
- Rodrigue may have designed this building for his family to live in while he worked on the church and St. John’s Hall, but NYC Landmarks points out that the style is more like the Rose Hill Mansion than the Gothic Revival structures Rodrigue is responsible for. The date “1840” appears on a stone beneath the attic window (predating the school’s founding.)
- “In any event, the house soon became the Parish house and office of the pastor of St. John’s Church, and later served as the college infirmary, earning the nickname the “Pill-box”. Offices of the “Fordham Monthly” and t he “Ram” were subsequently housed in the building, and for a time a bakery in the basement produced a campus specialty, “Fordham Buns”. Prior to being occupied by the Housing office, the building contained Alumni offices.”
- Landmarks report RE: Alumni House / Rodrigue’s: http://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/lpc/lp/1084.pdf
I will say, the Mason frequently mentions her interest in John Edward, the medium, so she’s definitely someone primed to believe in the paranormal. Doesn’t mean the things she saw weren’t paranormal, though.

Loyola/Faber

Loyola Hall and Faber Hall are two interconnected buildings that students didn’t live in when I was in school.
Loyola was built, I believe, 1928. Faber was built in 1959.
When I was a student, Loyola was just a Jesuit residence, and Faber was a departmental office building (there may have been classrooms too, but not sure.) Now, about 125 freshmen live in Loyola, and there are two floors of Faber where freshmen and transfer students live. Faber was renovated for students to live there in 2016, and I’m not totally sure when the switch to having students Loyola happened, but it was sometime in the last decade, which also means that there’s been less time for ghost stories to accumulate online about these buildings.
However, I expect there to be ghost stories that start to circulate about these buildings, 1) because Fordham’s real haunted, and 2) because Faber is built on top of the former location of the university’s cemetery.
According to a Ram article from October 21, 1999, at one point, the university cemetery was where Faber hall is now built. I mentioned this is a past episode, but the cemetery was originally where the botanical gardens are now (or some people say it’s where the old gym was, but I think the botanical gardens are more likely.) The bodies were disinterred and were moved from there to where Faber is now, then moved to their current location. I think I read this in an earlier episode, but to refresh your memory:
- “The cemetery, which dates back to 1847, has not been significantly changed since 1959, when bodies were moved due to the construction of Faber Hall.”
There’s also a 1976 article that says it was moved in ’59 to make way for Loyola Hall–Loyola and Faber are connected.
This is from a 2016 article called “Fordham University Is Straight Out of A Horror Movie” published on theodyssesyonline.com. The person who wrote the article lived in Loyola, and here’s what she had to say about it:
- “My home for the last year, and Father Joseph McShane’s former room, Loyola 415 is one of the lesser known haunted rooms on campus. Living there from 1992 to 1996, Father McShane has noted the room as the “best room on campus,” at least in his opinion. However, even with the best view on campus, 415 is not without recurrent spooky moments. Father McShane notes “One oddity of the room: I was awakened every morning at around 5 when the steam heat started up and the pipes banged to beat the band.” This occurrence as well as a few others have occurred during my time in the room. Late at night, construction work can be heard from the room, and not any other. My roommates and I have also witnesses the closet opening on its own many a time. While it was pretty spooky we may just be chickens.”

Don’t miss past episodes about Fordham’s history and hauntings:

Sources consulted RE: Fordham’s Haunted Dorms

See sources page for the full source list for the series

Books consulted

A history of St. John’s College, Fordham, N.Y by Thomas Gaffney Taaffe (1891)
Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 by Thomas J. Shelley (2016)
Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition by Raymond A. Schroth (2009)

The Collins Auditorium Ghost and Other Stories (Haunted Fordham University)

Ghosts emerging from paintings, an entity made from smoke, and bathroom electronics going haywire are just a few of the weird stories I dug up for this episode.

The Collins Auditorium Ghost and Other Stories: Ghosts emerging from paintings, an entity made from smoke, and bathroom electronics going haywire are just a few of the weird stories I dug up for this episode.

This is a look at some of Fordham University’s “less haunted” haunted buildings, including a theater, administration building, and classroom building. Plus a look at some of Fordham’s other campuses (including one defunct one.)

Highlights include:
• An urban legend about George Washington’s headquarters
• Phantom cigar smoke
• Stories from the Lincoln Center campus
• A look at a supposedly haunted women’s college that had an ill-fated merger with Fordham

Episode Script for The Collins Auditorium Ghost and Other Stories

Administration Building (now called Cuniffe House; it was renamed after a trustee in 2013) (1838):

The Administration Building was the old manor house for Rose Hill Manor. Technically it’s the second manor house, I’ve heard it called the Moat Mansion; there was another before it that was built in 1692, or maybe 1694, depending on what you’re reading. I’ve read lots of stuff about there being different old historic hospitals and stuff on campus, and while I’m not familiar with a hospital other than Fordham Hospital, which came in the later 19th century and was demolished in the 20th century, in 1846, the old Manor house was used as an infirmary and residence by the Sisters of Charity. So that’s at least one old hospital-type use that a building had on campus.
There’s an interesting article on Fordham’s website about what life used to be like on Fordham’s campus back in the day. There did use to be a farm at Fordham until around 1907. I wanted to read a bit from the article, because it talks about what life was like for students and how Cunniffe house was used:
- “The food was produced within sight of the building—today’s Cunniffe House—where the students studied, slept, and ate. On the site of the Rose Hill Gym was an orchard that produced apples, pears, and cherries, according to the professors’ research. Potatoes, corn, and other crops were also grown on campus. A vineyard on the site of today’s college cemetery yielded two or three barrels of wine per year, and the field at present-day Fordham Prep was a pasture populated by 30 to 40 cows.
- “. . . Dietary staples at Rose Hill included beef and pork; pigs as well as cows were raised at the farm, Wines and Gilbert said. On special occasions, students dined on oysters and other shellfish. Bread was probably baked on campus, and vegetables may have been grown in a greenhouse east of the University Church. Jesuit brothers oversaw food production.
- “After a few decades, the students’ dining area was moved from today’s Cunniffe House to a newly completed space in Dealy Hall. Eating was a solemn affair, far removed from the freewheeling atmosphere of today’s campus dining venues. It was strictly regulated by the college’s Rules and Customs Book, according to a chapter by Gilbert and Wines in Fordham: The Early Years (Fordham University Press, 1998), edited by Thomas C. Hennessy, S.J.
- “A student read aloud from literature or history during meals, and No. 5 in the Rules for the Refectory section of the customs book required students to eat in silence so they could “give an account of what is read, if called upon.” Students stopped eating at the ringing of a bell and then rose to face the prefect, answer a prayer, and make the sign of the cross before turning to silently leave in single file with their arms folded.
- “Indeed, students were expected to keep quiet during most of their daily routine, which was akin to the rigors of a “medieval monastic regime,” according to Msgr. Shelley’s book, Fordham, A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 (Fordham University Press, 2016). But they still found moments for food-related levity, he wrote: “God sent food; the devil sent cooks,” the students would gripe, echoing a longstanding complaint of college students everywhere.”
There’s a legend that says that the old manor house was used as George Washington’s HQ during the Revolutionary War, but I don’t think that’s been substantiated.
- Fordham Manor is supposedly mentioned in James Fenimore Cooper’s book The Spy, though I did a text search of The Spy for a lot of key phrases, like “Fordham,” “Rose Hill,” “Manor,” “Headquarters,” and both the old and new spellings of Bronx and came up empty handed, so it must be a fairly oblique reference.
- To read a bit from the 1891 book A History of St. John’s College:
  - “Tradition ascribes to this time-honored relic the distinction of having served as General Washington’s headquarters during some of the maneuvers preceding the battle of White Plains. Among the many venerable trees that surround and overshadow the houses is the identical tree (so says again infallible tradition) to which the Father of his Country tied his horse on dismounting. It is believed by a great many that this old manor house is the building in and about which the principal incidents described in Fenimore Cooper’s novel, ‘The Spy,’ took place.”
- I like how even this 1891 source is sarcastic about “infallible tradition”–at least I assume it’s sarcasm.
If it’s true anyway, it would have been the old manor house, because the current administration building was constructed in 1838, with the current wings added in 1870. (there had previously been wings coming out from the back of the building, east toward Keating Hall, and now the wings extend north and south)
The old manor house was torn down in 1896.
The most common story I’ve heard about the administration building is at hat supposedly it smells like cigars all the time, and people say that there’s a ghostly story behind that–I assume some former resident or a Jesuit was supposed to have smoked cigars?
The Ram, October 28, 1983 (this article was also reprinted in October 1988):
- Rumor has it that five Rose Hill buildings contain entities of the “former-human” persuasion: the Administration Building, Dealy Hall, Hughes Hall, Duane Library and St. John’s Hall.
- “There have been a couple of cases of old Jesuits floating around here,” says Rev. Norris Clarke, S.J. “The old Jesuit walking on the second floor of the Administration Building has been seen by a number of people,” he added.
- One of two buildings on campus to pre-date the arrival of the Jesuits (the other is the University Church), the Administration Building has served as everything from a student residence hall to a library since its construction in 1838. According to Clarke, a few elderly priests lived there when the second floor served as an infirmary several years ago. In the recent past a student worker was up-stairs after hours when he saw an elderly Jesuit walking around aimlessly. He made an attempt at conversation but got no response. Later, according to Clarke, the student asked a group of priests about his late night visitor
- Upon describing him to them, they said to then young man, “Well, he’s been dead for a number of years.”
The 1983 article also describes a supposed haunting on the first floor of the administration building, where a bunch of portraits of Fordham’s past presidents hang. Supposedly, the ghosts of the past presidents emerge from the paintings when they want to see how things are going.
Fordham farm: https://news.fordham.edu/fordham-magazine/on-campus-farm-nourished-fordham-in-its-early-years/

Keating Hall (1935)

Keating Hall is the university’s sort of flagship, trademark building. It towers over the quad and looks nice. It holds classrooms, some big lecture hall/auditorium type rooms, a chapel, and there’s also stuff like the radio station in the basement. At least when I was a student, there was a language lab in the basement, and some of The Exorcist was filmed there, though language labs prob aren’t a thing anymore, are they?
The basement room that was used in the filming of The Exorcist was also used as the Pentagon office in the movie A Beautiful Mind
In terms of hauntings and dark history relating to Keating Hall, I keep reading stuff online saying that Keating Hall used to be a hospital. I don’t know what they’re talking about.
- Keating’s actually one of the (relatively) newer classroom buildings on campus, it wasn’t built until 1935.
- I tried to figure out whether it was possibly used as a hospital or medical facility during WWII, and it doesn’t look like that was the case.
- Fordham was a site for two Army Specialized Training Program units, so in June 1943, the gym was a dorm for troops. At one time there were 788 troops staying there. And then after that, the army requisitioned some buildings, including the gym, Dealy Hall, and part of Keating. But that was just to use as housing for 900 Army Postal Service members. They were there till 1945. Keating Hall used to have a cafeteria, and apparently at one point during the war effort, 2,750 meals were served there each day (it was open from 4 am to midnight.)
Supposedly, Keating Hall was built on top of old morgue tunnels, and I’ve read that there was an old hospital there in the 1830s. I haven’t found reputable sources saying this, however.
- though I’d imagine that it’s connected to the steam/electricity tunnels, so that may be where the morgue rumor is.
An October 2005 article in the Columbia Spectator, Columbia’s student newspaper, recounts some of the stories of Keating Hall:
- “The first floor of the building has chairs and historical items on display, but few students sit on them because of the feeling of being watched. There are also cold spots even in the summer, and people often say they are the spirits of Jesuits that have past. On the third floor, there are many reports of being touched on the shoulder and seeing ghosts while in the auditorium, a chair tumbling down the stairs without anyone present has been witnessed more than once.”
  https://www.columbiaspectator.com/2005/10/28/haunted-new-york/
I can confirm myself that there were cold spots in the building. I remember feeling them on the first floor, in the interior area leading toward the big auditorium there. I remember there were these connected interior hallways with benches, and I specifically felt cold spots, and tried to find where they were coming from and wasn’t successful so thought they might be paranormal.
A video on Youtube from October 29, 2021, from the Truman High School Media Program, recounts one person’s story. Truman High School is a school in Co-Op City, so by Pelham in the Bronx.
- A teacher at the school had an experience in Keating her freshman year. She went into the bathroom, the automatic sink wouldn’t turn on. Suddenly, all the lights turned off. Then one of the other sinks turned on by itself, and she went over to wash her hands there and it went off. Then the window slammed and the lights turned back on, and then all the sinks turned on at the same time.
- She did think through what mundane stuff could have happened: The sinks were new automatic sinks. She thought maybe there could be a glitch in the electronics since they were new. It was also windy, it was March, so she said that was what may have been going on with the window.
- One additional point of interest is that her grandfather, both parents, and sister went to Fordham, and she was aware of Fordham being haunted before she started there.
- https://youtu.be/Ng_9bY6vedg
I found some claims that the clock tower in Keating is haunted, in an article published in The Fordham Ram, Truths of a Forbidden Tower Revealed (published online in 2021 but seemingly originally published in 2013?): https://fordhamram.com/1659/news/truths-of-a-forbidden-tower-revealed/
- Blair H—-, FCRH ’12, attests to a scary but worthwhile experience. “It was a lot of fun and kind of dangerous, especially when my phone lost battery in the dark,” she said. “But once we were up there the view was breathtaking.”
- Mairin O—- FCRH ’12, accompanied Hassell in the tower. She offers this warning to future climbers: “Beware of the ghosts. Blair’s phone died on the way down. Kelly swears a ghost tickled her neck.”
Maybe worth mentioning, the Keating clock tower is off limits and it’s dangerous, and when I was researching this, I saw that in 2019, a student fell to her death from the clock tower.

Collins Auditorium (1904)

This was originally the law school building. The law school was supposed to use facilities at Xavier, a catholic school downtown, but when enrollment at Xavier increased, they didn’t have space, so the law school was moved to Collins.
Nowadays, there’s a standard theater, a blackbox theatre, and I believe the philosophy offices.
Per Fordham library:
- With the hauntings around Collins even the faculty are spooked. They and students alike have reported seeing a man walking around the balconies. This same ghostly figure is often blamed for things being rearranged or moved backstage before performances.
A 2010 article in the Ram claims that Father Collins, the university president at the time that the building was constructed, is the ghost who haunts the theater, though that seems awfully convenient to me.
However, a website called theramrealm.com had a 2014 article that quotes an anonymous student who talks about the supposed ghost that haunts Collins Auditorium, Johnny Collins.
- “Johnny is harmless, but he likes to make his presence known. It can be frustrating when we’re practicing, and then the lights just shut off.” Still, despite the hauntings, she says “Collin’s is where I spend half my semester practicing, I think Johnny likes the company.”
That being said, it’s hard to say who a ghost is unless they tell you, or you see them (and even then, they could be lying.) So even though I think it’s kind of convenient that people assume the ghost is the guy the building was named after, I guess I don’t blame them for assuming that’s who the ghost is, lacking other evidence of who the entity may be.

Lincoln Center

There are very few stories that I could find about hauntings at Fordham’s Manhattan campus. I did find a few mentions of weirdness in one of the residence halls, McMahon, and maybe something in Lowenstein, which is a building that holds classrooms, offices, etc.
First, let’s look at McMahon, which was built in 1993 and is a 20-story dorm.
- https://fordhamobserver.com/33317/features/fordham-frights-the-ghosts-that-haunt-our-school/
- “For McMahon Hall resident Sam T—-, Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) ’19, this situation became a reality just a few weeks ago. “I was exhausted. I had pilates in the morning, so I figured I would go to bed early. While I liked the idea of having the apartment to myself, something just didn’t feel right, but I attributed it to being naturally paranoid and the spooky nature of October,” Sam recounted of the October night. She disregarded her uneasiness and quickly got ready for bed. Just like a typical night, Sam shut her door and laid on her bed with her back facing her door. That’s when she began to hear her door open and close. “My door has never shut all the way. The door just doesn’t fit the frame properly. So, I didn’t think anything of it at first.” Sam turned over to look at her door and didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but when she returned to her position facing the wall, she heard her door open and close again. “This happened a few times, and the door only seemed to move when I was facing the wall. Yeah, it was strange, but it was also starting to annoy me.”
- Sam got up and opened her door, but didn’t find anything. “I’ve seen my roommate prop her desk chair against the door before, so I did that, and got back in bed. I figured that would stop my door from opening and closing.” Sam paused to recollect herself for a second, then continued, “But the opposite happened. I turned to face the wall and got comfortable, then all of a sudden the door began rapidly banging against the chair as if someone was violently attempting to break in.” Instead of facing whatever was at the door head on, Sam decided to pull the covers over her head and tried to go to sleep. “I reasoned with the ghost. I basically said, ‘Hey, I have pilates in the morning, so I’d appreciate if you don’t do this tonight,’ and it seemed to work. The banging eventually stopped, and I was able to go to sleep. But, it was still the spookiest thing I’ve ever experienced.” Since this incident, Sam hasn’t experienced anything else in her apartment, but she believes someone definitely wanted to make their presence known that night.
- Sam is not the only student at Fordham Lincoln Center who has experienced something strange. Another McMahon Hall resident, Jasmine F—-, FCLC ’19, recalled seeing a ghostly figure: “It was the night before Halloween. I just remember waking up and feeling a presence. I looked near my bed and it appeared to be a person in rags with a black aura and smoke where their feet should’ve been.” When asked if she was as scared as Sam was, Jasmine replied, “No, I was more intrigued. It was magnificent really. It made me want to learn about the history of this building, and who the figure could’ve been.”
- While Sam and Jasmine have first-person encounters of ghosts at Fordham, many students haven’t experienced anything. One of the people I asked about Fordham ghost stories even said, “No…Lincoln Center is too new and nice for ghosts. Try the Rose Hill campus.” So, that’s exactly what I did.”
Now, let’s get to Lowenstein, which was built in 1969. It’s the building I was in the most at Lincoln Center, since I took some classes there. It has classrooms, the bookstore, theater, etc.
From the Fordham Observer, October 28, 1998:
- The article talks about how the building is so new that it doesn’t make sense for there to be hauntings there, etc. So there’s a kinda jokey article about that where the writer mentions one strange thing she’s encountered, and then comes up with a fictional story to say what could be happening.
  - “There is one Lowenstein room, however, that makes me think twice before dismissing it entirely. Have you ever wandered by the new Photo ID room when it is closed, either late at night or on weekends? If so, you may have taken notice of a strange, yet persistent phenomenon.
  - “Whenever the Photo ID room door is closed, an eerie tapping is heard from within. It is repeated and insistent, and it is always there. When I first heard it a month ago, I thought it was an isolated incident. Each time thereafter, though, I became more and more intrigued. Where was this sound coming from? What did it mean?“

Marymount

https://hauntedplacesofusa.blogspot.com/2009/09/marymount-college-of-fordham-university.html?m=0
“The ghosts of founders Father Gailhac and Mother Butler roam the halls of the dorms and protect the girls of this women’s college. Evil spirits lurk in Sacky parking lot, left behind when the Sacky House was torn down before the college was built in 1907. Most haunted dorms: Gailhac Hall and Gerard Hall. Strange phenomenon exist in these halls from invisible bed guests to bed shaking and the constant feeling of being watched. Beware students and stay far away from Ouija Boards.
“Marymount College has been closed in May 2007.”
Anonymous said…
- “I work there and i just recently had an experience I saw a shadowy figure move from right to left it was awesome and also heard whistling
- February 18, 2013 at 5:14 PM
Anonymous said…
- Neat trick on Fr. Gailhac’s part if he found his way to Tarrytown. He died before the college was founded and wasn’t in on the planning of the college. He knew nothing about it. His role was as Founder of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary in Beziers, France. Mother Butler is buried in the crypt of the now Marymount Convent. In my years at Marymount, I can’t say I ever met her wandering around, but I know she was very much loved by students who knew her when she was alive.
- “Regarding “Sacky House”, the information is really messed up. Sacre Coeur Hall stood on the site of the “Sacky Parking Lot” until after 1970, so it was very much a part of the college and was not torn down before the college was founded. I know. I lived in it as a student. It was NEVER called “Sacky House”. It was Sacre Coeur Hall or “Sacky”. It was one of our favorite dorms because it was a nice old mansion with turrets and a wide veranda with a view of the Hudson River. Haunted? I doubt it. In any case, if there are “spirits” slouching around the parking lot, they’re benevolent ones. Sorry to burst your bubble, but Marymount was a fine old college that provided a wonderful education to generations of young women. It’s not haunted.
- May 15, 2013 at 7:18 PM”

Don’t miss past episodes about Fordham’s history and hauntings:

Sources consulted RE: Collins Auditorium Ghost and other stories

See sources page for the full source list for the series

Books consulted

A history of St. John’s College, Fordham, N.Y by Thomas Gaffney Taaffe (1891)
Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 by Thomas J. Shelley (2016)
Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition by Raymond A. Schroth (2009)

The Curse of the Fordham Ram (Haunted Fordham University)

A strange story about a doomed dynasty of rams that once lived on Fordham University’s campus, and the urban legends that grew up around them.

The Curse of the Fordham Ram: A strange story about a doomed dynasty of rams that once lived on Fordham University’s campus, and the urban legends that grew up around them.

Highlights include:
• Kidnapped rams
• A house built for the ram by Grace Kelly’s father
• Gruesome office decor

Donate to bail funds to get people out of dangerous NYC jails:
https://linktr.ee/covidbailoutnyc
https://linktr.ee/emergency_release_fund

Episode Script for The Curse of the Fordham Ram

Just right off the bat, I want to make it really clear: This bit is about a bunch of animals being abused and dying.
This is actually a pretty upsetting story about animal abuse that then is cast into a sort of paranormal and ironic tone, with the tone of the reporting of these stories being lighthearted.
There are a few reasons why I wanted to tell this story:
1. It’s a weird story that I think adds something to the narrative about Fordham that I’m crafting.
2. More importantly, I think this points out a real problem that happens in the paranormal, when a story about a haunting or urban legend gets woven around something really bad, either as a way to evade responsibility and obfuscate, or to avoid looking at an issue right on its face, etc. This is a topic I want to continue to explore. I see it used in urban legends and ghost stories that are linked to racially motivated violence or sexual violence, etc, and I just think it’s a good thing to get into the habit of noticing and digging into and challenging. So this is me wading into the shallow end of this topic, where I’ll be talking about a ram.
So just wanted to clarify that before getting into this story, because it’s real bad.
- And I guess it’s worth mentioning here in case anyone doesn’t know: Rams are male sheep. I’ve seen pictures of the different rams who lived at Fordham and they looked like adorable, fluffy, helpless sheep, just with horns since they’re rams.
So, here’s the story. Fordham’s mascot is the Ram.
- The story goes that the university got that mascot because at football games, students used to shout “one damn, two damn, three damn, Fordham,” but the administration didn’t like it on account of the cursing, so they made the mascot the Ram, so it rhymed, and they could say “one ram, two ram, three ram, Fordham.”
- Anyway, in 1927, the brilliant minds of Fordham decided to get a live Ram to bring out as a mascot at sporting events.
- And what happened next was . . . Not good. As Ram after Ram, all named Ramses, I think about 28 total, died in horrible ways, people began to claim that the ram was cursed. And I’m not sure that they’re wrong. But even if there is a curse, it was helped along by some pretty rampant animal abuse.
- In case you’re wondering, all of the Ramses lived behind Queens Court, near the Metro-North train tracks.
Also worth noting, Fordham had a major rivalry with Manhattan College, another university that’s in the Bronx. Manhattan College shows up in the story a lot, with students abducting Ramses. Though I also heard accounts of NYU and even Georgetown students abducting Ramses.
So I found this article called “The Curse of the Fordham Ram,” The Ram, October 14, 1982, that recounts some of the trials and tribulations of the different Ramseses:
- “Most Fordham students are familiar with these supernatural aspects of the University, but one strange, yet true tale has thus far escaped notice–the Curse of the Fordham Ram.
- The terrible legacy began in 1927 when a naive group of students procured a live mascot for the University and christened him Ramses. SInce that time every animal bearing that unfortunate title has been stricken down in the most unusual and sickening ways.”
- Pausing here to say that I do remember being told some of these stories, but not all of them. I’ll continue reading:
  - “Ramses I himself was felled on a cloudy moonless night by a speeding passenger train. His shaggy head was subsequently decapitated and mounted on a ‘handsome walnut shield,’ as the unfeeling Ram [the newspaper] proudly announced. This ghoulish adornment graced both the front page and office wall of the Ram until 1930 and for this reason students and administrators alike accused the Ram editors of strapping poor Ramses to the tracks. However, a series of fiendish ‘accidents’ started in the mid 1950s made it all too clear that no mortal being was responsible.”
- This is me again, here to correct this 1982 article and say that bad things happened to Ramses before the 1950s, as well. There’s a whole section of the Fordham library website that’s called The Toils and Troubles of Ramses, Ramses Dynasty 1925-1978.
  - The library claims that Ramses I actually came onto the scene in 1925, and was kidnapped by a rival school and send to a slaughterhouse. I don’t know who is correct.
  - Ramses II met the same fate.
  - Ramses III, according to the library, was a troubled animal. Possibly because Rams aren’t supposed to be kept on urban campuses in NYC and abused by college kids? At any rate, he was apparently “aggressive,” and often ran away from campus and tried to attack the NY Central trains, because the train tracks are right off campus. Trains were delayed, conductors were mad, so instead of maybe building a better habitat that the Ram couldn’t escape from, Ramses III was “sentenced to death” in December 1927 and “executed” (to use the library’s phrasing) by the Fordham Rifle Team. So you know, if there’s a curse on the Ram, maybe it was of the school’s own making.
  - Here’s something weird, though: I found a article from the 1930s that claims that Ramses III met a different, maybe even more upsetting fate. I wonder if the numbering is off, like if the rams that the library says were I and II were actually unnumbered Ramses, and then it started over again in 1927 and what the library thinks was III is actually I?
- At any rate, in the November 13, 1930, issue of the Ram, you’ll find a front-page, above-the-fold article with a headline proclaiming:
  - Ramses III, Maroon Monarch, Dead; Long Live His Successor, Ramses IV! Fordham Mascot Sccumbs to Attacks of Wild Dog Pack at Dead of Night. Students Mourn Loss.
  - I wanted to read a bit of the article, which is slightly graphic, so if you don’t like hearing about injured animals, skip ahead a bit:
    - They found him Monday morning on what we call the Ramkin field over behind St. John’s Hall. No one knows exactly what happened but enough could be seen to piece together the story. He lay tangled in the long heavy chain that kept him to the stake. The ground about was torn and uprooted and white fleece scattered all around him. How long he fought that night stubbornly and silently–St. John’s is only fifty yards away and no sound was heard–hampered with his chain, a white blotch for his enemies in the blackness, we can only guess. Of the marauders we know nothing. The only hit is that a number of dogs were seen on the campus early Sunday evening. Whatever did the bloody work slunk off before daylight.
    - The knell of the chapel bell is rung–the Ram is gone. His ghost harbored in the mounted head will stare down enigmatically by day from one of the college walls and by night through the centuries will wander through the corridors and over the campus, munching quizzically . . . The Ram is dead, long live the Ram!
  - So based on this article, it wasn’t just Ramses I whose head was mounted and displayed somewhere on campus. I did find an article that contained a picture of at least one of the ram heads, the one at the Ram’s newspaper office, which I believe was in the basement of St. John’s Hall, now Queen’s Court. That ram head was there from 1927-1935 at least, not sure what happened to it afterwards. Where are these ram heads now?
- The library website continues listing the Ramses dynasty:
  - Ramses IV was known for liking to eat cigarettes.
  - According to a 2019 article in the Fordham Observer (the LC newspaper), in 1933, Ramses V was kidnapped by NYU students. NY state police had to help track him down, and they found him 300 miles away, somewhere in Connecticut. The cops grabbed him and brought him back to NYC as quick as they could, so Ramses could attend the Fordham-NYU football game.
  - We don’t know much about Ramses VI-VIII, but we do know that they died early in life, no surprise there.
  - I’ll read what the library had to say about Ramses VIII, which weirdly echoes what happened to Ramses V in 33–not sure if that happened twice, or if someone got some dates confused:
    - “The first Rameses to grow old and die of natural causes. Kidnapped by NYU and taken to a Connecticut farm. New York State troopers picked him up at the state lines and he was escorted to the game by four squad cars and six motorcycles, sirens blaring. He arrived just in time for halftime. He also made headlines in 1941 when he escorted models at the British Relief Society’s fashion show.”
    - Also, there’s a picture of Ramses VIII with two football players, and Ramses just looks like the cutest, fluffiest animal I’ve ever seen. So at least I don’t need to imagine him dying horribly.
  - In 1948, apparently the Ram ran an article imploring volunteers to guard Ramses from NYU students, because, to quote that article “it would be very discouraging to have him show up at the Polo Grounds on November 27 on the wrong side of the field.”
  - The library website says that we don’t know much about Rames IX-XV, so we can pick back up with the 1982 article:
- The article says:
  - “In 1954, Ramses XVI died under mysterious circumstances. Although foul play was suspected, the murderer was never found. Three years later Ramses XVII narrowly escaped a heinous kidnapping attempt by inept Manhattan students, but did not survive a second time when the luckless beast vanished one night and was brutally slaughtered.”
- Maybe worth noting, the library website says the killing happened in 1955.
- Back to the 1982 article:
  - “Ramses XVIII fared little better than his predecessor. In 1958, the Ram House was gutted by a fierce blaze that Fire Marshall Victor Delancey called ‘the most blood-curdling sight a man could ever witness.’ Although Delancey strongly suspected arson, this case too remained unsolved.”
- Here’s what the library has to say about Ramses XVII:
  - “Homeless after his shed burned down under mysterious circumstances. He was the first to move into a two bedroom with running water Ram House built by Kelly Bricklayers, a business owned by Princess Grace’s father. He died of alcohol related liver disease in 1961.”
  - I read this and was like, is this some kind of not-in-super-good-taste joke? But no, I did further research and learned that students were giving Ramses alcohol whenever Fordham won games (and probably some times when Fordham lost too, would be my guess), so he really did die of liver disease.
  - Now, again, we’re talking about a bunch of rowdy college students abusing a defenseless sheep. I know Ramses was technically a Ram, but I feel like people think of like mountain goats and rams that live in the mountains and look all tough. (At least that’s what I think of when I think of rams.” But you look at pictures of Ramses and you’re reminded that again, a ram is just a male sheep, and he was just a docile, domesticated, extremely fluffy sheep who didn’t deserve to be abused.
- Ramses XIX, whose nickname was “Thumper,” was kidnapped by Manhattan College students, who dyed him green, which is Manhattan College’s school color. There’s a Ram article detailing this 1961 kidnapping, and apparently the kidnappers bought all the green food coloring in Tarrytown/Sleep Hollow in order to dye Ramses green. It’s a whole long story, but I’m too exhausted by reading about this serial animal abuse to go into it, I’ll include a link in the shownotes, how about that?
- Ramses XX was around in the mid-1960s, and his nickname was “fatty.” He was also a very cute ram. In 1965, students from Iona College in New Rochelle tried to kidnap Ramses, but they were foiled by Fordham students (that happened twice in two weeks.) Ramses XX died of pneumonia.
- Ramses XXI was the most kidnapped ram; he apparently spent more of his career as a mascot at rival campuses than at Fordham’s.
  - I don’t get it, why was it a thing to repeatedly steal this animal? Was that a thing among all colleges in 20th century, or is this just a weird, cruel NYC/east coast type thing?
- Okay, the next story in the 1982 article, about Ramses XXII dying in 1970, sounds almost made up: supposedly Ramses disappeared for months, and was found by a street cleaner who “found his bleached skull near Madison Square Garden. Dental records confirmed the poor creature’s identity.” That’s got to be a joke, right? To keep reading:
  - “Just two years later, the bloated green carcass of Ramses XXIII was discovered dangling by his horns from the Whitestone Bridge. Every Ramses since then has become so violently insane that they had to be destroyed.”
- So I’d been told the bridge story when I was a student, I remember a professor told me about it.
- However, a 2019 article in the Fordham observer claims that Ramses XXXIII lived a long life and retired to Birch Hill Game Farm in upstate NY, so I think the Whitestone bridge thing is an urban legend. I’ve also heard a version of the story where he was hanged from the GW bridge.
- The article goes on to talk about how Ramses XXIV attacked a cheerleader at a basketball game in 1974 and “bit off a piece of her leg.”
  - I’ve read elsewhere that Ramses XXIV was actually a sheep, and the extremely intelligent Fordham students didn’t realize it until “he” gave birth to a bay ewe.
- I guess there were a a few other issues with Ramseses over the next couple years, and then the last straw was when Ramses XXVII got in a fight with a horse in 1978 at the Pelham Bit Studios. However, I’ve also read in that 2019 article that Ramses XXVII accidentally broke his own neck by twisting his head in the fence around his pen in 1975. I believe the 2019 article more.
- So after that, after 50 years of Ram issues, the university decided that there would be no more live rams on campus. The article ends in such a fun way that I have to read a little more:
  - “Yet, there exists one small fear harbored by those who know of the doomed Ramses heritage. Without a sacrificial ram, where will the angry force that plagues the campus vent his ancient rage? Given the demon’s past modus operandi, the student who wears the Ram suit would be wise to be on his guard, lest he find himself painted green and hanging from the nearest bridge, the latest, but not the last victim of the Curse of the Fordham Ram.”
I know this seems farfetched, but as you start to look into it, it does seem like there is something paranormal to consider here.
Most of these deaths seem attributable to abuse, except for when Ramses was torn apart by wild dogs, and when he broke his neck accidentally.
But this story shows some interesting things about urban legends, and how our stories about the paranormal can be dehumanizing or cruel.
Obviously, this is a story about an animal, and not a human, so maybe dehumanizing isn’t the exact right word in this case, but the urban legends, which seem to have been popularized and repeated in the 1980s, after the reign of the final Ramses, take a story about repeated, inhumane treatment and straight up abuse of a series of animals, and makes it into a spooky “ghost story” type urban legend.
You know, it’s easy to look at a chain of untimely deaths and attribute it to the paranormal. You can become so wrapped up in weaving a chilling story that you forget the real evil that may have been done.
This story is, of course, lower-stakes, because we’re talking about an animal. Now, I’ve eaten plant-based for years and was a vegetarian for 10 years before that, so I take animal life maybe a little more seriously than the average meat-eater. There is an argument that there’s a lesson about how we treat animals that you can take from this story.
But that’s not the thing I’m really trying to explore here. so I want to be clear that I’m using this story as a metaphor for the ways in which we talk about the paranormal, and perhaps even use stories of the paranormal to paper over some really bad stuff that may make us uncomfortable, but which are important for us to acknowledge and grapple with because they may still be happening now.
You know, many of the hottest spots to do paranormal investigations are old prisons, insane asylums, and hospitals. And I do think it can be easy to investigate those places and focus just on the “spooky” aspects of it.
And even if you’re thinking about the atrocities happening in those locations, and trying to honor that history through the paranormal stories you dig up, I think that it’s also essential to ask yourself if the terrible things that happened at, say, a closed old prison, are perhaps still happening now. And what about the medical trauma in old hospitals; are people still suffering unnecessarily in the hands of an uncaring medical system today?
I’m not saying that all paranormal investigators have to give, like, equal time to social justice topics, etc. I certainly don’t do that, and to be honest, I don’t want to do that. Paranormal research and investigation, for me, is a hobby and a sort of escape.
But with any kind of historical research and attempt to tell stories from human history, I do think it’s just important to make sure to peel back the layers of urban-legend, campfire-story type narrative and:
- 1) look at what really is occurring in a supposedly paranormal situation. In the case of Ramses, you read the article from 1982 and it’s easy to be like, “oh, there’s a curse, how creepy and fun, after all, the campus is super haunted,” etc. but then once you really sit with the stories, and peel back the sensationalism, you can start to glimpse what ‘s really happening, which is that an animal is being abused.
1. Once you see what’s really happening in a story, I think that’s a call to look around you and ask yourself, “do I live in a system that still allows this sort of thing to happen today? What are the ways in which I participate in making things worse, and is there anything I can do to make it better?”
Of course, this is just my opinion, and I’m not really interested in telling anyone what to do or how to think.
And to be totally clear, this isn’t directed at anyone I know. Everyone I know in the paranormal is really engaged in these topics and does talk about this sort of thing, and I know thinks about this sort of thing a lot.
I’m moreso trying to make a larger statement about how we as a society view urban legends, hauntings, curses, etc, and I’m trying to offer some additional lenses through which stories of the paranormal can be viewed.

Don’t miss past episodes about Fordham’s history and hauntings:

Sources consulted RE: The Curse of the Fordham Ram

See sources page for the full source list for the series

1982 Ramses story: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/16014
1928 article about Ramses: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/collection/RAM/id/1763
1928-03-09 picture of Ramses’ head on a wall: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/collection/RAM/id/1667
1930 article about Ramses: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/2238
1935-11-22 article RE: Ramses’ head: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/collection/RAM/id/3157
1948 article asking ppl to guard Ramses: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/collection/RAM/id/5397/rec/4
The Ramses Dynasty: https://fordham.libguides.com/c.php?g=279582&p=1863712
Article about 1961 Ramses kidnapping: https://fordhamram.com/2013/10/23/ramnapping-1961-the-true-story/
Rise and Fall of the Ramses Dynasty, Fordham Observer, 10/30/19: https://fordhamobserver.com/42471/features/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-rameses-dynasty/

Books consulted

A history of St. John’s College, Fordham, N.Y by Thomas Gaffney Taaffe (1891)
Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 by Thomas J. Shelley (2016)
Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition by Raymond A. Schroth (2009)

What Makes a Place Haunted? (Haunted Fordham University)

A look at different theories behind hauntings and the paranormal, with an eye to why Fordham University’s Bronx campus might be so haunted. This episode focuses on the spread of urban legends and theories behind urban legends.

What Makes a Place Haunted? A look at different theories behind hauntings and the paranormal, with an eye to why Fordham University’s Bronx campus might be so haunted. This episode focuses on the spread of urban legends and theories behind urban legends.

Highlights include:
• Comparisons with hauntings at Vassar, Columbia, and NYU
• Thoughts about urban legends and why they spread
• Interesting books I’ve read while working on this series
• Psychogeography and hauntology

Episode Script for What Makes a Place Haunted?

I’m trying to answer the question: what makes a place haunted, and specifically why might Fordham be so haunted?
- In theory, this episode wraps up my series on haunted Fordham University, but that’s not reaaaally what I want to explore here. Of course, I do have closing thoughts on the series I did on Fordham University, but it shouldn’t matter if you’ve listened to the series or not, since what I really want to do here is look at theories behind hauntings and the paranormal and what makes a place haunted.
  - The question I’m really trying to answer is this episode is: why are some places more haunted than other? What causes hauntings, or if not hauntings, then urban legends about hauntings?
  - This is a HUGE topic that I know it’s impossible to cover in just an episode or two, but I want to at least spent a bit of time exploring the question. This is a question that a lot of people have explored a lot of different ways, and there are a number of podcasts looking into why a certain area might have strange stuff associated with it (for example, the podcast Penny Royal looks at the town of Somerset, KY, and really dives deep into it–so if you’re interested in the subject and haven’t already listened to Penny Royal, you should check it out).
  - I want to at least scrape the surface of the subject, so let’s get into it.
- First off, there’s a clarification that I wanted to give: Throughout this series, I think I’ve probably fallen into the trap of talking about phenomena as if everything’s a ghost, and every “ghost” is the spirit of a dead person. That is, in part, because that’s what a lot of the urban legends have posited. It’s probably also related to the less complex ideas I had about the paranormal while I was in school. It’s also because, when looking at urban legends and trying to analyze them, it’s hard to know what to look into aside from the history of the people who lived in that location, and the location’s past.
  - But just to be completely clear, I don’t think that all paranormal phenomena are ghosts. I tend to be of the opinion that all paranormal stuff, whether it’s apparently ghostly experiences, or UFOs, or cryptids, etc, are all connected somehow and potentially part of the same phenomena.
- I started publishing this series in October 2021. (Though I did most of the Fordham-related research for it back in 2020.)
  - Since last October, I’ve been delving more into what I guess you’d call theory, looking at stuff like folklore, urban legends, psychogeography, and hauntology, trying to get some additional angles through which to see these phenomena that I’ve been looking at. Though I haven’t necessarily been talking about these books, I still wanted to mention them because I believe that they’re of interest, and because they’ve helped me contextualize and think of a lot of the stuff I’ve been talking about. So, the specific books that I wanted to mention were:
    - Magic in the Landscape: Earth Mysteries and Geomancy by Nigel Pennick
      - I read this because I was interested in ley lines. I had this thought in October, which was, “Could Fordham possibly lie on a ley line?” so that question led me to read more about the subject. This book was a good intro to the topic.
    - Psychogeography by Merlin Coverly (2006)
    - Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past by Merlin Coverly (2020)
      - Both of these Merlin Coverly books were very good and interesting, though please don’t ask me what psychogeography or hauntology are. I think they’re better known concepts in the UK, and it also sounds like the sort of mean a lot of things and nothing at once.
      - But if I were to give my best, and probably very incorrect or at least incomplete definition:
        
        Psychogeography is about place
    - The Official Guide to Randonautica: Everything You Need to Know about Creating Your Random Adventure Story by Joshua Lengfelder and Auburn Salcedo (2021)
      - I should do an episode about randonautica sometime, but I read this book because randonauting is a form of psychogeography. And if that sentence made no sense to you, don’t worry, I’ll explain randonautica in a future episode.
    - On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor (2017)
    - Dark Folklore by Mark Norman and Tracey Norman (2021)
    - The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings by Jan Harold Brunvand (1981)
In a 3/25/82 issue of The Ram, there’s an interview with a elderly Jesuit theology professor named Robert Gleason.
- There’s an interesting, seemingly random question thrown into the middle of the interview. The interviewer asks: “What is this “curse” on Fordham that I’ve heard about?” and the priest answers “That’s a very old, long-lived Jesuit story. I heard it first 50 years ago and many times since. A strange curse is supposed to lie on the land—why, I wonder? Of course, much more interesting, we have a Jesuit “ghost” they tell me, who roams and moans at night. My advice—better get home early!”
  - https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/15884/itemsearch/%22fordham%20curse%22

So basically the Jesuit just jokes about it, but interesting that back then everyone was like, “oh, you know, Fordham’s curse.”

Urban legends

First, I want to talk about urban legends. There’s one big reason why a college would have more stories about hauntings, because I think that universities, especially residential ones, are a perfect petri dish for urban legend creation and proliferation.
- Here’s why:
  - In a college with dorms, a bunch of people who all presumably know each other or are likely to interact are all living in close proximity, partying together, etc.
    - By contrast, when you’re a regular person living in an apartment or house, the only thing that you and your neighbors share for sure is just geographic proximity. You may not be the same age, run in similar social circles, etc. So you might know your neighbors, or you might not. Unless your neighborhood has a lot of block parties, though, you probably don’t spent large amounts of time partying with, hanging out and talking to your neighbors, swapping stories, etc.
      1. So for example, I’ve talked before on the podcast about some paranormal activity in my current apartment. But I’ve never talked to my neighbors about it. Usually we just say hi, maybe quickly talk about the weather, etc. But we’re certainly not swapping strange stories.
      2. Contrast that with a university, where not only is there already a shared trait between all students (the fact that they’re students there), but there are socially acceptable reasons why you might be hanging out more with your classmates, maybe getting drunk and telling wild stories, etc.
  - Also, undergraduates usually only spend 4 years living on campus and then they move away.
    - So it makes it easier to spread weird, unlikely urban legends.
    - Say that today one of my neighbors told me that another neighbor, who’d been living in the building for a couple decades, had a weird experience 6 years ago. I would be able to ask the other neighbor about it, hear it firsthand. And even if I didn’t do that, my neighbor might be less inclined to exaggerate, because they’d know that I could just check with the original source if I wanted to.
    - Again, contrast that with a university, where people usually only live in dorms for about 9 months at a time, and, if they’re lucky, don’t spend more than 4 years in college. It would be so easy for an upperclassman to tell a freshman a weird story, and then for that story to get passed down from class to class. The upperclassman would be long gone, so it’s not like anyone’s going to ask that person about it. Also, there are lots of parties where people are gossiping, spreading urban legends, etc, so that gives things a chance to spread far and wide and to possibly get embroidered with each retelling.
  - So to me, a college is the perfect breeding ground for urban legends. Now, this isn’t to say that all of the stories of Fordham hauntings are urban legends. It’s just that I think urban legends are far more likely to form.
Here’s a bit of an explanation of what urban legends do, from The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings by Jan Harold Brunvand (1981):
- “In common with age old folk legends about lost mines, buried treasure, omens, ghosts, and Robin Hood-like outlaw heroes, urban legends are told seriously, circulate largely by word of mouth, are generally anonymous, and vary constantly in particular details from one telling to another, while always preserving a central core of traditional elements or ‘motifs.’ . . . Like traditional folklore, the stories do tell one kind of truth. They are a unique, unselfconscious reflection of major concerns of individuals in the societies in which the legends circulate.”
At Fordham, there are a number of stories about people encountering ghostly priests, especially while studying. So in theory, the urban legends about Fordham could be related to it being a Catholic university, and to students being anxious about doing well in school, especially since some priests there are professors.
- And of course there are other concerns that individuals may have that I’m not thinking of. Those are just the two most obvious ones to me.
Also, I mentioned this in prior episodes, but stories about Fordham hauntings only appeared in print starting in the 1970s. There are several reasons for that, I think:
- Parts of The Exorcist were filmed on campus in the early 70s
  - That both added a creepiness factor to campus, since The Exorcist was such a defining cultural product, and it also served as a reminder that the Catholic church still performs exorcisms.
- Also, the number of students living on campus increased steadily starting in the 70s or so (it became less and less of a commuter school, so people had more time on campus to either witness hauntings, swap scary stories late at night, etc.)
- The satanic panic in the 1980s clearly influenced campus urban legends (for example, stories of “cultish” paintings in Hughes Hall in the 1980s)
So in thinking about this, I was wondering whether any university would have the number of paranormal stories that Fordham has. I was curious whether I was just thought Fordham was more haunted because I went there, but I might have felt the same about any school I might have gone to. So to try to answer this question, I wanted to look at some other colleges
First, I wanted to think about NY private schools with a large amount of students who live in student housing
- NYU
  - I’ve been arguing that Fordham is the place of the most highly concentrated hauntings in all of NYC, but you’ll notice that I haven’t been arguing that it’s the most haunted college in NYC.
    - That’s because I really don’t know whether it could hold a candle to NYU, which is a much larger and better known school downtown, in the Village. NYU is larger in both student population and geographically, so it has that edge on Fordham. But also, the Village is just an infamously haunted part of NYC.
    - Without looking very hard, I found 17 different articles or websites talking about some of NYU’s hauntings, and that’s just what I found at first blush.
    - So is I would argue that NYU haunted because it’s in a famously haunted neighborhood. How could it not be haunted, in that case?
- Columbia
  - I was very interested to see what hauntings Columbia University had, since Ghostbusters was partially filmed there
  - I was disappointed, however, because while there was one story about a ghost in a philosophy building that was interesting, there just weren’t the level of stories that I could find about Fordham
    - https://blogs.cul.columbia.edu/rbml/2018/10/31/a-ghost-in-philosophy-hall/
  - I found this story on the website Her Campus:

“Years later, during World War II, the United States launched the Manhattan Project to secretly develop a nuclear weapon. The project mainly took place at Columbia, where researchers, students, and physicists worked on creating these atomic bombs.

“Legend has it that one of the students working on the project was exposed to radioactive material and fatally poisoned. Students say that he haunts the tunnels below campus, which are remnants from the asylum. Supposedly, desperate physics students go looking for him, hoping he can help them with their exams. “

https://www.hercampus.com/school/columbia-barnard/columbias-spooky-past/
https://www.scoutingny.com/searching-for-the-remains-of-manhattans-bloomingdale-insane-asylum/
I was actually shocked to find so few hauntings, considering the fact that Columbia has some similarities to Fordham, because an iconic paranormal-related movie was filmed there (Ghostbusters) and because it was literally built on the former site of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. The main library building was built on the site of the original insane asylum, which could house up to 200 people.
- https://news.columbia.edu/news/6-spookiest-things-you-should-know-about-columbia-university
- This is anecdotal, of course, but my wife went to grad school at Columbia and lived just off campus, and she worked in one of the libraries when it was being renovated so spent lots of time alone during a renovation, which supposedly kicks up hauntings. Despite being really sensitive, my wife said she never experienced anything weird, got any weird vibes, or heard other people talk about ghosts, hauntings, or urban legends on campus.
Vassar
- My wife went to Vassar, which is a school in upstate NY, for her undergrad, and said that it did have a kind of creepy vibe at times, so I wanted to include it.
  - From Vassar.edu:
    - “Main fifth floor, Main third floor, Pratt House, Alumnae House, Davison fifth floor, Old Observatory.

“Many people have reported feelings of “a presence” watching them in these places. According to legend, Main is the refuge of the spirits of suicidal students and deceased employees. Pratt House is inhabited by a ghost who is friendly to Vassar folk, but often disturbs those not officially affiliated with the college.”

https://www.vassar.edu/vcencyclopedia/vassar-myths-legends/
A 2014 article in the Miscellany News, Vassar’s student newspaper tells stories of ghostly maids, people’s spirits hanging out after dying, ghostly Victorian women, the ghost of Matthew Vassar (who died while giving a speech to the board), phantom footsteps, and people feeling invisible hands touching them, hearing voices, etc. An emeritus dean said that “A now rather famous performance artist in the Class of ’81 supposedly governed a coven somewhere in the South Tower of Main” and that another time he was he was “were called into the basement where some wallboard had been removed to determine if graffiti there were satanic markings. Our inexpert conclusion was that they weren’t.” The graffiti thing was interesting since it made me think of the Fordham story.
- https://miscellanynews.org/2014/10/29/features/ghosts-haunt-historic-vassar-buildings/
Vassar’s Main Building was designed by James Renwick, Jr., of Renwick Smallpox Hospital fame
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Building_(Vassar_College)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vassar_College_Observatory
“If you’ve ever visited the Blodgett basement, you’re probably not surprised to hear that Vassar is infested with ghosts. Specifically, spirits roam the third and fifth floors of Main, the fifth floor of Davison, the Alumnae/i House and the Old Observatory. There’s the friendly ghost of Pratt House, who only haunts those not officially affiliated with the College.”
- https://miscellanynews.org/2017/10/25/features/vassar-legends-ghosts-sure-to-surprise-every-student/
I’ve been thinking about parallels between Vassar and Fordham and trying to see why they might both be pretty haunted. You almost couldn’t find schools that are more opposite of each other. They’re almost inverses or reflections of each other, as far as I can tell.
- Sure, they’re both extremely overpriced private schools in New York State, but Vassar is suburban and upstate, where as Fordham is urban and downstate. Vassar is famous for its, uh, liberalism (politically, culturally, sexually, etc), and Fordham is extremely conservative and repressed.
- Vassar started out as a women’s college (though it’s open to all genders now), and I was curious if other women’s colleges had a lot of hauntings. I just checked one other one, Smith College, but Smith does seem to have a lot of stories of hauntings and shows up on a lot of most-haunted-school lists that I was finding.
  - https://sophia.smith.edu/blog/smithipedia/traditions/ghost-stories/
- I haven’t done a deep dive into this, but what this says to me is that while schools like NYU might be haunted because of their location, some other colleges may be haunted because of their students. Like, the people who choose to go there.
- This may be tenuous, but hear me out:
  - Fordham is a Catholic school, and the Catholic church is famous for a lot of beliefs that some people might consider paranormal. I’m talking exorcisms, ghosts, demons, etc.
  - Vassar is a women’s school that was founded in the 19th century, and women have historically been linked to spiritualism, seances, mediumistic talents, witchcraft, etc. I have NO idea whether there are actually any links between Vassar students and spiritualism so I’m not trying to make any solid assertions there, I’m more saying that there’s a historic link between women and the paranormal, just like there’s a historic link between the Catholic Church and the paranormal, and I wonder if there’s something in that. Because it doesn’t matter how many ghosts a school has, if the people who go there refuse to acknowledge the existence of the paranormal, then there won’t be paranormal stories coming out of that school.
    - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vassar_College
  - Also, importantly, both schools have a population of students who live on campus. Since the 1970s or so, Fordham has had a steadily increasing number of students residing on campus, and I think it’s no coincidence that ghost stories started arising at Fordham starting in the 1970s. The more time you spend in a place, especially at night, the more likely you might witness something weird.
  - Also, and this may be completely unrelated, especially since many paranormal stories happened to men, especially in the 70s, but Fordham became co-ed in 1974.
    - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordham_University
Then I wanted to look at other Catholic universities, since I think Fordham’s Jesuit identity has an influence on the hauntings, since there are so many stories of ghostly priests.
- NYC Catholic schools
  - St John’s University (in Queens, founded 1870)
    - I searched “haunted” and “ghost” in their newspaper, found nothing related to hauntings at St. John’s: https://www.torchonline.com/
    - Note: St. John’s is more of a commuter school
      - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s_University_(New_York_City)
  - St Francis college (founded 1859 by the Franciscans)
    - In a basic online search, I couldn’t find stories of hauntings.
    - The site for the student newspaper, SFC Today, didn’t seem to be live when I checked on 1/22 (I tried multiple browsers). And I couldn’t find the archives of The Voice, the former student newspaper, online.
    - I know it’s a commuter school, so there’s probably less lore and fewer urban legends
- Other Jesuit Schools
  - I did think about doing a bit of a closer look at Jesuit schools like Georgetown in DC (another Exorcist filming location), Santa Clara in CA, and Creighton in Nebraska, but I had to cut myself off. Let’s just say that there are definitely stories of hauntings at those schools, but I haven’t done enough of a deep dive to see whether they rival Fordham’s or not.
    - Georgetown
      - Georgetown’s stories definitely sound familiar: “Two of the most popular Healy Hall legends reach back to the earliest days when Georgetown was a liberal arts college. According to one tale, a young Jesuit student accidentally opened the Gates of the Underworld when reading forbidden chants in a book about exorcism. A second tale involves another Jesuit, who was crushed to death by the hands of the clock while working in the clock tower. Other Georgetown ghost stories tell of trapped spirits lost for eternity in the University’s underground tunnel system.”
        
        https://scarydc.com/blog/healy-hall-haunts-of-georgetown-university/
      - https://thehoya.com/haunted-streets-ghosts-georgetown/
    - Santa Clara
      - https://activate.metroactive.com/2016/10/the-23-most-haunted-places-in-the-silicon-valley/
      - https://backpackerverse.com/best-colleges-in-california/
    - Creighton
      - https://alumni.creighton.edu/magis-meets-macabre
      - https://omaha.com/news/local/history/just-in-time-for-halloween-tales-of-omahas-ghosts-and-haunted-places/article_d0f6179e-328f-11ec-9573-ebe839fd13e1.html

Don’t miss past episodes about Fordham’s history and hauntings:

Sources consulted RE: What Makes a Place Haunted?

See sources page for the full source list for the series

Books consulted

Magic in the Landscape: Earth Mysteries and Geomancy by Nigel Pennick
Psychogeography by Merlin Coverly (2006)
Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past by Merlin Coverly (2020)
The Official Guide to Randonautica: Everything You Need to Know about Creating Your Random Adventure Story by Joshua Lengfelder and Auburn Salcedo (2021)
On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor (2017)
Dark Folklore by Mark Norman and Tracey Norman (2021)
The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings by Jan Harold Brunvand (1981)

Ley Lines in New York, Window Areas, Liminal Spaces (Haunted Fordham University)

A spin through some theories behind why hauntings and strangeness occurs.

Listen to the episode here or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Ley Lines in New York, Window Areas, Liminal Spaces: A spin through some theories behind why hauntings and strangeness occurs.

In this instance, I’m looking at the concepts of ley lines, window areas, and liminal spaces, and seeing whether any of them could be in play in the hauntings of Fordham University.

Highlights include:
• A quick examination of incomprehensible aeromagnetic maps
• A weird internet aesthetic
• Former trails that ran through the area
• Ley line weirdness

Note: Sorry about the radiator noise on this one. I did my best to reduce it, but it ended up sounding a lot louder on the recording than it did in real life. Maybe just pretend it’s a poltergeist or something.

Episode Script for Ley Lines in New York, Window Areas, Liminal Spaces

Ley lines

Ley lines show up in a lot of pop culture fantasy and paranormal stories, but I wanted to do some digging into the history behind ley lines and look at “real” ley lines.
The quick and dirty definition of a ley line is:
- A straight line drawn between important historic structures and landmarks that supposedly have connections to paranormal phenomena, earth energy, etc.
  - I’m trying not to be a jerk here, but while I find the concept of ley lines really fascinating, I find them pretty suspect.
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line
I first heard of the origin of the ley line idea from Magic in the Landscape: Earth Mysteries and Geomancy by Nigel Pennick. The book talks about Alfred Watkins, an amateur archaeologist who in the 1920s coined the term ley line. Basically, he was looking at a line on a map that connected different parts of the landscape, ancient sites, etc.
- The book goes on to talk about how Watkins’ “discovery” of ley lines wasn’t really an original idea, but Watkins was the one who gave it the name ley lines. He published a book in 1925 called The Old Straight Track, which then became popular in the 60s and 70s and there was this resurgence of interest in the topic.
  - The Old Straight Track: https://archive.org/details/b29827553
It’s funny, right when I started researching ley lines, a podcast that I listen to sometimes did a whole episode about ley lines, so I felt like that synchronicity signaled I was on the right path in my research.
Ley lines are a huge topic that seem pretty easily debunked. Seems like the big argument is that you can draw lines to connect important sites really easily, but that doesn’t mean there’s actually a pattern, since of course there are also important sites outside of whatever lines you might draw.
But to get back to the relevance of ley lines to my research, to my puzzlement, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of high-quality, detailed map of supposed ley lines that cross through the US.
- I was looking for one that was overlaid over a google map, which you could zoom in on, etc.
- I’m ashamed to say that the terrible lady Ghostbusters movie (which though I don’t think it’s good, I own and have watched more times than I care to admit), had me thinking that there existed detailed maps with ley lines. (There’s a whole plot point related to NYC ley lines.) As far as I can tell, there aren’t official ley lines in NYC.
- If you google ley lines, you can find some somewhat low res jpgs that show at least two lines in NY state: one that passes through upstate, and one that passes through Long Island.
  - It was when I was reading about the Hammonasset Line, which starts in Montauk, LI, that the bad feeling I was starting to get about ley lines was confirmed: I pretty quickly ended up on the website of Graham Hancock, whose name set up some big alarm bells for me.
  - I tried to remember where I knew his name from, and then I looked it up and confirmed that some of his books have been characterized as supporting ultra far right, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. He’s one of those people who has published all these books that sound really smart and sort of . . . DaVinci Code or National Treasure-like, only they aren’t fiction.
    - The Southern Poverty Law Center mentions Graham Hancock in a 2018 article called “Close encounters of the racist kind,” which talks about links between ancient alien theories and the far right, so you can google that if you want to know more. There’s also a great episode of the Qanon Anonymous podcast that talks all about the history channel, ancient aliens, and all of the bad stuff tied up with that whole scene, if you want to learn more about that.
- To be clear, I’m NOT saying that everyone who’s interested in ley lines is racist or far right or anything. Not at all. But I do think that when you look into ley lines, you should just be very careful to be a filter, and not a sponge.
But, as usual, I digress, and to make a long story long, I determined that ley lines weren’t really going to help me explain anything going on at Fordham. Fordham also doesn’t lie on any kind of latitude that’s known for weirdness, either.
So then I turned to psychogeography, which as I explained in the last episode, I only sort of understand.
- The conclusion that I kinda drew from reading what I did about psychogeography was this:
  - The way that people interact with a place and each other might have complex repercussions that may affect the paranormal
  - The paths that people take (walking paths, trails, train routes, roads, rivers and shipping routes) are important.
    - To me, they seem maybe more important than ley lines. Like, for example, who cares if there are no ley lines going through NYC? If a ley line is defined by connecting the dots between important places, then every street is basically a ley line. So much history has happened here: important events, famous buildings, the lives of a higher-than-average number of people for hundreds of years, and many, many people prior to the centuries of settler colonialism.
    - We also know that many present-day streets grew out of old walking paths that may have been around for hundreds, or even thousands of years.
      - As a sidenote, I don’t want to get too sidetracked about this, because in the process of researching this episode I’ve spent tens of hours pouring over old books and maps, and newer, not-exactly-accurate books, trying to identify important pre-contact paths and villages, and plotting them on a map. and I could go on about this subject for a very long time while also giving very little real information, so I’m going to try to keep in brief.
    - But for example, to name one of the very many sources I’ve delved into in researching this, in 1946, a man named James A. Kelly created a map of Brooklyn called Indian Villages, Paths, Ponds, and Places in Kings County, and the map shows that some of the trails became major roads, including Fulton Street, Flatbush Avenue, and some of Atlantic Avenue.
    - Another source: Indian paths in the great metropolis by Reginald Pelham Bolton (1922) https://archive.org/details/indianpathsingre01bolt/page/n3/mode/2up?q=map
    - In the US, it seems that ley lines are often plotted and drawn based on landmarks left by the indigenous population, like mounds and sacred sites.
      - But what about trails? To me, by ley line logic, it seems just as legitimate to plot out ley lines based on the trails that were used by indigenous people.
      - So, you might ask, what trails went through the land that is now Fordham University?
        
        I’ve mentioned that the NYBG is right next to Fordham’s campus, so I wanted to read a bit from their “Outdoor Self-Guided Visit: Westchester Indian Trail Walk TEACHER GUIDE”
        
        “The southern branch of the Westchester Indian trail came across Fordham University’s campus [note from me: I believe this refers to the university’s prior, larger campus grounds, part of which were later turned into the botanical garden], through present day Garden land and made its way to a ford across the Bronx River about 150 feet north of the Pelham Parkway bridge. There was a cross-over trail (the Aquahung trail) which followed the east side of the river and connected the south and north branches of the Westchester trail.
        
        “The Siwanoy (Munsee dialect–speaking) occupied the east side of the Bronx River and the Weckquaeskec (Renenu dialect–speaking) occupied the west side, but both tribes traversed both sides of the property. There were no permanent dwellings on Garden property, but there was at least one further south, alongside the present-day zoo.
        
        “At least two middens (shellpiles) were revealed on Garden grounds: one on the hillside where the present-day Ruth Howell Family Garden is located and another, located at Daffodil Hill.”
One note: the full sources for this teacher guide weren’t really cited, and many of the sources I’ve found aren’t exactly accurate, so you should take this historical information with a grain of salt rather than accepting that it’s 100% accurate.
However, we do know folks were living in the area, pre-contact, and I think it’s worth noting that an important turtle pictograph was found on the grounds of the NYBG. The pictograph is thought to be between 400-1000 years old.
- Per the NYT in March 1988:
  - “”For the first springtime since it was given form by Delaware Indians some 400 to 1,000 years ago – perhaps as a clan design, a hunting-ground designation or a symbol of the creation myth – the turtle will be far from its original home on a bluff above a gentle bend in the river.”
  - https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/25/nyregion/the-voice-of-an-ancient-bronx-turtle.html
- Who knows how accurate those theories are, but my understanding is that the stone with the pictograph was brought indoors, and based on what I read online, it’s unclear whether casual visitors can see it now.
So anyway, to get back to my original point, I’m not trying to say that Fordham is haunted because historic trails went through it or near it. There’s plenty of irresponsible urban legends claiming that artifacts and sacred sites from indigenous people make a place haunted, and I don’t want to add to that.
But I do want to challenge and complicate the idea of ley lines a bit, and I do want to underscore that the area has a long precolonial history that may or may not have an effect on the paranormal in the area now. However, as I’ve discovered, much of that history has been lost and/or obscured by incorrect information, so I don’t feel able to hypothesize anything on this front.

Window areas

Tangentially related, there’s a theory that hauntings could be connected to a location being a so-called “window area.”
The concept was created by legendary journalist/investigator/UFOlogist John Keel, of Mothman Prophecies fame.
- He suggested that Point Pleasant, WV, might be a window area, which is basically an area where a bunch of strange phenomena are concentrated.
Here’s a bit from Keel’s book Operation Trojan Horse where he talks about his idea of window areas. This is in the context of UFO sightings but, like I mentioned last time, I think that all paranormal phenomena are related and there’s plenty to learn from reading across disciplines.
- “At first I termed these sectors [of greater activity] base areas, but this was misunderstood by many UFO enthusiasts, and soon after my first article on UFO base areas appeared, teenagers everywhere were out scouring the countryside looking for underground UFO hangars. So I adopted the term “windows” as a good substitute.
- “Every state in the United States has from two to ten “windows.” These are areas where UFOs appear repeatedly year after year. The objects will appear in these places and pursue courses throughout the 200-mile limitation. These window areas seem to form larger circles of activities. The great circle from Canada (not to be confused with the traditional geographic Great Circle) in the northwest through the Central States and back into northeast Canada is a major window. Hundreds of smaller windows lie inside that circle. Another major window is centered in the Gulf of Mexico and encompasses much of Mexico, Texas, and the Southwest.
- “Many windows center directly over areas of magnetic deviation such as Kearney, Nebraska; Wanaque, New Jersey; Ravenna, Ohio. In the 1950s, teams from the national Geological Survey Office quietly flew specially equipped planes over most of the United States and mapped all of the magnetic faults in the country. You can obtain a magnetic map of your locale from the Office of the Geological Survey, Washington, D.C. 20242. If you have been collecting UFO reports in your home state, you will probably find that many of those reports are concentrated in areas where magnetic faults or deviations exist.
So I thought this thing about magnetic maps was very interesting.
I searched the USGS website to try to find detailed magnetic fault maps of NYC, but weirdly, a lot of the maps cut off right before reaching the city, around the North Bronx. I’ll include links in the show notes for what I found, but I don’t think I can say much based on any of that. If you know of magnetic fault maps of NYC, please let me know, because I’d love to see them. Here’re the maps I was able to find:
- Aeromagnetic maps of NY:
  - Aeromagnetic map of the northeastern United States: In color: very hard to read in the NYC part
    - https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/gp942
      - https://pubs.usgs.gov/gp/0942/plate-1.pdf
  - Aeromagnetic map of parts of the Yonkers and Mount Vernon quadrangles, Bergen County, New Jersey and Bronx, Rockland, and Westchester Counties, New York: this cuts off right before Fordham
    - https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/gp495
    - https://pubs.usgs.gov/gp/0495/plate-1.pdf
  - Aeromagnetic map of northern New Jersey and adjacent parts of New York and Pennsylvania: cuts off in the north Bronx, before Fordham:
    - https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/gp562
    - https://pubs.usgs.gov/gp/0562/plate-1.pdf
  - Extreme-Value Geoelectric Amplitude and Polarization Across the Northeast United States (mentions power grid vulnerability to electromagnetic storms, which is interesting?): https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018SW002068
  - https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70203296
  - “Results reported here inform utility companies in projects for evaluating and managing the response of power grid systems to the deleterious effects of geomagnetic disturbance”
I did find this really interesting article called Intensity and impact of the New York Railroad superstorm of May 1921, which the USGS wrote, which actually may be relevant. Here’s the summary of what the report was about:
- “Historical records of ground-level geomagnetic disturbance are analyzed for the magnetic superstorm of May 1921. This storm was almost certainly driven by a series of interplanetary coronal mass ejections of plasma from an active region on the Sun. The May 1921 storm was one of the most intense ever recorded by ground-level magnetometers. It exhibited violent levels of geomagnetic disturbance, caused widespread interference to telephone and telegraph systems in New York City and State, and brought spectacular aurorae to the nighttime sky. Results inform modern projects for assessing and mitigating the effects of magnetic storms that might occur in the future.”
- The article had this bit, which probably isn’t relevant to the story here, but which I found interesting so wanted to share, especially since SO many people in the paranormal are interested in the Appalachian Mountains:
  - “The high-geoelectric hazards shown in Figure 4 are part of a band running from the southwest to the northeast that more or less corresponds to igneous and metamorphic rock of the (highly eroded) Appalachian Mountains and the New England Highlands. Such rock types tend to be relatively electrically resistive, corresponding to high impedance, and, thus, for a given level of geomagnetic disturbance, geoelectric hazards will tend to be high. In contrast, low-geoelectric hazards are seen to the northwest, across the sedimentary rocks of Appalachian Plateau. Such rock types tend to be relatively electrically conductive, corresponding to low impedance and, for a given level of geomagnetic disturbance, lower geoelectric hazards. Notably, geoelectric hazards are relatively high around New York City and southeast New York State “
- And in case you’re wondering:
  - “The most intense magnetic storm since the IGY (1957–1958), that of March 1989 (Allen et al., 1989), had a maximum –Dst = 589 nT. This storm is especially notable because it caused an electricity blackout in Québec, Canada. This impact on electricity power grids is essentially the modern version of the disturbance summarized here for landline telegraph and telephone systems in May 1921. Indeed, should a storm as intense as that of May 1921 occur today, its impact on electricity networks might exceed that realized in March 1989.”
  - https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/70204992
  - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019SW002250
So, in conclusion, do I think Fordham could be haunted because it’s a window area? It’s a place where a ton of stuff has seemed to occurred, so I guess it’s possible, but I couldn’t find anything to support it. There are no UFO sightings that I’ve found, and no magnetic anomalies that I’ve found, aside from that ominous thing about geoelectric hazards being high in NYC, but I’m not science-y enough to understand exactly what that means.
- https://www.americanhauntingsink.com/moth
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keel

Liminal spaces/liminality

The last things I wanted to talk about in this episode are liminal spaces.
- Liminal space is a huge buzzword right now, and I feel like it’s the kind of term that will very soon become almost meaningless.
- If you’re someone who’s very online, “liminal space” may immediately make you think of the liminal space aesthetic. Images of dead malls, empty school hallways, fluorescent-lit office corridors, and playgrounds at night might come to mind. These sort of images, which are very unsettling but also compelling, have become popular enough that the aesthetics wiki has a whole page on it. (Which I’ll link in the shownotes if you want to take a look.) If I had to describe the liminal space aesthetic, I’d describe it as nostalgic images that make you feel like you’re the only one left after the rapture, maybe, like you’re wandering alone through spaces that should be full of life and people but which are instead unsettlingly empty of people, but which make you feel exposed, almost like you’re being watched.
  - https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Liminal_Space
  - https://cheezburger.com/15296005/an-unsettling-collection-of-creepy-memes-and-liminal-spaces
- That’s the liminal space aesthetic. But if you’re steeped in the paranormal, you probably think of liminal spaces as places in-between other places. Hallways, bridges, staircases, and other places that you pass through on your way somewhere else.
  - You might also be used to hearing liminality talked about in terms of life stages. It’s a time of transition in your life, a rite of passage, or maybe even an initiation.
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality
- You see what I’m getting at here, right? For people who attend universities, that time is likely a liminal time in their lives.
  - If you’re a residential student, you’ve left the home you grew up in, but you likely aren’t working full time yet.
  - There’s this idea of figuring out what you want to do in your career, but also figuring out who you are.
  - That self-discovery can be somewhat tame and straightforward. But it often isn’t.
    - College is also often billed as a last hurrah. Some people treat college as a four-ish-year-long bachelor’s party thrown for an impending marriage to adulthood, a time when you can and must do all of the foolish things you wanted to do before having to grow up.
    - Or many people, myself included, experience somewhat major mental health crises, which ends up turning the college experience into a highly emotionally charged trial by fire.
  - No matter how dramatic a person’s college experience may be, I think it’s safe to consider it a rite of passage, and a liminal time.
- The idea in paranormal circles is that the paranormal appears more often during liminal times, and in liminal places. It’s a sort of Twilight Zone where the uncanny pops in.
So college is a liminal time. But another thing to consider is that as liminal spaces, residential universities have students moving in and out with great rapidity. And I think that has its own impact on the paranormal.
- In one of the episodes I did on the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, I talked about how the intersection in Vegas that Excalibur and Luxor sit at, where Tropicana and Las Vegas Boulevard meet, has the most hotel rooms of any intersection in the world. That’s a lot of lives and souls moving through there. In a place like Vegas, where people travel to party and often lose huge sums of money, it seems like there could be an awful lot of psychic upset and human pain there.
I think something similar could be at work when looking at a college campus
Of course, last episode, I talked about urban legends, and how the residential population of a college campus is, I think, a perfect breeding ground for urban legends. But what if it’s also a perfect breeding ground for real paranormal phenomena, as well?
- Much like my Vegas example, we have a bunch of young people who are not transient exactly, but on short-term, less-than-a-year-long leases to live in dorms shared with a bunch of other people. (And I talked in previous episodes about how, at least in my day, sharing a single bedroom with 2 or 3 other people wasn’t unusual. So that adds to this sense of a bunch of emotionally volatile young people all being crammed together in a small space.

Don’t miss past episodes about Fordham’s history and hauntings:

Sources consulted RE: What Makes a Place Haunted?

See sources page for the full source list for the series

Books consulted (partial list)

Magic in the Landscape: Earth Mysteries and Geomancy by Nigel Pennick
Psychogeography by Merlin Coverly (2006)
Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past by Merlin Coverly (2020)
The Official Guide to Randonautica: Everything You Need to Know about Creating Your Random Adventure Story by Joshua Lengfelder and Auburn Salcedo (2021)
On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor (2017)
Dark Folklore by Mark Norman and Tracey Norman (2021)
The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings by Jan Harold Brunvand (1981)
The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins
Indian paths in the great metropolis by Reginald Pelham Bolton (1922)

Why is Fordham University Haunted? (Haunted Fordham University)

Wrapping up this series on the history and hauntings of Fordham University, I look at some additional theories behind why Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus seems to be so haunted.

Why is Fordham University Haunted? Wrapping up this series on the history and hauntings of Fordham University, I look at some additional theories behind why Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus seems to be so haunted.

Highlights include:
• My recent trip to Fordham’s campus
• Some less pleasant elements of Fordham’s past
• Stone tape theory and residual hauntings

Check out BronxWitch HeadQuarters:

Episode Script for Why is Fordham University Haunted?

Before I get into the episode, since I’m talking about weird paranormal phenomena in the Bronx, I wanted to pause and talk real quick about a cool witchy place that just opened up in the Bronx a few months ago.
Yesterday I went up to the Bronx to visit a new space called BronxWitch HeadQuarters, which is in the South Bronx on Grand Concourse, a couple blocks away from Yankee Stadium. For folks who aren’t very familiar with the Bronx, that’s only a couple subway stops away from Manhattan, depending on which train you’re on, so it’s a really convenient location.
You might follow Aly, the owner, on instagram–her handle is bronxwitch. https://www.instagram.com/bronxwitch/
BronxWitch HeadQuarters is kind of like WeWork for witches. It’s a workshare space that folks who do readings, healing, and that sort of thing can work out of. You can also rent out the space for classes and stuff, and I know Aly has some events planned.
- For example, she’s doing a tea and tarot event this weekend, on Sunday, March 20th, for the spring equinox. You can follow the BronxWitch Headquarters’ instagram at bronxwitchHQ, or visit the website at bronxwitch.com to stay in the loop and hear about other events.
- https://www.instagram.com/bronxwitchhq/
- https://www.bronxwitch.com/
I think what Aly is doing is really cool, and I’m especially excited to see a place like this open up in the Bronx. If you live outside of NYC, you might not be familiar with the scene here, but there are some really cool shops that cater toward witchy types and have classes and events and stuff, but they’re mostly located in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and I at least can find them a little intimidating. Aly is so so nice, and she’s really focused on building community and establishing a welcoming environment.
So if you live in NYC and are some sort of witchy person who needs a space to see clients or teach classes, or if you’re just interested in maybe going to a witchy sort of event, then definitely check out BronxWitch Headquarters.
And if you want to know more about it, you should check out the podcast Chaos and Shadow . Aly was a guest on a recent episode, and that was a great conversation to listen to.
Also, sidenote, if you’re a fan of NYC history and haven’t been to the neighborhood around Yankee Stadium, you definitely should.
I mentioned that BronxWitch Headquarters is on Grand Concourse, which is a really famous street in the Bronx. It was envisioned in the 1890s and opened in the 1900s, and it’s modeled on the Champs-Elysees in Paris. It also looks a lot like Park Avenue in Manhattan. It’s this grand avenue where all of these beautiful apartment buildings opened in the early 20th century. There was even a fancy movie palace, the Loew’s Paradise Theater, which opened near Fordham in 1929 and which is still around today. It was an event space and now used by a church.
Anyway, if you go to the part of the Bronx near Yankee Stadium, you can check out the Grand Concourse Historic District, and there’s also the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which is a cool (and free) art museum. I feel like a lot of people in NYC don’t go to the Bronx very often, but the Bronx is great and extremely worth a trip if you’re in the area and don’t make it up there very often.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Concourse_(Bronx)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Theater_(Bronx)

Strong emotions / Focus point for poltergeist

I mentioned this in previous episodes, so I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail here, which is what about poltergeist activity?
- The traditional poltergeist haunting is stereotypically centered around a young person going through puberty, often but not always a young girl,. The theory goes that that’s a difficult, emotional, perhaps even liminal time in a person’s life. If a poltergeist may be subsisting or feeding off of someone’s energy, especially negative energy, there might be a lot of it.
And while teenagers get the award for being most angsty, at least as far as commonly accepted wisdom goes, I don’t really think that college students are less angsty. There’s a lot of heavy emotional stuff that someone may be dealing with in college, and even under the best of circumstances, you’re living in a new place, with a lot of different people, away from family probably for the first time, etc., which can be emotional or stressful.

Intelligent Hauntings vs. Residual Hauntings / Stone Tape Theory / Place Memory

I talked about this topic some earlier in the series, so I don’t want to belabor the point here. But while working on the series, I read a book called Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past by Merlin Coverly (2020), which had some interesting ideas I wanted to share.
But before I do that, just a refresher:
- Intelligent hauntings are ghosts that can perhaps interact with observers or investigators
  - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/intelligent_haunting
- Residual hauntings are more like an echo, or a moment in time played over and over, which can’t interact with observers.
  - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/residual_haunting
  - You’ll often hear Stone Tape Theory invoked when talking about residual hauntings.
  - Stone tape theory was popularized by a 1972 British TV play called The Stone Tape, which drew on the theory of residual hauntings by parasychologist TC Lethbridge.
Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past by Merlin Coverly (2020):
- On residual hauntings/stone tape theory:
  - “Broadly defined as the belief that haunting is in some sense analogous to a recording, the idea of residual haunting suggests that the natural world is embedded with the mental impressions of emotional or traumatic events, some dating back millions of years. These can subsequently be replayed, our brains acting as receivers with which to decode such ghostly transmissions.”
There was a bit in Merlin Coverly’s book Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past that mentioned place memory/spiritual conductors, which really caught my eye when I was reading it. I think these ideas may have some connection to my experiences of hearing strange sounds (the sound of a bell and a gibbering sound) in Finlay Hall, the former medical school building at Fordham, where I lived my sophomore year. I described that in detail the Demon in the Basement episode. So here’s the bit I wanted to read:
- “In his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837) the polymath and pioneering computing engineer, Charles Babbage (1791-1871) outlined the possibility that spoken words may leave permanent impressions in the air, aural residues which only later become inaudible. ‘The air itself’, he wrote, ‘is one vast library on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered’, speculating that at some point in the future man might be able to rewind time to retrieve these lost voices from the past.⁴¹ Later, Edmund Gurney (1847-88) and Eleanor Sidgwick (1845-1936), both members of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), introduced the concept of ‘place-memory’ as an explanation for haunting, proposing that certain locations could act as a type of spiritual conductor, preserving traces of past events which could subsequently be accessed by certain psychically attuned individuals. In 1886, Gurney, along with fellow members of the SPR, Frederic Myers (1843-1901) and Frank Podmore (1856-1910), published Phantasms of the Living which explored hundreds of cases in which apparitions of living people had been seen, often at the moment such people had imagined themselves being there.⁴² Haunting was coming to be seen less as a ghostly manifestation than as an example of mental projection, in which the subject was able to transmit an audible or visual trace through time and space. In 1939, the Welsh philosopher and then president of the SPR, HH Price (1899-1984), proposed that such memory traces were recorded via the medium of a universal ‘psychic ether’, an intermediary between spiritual and physical reality, composed of images and ideas.⁴³ But the figure who was perhaps the first to suggest that ghosts might not only be projections but recordings, was the British physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), who, like so many of his contemporaries, appears to have conducted his scientific career in tandem with his paranormal interests. He wrote in Man and the Universe (1908):
- “Take, for example, a haunted house […] wherein some one room is the scene of a ghostly representation of some long past tragedy. On a psychometric hypothesis, the original tragedy has been literally photographed on its material surroundings, nay, even on the ether itself, by reason of the intensity of emotion felt by those who enacted it; and thenceforth in certain persons an hallucinatory effect is experienced corresponding to such an impression. It is this theory that is made to account for the feeling one has on entering certain rooms, that there is an alien presence therein, though it is invisible and inaudible to mortal sense.⁴⁴
- “Just as Lodge, in seeking to explain the supernatural through recourse to scientific speculation, falls back upon the principal technological medium of his day, photography, so too does Lethbridge, writing in 1961, employ the most current means of transmission at his disposal: television. For, if ghosts are simply recordings of past (or future) events, what better way to illustrate this fact than through comparison with a technology which promised, in the 1960s, not only to bring such spectres to life, but to do so in colour?”

Tulpas, egregores, exorcism

I talked some earlier in this series about the links between Fordham and both the film The Exorcist, which was partially filmed on campus, and exorcisms themselves. There are TONS of creepy urban legends associated the rite of exorcism (like ghost priests “handling” entities that are haunting a building), or with the filming of the movie (I talk about that in the episode about Hughes Hall, or “the Exorcist dorm,” and a bit in the episode about the haunted theater and other haunted buildings on campus. Also, there were hauntings attributed to Duane Library, which supposedly occurred in the area of the stacks where texts on exorcism were kept.
So I think it’s safe to say that while on-campus deaths haven’t seemed to have entered the zeitgeist much when it comes to hauntings, exorcism definitely has. I don’t know how much of that is because of the university’s connections to exorcism, or just people reading into the university’s connections to exorcism and imagining things. Maybe a bit of both, who knows.
That also makes me think of the idea of tulpas/egregores/thoughtforms, so I just wanted to touch on those ideas briefly.
- To put it very simply, a tulpa is an entity or thing that is created through someone’s spiritual or mental powers. Typically it’s an entity that is sentient, has its own thoughts, etc.
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa
- And an egregore is, to read the wiki definition, “an occult concept representing a distinct non-physical entity that arises from a collective group of people.”
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore
- I’m not doing these topics justice here, but basically what I’m trying to say is, it could be possible that by thinking about hauntings and strange entities at Fordham, students could be creating these hauntings and entities, either individually or as a group.
- One question I have here is, can you make an urban legend come to life?
- Seems possible, maybe? I’m not super well-read on these topics, though, so I can’t offer much more than just that question here.

Something bad happened there

One thing I always think is important to consider when looking at any haunted place is, what bad things happened there? What could have left some sort of bad impression or uneasiness there? And for Fordham, the list is very, very long. There are a lot of student life-level things that I experienced or saw while I was there that were very bad, and I’m sure bad things that happened there prior to the university’s founding, but I’m going to confine myself to just details that relate to the university’s history:
I’ve talked about French Jesuits in NYC before, in one of the episodes about Calvary Cemetery. In that episode, I discussed what you could call the evil wizards of NY, the Jesuits who came to NYS in the 1600s, tried to convert indigenous people, and brought disease and discord in their wake. The indigenous peoples generally didn’t trust them, and called them “blackrobes,” for good reason, since like evil wizards, the Jesuits brought both a system of magic (Catholicism) and the invisible spirits of death in the form of infectious diseases with them. Which is why I tend to refer to them as evil wizards. A number of the French Jesuits ended up being killed (after a much larger number of indigenous peoples had died, to be clear), and have since been sainted and are considered Martyrs.
- Now, it was a different set of French Jesuits, a group from Kentucky, who bought Fordham from John Hughes in the 19th century, but they were French Jesuits nonetheless, which is not great.
- On campus, there’s a dorm called Martyrs’ Court, which was built in 1951 and which, when I was there at least, was considered the least desirable dorm for a number of very good reasons. It was also considered pretty haunted. And it was also named after the French martyrs, with three wings, each named after one of the martyred French Jesuits, which I always thought was really screwed up.
Bad stuff goes on at every college campus. Fordham has no monopoly there, and I’d even argue that because Fordham doesn’t have Greek life, probably fewer bad incidents happen on campus than happen at a lot of schools with more of a reputation for partying.
- I’m not going to say that people don’t party at Fordham, and screwed up stuff does happen there. There’s a reason why I decided to stop drinking during my senior year of college and haven’t drank since then.
- But my impression is that most colleges, especially larger state colleges, have a worse record of really screwed up stuff happening on campus. (Read Missoula by John Krakauer if you don’t get what I’m alluding to.)
But there are some on campus events that may or may not contribute to some of the anomalous stuff that people have reported at Fordham. So let’s talk about on-campus deaths (I’m only looking at some from the 1980s and earlier), just a few of the ways that Fordham is stuck in the past, and a sampling of incidents of racism and homophobia that have occurred on campus.

Deaths (esp of young ppl)

There have of course been deaths on campus; I’m sure that’s true of any university. I wanted to do a quick rundown of some deaths and strange accidents that occurred at Fordham from around the 1980s to the 1990s. Though there have been more recent deaths on campus, I’m not going to talk about them.
Content warning here, I’m going to talk about people being hurt in some pretty upsetting ways, including ways related to cars, falls, stabbings, illness, shootings, and suicide.
In February 1996, a student died in a strange accident right off campus: as he was walking home with friends from a bar, he was hit by a stalled car that was being pushed by another car from behind (they were going 15-20 miles per hour) and died.
In February 1997, a freshman at Fordham’s Bronx campus caught bacterial meningitis and died at Our Lady of Mercy Hospital in the Bronx. The previous year, a law student at Fordham died of meningitis.
- https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/OBVR/id/3519
- https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/OBVR/id/3298
There was one April 8, 1999, issue of the Ram that reported three disasters: First, a student was stabbed in the back and the stomach right off campus, though it sounds like he was okay, just recuperating.
- Then, a 22-year-old undergraduate at Rose Hill was found dead in a park in Manhattan (he’d last been seen at a bar in Manhattan.) Cause of death was unknown, but a toxicology report was pending and foul play wasn’t suspected.
- Then also a 38-year-old PhD student died by suicide.
- I was skimming the rest of the paper, which always includes security files that note different bad things that happened on campus. There wasn’t much else there, just the usual muggings and stuff, though I did notice that two tombstones at the cemetery had been knocked over on April 5.
- https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/25824
The February 1, 1979, issue of the Ram talks about how a student fell out of what at the time was called 555 (555 East 191st Street) but which is now called Walsh Hall. That’s the building right beside Finlay.
- It sounds like it was an accidental death; he’d been at a party, there was a drunken altercation, and then he went into a room to cool off. They said he was sitting on the sill of an open window, to cool off, and fell.
- (the article has some gruesome details)
- https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/14354
In 1983, a student was stabbed in Walsh Hall. It sounds like she was okay, just that her shoulder was injured.
- And within a few months of that, on the last day of classes in December 1983, a student was struck by a bullet while sitting in her room in Walsh Hall. She lost an eye, but it sounds like she was okay aside from that. She returned to school the next semester. It’d just been someone shooting a gun off their rooftop off campus; it’d been an accidental shooting. The window and blinds of her room had been closed.
- I actually remember hearing this story when I lived on campus; a professor told me about it.
- The same school year, two students died by suicide. One died at his family’s house in Westchester, and the other died in St. John’s Hall, in Queen’s Court.
- https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/16826
- https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/16587
- https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/16843
- https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/16625
- https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/16813
- https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/17038
I talked in length about how I don’t think it’s good form to graft stories of hauntings onto recent deaths, so to be clear, that’s not what I’m doing here. What I’m actually trying to point out is that there have been a number of deaths and accidents on campus, and you almost never hear about hauntings related to those.
- I know of two exceptions: the construction worker who died while working on O’Hare Hall, and the seminarian who died in the 19th century because of unsafe living conditions in St. John’s Hall. Both of them have hauntings attributed to them, but I don’t know of any other hauntings where specifics about a particular person’s death have been worked into the urban legend.
- So I think this is notable. There’s an idea that hauntings happen because of deaths, particularly the deaths of young people or people with unfinished business, and, at least in Fordham’s case, that just hasn’t been a thing.

Stuck in the past

If you forced me to choose one “cause” or reason for Fordham’s hauntings, I think I might have to say that, at least when I was a student there, it felt like a place stuck in the past. It was a place where time folded in on itself, so of course there were ghosts and strangeness occurring.
For me, as someone who’s interested in history, I think that some of Fordham’s interest in history attracted me to Fordham, at least aesthetically. I’m from suburban Texas, a place where there aren’t that many structures around that predate the 1980s, and I loved the idea of being wrapped up in this place that felt so old. You know, all these old buildings, old ghosts, etc.
Nowadays, there’s a word for this: Dark academia
- https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Dark_Academia
- The Problem with Dark Academia by Rowan Ellis on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfkYXVdkUEE
Just so you know, this section of the episode was originally much longer. I cut out 1,000 words worth of content about how the school was basically the “reject modernity embrace tradition” meme but not ironic, they literally handed out a syllabus from the 1950s at orientation for my program, etc.
I’m from the Bible belt and I thought I knew what stifling conservatism felt like. My experiences in school proved me very wrong.
Oh, also, sidenote, just this month, Fordham announced a new university president. Surprisingly, the person the chose was not a priest, and even more surprisingly, the new president is a woman. That’s a first in the university’s history.

Isolation and paranoia

- In the episode “The Demon in the Basement,” I talked about how I believe that my own personal feelings of isolation and paranoia (caused by mostly interpersonal issues and my own illness) contributed to some of the paranormal experiences I had on Fordham’s campus.
- But the school itself has a sense of isolation from and paranoia about the wider community, something that I find completely unacceptable. The campus is gated and has guards posted at the gates and there’s a strong sense of it being separate from the neighborhood.
  - I could go on for a long time about my own experiences of this and my thoughts on it, but I know that if I do that, I won’t be able to find a way to be brief, because I have too much to say on the subject.
  - So in the interest of time, I wanted to read a bit from a 2015 article that I found on the website welcome2thebronx, since it has a great quote from a student who was from the neighborhood. The article mentions Belmont, the neighborhood south of campus, and Arthur Avenue, which is a major street with restaurants and bars that students frequent. The area is also called the Little Italy of the Bronx. And to be completely clear, I agree with what this student has to say:
- - - Third generation Bronxite, Antoinette Legnini, [a] Fordham University student who lives in Belmont in the shadows of the university has these heartfelt words to say which have resonated with many other students online:
- - - ‘I have never felt like more of a stranger in my own home on Arthur Ave than when I started going to Fordham.
- - - ‘The disconnect between students on campus with people who have been living in this community for years is so great that local Bronx residents are referred to as the (now derogatory term) “locals” – who are assumed to be predominantly Black or Latino. But even with my discomfort on campus – I’m still a white student and have never felt personally discriminated against because I’m not assumed to be from the Bronx.
- - - ‘This discomfort comes from hearing/seeing the thoughts/actions of other students on the Bronx and of “locals.” I’ve never been called a local/assumed to be from the Bronx – even though my family has been living on Arthur Avenue for three generations. I’ve never been stopped at the gate when I don’t have my ID – not once have I ever been questioned as to whether or not I went to Fordham.
- - - ‘When I hear the word “local” out of some people’s mouths I hear such negativity – it almost sounds like people are referring to an annoyance, an obstacle in their college fun that they have to “deal” with. Now, there’s nothing wrong with calling someone a local, but the tone and assumptions that can be adhered to this name by Fordham students is what becomes so problematic. . . .
- - - ‘Don’t let these gates fool you into thinking that everyone outside of them is “othered.” Support local businesses, talk to your neighbors, engage in community activity. Demand that Fordham does a better job. . . .
- - - ‘This culture of classism, racism, & sexism on campus is stultifying to our growth communally as well as individually and the safety of our students is at risk.’
- - - I really recommend that you read the whole article: https://welcome2thebronx.com/2015/10/13/fordham-university-student-feels-a-stranger-in-her-own-home-borough-says-university-should-implement-a-class-on-the-bronx/
- I visited Fordham’s campus a couple weeks ago, and I definitely felt uneasy the moment I stepped onto campus. I’d made a day of being in the Bronx, walking around near Lehman College’s campus, going to Van Cortlandt Park and doing a bit of hiking there, and then walking down to Fordham’s campus.
  - Some of this could completely be my own bias and memories of my time at Fordham, but my feeling of having a nice relaxing day evaporated as soon as I got to campus.
  - To get onto campus, you have to show an ID. I had my alumni ID card, which they give out to alumni so you can show it to get back onto campus. But even with that, they almost didn’t let me onto campus. The guard had to call his boss to get permission, and then even after that, they told me I wasn’t allowed to go into any buildings.
  - Then, the whole time I was walking around campus, I think because from the start I felt like I shouldn’t be there, I felt like I was being watched. I’d forgotten that even though the campus is closed and they don’t really let visitors onto campus, security cars are constantly driving around campus, which really put me on edge. Also, I went inside one of the buildings, Keating Hall, to use the restroom and take a few pictures. It was a Friday night around 5 pm, so the building was empty, but I noticed there were cameras everywhere, which again, just made me feel like someone was always watching me.
  - Also, like I mentioned, I’d been walking around near Lehman College’s campus earlier, and the vibe had been really different. I saw groups of students hanging out, and multiple times I noticed students looking over at me as if they thought they might know me. The vibe was just really friendly, as if at any time someone might say hello to me, if that makes sense.
    - At Fordham, on the other hand, the atmosphere was very cold and pretty unfriendly. And I remembered that feeling from back when I was a student, but I think I just assumed that was because I was unhappy back then. And of course my recent experience could just have been tainted by my own memories. But either way, the vibe there was bad.
    - There are a lot of differences between Fordham and Lehman College, of course, even though the two schools are only about a mile away from each other. But, importantly, Lehman College is a public school, part of the CUNY system, whereas Fordham is an extremely expensive private school. So I guess it’s natural that it would feel more closed off. But man, the difference is striking.
    - Also, I’m about to talk about bigotry on campus, so I did want to note that I do not think that the bad vibes I got from my most recent visit to Fordham had anything to do with homophobia or people thinking I didn’t belong there.
      - I had a backpack on. It was really cold and I was wearing a huge coat. So no one could see my tattoos and there wasn’t really anything to distinguish me from the students around me. And usually, unless I’m wearing a tank top or leggings, strangers just assume I’m a dude, especially if I’m not talking to anyone. So I definitely don’t think people thought I was a queer person and had an issue with that. People probably just assumed I was just a male student. I mention this just because even if you seem like you belong, there’s just something uneasy and isolating and paranoia-inducing about being there.

Racism and homophobia

So all of this brings us into the racism, homophobia, and just general bigotry that at least when I was a student, tended to crop up on campus.
I believe I mentioned this earlier in the series, but reminder that the original Fordham Jesuits from Kentucky were enslavers
- From the book Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York, 1841-2003:
  - “In the years prior to the outbreak of hostilities in 1861, there may have been less antagonism than one might expect between the southern and the northern students at St. John’s College, because most of the New York Irish shared the anti-abolitionist sentiments of their southern brethren.”
- Then the book goes on to say:
  - “As former slave owners in Kentucky, the Jesuits at Rose Hill might also have been expected to be ardent anti-abolitionists, but such conjecture may be inaccurate. When Father Maréchal, a French-born veteran of the Kentucky mission, cast his ballot for president of the United States in 1860 at the voting booth in West Farms, he announced publicly that he had voted for the “abolitionist candidate.” An unhappy fellow voter threatened him with physical harm, but the feisty Maréchal raised his cane and challenged him to a fight. His critic turned tail and ran away.”
- I’ve talked about this in past episodes including the Calvary Cemetery episode where I talk a lot about Fordham’s founder, Archbishop John Hughes, but NYC was historically a pretty pro-slavery place, because even after slavery was abolished in NYC at the very late date of 1827, business interests in NYC made a lot of money from the labor of enslaved people in the south. So I’m not necessarily trying to say that anyone at Fordham was more anti-abolitionist/pro-slavery than their peers in NYC, but I also want to make the point that Fordham, like many similar institutions, began with people with pro-slavery sentiment.
But let’s swing back to the present day. I mentioned that there was a lot of bigotry on campus when I was a student. I dug up some articles and data points elaborating on that, mostly from after I graduated. I really hope things are better than they were then, but I don’t really know how students on campus feel nowadays.
- As usual, I tried to load information about racism and homophobia into the end of the episode, so if that isn’t something you want to listen to, you can turn this off now without missing any other topics.
- Let’s get into the articles.
The Daily News, MAR 05, 2012:
- Student comes home to racial slur written on door
The Observer, September 16, 2015:
- Another story about a racial slur written on a door
The Fordham Ram, September 2015:
- This article mentions another instance of bigotry that also happened in September 2015: “The second incident occurred on Sunday, Sept. 20, when, according to Public Safety, a student notified university officials that he saw “a crude, backwards swastika approximately two inches across” scratched into a stairwell wall in the same residence hall.”
  - https://fordhamram.com/2015/09/23/a-history-of-vandalism-at-fordham/
December 2015:
- From the university president, Father McShane:
- “I learned this morning that once again, Fordham students report that they were the targets of racial and sexual slurs from a fellow student at their off-campus housing late last night”
  - https://news.fordham.edu/campus-life/off-campus-bias-incident/
There was a 2016 incident involving homophobic language being written on someone’s door in Finlay Hall, which I mentioned in the Demon in the Basement episode:
- https://fordhamram.com/2016/09/07/students-in-finlay-hall-find-harassing-comment-on-door/
There was also a study done in 2013 to assess how safe queer students felt on campus, which I think is worth pausing and taking a look at here.
- Findings of the Fordham Que(e)ry: Report to the Fordham University Community (2013 study)
  - http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jwlock/Queery_Fordham_Community_Report_updated.pdf
- From the report’s executive summary:
  - “Students’ outness at Fordham indicates a prevalence of fear and discomfort, and that these feelings vary depending on who a student is interacting with. We also find that students are frequently without any family support and come from hostile high school environments. . .
  - A large portion of students report feeling unsafe, uncomfortable, or unwelcome in residence halls, and these concerns impact housing decisions. . . .
  - Students generally feel safe and comfortable in student clubs, but only because they avoid clubs they worry will not welcome them.
  - The vast majority of student athletes experienced discrimination or harassment.
  - Students are likely to frequently experience ambient hostility in homophobic language and jokes. . . .
  - Verbal harassment and even threats of physical violence are not uncommon, but they are rarely reported to authorities and seldom discussed. This leaves the issue largely hidden, provides no recourse, and leaves the affected students without support.
  - Compelling evidence of physical violence based on sexual or gender identity is presented. . . .
  - Many students indicate that the offices and individuals they have reported incidents to were “not at all” responsive and respectful to their needs as a sexual or gender minority. Further, fears that the university will not take their report seriously, or that their response will be ineffective if they do, are major factors preventing students from reporting.
  - Students who experience harassment and discrimination based on their sexual or gender identity report that they seriously consider transferring, their academic work suffers, they regret coming out at Fordham, and an alarming number of students struggle with internalized homophobia, blaming themselves for the treatment of others or believing their negative remarks. “
- But I talk a lot about my personal experience in my episode the Demon in the Basement, and I talk about how the ambient homophobia at Fordham had a major negative impact on my own mental health, and I ask some questions in that episode about whether that had any impact on my paranormal experiences on campus.
Before we leave this subject, I wanted to talk about the last couple of times that I visited Fordham’s campus.
Before my most recent visit, I hadn’t stepped foot on Fordham’s campus in 7 years, despite living about an hour-long subway ride away, and despite being a frequent visitor to the Botanical Gardens across the street from Fordham.
- The reason for that is because in 2015, shortly after I started dating my then-girlfriend (now my wife), we went up to the Botanical Gardens, and I suggested that we walk through Fordham first because I was excited to show her the campus. This was a random Saturday morning in the spring, and we walked around, and were holding hands, and we got some very dirty looks from students and people were staring at us. So that made my wife uncomfortable, reasonably so, so we had to stop holding hands.
- Then, as we were passing by Martyr’s Court, a dorm, we looked up at a window and hanging in the window, prominently displayed for anyone passing by to see, was a confederate flag. It was a large flag, filling up a lot of the window. I have no idea how long the flag had been up, or whether the student was asked to take it down later. But on a weekend morning in April or May 2015, in the Bronx, NYC, a confederate flag was being flown by a student on Fordham’s campus.
- I grew up in the Bible belt and almost never saw the confederate flag in my Texas hometown, but some racist felt emboldened to fly it on Fordham’s campus. That sort of action does not happen in a vacuum, and a student wouldn’t do that if they felt it wouldn’t be tolerated, and perhaps celebrated, by at least some people on campus.
I know I’ve said this a bunch of times throughout the series, but obviously there were a TON of great people at Fordham, and not everyone was racist and homophobic. But it doesn’t take that many bigoted students and administrators to make everyone else feel uncomfortable, unsafe, surveilled, or trapped. And I do think that sort of energy in a place could certainly contribute to experiences of the uncanny there.

Wrap up

So you might ask, Chris, if you hated your time at Fordham so much, why did you decide to do a 12-part series on the subject?
- I think that would be a fair question to ask.
- First, I don’t think that anyone can deny that the university has a higher than average number of hauntings, urban legends, and weirdness, both for NYC in general and universities in general. So that makes it a good topic.
- Second, it’s the site of some of my earliest paranormal experiences, so of course there’s a personal connection there, and I of course had already done a lot of research over the years trying to make sense of some of my experiences there, and also just out of interest in the history of a place where I lived for a formative period in my life.
- Now, if I were trying to psychoanalyze myself, maybe I would say that in this series, I’ve been looking at a place where I was very deeply miserable and unhappy and trying to put a mostly positive spin on it.
  - I may even be trying to enamel it with this layer of the paranormal. So, for example, when I think of Finlay Hall nowadays, I think of urban legends and my paranormal experiences there, not other, worse memories. And that goes for the whole campus.
  - I don’t know, maybe that’s what I’m doing, though that definitely wasn’t my intention when setting out on this series.
  - I feel better the less I think about that, so I’ll stop the self-reflection here.
Anyway, thank you for listening to this series. Whether you just listened to this episode, or listened to the whole series, I’m really grateful that you decided to listen to me deep dive into the history and hauntings of a small university that isn’t super well known outside of the northeastern region of the US.
I say that especially because I don’t think a ton of Fordham people have found this series yet; based on the feedback I’ve gotten, and the numbers, it’s mostly been my usual listeners, the vast majority of whom did not attend Fordham. So again, thank you!
However, if you’re listening to this and you did go to Fordham and had any weird experiences, please email me at buriedsecretspodcast@gmail.com because I still want to hear your strange stories.

Don’t miss past episodes about Fordham’s history and hauntings:

Sources consulted RE: Why is Fordham University Haunted?

See sources page for the full source list for the series

Books consulted (partial list)

Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 by Thomas J. Shelley (2016)
Magic in the Landscape: Earth Mysteries and Geomancy by Nigel Pennick
Psychogeography by Merlin Coverly (2006)
Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past by Merlin Coverly (2020)
The Official Guide to Randonautica: Everything You Need to Know about Creating Your Random Adventure Story by Joshua Lengfelder and Auburn Salcedo (2021)
On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor (2017)
Dark Folklore by Mark Norman and Tracey Norman (2021)
The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings by Jan Harold Brunvand (1981)
The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins
Indian paths in the great metropolis by Reginald Pelham Bolton (1922)

Haunted Fordham University Series (and Sources)

Sources for my series on the history and hauntings of Fordham University.

The Haunted Fordham University series:

Sources consulted for the Haunted Fordham University Series

Sorry about the organization of these sources, I know they’re a mess. (I’m only a podcaster, after all.) This list includes pretty much everything I looked at when preparing this series, whether or not I ended up quoting it directly.

If you’re looking for a source and can’t find it, feel free to email me at buriedsecretspodcast@gmail.com.

Books consulted

A history of St. John’s College, Fordham, N.Y by Thomas Gaffney Taaffe (1891)
Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003 by Thomas J. Shelley (2016)
Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition by Raymond A. Schroth (2009)
Haunted Halls: ghostlore of American college campuses by Elizabeth Tucker (2007)
The Big Book of New York Ghost Stories by Cheri Farnsworth (2019)
The Graveyard Shift: A Family Historian’s Guide to New York City Cemeteries by Carolee Inskeep (2000)
Ghosthunting New York City by L’Aura Hladik (2011)
Where the Footprints End: High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon Volume 1: Folklore by Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner
The Encyclopedia of Demons & Demonology by Rosemary Ellen Guiley
Hauntology: Ghosts of Futures Past by Merlin Coverly (2020)
Psychogeography by Merlin Coverly (2006)
Dark Folklore by Mark Norman and Tracey Norman (2021)
The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings by Jan Harold Brunvand (1981)
The Official Guide to Randonautica: Everything You Need to Know about Creating Your Random Adventure Story by Joshua Lengfelder and Auburn Salcedo (2021)
On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor (2017)
Magic in the Landscape: Earth Mysteries and Geomancy by Nigel Pennick
The old straight track : its mounds, beacons, moats, sites, and markstones by Alfred Watkins
Indian paths in the great metropolis by Reginald Pelham Bolton (1922)

Articles consulted

Boo! Are you Frightened Yet? You should be By Kelly Villelia, October 31, 1999 issue of The Ram: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/24191
student ghost encounter, duane library, I think it’s a joke:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/21409
https://www.columbiaspectator.com/2005/10/28/haunted-new-york/
The Fordham Ram, Truths of a Forbidden Tower Revealed (published online in 2021 but seemingly ordinally published in 2013?): https://fordhamram.com/1659/news/truths-of-a-forbidden-tower-revealed/
Ghosts of Duane, October 7, 1976: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/13352
The Ghosts of Duane Continue Their Haunt, October 21, 1976: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/13404
student ghost encounter, duane library, I think it’s a joke:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/21409
this seems like a real ghost encounter? poltergeist type activity in queens court:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/24191duane library ghost:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/13392/itemsearch/ghost
ghost in lowenstein:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/OBVR/id/3984
story about fordham prof who wrote book about parapsychology: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/19247/itemsearch/ghost
1985 story from rose hillhttps://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/17853/itemsearch/ghost
ghosts of duane libraryhttps://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/13341/itemsearch/exorcism
ghosts of duane library (same?):https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/13341
11/3/88 rose hill ghosts (maybe a repeat of the other 80s one?):https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/19638
an new 80s one?https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/16605/itemsearch/ghost
Mention of jesus tree: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/16183/itemsearch/jesus%20tree
Construction worker dies in tragic accident, The Ram, 03/23/2000: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/26348
not about a ghost, but about keating hall construction: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/3201/itemsearch/ghost
not about a ghost, but about queens court add on construction:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/4072more about keating construction: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/5261/itemsearch/ghost
curse of the ram: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/16026
1930 ram death: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/2238/itemsearch/ghost
gravestone renovation: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/26074
Interview with jesuit priest, 1982:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/15884/itemsearch/ghost
https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/27048/itemsearch/ghost https://fordhamram.com/58141/culture/haunted-history-fordhams-school-spirits/
1954-04-14 article about Fordham cemetery being moved: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/6470/itemsearch/cemetery
1959 article about cemetery being moved: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/7469
article about Fordham cemetery 11/04/76: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/13488/itemsearch/cemetery
2003 cemetery article: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/OBVR/id/5158/itemsearch/cemetery
20/26/00 cemetery article: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/26771/itemsearch/cemetery
Walsh Hall/555 noise, 1972: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/11583/itemsearch/cemetery
Fordham ghosts: https://fordhamram.com/58141/culture/haunted-history-fordhams-school-spirits/
https://fordhamram.com/68577/opinion/editorial/respecting-the-life-and-memory-of-sydney-monfries/
https://nypost.com/2019/04/14/behind-the-scenes-of-sydney-monfries-harrowing-rescue-after-fordham-tower-plunge/
https://fordhamobserver.com/40482/news/reflections-on-sydney-monfries-passing/
https://fordhamobserver.com/40048/news/rose-hill-student-falls-from-clock-tower-critically-injured/
duane library ghost:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/13392/itemsearch/ghost
ghost in lowenstein:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/OBVR/id/3984
story about fordham prof who wrote book about parapsychology:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/19247/itemsearch/ghost
1980s story from rose hillhttps://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/17853/itemsearch/ghost
ghosts of duane libraryhttps://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/13341/itemsearch/exorcism
ghosts of duane library (same?):https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/13341
11/3/88 rose hill ghosts (maybe a repeat of the other 80s one?):https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/19638
Another 80s story:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/16605/itemsearch/ghost
not about a ghost, but about keating hall construction: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/3201/itemsearch/ghost
not about a ghost, but about queens court add on construction:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/4072
more about keating construction: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/5261/itemsearch/ghost
curse of the ram: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/16026
1930 ram death: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/2238/itemsearch/ghost
gravestone renovation: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/26074
Interview with jesuit priest, 1982:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/15884/itemsearch/ghost
2002 story about ghosts:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/27048/itemsearch/ghost https://fordhamram.com/58141/culture/haunted-history-fordhams-school-spirits/
re: exorcism in general, with quotes from a fordham priest, plus priests reacting to the exorcist: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/12481/itemsearch/exorcism
interview with a priest who consulted for the film:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/OBVR/id/2625/itemsearch/exorcism
interview with priest who’s done exorcisms:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/14878/itemsearch/exorcism
priest interviewed about exorcism:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/OBVR/id/5183/itemsearch/exorcism
Interview with author of American exorcism:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/newsMedia/id/0/itemsearch/exorcism
RE: the priest who was in the exorcist:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/20575/itemsearch/exorcism
“truth behind the exorcist”:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/22350/itemsearch/exorcism
priest from the exorcist speaks to students:https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/26841/itemsearch/exorcism
https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/14725/itemsearch/duane%20library
https://news.fordham.edu/science/fordham-brightened-the-bronx-with-early-electric-light/
https://fupaper.blog/2018/10/14/what-is-fordham-hiding-in-those-underground-tunnels/amp/
https://thefordhamram.com/58141/culture/haunted-history-fordhams-school-spirits/
https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/16766
https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/18041
https://thefordhamram.com/58141/culture/haunted-history-fordhams-school-spirits/
https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/11583/itemsearch/cemetery
https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/16247/itemsearch/primal%20scream
https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/OBVR/id/159
https://fordhamram.com/2016/09/07/students-in-finlay-hall-find-harassing-comment-on-door/
Land acknowledgement: https://thefordhamram.com/78441/news/proposal-for-acknowledgment-of-indigenous-land-fordham-occupies-passes/
1982 Ramses story: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/16014
1928 article about Ramses: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/collection/RAM/id/1763
1928-03-09 picture of Ramses’ head on a wall: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/collection/RAM/id/1667
1930 article about Ramses: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/RAM/id/2238
1935-11-22 article RE: Ramses’ head: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/collection/RAM/id/3157
1948 article asking ppl to guard Ramses: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/collection/RAM/id/5397/rec/4
The Ramses Dynasty: https://fordham.libguides.com/c.php?g=279582&p=1863712
Article about 1961 Ramses kidnapping: https://fordhamram.com/2013/10/23/ramnapping-1961-the-true-story/
Rise and Fall of the Ramses Dynasty, Fordham Observer, 10/30/19: https://fordhamobserver.com/42471/features/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-rameses-dynasty/

Websites consulted

Historical photos of Fordham

Medical school / Finlay Hall:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/12

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/13

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/90

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/4

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/1

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/89

Banquets:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/10

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/11

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/5

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/15

Cadets:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/372

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/369

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/371

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/591

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/549

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/484

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/572

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/575

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/473

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/474

Band: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/486

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/483

Pharmacy:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/112

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/347

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/391

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/386

Spellman:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/540

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/542

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/543

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/546

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/544

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/538

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/504

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/508

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/511

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/509

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/506

Duane Library:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/461

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/602

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/603

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/601

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/607

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/606

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/693

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/694

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/695

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/701

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/696

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/697

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/482

Interior: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/446

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/460

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/463

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/462

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/459

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/604

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/605

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/444

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/700

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/706

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/703

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/707

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/704

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/698

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/708

Freeman Hall:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/452

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/451

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/453

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/450

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/715

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/716

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/717

Larkin:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/447

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/445

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/448

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/449

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/718

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/581

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/588

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/583

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/582

Loyola:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/466

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/709

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/710

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/711

Unidentified interiors:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/106

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/346

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/2

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/113

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/590

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/492

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/345

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/108

Cadets:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/397

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/758

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/496

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/381

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/368

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/576

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/524

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/491

Reidy Hall: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/561

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/558

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/559

Priests:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/82

Queens Court:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/40

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/35

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/42

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/41

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/37

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/38

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/44

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/43

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/39

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/103

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/102

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/36

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/530

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/467

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/512

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/586

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/479

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/480

Thebaud:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/384

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/67

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/66

Keating:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/404

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/410

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/405

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/401

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/115

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/114

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/402

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/406

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/407

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/539

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/537

Construction: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/408

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/529

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/534

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/400

Students:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/390

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/389

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/388

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/61

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/340

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/380

St Brendan’s Band: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/568

Church:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/385

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/104

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/595

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/599

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/600

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/593

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/598

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/597

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/594

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/595

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/599

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/596

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/686

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/687

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/688

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/689

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/692

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/684

Crypt: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/584

Nativity scene: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/515

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/516

Cross: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/587

Collins Auditorium:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/110

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/109

Faculty building / Loyola:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/667

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/464

Administration Building:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/29

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/105

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/335

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/140

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/27

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/178

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/32

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/139

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/28

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/34

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/344

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/31

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/30

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/33

Snow: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/493

Fire: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/668

Fire: https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/669

Alpha House:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/585

Proposed rebuilding:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/337

Truman:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/680

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/679

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/498

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/497

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/499

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/494

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/495

Kennedy:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/677

Woolworth Building and downtown:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/117

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/577

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/580

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/578

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/569

Statues:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/214

Gym:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/727

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/454

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/455

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/746

Map:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/535

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/545

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/548

Hughes Hall:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/123

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/589

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/123

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/75

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/574

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/481

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/470

Dealy Hall:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/47

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/46

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/49

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/51

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/48

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/107

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/470

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/75

Multi buildings:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/518

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/70

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/71

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/74

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/73

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/72

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/75

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/130

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/126

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/138

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/69

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/531

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/566

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/565

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/567

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/532

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/121

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/533

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/485

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/489

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/487

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/488

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/468

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/469

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/528

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/525

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/527

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/502

Snow scenes:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/541

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/553

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/493

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/564

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/507

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/563

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/490

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/522

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/517

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/518

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/526

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/523

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/520

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/522

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/526

Old campus:

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/52

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/64

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/68

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/124

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/127

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/341

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/216

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/651

https://www.library.fordham.edu/digital/item/collection/PHOTO/id/652

How to Ghost Hunt By Yourself Using the Solo Estes Method

A how-to guide on how to use a modified version of the Estes Method in solo paranormal investigations. I walk through how to set up your own Solo Estes Method kit, how to use it, cheap or free alternatives to buying new gear, and more.

Highlights include:
• Some weird audio from a 1979 spirit communication
• A look at some ghost hunters who developed a technique very similar to the Estes Method
• A quick history of the Estes Method

Episode Script for How to Ghost Hunt By Yourself Using the Solo Estes Method

Note: Please be safe when you’re investigating. Don’t enter into private property or dangerous areas. If you feel unsafe being out and about alone, then try this indoors where you know you’re physically safe. And as with all things paranormal, be respectful and investigate at your own risk.

I’ve talked about the Solo Estes Method a bit before, for example, during my Ghosts of Mount Beacon episode. But this episode, I want to give a background on what the Estes Method is, and a how-to for how to do the Solo Estes Method

Most people interested in paranormal investigation have heard of the Estes Method, a technique that was popularized by the webseries Hellier. There’s a good reason for the Estes Method’s popularity. It potentially allows for real time communication with supernatural entities, reduces the risk of matrixing or pareidolia (hearing what you want to hear), and can be done relatively cheaply with tools that many paranormal investigators already own.

The basic concept of the Estes Method is this:

One person (the Operator) asks questions, while another person (the Receiver) answers them.
The Receiver can’t hear the questions or see the Operator, because they’re blindfolded and wearing noise blocking headphones that are plugged into a spirit box (a modified radio that can be set to sweep AM or FM stations at a swift rate, also known as a ghost box).
The Receiver repeats any words that they hear from the spirit box.

If the Receiver hears words that answer the Operator’s questions, despite not knowing what the questions are, then there may be spirit communication afoot.

Despite the Estes Method’s benefits, it does have an important drawback for solo investigators: it requires two people to be present. However, last year, I started experimenting with a modified version of the Estes Method, which is possible to do alone. While the technique has some drawbacks, I’ve gotten interesting results so far, and I think the Solo Estes Method is a great option for people who want to investigate on their own.

The Solo Estes Method should lower the barrier to entry for people who are interested in investigating on their own but don’t know where to start. My goal of this essay is to share what I’ve been doing, what I’ve learned in related research, and to document my early thoughts about the benefits and pitfalls of the Solo Estes Method. My hope is that other people can take what I’ve been doing and figure out better ways to do it.

My Experience with the Estes Method

On March 12, 2020, I traveled to Salem, Massachusetts, stayed in the Hawthorne Hotel, and tried the Estes Method for the first time. I was excited to try out the technique I’d heard so much about. In Salem, my wife acted as Receiver, and my friend and I asked questions. The session yielded interesting responses, leading us to information about the area and the hotel that we hadn’t known about. I worried that it was beginner’s luck, but was excited to try it again.

However, by the time I returned home to Queens, NY, the United States had started to take the pandemic somewhat seriously. Trying to find a way to work around the lockdown, I toyed with the idea of performing a socially distanced Estes Method, with a friend calling me and asking questions, something that I know other people have tried. However, after an unsettling solo experience with a planchette (the automatic writing device), I decided that I needed to pause all paranormal investigation until I did some initial research and had clawed my way out of my lockdown-induced depression.

Despite having paused investigating, over the following year, I pondered ways to make the Estes Method work for a solo investigator.

My first thought was that I could write questions on notecards, shuffle the cards, and hold them up to a camera, instead of having an outside person ask the questions. There were some issues there, though: logistically, I’d have to make sure I was somewhere where I could set up a camera in good light and make sure it could pick up something written on a card, which I would have to hold up with the correct side facing the camera while my eyes were closed, blindfolded, or at least averted. Plus, I could only write down so many questions, and they’d be fresh in my mind, so I might end up hearing what I wanted to hear. I continued to puzzle over it: Could I set up some kind of formula in a spreadsheet to shuffle a list of questions? Was there an app that could shuffle flashcards?

Then, one night in summer 2021, just as I was falling asleep, I realized there was a far easier solution: I could record a bunch of questions, put them on shuffle in my phone’s music player, and have the phone act as Operator, while I could be the Receiver. As long as I had a recorder positioned so it could pick up the audio from the phone’s speakers and my own voice at the same time, it would work.

Since then, I’ve been testing out the solo version of the method. I remain a rank amateur, and I know I’m not the first person to think of adapting the Estes Method for solitary use. (For example, the podcast Small Town Secrets has an August 2020 YouTube video using the notecard method, and also mentions the idea of pre-recording questions, which I discovered a month or two after starting to test my version of the Solo Estes Method.)

I’ve tried the Solo Estes Method in my apartment, in different parks in New York City, on a mountaintop in upstate New York, and in the woods of North Carolina, and I’ve gotten some pretty interesting–and at times unsettling–responses.

History of the Estes Method

Before getting into how to do the Solo Estes Method, it’s worth looking at the history of the Estes Method and what makes it so groundbreaking and popular.

Prior to the Estes Method, the use of spirit boxes in paranormal investigation had been popularized by TV shows like Ghost Adventures. The spirit box was a controversial device, since people used it by asking questions and then listening to hear if they got a response. Since they knew what question they’d just asked, it was likely that even well-intentioned investigators were hearing what they wanted to hear.

But before the spirit box was popular on paranormal TV shows, this type of ITC (instrumental transcommunication) was more of a DIY project. In 1979, George Meek and Bill O’Neil created the Spiricom, an early spirit box made of 13 tone generators. You can find clips online of Bill O’Neil communicating with a supposed spirit named Dr. George Jeffries Mueller. Later, in 2002, Frank Sumption came up with the first modern ghost box, the “Frank’s Box.” In the late 2000s, “Shack Hacks,” became popular; people would follow online instructions on how to modify cheap Radio Shack radios to work as spirit boxes.

In 2016, during the filming for the webseries Spirits of the Stanley, investigators Karl Pfeiffer, Connor Randall, and Michelle Tate tried out an idea they’d been talking about for the previous five years. That idea was an early iteration of the Estes Method, which Pfeiffer and Randall continued to refine and test. The method was named after the town of Estes Park, Colorado, the location of the Stanley Hotel.

In an interview with the website Week In Weird, Randall suggests that the Estes Method works through psychic means: “I think it’s quite possible that the method is simply a barrier breaker to being able to perceive the voices of spirits that are trying to communicate via our minds.” The Estes Method has some parallels to the Ganzfeld experiment, a test of psychic abilities that consists of putting ping pong balls which have been cut in half over someone’s eyes, playing static, and seeing if the person can describe an image that is being psychically sent to them.

In 2013, separately from Pfieffer and Randall’s work, investigators Shawn Taylor and Daniel Morgan published a book called The Double-Blind Ghost Box: Scientific Methods, Examples, and Transcripts. Their version of the method is the Double Blind Ghost Box Session, alluding to their more scientific (and less psychic) approach to the technique. One key difference between their Double Blind Ghost Box Session and the Estes Method is that the spirit box is connected to the mic input on a recorder, so the spirit box audio is recorded. The receiver’s headphones are plugged into the headphone jack on that recorder. A second recorder is set up to document the questions and responses. Then, during evidence review, the investigator listens back to the spirit box audio as well.

The Double-Blind Ghost Box method assumes that the actual spirit box audio is what’s most important, rather than someone’s (potentially psychic) response to hearing the spirit box audio. (However, the authors do give examples where receivers hear things, like a prolonged period of loud singing, that aren’t present in the spirit box audio that they listen back to, suggesting that something psychic may still be at work.)

I tend to be of the opinion that the Estes Method is based more on what the person is perceiving psychically when listening to the spirit box, rather than on what might appear in a recording of the spirit box audio. But either way, The Double-Blind Ghost Box: Scientific Methods, Examples, and Transcripts is valuable reading for anyone interested in the Estes Method, because it gives a less-talked-about perspective on this sort of investigation.

How to do the Solo Estes Method

What You Need

There are a handful of items you’ll need in order to do the Solo Estes Method. The full list is below, but I tried to offer alternatives to buying new gear whenever possible. The spirit box is the most important item, however.

Computer

You’ll need a computer and a DAW (an audio editing program) to record your questions. I recommend using Audacity, a free audio editor (which you can download for free at https://www.audacityteam.org/) . If you don’t have a computer, you may be able to record the questions on a smartphone, load them into a music app, shuffle them, and then listen to the final audio on your phone or recorder, though that solution will likely be harder.

Spirit Box

I use an P-SB7 Spirit Box, though any spirit box should work. If you have an old radio, you may be able to find instructions to make it into a “Shack Hack” spirit box and save some money. At the time of writing, a P-SB7 goes for $80-100 USD online. I haven’t tested any spirit box smartphone apps, so you could try one of those, though I haven’t heard anything good about smartphone paranormal investigation apps in general. I would take any results from one with a large grain of salt.

You could also try something like Liminal Earth’s Christmas Spirit Box: https://christmasspiritbox.com/

You can make your own from any collection of mp3s (this takes a bit of tech savvy): https://github.com/Liminal-Earth/custom-spirit-box

Digital Recorder

If you don’t already own one, you should be able to buy a digital recorder for $50 USD or less. I usually use a Sony ICD-PX370, which is lightweight and easy to connect to your computer. If you don’t want to buy a recorder, you can also probably get away with using a recorder app on your phone, or you can record using Audacity on your computer (though that will mean bringing your computer with you when investigating).

Headphones

You’ll want a pair of sound-blocking (not noise canceling) headphones. Typically, people use the Vic Firth stereo isolation headphones, which are drummer’s headphones that are great at blocking external sound. In a pinch, I’ve also used regular earbuds (after testing to make sure I couldn’t hear the questions played on my smartphone), but that isn’t recommended.

Smartphone

You’ll probably want to use your phone to play the questions, though you could also use an mp3 player with external speakers or your computer to play the audio, if you prefer. Any audio player with a shuffle function will do.

Optional: An eye mask or blindfold

Optional: Notebook

Create your Solo Estes Session Kit

You’ll need to have a little bit of tech savvy to record and set up your questions. This initial setup is the hardest part, but you’ll only need to do it once.

1. Come up with a list of questions

In a spreadsheet software like Google Sheets (which is free), make a document with at least two columns: “Question” and “Number.” I also added columns labeled “Recorded” (for me to mark off whether I’d recorded the question yet or not) and “Source” (to note where I got a question from, if I didn’t think of it myself.)

Then brainstorm a list of questions, adding each one to its own row in the “Question” column. I used a mix of questions I’d sourced online, and questions I’d thought of myself. I wanted to pull questions from other sources because they were phrased differently from how I would have written them, and because some of them weren’t things I would have asked. I was looking for variety because that would make it harder for me to guess what question was playing and start to hear what I wanted to hear.

To start, I came up with about 150 questions. I wanted to make sure there were a lot, again, so it would be harder for me to accidentally guess them.

2. Assign a random number to each question

You don’t have to do this step, but I strongly recommend it. If you assign a random number to each question, you’ll be able to make each question’s filename a random number instead of with the question. So if you happen to glance at your phone during the session, all you’ll see is a random number, and that won’t bias you as you listen for answers. But if you need to locate a particular audio file later on, you’ll be able to look up the file name in your spreadsheet.

To assign a random number, type this formula into the cell in the “Number” column next to your first question: =randbetween(100,1000000)

That formula will fill in the cell with a random number between 100 and 1,000,000. You can choose any number range you want, but the bigger, the better, because that reduces the chance of having a duplicate number. Copy this formula down to all of the cells below, so each question has its own random number.

Once the numbers have been assigned, select the entire column, copy it, then right click (or Command+click on a Mac) and select Paste Special > Paste Values Only. That will remove the formula and leave you with just the numbers. If you don’t do that, the numbers will re-randomize every time you edit the spreadsheet.

If you find later on that a number is repeated, just add another number or two to the end of it to make it unique again.

That’s the end of the spreadsheet part of things!

3. Record the questions

Open up Audacity or another audio recording program and record your first question.

Once you’ve recorded the question, add some silence onto the end of the recording (you can do that by just letting it continue to record.) I added about 1 minute to the end of each question. That will give you time to answer during the session, before the next question plays.

Once you’ve recorded the first question, export it as an mp3 and name the file with the random number that the spreadsheet assigned it.

Continue recording questions and saving each of them as an individual file until all of your questions are recorded.

I also included a couple “questions” that were just 1-3 minute stretches of silence, also with random numbers as their filenames. I did that just to add some additional randomness to the session, and to make the cadence of the questions less predictable to me. (Again, my goal with these questions is to try to “trick” my subconscious into not being able to guess what’s being asked, or not asked, on the recording, and thereby hopefully getting more trustworthy results.)

This process will take a while, but the good news is that you’ll only need to do it once (unless you decide to add or eliminate questions later).

4. Update the questions’ metadata

Drag and drop the questions into Mp3Tag (which you can download for free) or iTunes. Once all of the questions are loaded into the program, highlight all of them, and update the album name to “Estes Session Kit” or something similar.

(You can skip this step if you labeled each file with a consistent album name when you exported them, though it was faster for me to just update the metadata all at once at the end.)

Subscribe on Patreon to get the Solo Estes Method Kit (pre-recorded questions) that I made: https://www.patreon.com/buriedsecretspodcast

5. Upload the questions onto your smartphone

Download the questions onto your smartphone and open them up in a music app. (I like to use Pulsar, but anything that allows you to shuffle tracks within an album will work.)

Open up the album you created, and play it on shuffle. The questions should play from the phone’s speakers (or an external speaker), not from headphones.

Test it out with your recorder to get a sense of how loud you should have the volume turned up, and how close your recorder should be for it to pick up the sound from both your phone’s speakers and your voice.

Investigate!

Now that the prep work’s done, it’s time to investigate. Bring your digital recorder, phone, spirit box, and headphones to the location you want to investigate.

The typical Estes Method requires you to be blindfolded, but since you’re investigating alone, it may not be safe to be blindfolded. (I do usually take my glasses off, though, because the Vic Firths are uncomfortable to wear with my glasses. If I decide it isn’t safe for me to be in the location without my glasses on, I usually use a different pair of headphones, making sure to test the audio extra carefully to make sure that I can’t hear the questions over the spirit box.) However, since there isn’t an Operator whose lips you might accidentally read, and the questions are labelled with random numbers, the lack of a blindfold shouldn’t compromise the results from that standpoint. (Though it will make the Estes session less of a sensory deprivation exercise.)

Plug your headphones into the spirit box and turn on the spirit box, setting it to sweep stations. (If you’re using an SB7, plugging it into the spout should get you louder audio than plugging it into the headphone jack.)

Test out the question audio on your phone: Play a question and see if you can hear it. If you can, turn the spirit box volume up louder or move the phone further away from you until you can’t hear it anymore.

Turn on the recorder, and place it where it can pick up both the phone audio and your responses.

Record a quick tag for the audio: State the date, time, and location. I also like to address any spirits that might be present, explain that I’d like to communicate, and talk a little bit about how the Estes Method works.

When you’re ready, press shuffle on your questions and start the session. Say any words that you hear clearly through the spirit box. If you aren’t getting much, you may want to experiment with the sweep rate, switch from AM to FM (or vice versa), or try retracting or extending the spirit box’s antennae.

I usually set a timer on my watch for 20-30 minutes, and then end the session once the timer goes off. Sometimes I want to go for longer, or shorter, times, so I try to just go with what feels right and end the session when I feel like it should be over.

To end the session, stop the questions on your phone. I usually keep the headphones on for a minute or so after that and say anything I hear, then I turn off the spirit box and thank anyone who was speaking to me. I keep the recorder on and and say how I’m feeling, how I think it went, and anything else I think I’d want to remind myself of when I listen back.

Review your evidence

Time to see what you got! Listen back to the audio on your recorder, or on your computer. I like to write down the entire session’s questions and answers in a notebook, and then read through, adding asterisks next to responses that seemed like answers to my questions.

Pitfalls of the Solo Estes Method

The biggest benefit of the Solo Estes Method is that it’s easy to do. You can do it alone, on a whim, whenever you want, without needing to make plans with anyone. (I’ve taken to carrying around my Estes Method kit in my bike bag so I have it in case I want to try an impromptu session.) It’s great if you don’t know local people who are into paranormal investigation, or if your investigation pals are busy on a day when you want to check out a location.

There are a lot of drawbacks to the method, however. Looking at it objectively, I don’t think the Solo Estes Method is as good as the regular Estes Method. But I also think it’s better than nothing. The Solo Estes Method’s drawbacks aren’t enough to make me reconsider using it, but they’re worth being aware of.

Safety

There are, of course, safety risks to being out and about alone. That goes double for when you’re in a potentially remote location, and even if you take my advice and forgo the blindfold, you’re still alone, with your hearing blocked out.

Ensure that you’re somewhere safe, and that your emergency contact knows where you are and when you expect to return home. Consider using a GPS device that allows you to broadcast your location to your emergency contact.

Also, be sure that you aren’t trespassing. Off-limits areas can have many dangers, whether it’s an over-vigilant property owner, other trespassers, unstable structures, or unpleasant animal or insect life.

I usually investigate during the day at public parks that I know well, but even that holds some risks. Be careful, and if you aren’t comfortable being out and about alone, you could try out the Solo Estes Method at home or in a hotel room.

Random Questions

Instead of having a human Operator asking questions based on what responses you have received so far, you’re relying on a music player on shuffle. Depending on which, and how many questions you record, you may find that your phone repeats questions, plays questions that make no sense in the context of the larger session, or asks questions that aren’t appropriate for your situation. You’ll be unable to ask follow up questions when you get an interesting response.

You also may find that there’s too long, or too short, of a gap between questions. For example, I’ve had Solo Estes Sessions where I get a quick (sensible) answer to my question right off the bat, but in the time between that answer and the next question, seemingly random, nonsensical responses start to come in. I have a feeling that whatever I was communicating with had answered quickly, then gotten bored waiting for the next question. If I’d been with a human Operator, they could have asked another question right after getting an answer that made sense, staving off random responses, and leading to a session that made more sense in general. (And that could cover more ground in the same amount of time.)

In addition to the logistical issues with playing random questions, you may also risk whoever or whatever you’re communicating with getting annoyed at you for not being able to have a normal conversation. I don’t believe that I’ve had a session yet where this has happened, but it’s something to keep an eye out for, since conducting a conversation with someone using a list of random questions may not be the most respectful way to behave.

You Know What Questions You Recorded

When responding to questions you recorded yourself, there’s always the possibility that you might hear what you want to hear.

I’ve tried to mitigate this issue by mixing in questions that I found online that I probably wouldn’t have asked, and thus probably am less likely to unconsciously think of a response to; naming files with random numbers, varying the lengths of audio files; and having a bunch of recorded questions. You could also ask a friend to select and record questions for you, and if you find that some questions end up being played more often than others, you can always “retire” some questions (or reword and re-record them) to keep yourself on your toes.

I’m pretty comfortable with this issue with the Solo Estes Method, however, because even in a regular Estes Method session, you can probably guess a lot of the questions that might be asked. Most Operators would ask questions like “Is there anyone here?”, “Who am I talking to?”, “How old are you?”, etc, as well as questions specific to the place you’re investigating. If you’ve investigated with someone often, you’re also likely to know what sorts of questions they tend to ask, and in what order. So even during a regular Estes Method session, matrixing is always a risk.

The Psychic Aspect

If the Estes Method potentially relies on psychic communication, what happens when part of that conversation is conducted by a machine? Perhaps part of what makes the Estes Method so effective is that the Operator is psychically as well as verbally transmitting their queries. If that’s the case, just having the questions played audibly might not be as effective as having a person think the questions as well as speak them.

Also, if you aren’t blindfolded, then you might be distracted by the things around you, which could have an effect on whether you’re picking up as much as you could from a psychic standpoint. The blindfold would contribute to the sensory deprivation experience that might make you more receptive to psychic messages, as well. But for me, the safety benefits of not being blindfolded are worth the tradeoff.

No Real-time Feedback

One of the biggest benefits of the regular Estes Method is that you can have a conversation in real time, unlike EVP sessions where you record audio, and then need to listen back to the audio later before you know if you got anything. The Solo Estes Method goes back to the non-ideal state of having to review the evidence afterwards in order to learn whether you were having a conversation or not.

Harder-to-Prove Results

One nice thing about a regular Estes session is that it involves at least one witness. Short of having the spirit box volume turned too low and being able to hear the Operator’s questions, it’s harder to cheat, and harder to hear what you want to hear. That’s the whole point of the method, and why it’s become so popular.

But if you’re hoping to use your results to convince a skeptical audience, there’s a lot more they could pick apart and question during a solo Estes session.

Closing Thoughts About the Solo Estes Method

While there are drawbacks to the method, when determining if the Solo Estes Method may be right for you, it’s important to look at your own goals. Why are you undertaking a paranormal investigation? Who are you trying to convince of your results, and/or where will you be sharing them? What are you looking to learn?

As for me, my goal isn’t really to convince anyone of anything. I’m looking to learn, and my ultimate goal is to learn something from an Estes session that I didn’t already know, whether it’s a story of someone in history, something about the location, or just another sliver of knowledge about the unknown. While I like to share my results and my thoughts, I wouldn’t be offended if someone dismissed everything that I got during a solo Estes session (or any paranormal investigation).

For that reason, I don’t mind that the Solo Estes Method is a bit less credible than the original version. It makes paranormal investigation more accessible to me, and easier for me to do often, and I find it easier to decipher than other solo investigation methods like EVP sessions. But your mileage may vary.

If you’re a solo investigator, someone looking for a low-cost, easy way to get into paranormal investigation, or just an investigator who can’t always meet up with friends for an investigation, the Solo Estes Method will probably serve you well.

Sources consulted

Videos and podcasts consulted

Small Town Secrets Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9pcDdJO7qk

Books consulted

The Double-Blind Ghost Box: Scientific Methods, Examples, and Transcripts by Shawn Taylor and Daniel Morgan

Websites

http://weekinweird.com/2019/01/24/estes-method-sb7-spirit-box-experiment-paranormal-investigation/
ITC Voices: http://itcvoices.org
https://paranormalauthority.com/spirit-box/
How to Make a Spirit Box: https://paranormalschool.com/homemade-spirit-box/
Clips online of Bill O’Neil communicating with a supposed spirit named Dr. George Jeffries Mueller: http://worlditc.org/k_06_spiricom.htm
http://itcvoices.org/rest-peace-frank-sumption/
http://itcvoices.org/frank-sumption-explains-the-box/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
http://weekinweird.com/2019/01/24/estes-method-sb7-spirit-box-experiment-paranormal-investigation/

Don’t miss past episodes where I’ve used the Estes Method:

Escaping the Probability Tunnel (Randonautica Series)

A deep dive into how to randonaut, or go on mysterious, synchronistic adventures using the Randonautica app.

Escaping the Probability Tunnel Using Randonautica: A deep dive into how to randonaut, or go on mysterious, synchronistic adventures using the Randonautica app.

Highlights include:

Psychic self-defense
Ideas behind how the app works
Weird owl stories
Probability Tunnels

Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get cool stuff: https://www.patreon.com/buriedsecretspodcast

Episode Script for Escaping the Probability Tunnel (Randonautica)

What is Randonautica?

Randonautica is a free app that you can download to your phone. You set an intention in your mind (you don’t type it anywhere in the app), and then it generates a random point near you for you to visit. Then you visit the place.
You can set the radius, and adjust other settings, which I’ll get into, but that’s the basic gist.
The app became very popular in 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic. The beta version of the app came out in early 2020, and people grabbed onto it as a fun thing you can do outside, near where they lived. Since then, it’s almost taken on the character of an urban legend.
The idea is that the app breaks you out of your daily routine, out of your mundane daily reality, and basically takes you on an adventure. Ideally, it also gets you to engage more with your own life, getting you away from screens for a bit and breaking you out of the social media, TV shows, etc, that often end up filling up our free time.
I’ve been using the app for about 2 years, and I can say that it’s definitely interesting. I’ve found that it’s led to a number of synchronicities, has a bit of a sense of humor, and at least one time, it’s tried to give me a very specific message to warn me about something, which I foolishly decided to ignore.
I’ll get into my own experiences while using randonautica in the next episode, but this time I just want to talk about what the app is, how to use it, and some of the theories behind it.
I’ve read the book The Official Guide to Randonautica: Everything You Need to Know about Creating Your Random Adventure Story by Joshua Lengfelder and Auburn Salcedo (2021) twice so far in 2022, so a lot of the information in this episode comes from that book, and I’ll read some bits from the book.
- If you think that anything that I’m talking about is interesting, then you should definitely pick it up.
- I read it initially in audio, and then re-read it as an ebook so I could take notes and highlight things, but I’ve seen the physical book before and it’s really cool looking, so worth picking up in whatever your favorite format is.

A quick history of Randonautica

The book goes into a lot of detail about this, so I’ll just hit the broad strokes:
I’ve mentioned this in some of the Fordham episodes where I talked about psychogeography, but back in the mid-20th century, a Marxist philosopher named Guy Debord came up with this idea of the dérive, or drift. The idea is that during the dérive, you go on an unplanned walk through a (usually urban) landscape. The Randonautica book describes it really well: “The idea was to reshape how people view cities and to develop a more holistic perspective on the urban environment as a living, breathing creature.”
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9rive
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Debord
Randonautica goes a bit further, giving the Randonaut a specific destination, and making the trip actually random.
- The person using Randonautica is called a Randonaut, and the term comes from the words “random” and “nautical,” meaning “randomness explorer.”
Before there was a Randonautica app, there was a Randonauting subreddit, of course. People in the community were given random coordinates, and weird stuff started happening.
- From the book:
  - “The Randonauts’ stories were not only mind-bending but oftentimes connected. People were also corroborating similar feelings like despair or fear on their first time out.
  - Others were telling stories of odd occurrences, like coming across people who appeared to be out of place—for example, a woman seemingly inexplicably staring into the distance while standing still, or a man walking in circles around a small fence. People weren’t the only ones acting strange; animals were overly friendly and approachable. Cats, dogs, birds, even larger animals like cows and horses would gently mosey their way over to the stranger stepping into their otherwise predictable animal world.”
- There was also a wild story about how owls suddenly started appearing on people’s trips. People were baffled, but then it turned out that one of the developers at Randonautica had happened to put a weird antique owl statue, which he had found while Randonauting, on top of the server that was generating the random points. As an experiment, the developers tried placing other things on top of the server to see whether people would see them on their trips, and of course, they did. They tried it out with salt and a meteorite (which led to people seeing UFOs.)
For a while, Randonautica was a bot on Telegram, then it was a bot on a website, and then on February 22, 2020, the beta app was released and quickly went viral. There was a #randonautchallenge hashtag, and the app also got some negative press when some randonauts found a suitcase in Seattle with a body in it.

How does Randonautica work?

- Part of the idea behind Randonautica is that it breaks you out of your “probability tunnel,” which the book defines as: “an abstract representation of the idea that limited decision-making possibilities based on a human’s previous experiences and patterns create a likely ‘probable’ response.”
  - That may feel a bit hard to parse, but think about it this way. Every day, you wake up in the morning and eat breakfast. You probably choose from one of a couple typical breakfast foods, and you eat that while watching or listening to something that you typically watch, etc.
  - If you work outside the house, you may walk the same way to the train or bus stop, or drive the same route to work every day. You’re probably not going to deviate from that very often, or if you do, it’s because you’re going somewhere specific, like to the grocery store you always go to, or a park that you like.
  - You have this routine of non-random things that you do every day, that takes you down the same path every day. That’s your probability tunnel.
  - You might not know you’re in your probability tunnel, which makes it even harder to break out of. You don’t really end up making random decisions, which means you could be missing a lot of stuff that’s outside your tunnel.
- Let me read a bit from the book:
  - “Let’s assume there were an infinite number of small occurrences that had to happen in order for you to be in this precise time and space. What role did you consciously play? What if every move you’ve made—emotional responses, left turns, right turns, choices in relationships, your work, your hobbies, the media you’ve consumed, and all your other habits—has been part of a predetermined order of your life? In other words, your probability tunnel. A long, narrow, enclosed path that you follow aimlessly day-to-day. How can you escape it? You’re basically operating like a human algorithm.”
- So, again, Randonautica is meant to break you out of this algorithm or matrix. And it’s not a matrix like in the movie The Matrix, where the world is fake or anything. It’s just supposed to change your perspective. Ideally, it’ll take you to new places, and maybe even challenge some of your beliefs about how the world and reality works.
- For me, Randonautica has done a bit of both. It has broken my routine, shown me some cool stuff, and even sent me pretty clear messages at times.
- There are some theories about mind matter interaction and destroying Cartesian dualism.
  - Dualism is the idea that your mind is separate from physical reality, but I can’t explain it much better than that.
  - The YouTuber Thought Slime did a video about non-dualism which you should watch if you want to know more about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp2iZqUJV3w
- I’m probably not going to do the best job of explaining this, but there’s something significant in setting intentions. I think there’s a handful of different explanations for this, but to me, the most compelling one is this idea that humans may be able to influence random number generators (RNGs).
  - There’s a group called the Global Consciousness Project that studies this.
  - I really struggle to describe and articulate the concept, so I’ll read a bit more from the Randonautica book:
The Global Consciousness Project . . . studies the ability of consciousness to influence RNGs. At a very basic level, they study the connection between minds and intentions, and the distribution of random data they’ve collected from devices. The project’s experiments have pointed toward the possibility that human consciousness interacts with RNG devices at the quantum physical level. Specifically, one set of experiments found that when they put an RNG at a location where groups of humans were at a high level of coherence, like at an opera where a large number of people were listening to the same music and feeling the same emotions, the devices deviated from the expected normal distribution of random numbers. . . . The results of the . . . experiments suggested that when people gathered together are on the same vibe or wavelength, the resonant energy produced will create unexpected effects on the RNGs.
Interestingly, when they placed RNGs in busy shopping malls or places that lacked the resonant coherence of a group, they found the RNGs did not deviate significantly from the normal expected outcome. . .
The researchers at the Global Consciousness Project went on to create a network of RNGs across the globe, referred to as the “EGG” (which stands for ElectroGaiaGram), that would pick up on large-scale events that seemed to affect the global intelligent field. Events such as the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, showed high levels of coherence among the RNGs of the EGG. These events drastically affected human consciousness and seemed to have a measurable effect on the RNGs, causing them to output data that was less random than expected.
- If you want to know more about it, check out the links in the show notes:
- But basically, the point here is that this could be a way that our intentions affect the points we get on the Randonautica app.
- Randonauting could also be considered a type of remote viewing.
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_viewing

Criticisms of Randonautica

Some skeptics of Randonaut say that the strange encounters and synchronicities that people experience using the app are just the result of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, which is when you learn something new and then suddenly see that thing everywhere.
- So for example, if I go Randonauting with the intention of “flamingo,” maybe I’ll suddenly notice a bunch of lawn flamingos that I’d walked by before but never paid attention to.
Some people say it’s just an example of confirmation bias, which is where you look for evidence to support your existing beliefs.

How do you use Randonautica?

- I went over this a bit in the beginning, but let’s get into a bit more detail into how to use the Randonautica app.
- It’s an app that’s available for Android and iOS, so of course first you want to download the app.
- The current version of the app has coins called “Owl Tokens” that you need to claim in order to use it, but it gives you a bunch of free ones, so just follow the prompts to claim the free daily tokens. You get allotted new ones every day, so I’ve never run out, but if you do run out, or if you want to support the developers, you can buy some as well.
- Then you go to the “Point Finder” section in the menu and you should see a map of where you are. You can change the radius on the map (the smallest size is 1 kilometer, I believe); that’s the area that the app will generate points within. The app uses an algorithm to generate a bunch of random points within the radius.
- Choose whether you want it to look for Anomalies or Blind Spots
  - If you select Anomalies, it’ll look for areas where the random points that the app generated are either really close together (those are Attractors), spread out (which the app calls Voids), or just the most anomalous area (called Power) Basically, it’s looking for something out of the ordinary.
    - Some people have reported that void spots tend to feel eerie, airy, and as if they lack–or are void of–energy. Some people said they feel despair or uneasiness when they select this option, but other people like it.
    - Some people say that attractors tend to bring people to places with more things to see.
    - But, as the book points out, that could just be confirmation bias.
  - You can also choose Blind Spots instead, which are just random points.
    - Within Blind Spots, you can choose Quantum or Pseudo.
      - Pseudo coordinates are mathematically random.
      - Quantum coordinates . . . have something to do with something quantum. I’m sorry, I don’t really understand what that means.
    - https://www.randonautica.com/randonauting-101
- Then, you set your intention by thinking about it, and click the Generate button. It’ll generate a point for you.
  - You’ll notice a bit more jargon when you get your point: You’ll get stats for Z score and Power.
  - I’ll read from the Randonautica book to explain what Z-score means, because I took stats 15 years ago and don’t remember this kind of technical stuff:
“Z-score tells you how many standard deviations you are from the mean. The higher the z-score, the farther it is from the normal, expected distribution. Z-score is used in Randonautica to show the likelihood that a certain point has been influenced by consciousness. Z-scores greater than 5 are considered interesting, because the deviation from the normal, expected outcome is so far outside of chance that the scientists studying Randonautica hypothesize the point has likely been influenced by the operator’s conscious intent.
In the example of the Randonautica algorithm, which lays out thousands of random points and measures how densely they cluster, the z-score tells us how unlikely that cluster was to occur. If an attractor has a power of 5, that means it is five times more dense than the average amount of points on the map. The higher the score, the denser the cluster of random points, and the more likely that it has been influenced by intention.
The concept of “power level” also comes into play here. If you imagine the distribution of random points as forming hills and valleys, the power level gives you an idea of how high or low these valleys are, while the z-score represents volume (e.g., how many pounds of soil are in those hills).”
- Okay, you got all that? Anyway, that’s Z-score and power level.
At that point, I always like to click the bookmark button and label the bookmark with my intention, so it’s easy to refer back to later on when reflecting on the trip.
Then you go to your point, paying attention to anything interesting you encounter or experience during your journey or at your point. If you can, document your experiences so you can look back at them later.

Safety factors to remember while Randonauting

- Randonautica themselves have a whole set of safety rules, which I wanted to review real quick.
- The official Randonautica rules are, and this is me paraphrasing:
  - Don’t trespass on private property.
  - Stay away from dangerous areas.
  - Don’t randonaut at night.
  - Bring a trash bag so you can pick up litter.
  - Charge your phone, especially since GPS is so battery-draining.
  - Be positive in your intentions.
  - Don’t randonaut alone.
  - Only go where you feel comfortable.
  - Use common sense.
  - Enjoy the journey, not just the point you’re directed to.
    - https://www.randonautica.com/randonauting-101
- I think these are all good guidelines, for the most part. I randonaut a lot at night, but I live in NYC so that’s totally different from being somewhere remote and dark, etc.
- I mentioned this in the last episode, when talking about investigating the paranormal alone, but a number of GPS devices and apps let you send your location to your emergency contact so they can keep an eye on where you are, for safety, so it may be worth doing that while randonauting as well.
- You also might want to bring snacks and water for while you’re out.
- One thing that the book mentions is that sometimes the actual point will be in a body of water or on private property, so you’ll only be able to get near the point. That’s still fine and should yield interesting things.
- The book also recommends meditation and grounding yourself; that can especially help if you feel anxiety or fear about going to an unknown location. There are lots of great ways to ground yourself, but if you don’t know where to begin, just search YouTube and you’ll find tons of options for guided grounding meditations.
  - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=grounding+meditation
- I want to spend a bit more time talking about intentions.
  - The book talks a bit about latent or conflicting intentions, and suggests using this method to try to resolve them:
“A good exercise is to write down all of your desires and see if any of them conflict with one another. Sometimes you think you want something, but deep down you really don’t. Part of setting a good intention is knowing what you want. You should be extremely brief and really think about the words you are using to formulate your intention. It doesn’t hurt to start looking up the specific meaning of the words you are using in the dictionary.”
- In general, I do think you should be wary and careful about your intentions, and make sure that you aren’t setting yourself up to be led to something unpleasant.
- This sort of falls within the bounds of sensible paranormal investigation guidelines. I do think it’s worth ensuring that you’re in a stable enough mental state to be interacting with the unknown. In the last episode, I alluded to some of my own struggles with mental health, and how I try to avoid paranormal investigation, spirit communication, and just . . . too much contact with the unknown . . . when I’m feeling bad.
- I, at least, have a tendency to get reckless when I’m in a bad mental state–I’m a naturally curious person, and I can be curious to a fault when I’m very depressed, for example. For me, that’s because my self-preservation instincts are low in that state, and I end up with an “I don’t care what happens, throw anything at me!” attitude, which can be dangerous. That has led me to the occasional unpleasant paranormal experience. And even with Randonautica, I often take a break for a few months if I’m just not feeling into it.
- I do think it’s possible to be in a bad enough headspace that you just can’t come up with a safe intention. But at the same time, I definitely think that something like Randonautica can help you get out of the house, go on adventures, and even lead to some self-discovery and reflection, all things that can really help folks with their mental health.
- I try to listen to my own intuition on this kind of thing and not force it, and I’d advise you to, as well.
- Oh, and one side note that I wish I’d mentioned last episode: If you’re new to more active paranormal investigation (like the Estes Method that I talked about last week) or metaphysical exploration like Randonauting then I do think it’s worth thinking about psychic self-protection. You don’t have to, obviously–follow your heart–but it’s at least worth considering.
  - I personally use a couple different protection methods.
  - One of those is drawn from my own faith tradition, so I’d advise that you look into your own faith for methods of protection, if faith is something you’re into.
  - The other psychic self-protection method that I use is a modified version of the Tower of Light method from The Llewellyn Practical Guide To Psychic Self-Defense by Melita Denning and Osborne Phillips.
    - I have an old copy of the book from the 1980s, which you can find for super cheap, like less than $5 USD, on ebay or thriftbooks. The book, or at least the edition that I have, can be a little dated in some of its language and examples, but it was worth the read for the Tower of Light. I think there might be a new edition of the book that might be worth picking up, but the title’s different so I’m not totally sure if it’s the same.
    - I read the book back in 2018 and have been using the method ever since. One nice thing about it is that it’s designed to work to protect you from psychic dangers, but also from more metaphorical stuff, from people who might make demands on your time that enervate you, etc.
    - I can’t promise that it’ll work the same way for you, but for me, it’s been immensely helpful for life in general in NYC, especially when I worked in the city. In the neighborhood where I used to work, there were often canvassers or salespeople trying to get you to sign up for things, and multiple times a week, a person with a clipboard would approach me, and then I’d do a quick, modified version of the Tower of Light, and the person would turn around and walk away, or look away from me and accost someone else instead, etc.
    - Again, not sure if it’d be as effective for you, but if you’re looking for a psychic self-defense technique and don’t know where to start, I think The Llewellyn Practical Guide To Psychic Self-Defense is great, though I know there are lots of great resources out there for psychic self-defense.
- Anyway, I know that was a tangent, but I wanted to make sure to mention psychic self-defense. But to bring it back to what started this detour, be responsible when choosing an intention.

Conclusion

So that’s how to use Randonautica.
Like I mentioned, if this interests you at all, definitely pick up The Official Guide to Randonautica: Everything You Need to Know about Creating Your Random Adventure Story by Joshua Lengfelder and Auburn Salcedo (2021). The book has been really helpful to me in trying to wrap my head around some of the concepts surrounding Randonautica.
I’ll also include a link in the show notes to an interview with Joshua Lengfelder that was on the podcast/radio show Nite Drift, which is how I heard about the book. It’s a really interesting conversation: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5aOK237MXWb3waNOmxjEkx?si=ot8xKRg8QjqzQNYZ_CsBPg&nd=1
Next time, I’ll talk about some of my own randonauting experiences, and I’ll probably also touch on some more important randonauting concepts that I didn’t get to this time, like memetics, the despair meme, and synchronicity.

Sources consulted

Books consulted

The Official Guide to Randonautica: Everything You Need to Know about Creating Your Random Adventure Story by Joshua Lengfelder and Auburn Salcedo (2021): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55710642-the-official-guide-to-randonautica
The Llewellyn Practical Guide To Psychic Self-Defense by Melita Denning and Osborne Phillips
Psychogeography by Merlin Coverley: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1003489.Psychogeography

Websites

Don’t miss past episodes:

Strange Randonautica Synchronicity (Randonautica Series)

A look at the connection between strange synchronicities and Randonautica.

Randonautica synchronicity: A look at the connection between strange synchronicities and Randonautica.

Plus, I explore some unusual synchronicities that happened to me while just talking and thinking about randonauting. Can Randonautica cause synchronicities when you aren’t even actively using the app? I’m not sure, but I’m ready to speculate wildly.

Highlights include:
• Stumbling across a piece of art called “Synchronicity”
• Conspiracy thinking
• A higher-than-average number of references to 80s music

Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get cool stuff: https://www.patreon.com/buriedsecretspodcast

Episode Script for Strange Randonautica Synchronicity (Randonautica Series)

DISCLAIMER: I’m providing this version of the Strange Randonautica Synchronicity script for accessibility purposes. It hasn’t been proofread, so please excuse typos. There are also some things that may differ between the final episode and this draft script. Please treat the episode audio as the final product.

Intro (Strange Randonautica Synchronicity)

As usual, this series is going to be a little longer than I planned for it to be!
- I wanted to cover synchronicity, memetics, the despair meme, and my own experiences with Randonautica all in one episode, but once I sat down to write it, I ended up with way more material than I expected. So this time, I’m just going to talk about synchronicity.
- Next time, I’ll cover memetics and the despair meme, and I’ll also touch on more of my own experiences, including some weird stuff surrounding the Hell Gate, which I’ve talked about a lot in prior episodes.
- Then I’ll have probably just one more episode after that, where I talk about some of my randonauting experiences in more detail.
Also, about a year ago, I switched this podcast to become biweekly, but I’m finding that lately, my episodes have been going pretty long, so I’m going to try switching back to weekly and ideally like to keep the episodes more in that 30-45 minute range. Let’s see how that goes!
Before I get into this, I want to give a quick summary of what Randonautica is, since I see the download numbers and know y’all listen to series out of order. (Which, by the way, is totally fine, you should listen to whatever you’re most interested in!)
Anyway, Randonautica is a free app that you can download. You set an intention in your mind, and it uses some science-y algorithmic whatsits to direct you to a point. You go to the point, and you’ll often experience strange things en route or at the point. It’s a great way to go outside and have adventures in your area. If you want any more detail about how to use it, listen to the previous episode.

Randonautica synchronicity

Synchronicity a really important part of both Randonautica and paranormal investigation and research in general. If you’re really into paranormal stuff, you’re probably used to hearing synchronicity mentioned all the time. Right now, both synchronicity and liminal spaces, which I talked about a few episodes ago, seem to be really hot right now.
- I can certainly see why they’re popular.
- A quick definition of synchronicity is: a meaningful coincidence that doesn’t seem to have an obvious cause.
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
- Looking for, and finding, synchronicities can be really personally impactful. In paranormal investigation, a lot of people interpret synchronicities as an indication that something strange is going on, or maybe that they’re on the right track or about to find something important.
  - This is a sidenote, but it’s something that popped into my head while thinking about this concept. So, synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence with no obvious cause. But nowadays, on social media and elsewhere, it’s very likely that we’re running into coincidences, maybe even meaningful coincidences, that do have a very real cause: an algorithm.
  - Obviously, these algorithms are made to drive up engagement, get you to spend more time and attention on platforms, and better target you with ads. They do this by hitting you with the things they know you’re most interested in, in a moment that you’re most emotionally vulnerable to succumbing to what they’re trying to get you to do.
  - It’s actually pretty interesting to think about that in comparison to synchronicity. I wonder if there’s an unconscious part of our brains that, even though we know an algorithm is at work, still responds to that sort of targeted “coincidence” as if it was a synchronicity, or a sign from the universe.
  - I don’t have any answer there, but it is an interesting thing to consider.
- Anyway, back to synchronicity. The idea comes from Carl Jung, the famous Swiss analytical psychologist.
  - You probably know who Jung is, and I’ve talked to him before, but just in case: it’s worth mentioning that in addition to being a respected psychologist (he and Freud were close for a while before having a dramatic falling out), he also wrote some influential stuff about paranormal topics, like UFOs, alchemy, etc.
- To put this into a concrete example, here’s a weird synchronicity that happened the other day.
  - My friend and I were at St. Michael’s Cemetery here in Queens, and I was telling her about how I was working on these episodes for the podcast about Randonautica, and she’d never heard of randonauting. So I was explaining it as we were walking around, and I started talking about synchronicity.
    - Maybe 30 seconds later, we walked by a tombstone that marked the graves of a family whose surname happened to be Jung.
    - We had a laugh about that, and then less than a minute later, we came across two tombstones marking the graves of some folks with the last name “Freudenburg.” That was a synchronicity that really stood out to me because Jung and Freud are connected, and because Jung is the synchronicity guy.
  - I’d also like to put forth a theory that I have that synchronicities happen more often when thinking or talking about randonauting. A lot of striking synchronicities tend to happen to people while randonauting, but I don’t really think you need to be randonauting to have these synchronicities happen to you. You just need to be engaging with the idea of randonauting.
    - Now, I say this with just a few personal experiences as my very anecdotal evidence. But I’m curious if other people have had the experience of weird synchronicities while thinking or talking about randonautica but not actively using it at the time.

One more thing I’ll say about this is that while re-reading The Official Guide to Randonautica during a trip to Austin last month, I encountered a couple odd synchronicities. I’ll talk about one of them in a bit, but I wanted to talk about a quick one that, to me, has a sort of sense of humor that I feel like Randonautica-related synchronicities often have, to me at least.
- My wife and I were in Austin, walking around over by Zilker Park, about to go to the airport. So I was already planning what I was gonna do on the plane, which was to draw episode art for the Randonautica episodes and keep rereading The Official Guide to Randonautica.
- We needed to call a Lyft to take us to the airport, so we walked up from the riverside walkway and ended up near the Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum, so we went to the parking lot and requested the Lyft from there.
- From the parking lot, you could see a few sculptures and installations, and I saw one that looked kind of like a fairy ring. It was a ring of blue and white tiles set into the grass, next to this beautiful babbling brook. I’ve always been fascinated by fairy rings, and it was such a nice, peaceful moment on a day that had been pretty stressful (we’d been supposed to fly out the day before but our flight got canceled, etc.)
- As I was standing there looking at it, I thought, “oh, this is such a nice synchronicity.”
- And then I second guessed myself and thought maybe I was using the term too loosely, maybe me stumbling across this meaningful piece of art wasn’t a synchronicity, etc.
- Then I went up to the placard that had the artist name and title of the piece, and it was literally called “Circle [Synchronicity]”. In case you’re wondering, it’s a 2014 piece by Margo Sawyer.
- But that’s really emblematic of the type of synchronicities I find while using or thinking about Randonautica. I couldn’t help feeling like it was very pointed and directed at me. We could have stopped anywhere and waited for our Lyft, and that’s where we went.

Randonautica synchronicity while researching

I had a weird synchronicity while researching this episode. I was on an airplane, re-reading the book and listening to music. I was listening to a 7.5 hour long playlist, which was on shuffle.
- While reading the part of the book about how studies have shown that people can psychically have an effect on random number generators, I thought about how I wanted to listen to a particular song. I didn’t want to exit out of the app where I was reading the book to switch the song, because I didn’t want to get distracted, so I thought, well, this says you can have a potential impact on random number generators using your mind, so why don’t I try to influence the algorithm on spotify’s shuffle feature so the song I want comes on?
- It was a quick thought. I wasn’t holding it in my mind or really focusing on it, I just mentally stated my intention and kept reading. And sure enough, the next song that came on was the one I thought of.
- In case you’re wondering, I’d been listening to “Dreamland” by Pet Shop Boys featuring Years & Years, and the song that I wanted to come on was “Smalltown Boy” by Bronski Beat.
  - I definitely thought of “Smalltown Boy” because of “Dreamland,” since Pet Shop Boys and Bronski Beat are both queer 80s bands.
- Now, maybe you’re listening to this and thinking, that’s a weird coincidence, but not an impossible one.
- I can’t see how many songs are on the playlist because Spotify hides that for some reason, but if we assume the songs average about 4 mins long each, it’s probably about 113 songs, so that’s a 1 in 113 probably of any one song playing, or about .1% (1/113=.0088496) So not likely, but not the longest odds either.
  - https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com/length-average-pop-rock-song-lets-turn-statistics/
Spotify shuffle is actually less random than you think. There are a number of articles, which I’ll link in the shownotes, about different issues with the shuffle algorithm not being truly random. I can tell you, I listen to this playlist pretty often and I don’t actually believe their algorithm is random. I assume they favor songs where they get better royalty rates, though who knows. But I can tell you that “Dreamland” is not one of the ones that plays more often than others, and I looked it up and it’s on a different label than the tracks that play more often. (There are a handful of songs published by Interscope that I’ve noticed play more often, but maybe that’s just coincidence.)
- The reason why I think that some of the songs that come up way more than they seem like they should are
But all of this kind of doesn’t matter. I did want to address the most low-hanging objections to this synchronicity, though the important thing is just that a lot of weird synchronicities happen around randonautica. Like, more than usually happen to me in my daily life. And for me, each weird thing that happens in randonautica has a possible rational explanation, of course. However, when you thread all of these many synchronicities together, then it starts to look interesting.
But if this is true, then I do need to bring up last week’s episode, where I talked about using a modified version of the Estes Method, using pre-recorded questions on shuffle.
- The goal of doing the Solo Estes Method this way is so that you’re less likely to just hear what you want to hear from the spirit box, since the song has come up randomly.
- However, if a human can potentially psychically have an effect on random number generators, then that means it’s possible that maybe you could unwittingly have an effect on what question comes up.
- I don’t have a real solution for that, aside from saying that it’s something to be aware of and it’s an argument for being in a sort of meditate state while doing the Solo Estes Method, rather than thinking about what the questions might be, etc.
Now, you could argue that I just think that I run into synchronicities when thinking about Randonautica because thinking about randonauting makes me think of synchronicities, and makes me more likely to notice them.
Just to be clear: I always have an eye out for synchronicity, it’s not just something I have in mind when thinking of Randonautica.
I think synchronicities are really cool and interesting, and I like thinking about them, trying to interpret them, etc. But I do want to give a word of caution here.
- I’ve said this before, but as you make connections and spot synchronicities and make meaning from the world around you, just make sure that you’re using your judgment.
- I talked about this in more detail in my episode The Demon in the Basement, but I do think it can be easy to fall into conspiratorial thinking.
- In particular, in paranormal investigation and experiences like randonauting, there is a focus on looking for patterns and following your own emotions. I think there’s a time and place for that. But be careful, because while those are important muscles to develop for interacting with the paranormal, they’re the same muscles that are used in conspiratorial thinking.
- I do worry that it’s possible to get really used to looking at every facet of life in the same way that you look at synchronicities, for example, and I just want to caution you against that.
- If you want to hear me talk more about that, listen to The Demon in the Basement, but I wanted to at least mention the subject here.
- Also, while I was working on the script for this episode, the YouTuber Philosophy Tube, or Abigail Thorn, released a really awesome video about Transhumanism that has a great bit about conspiracy theories.
  - Honestly, if you’re interested in randonauting you’re probably also interested in transhumanism, so you should check it out.
  - Search Transhumanism Philosophy Tube to watch that, or I’ve got a link in the shownotes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqPd6MShV1o
  - In the video, Thorn has a great metaphor for what conspiracy theories do, like how they’re different from other theories.
  - Basically, the way she put it is that conspiracy theories are about expressing something emotional, rather than a statement about how the world is. If you’re a scientist saying that the Earth is about 93 million miles away from the sun, then other scientists can take that fact and how to measure it, etc. But if you and a friend go to see a movie, and you say, “I think that was a good movie,” it doesn’t really make sense for the friend to say, “how can you prove it?” Because you weren’t trying to express a objective truth, you were trying to have a social interaction. And she argues that conspiracy theories are that second sort of statement disguised as the first kind, so, opinions disguised as truth.
  - And because you can’t really argue with opinions the way you can argue with facts, and you don’t need to prove opinions the way you’re expected to prove facts, conspiracy theories become very fluid and vague and difficult to debate.
  - So the reason why I mention this here, is if I say something based on my own subjective experience of randonauting, or anything related to the paranormal or anomalous, I’m really just talking about my experience. And I may theorize things, and find patterns, and talk about things using somewhat scientific terms, I can’t prove or measure what I’ve experienced. I also don’t come at this with the automatic assumption that you will, or should, agree with everything I say, or take it as truth.
  - I would also suggest that you apply that same standard to yourself. It can be easy to fall into patterns of fear or superstition, and to see patterns and assume some sort of specific intent, when it comes to the paranormal. To some extent, that’s fine, and any sort of engagement with or interpretation of the paranormal requires you to do a bit of that. But it can be easy to make an assumption, or hear a theory that someone has, and start to believe it to your own detriment, or to the detriment of others.
  - I especially think this is important to think about this in relation to randonauting, because a lot of randonauting is discussed in a sort of scientific, or at least science-adjacent language. We’re looking at quantum points with z-scores, etc. I have a suspicion that because randonauting has more of a science-y vibe than, say, and urban legend, it might be easier to fall into a pattern of taking things too seriously and maybe even spreading a sort of superstitious thinking into your own daily life.
  - You’re smart, so use your discretion. If you feel like you’ve lost the thread, talk to a trusted friend or, even better, a mental health professional.
  - I think that if you’re feeling consistent fear relating to your experience with randonauting or the paranormal, that’s probably the time to look for trusted, grounded, external help. But you know your own needs better than I do.
  - Oh, and obviously, all of this is just my own opinion. While I’ve been referencing the Randonautica book a lot, I’m obviously not speaking for the creators of Randonautica in any way.
With all that said, I wanted to dive into what The Official Guide to Randonautica: Everything You Need to Know about Creating Your Random Adventure Story by Joshua Lengfelder and Auburn Salcedo (2021) had to say about synchronicity and randonauting:
- “Due to synchronicity being an essentially unconscious phenomenon, the repressed or unconscious parts of people can reveal themselves while Randonauting. But as with all ways of understanding darkness, the method is blamed. People assume Randonautica itself is picking creepy and negative locations, when in reality the users are given precisely what their intention is. In truth, owls are the perfect symbol of the Randonaut’s experience: They go out into the unknown in search of things with a wide-eyed curiosity.”
The book calls randonauting a “sort of waking-dream space” because synchronicity logic is much like dream logic, where things are connected based on how they’re related, and the experience is full of signs and symbols that can be interpreted much like signs and symbols in a dream.
The book talks about how there’s a sort of alchemical process that happens when randonauting, where you undergo an inner transformation and see things differently. Theoretically, you’re exploring your blind spots, going to places you haven’t been before, and taking the time to pay attention.
Synchronicities are slippery, so you definitely want to make sure to write them down and keep a good record of randonauting. I don’t follow my own advice all the time, but often when I look back at my randonauting notes, I see stuff that I didn’t really notice before, and themes start to emerge throughout trips.

Outro (Strange Randonautica Synchronicity)

Also, I just wanted to remind you that I do have a Patreon now.
- Right now, you can download my Solo Estes Session kit from there.
- Also, by the time this episode is out, I will have posted a draft version of an interactive google map I’ve been working on since January or so.
- It’s still very much a work in progress, but I’ve designed it to be a resource for people who are researching the paranormal or anomalous in New York City. To that end, I’ve been working on adding information that I think would be relevant to fellow researchers.
  - Right now, the map has:
    - 47 paranormal encounters
    - 1 UFO sighting
    - 57 historic structures and cultural sites
    - 11 important events
    - 153 urban legends and rumors
    - 73 burial grounds and famous graves
    - 26 natural and industrial landmarks
    - 46 indigenous villages, trails, and names
  - The way it works is you go to this map, and all of these things are marked on the map. If you click on any of the points, a little box will come up with pictures and a description, as well as sources and other information.
  - A lot of the places I’ve marked no longer exist. So my thought is that if you have something strange happen or are researching a place, ideally you could go to the map and see that maybe there used to be a cemetery there, or there used to be a mansion there, or a conflict happened there, or whatever.
  - Filling out this map is a huge undertaking, so like I said, it’s a work in progress. As you might guess, my focus so far has been mostly on the Bronx and Queens, but I’m continuing to work on filling it out.
  - It’s been a really fun project, and I’ve been hesitant to share it because it’s going to continue to be a work in progress, so I decided that the best place to keep it is behind patreon rather than shared with the wider world.
  - So if you want access to that, or the Solo Estes Method kit, subscribe at patreon.com/buriedsecretspodcast, and keep an eye out for other cool stuff that I’m working on and will post there.
  - And a huge thank you to my friends at the Lunatics Radio Hour podcast for joining my patreon.
    - If you don’t already listen to the Lunatics Radio Hour podcast, definitely check them out. They’re focused on the history of horror and look at both horror movies and paranormal stuff, including a lot of NYC paranormal things. They also have a patreon, where they have all sorts of cool stuff, like bonus episodes about horror movies, stickers, issues of their magazine, etc. They’re at https://www.patreon.com/lunaticsproject

Sources consulted RE: Strange Randonautica Synchronicity

Books consulted: Strange Randonautica Synchronicity

The Official Guide to Randonautica: Everything You Need to Know about Creating Your Random Adventure Story by Joshua Lengfelder and Auburn Salcedo (2021): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55710642-the-official-guide-to-randonautica

Don’t miss past episodes:

The Despair Meme and the Hell Gate (Randonautica Series)

A look at memetics and the idea of the despair meme in Randonautica. In particular, I talk about some weird stuff that happened to me at New York City’s Hell Gate, examine its relationship to randonauting, and see whether my experiences could be tied in with the despair meme.

The Despair Meme and the Hell Gate: A look at memetics and the idea of the despair meme in Randonautica. In particular, I talk about some weird stuff that happened to me at New York City’s Hell Gate, examine its relationship to randonauting, and see whether my experiences could be tied in with the despair meme.

Highlights include:

An attempt at explaining memetics
A possible initiation experience
Ghost-transmitted memes?

Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get cool stuff: https://www.patreon.com/buriedsecretspodcast

Episode Script for The Despair Meme and the Hell Gate (Randonautica Series)

Memetics

Let’s talk about memetics. This is a concept that I still struggle to understand. But it’s been popping up a lot in different things I’ve been reading, including The Official Guide to Randonautica, and it has some bearing on randonauting, so I want to spend some time with the idea here.
So, first, let’s get the obvious out of the way. The first thing I think of when I hear “memetics” is “memes.”
- I think everyone listening to this podcast knows what an internet meme is, but just in case: I’d describe it as a popular format of telling jokes online, where text is placed on top of an image to convey a message that’s typically funny. You’ll see the same images circulating over and over, with different text superimposed. Check out the website Know Your Meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/) to if you want to see a bunch of memes.
- But it seems that the images we typically call memes online are really more accurately described as “image macros.” So they’re more like a subtype of Internet meme, and technically you could consider anything that’s going viral as a meme, like a phrase or idea or video or maybe even a creepypasta like Slender Man.
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_macro
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme
- So if an internet meme is something that’s spread through the internet, a meme is basically the same thing, just not necessarily online.
So looking at the idea of “memetics,” I’m gonna start out real basic, with the wikipedia definition:
- “Memetics is the study of information and culture based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution. Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. Memetics describes how an idea can propagate successfully, but doesn’t necessarily imply a concept is factual.”
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
- Honestly, I hear the phrase “cultural information transfer” and my eyes glaze over. But basically a meme is something that spreads information, behavior, styles, symbols, practices, and ideas, and memetics is looking at it through a sort of evolutionary lens.
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
- The word meme was originally coined in the 1976 book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, the delightful public intellectual who brought us New Atheism. (To be clear, I’m being sarcastic, I’m not a fan.)
  - Basically, his idea was that a meme is like a mental gene, in that it’s a unit of culture that is “hosted” in people’s brains, and can spread between their brains. He gives the example as a tune that you can hum as a meme. Someone’s humming it, then it gets stuck in someone’s head, etc.
    - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
  - It seems that Dawkins doesn’t really see internet memes as true memes because they are, to quote wikipedia again, “deliberately altered by human creativity, distinguished from his original idea involving mutation “by random change and a form of Darwinian selection.””
    - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme#Internet_culture
This is all pretty twisty, to me at least, but you’re probably seeing how memetics has some connections to synchronicity, etc.
And unsurprisingly, the group of folks who inspired the creation of Randonautica were some researchers, or as the book calls them, “mad scientists,” who studied memetics.
The book talks about how you can read memes as archetypal expressions (which brings in Jung’s ideas again), and theorizes that you could read the general collective unconscious based on what is bubbling up in randonauting journeys.
- To read from the book:
  - “The memes that emerge through Randonautica represent a global mythos based around curiosity. Although synchronicity is extremely personal and strikes to the very core of who you are, it turns out it can be a shared experience. People from around the globe often report the same synchronous experiences, which in turn are shared as memes, and turn into legends if they become popular enough. These legends are folktales that arise through curiously exploring the void and emerge through the collective unconscious.”
- So that’s a really interesting idea.

Despair meme

Next, let’s talk about the despair meme.
I’ll read a definition of what this is from the book:
- “The despair meme is the visceral physiological reaction some people have at the prospect of going to a random place, or even a fear of uncertainty in general. Since that random place is totally disconnected from any prior events in your life, your brain is attempting to predict what will happen when you get there. This response to uncertainty can cause some people to feel fear or anxiety, even manifesting as a projection of their worst fears. Sometimes at the mere prospect of going to an unknown location, people start to feel nauseated and sick or dizzy.”
My own despair meme experiences:
- I talked last time about how sometimes I do have a strong reaction to randonauting, and do get this big sense of anxiety and I feel like I shouldn’t do it that day.
- The book suggests that you push through that feeling, and I think your mileage may vary with that technique.
  - Usually, when I get this despair meme feeling, I give randonautica a rest for a while until I feel better about using it. That’s because I don’t see the point in forcing myself to do something that I’m just doing for fun, and I always know I’ll return to randonauting when it feels right.
  - I also, personally, am not neurotypical and sometimes do have anxiety about breaking my routine, especially if I’m worn down or stressed about something else already. And I know that when I force myself into a situation where I’m piling anxiety over already feeling bad, I’ll just feel worse.
  - You’ll know what’s best for you in this situation, though.
- Now, I didn’t know about the despair meme until I read this book in January 2022, but I’d been using randonautica for almost two years at that point, so I was surprised to see that other people had encountered it. But it also made me feel better, and less alone in what I felt like was sort of an extreme reaction, even for me.
- While looking at the despair meme, I also wanted to talk about a weird set of experiences that I’ve had, which may or may not have some overlap with the despair meme. Let’s talk about the Hell Gate.
  - Back in late 2020, I did a series of episodes about the Hell Gate and its environs (like Roosevelt Island, etc.)
  - The Hell Gate is a tidal strait in the East River, sort of in that area around Astoria, Roosevelt Island, and the Upper East Side.
  - The Hell Gate is also said to be haunted, though I haven’t found as many stories about the area’s hauntings as I would like. It seems like there’s mostly just urban legends, which are fun and interesting, but not particularly convincing.
  - Another important thing about the Hell Gate is that it’s a troubled place, as you can guess from the name. It used to be incredibly dangerous to pass through, and thousands of ships ran aground there.
  - I did episodes about two of the most famous ones:
    - The first is the HMS Hussar, a British warship that sank during the Revolutionary War with what was supposedly an enormous amount of gold
    - The second is the General Slocum, a steamship that a church group rented out for a trip in 1904, and which sunk, resulting in between 1,000-1,300 deaths. It was the largest loss of life in NYC until 9/11, and there are lots of horrific pictures of bodies washing up to shore in the area.
  - If you want to know more, you can listen to those episodes.
  - But basically, since 2020, I’ve been fascinated by the Hell Gate. But at the same time, I’ve been sort of repelled by it, often without realizing it.
  - I had a weird experience in spring 2020, where I was there and suddenly felt really upset and uncomfortable and wanted to leave, which was kinda weird and unlike me.
  - Other strange stuff has happened to me by the Hell Gate, too, and I often leave the Hell Gate being very upset. Usually there’s no clear reason for me to be upset, but I did have one weird experience where there was a sort of freak accident right after I did an Estes session there.
    - In the end of August 2021, I did a solo Estes session by the waters of the Hell Gate, at Astoria Park. This was the first Estes session I had done there. I got some interesting responses and was fairly happy with how the session went.
    - But the most memorable thing was that on my walk home, a manhole cover on the street next to me blew up in flames. It was a ConEd manhole, so I assume it was an electrical fire, since they’re the electric company. The flames were pretty high–probably a couple feet high–and the manhole cover kept bouncing up and down as the flames came and went. It was also making very loud explosion sounds. And this was just in the middle of the street.
    - It was pretty early on a Saturday morning, so not that many people were around. And the people who were around mostly just ignored it.
    - So I had to call 911 to get the fire department to come put out the fire. Luckily they came pretty quickly, no one was hurt to my knowledge, and they were able to put it out, but there was a lot of smoke and tons of emergency vehicles.
    - I’ve mentioned this in the podcast before, but I am very uncomfortable around fire and probably have a bit of a phobia about it, because in 2019, the building next to ours burned down. I spent hours watching the fire department try to put out the fire and was worried that the fire would spread since the buildings touched. Luckily the building I lived in was brick and was mostly fine, but the smoke smell lingered for months, and it was generally a fairly traumatic experience.
    - So I was probably a little more upset than an average person would be at encountering open flames in the middle of the street.
    - Then, on my way home, I ran into a friend of mine who I had plans to hang out with later that afternoon, which I mention just because it was a random coincidence.
    - And this isn’t the manhole fire’s fault, or the Hell Gate’s fault, but that sort of marked a turning point last year, where things in my life had been going in a certain direction, and starting after that morning in August, things took a turn.
      - It’s not worth going into a ton of detail, and it wasn’t all bad, but just to give you an example of what I’m talking about: I later learned that around that time, some stuff was put into motion that I didn’t know about that would result in me being laid off from my job a few months later, etc. And like I said, there were also some good things that happened around that time. But when I think of the last year or so, that time seems to be a bit of a pivot point for a lot of things in my life.
      - In retrospect, I’d almost describe the feeling as being like, if, on a summer day, the temperature suddenly dropped and standing water started freezing. I look around, and am pretty unsettled, and as I head home to get a coat and dress for the weather, I look around, and no one else can see it. They don’t feel the drop in temperature, they don’t see puddles freezing over, and they don’t need a coat. I’m experiencing a winter day, and they’re still all experiencing a beautiful summer day.
      - The metaphor is imperfect, but that’s how it felt. It was as if something was off, and that something was external to me, but other people just didn’t notice it.
      - Who knows, maybe that feeling started when I was reacting to seeing open flames in the street and other people were walking by as if they weren’t there, so I had to be the one to call 911.
      - In thinking about all of this, I almost wonder if I could interpret this as a sort of initiation experience, because it does feel like I crossed some threshold that day.
      - After that, things felt almost dreamlike for a while. A few days later, there was a freak storm and a number of people died, or lost everything, in Queens. The storm has nothing to do with me of course, but it felt really strange to encounter two somewhat dystopian environmental dangers in the space of less than a week.
      - However, I didn’t realize all of this was happening when it was going on. It’s only a pattern that I can see in retrospect.
  - So at this point, I sort of had some baggage around Astoria Park, so when I went on runs, I tried to avoid the park. Not consciously, I was just running to other places because I liked them better. You might wonder why I would like running through the large, beautiful park less than running through crowded sidewalks during a pandemic, and that’s kinda what I’m getting at here when I’m saying that it’s weird that I was unconsciously avoiding it.
    - As I mentioned in the last episode, I often randonaut while running. So I would set the radius so that Astoria Park would not be included in the area, and again and again, it would choose a point close to the outer edge of the radius, the closest it could get me to Astoria Park given the distance I had allowed.
    - Without really reflecting on it, I would run to the point, often not see much of anything, and then think, oh, I’m right near the park, I should run in the park since I’m here already.
    - I would do that, and again and again, partway through the run through the park, I would get this really awful feeling. It’s hard to explain, but I’d get there and I’d just feel extremely lonely and demoralized and awful. If I had to choose one word to describe it, I’d say I was probably feeling despair.
    - However, at the time, I didn’t notice that I was feeling that way consistently when going to the park.
    - Finally, in October, I believe, I was doing a solo Estes session in the park and then suddenly started feeling deeply depressed. It came on really suddenly while I was there, and it was just very extreme and awful.
    - Once I was done with the session, I went home, and once I got home, I felt better pretty much right away. And as I was telling my wife about it, she said, “oh, that makes sense, because you always feel depressed when you go to that park.”
    - I hadn’t made that connection, but then I thought back to the prior year and a half during some of the stricter COVID lockdowns. After my feeling of despair in the park in April 2020, my wife often tried to get me to go on walks with her to Astoria Park, because it is a beautiful park, but I always found some excuse for why I couldn’t go. I wasn’t consciously avoiding it, but in retrospect, I was definitely avoiding it. And that’s even weirder when you consider that during late 2020, I got really obsessed with the Hell Gate and did a bunch of episodes about it, and I’m still obsessed with the Hell Gate.
    - After realizing this, I try not to go to the park alone, or if I do, I try to bike through. It seems fine if I bike in and out of there quickly, or if I’m with someone else. But when I’m walking, running, or sitting there alone, this deep feeling of despair creeps in.
- To bring this back to Randonautica, I think it’s very odd that the app tended to send me there again and again, and that I had a similar experience of despair each time.
  - Was it sending me there because I was obsessed with it so was thinking about it in the back of my mind and accidentally influencing my intention? Or was it sending me there for another reason?
  - Also, does this have anything to do with the despair meme? On face value, it seems like not, since the despair meme is about fear of uncertainty. But if there’s something strange going on there from a paranormal perspective, maybe there’s some uncertainty or strangeness that’s disturbing me there.
    - I don’t know, there’s just something about the phrase “despair meme” that makes me think, okay, yeah, I feel like I could be experiencing a despair meme.
    - I think that’s because the depression I feel when I’m in the area of Astoria Park feels like it comes from outside of me. Usually, I get the sense that my feelings originate from something going on in my brain, or something that another person did. But in this case, it feels like something non-human and external to me is influencing me in a way that is invisible to me, aside from the terrible feeling I get there.
    - It’s like this feeling just appears, and is very intense, and that to me feels almost meme-like. If memes are ideas spreading between people, I wonder if memes can be spread by ghosts. My first impulse is to say that maybe I’m being influenced by being in this haunted area. But I only get this feeling when I’m alone.
    - Is it possible that, when I linger there and am not in the presence of another corporeal person, I am maybe picking up a despair meme from some sort of paranormal entity?
      - I do want to pause to acknowledge that I could be, unknowingly, be experiencing other factors. Those could include:
        
        Sadness because I know that a lot of people died near there
        
        Some sort of trauma response related to the manhole fire explosion
        
        A weird reaction to pollution from the nearby power plant (though I will say that I spend a lot of time near a different power plant and the only reaction I have then is just asthma problems)
      - I really do feel like there’s a more paranormal aspect that I’m experiencing there, because I don’t have an issue if I’m not alone, but who knows?
    - It’s not lost on me, however, that Randonautica is all tied up with this phenomenon and set of experiences.

Outro

Next time, I’ll talk about some more of my own experiences of randonauting weirdness
Also, I have a patreon now!
- I wanted to curate a digital library of cool public domain books and share that on patreon, so by the time this goes up, I’ll add a book that I have only read part of so far, but which I’ve heard great things about.
  - It is a Victorian ghost hunting book that was written by a woman.
  - It was forgotten for a long time, but has recently enjoyed a resurgence of popularity, at least in the corner of the paranormal community that I inhabit. So go to patreon.com/buriedsecretspodcast to get that.
- I might add something else as well, but I’ll at least upload that book.
- Remember that if you sign up for any level of the patreon, you’ll also get access to my Solo Estes Session kit and my Haunted Map of New York City, which has about 200 stories of hauntings in the city, as well as a bunch of other forgotten history and landmarks.

Sources consulted RE: The Despair Meme and the Hell Gate

Books consulted: The Despair Meme and the Hell Gate

The Official Guide to Randonautica: Everything You Need to Know about Creating Your Random Adventure Story by Joshua Lengfelder and Auburn Salcedo (2021): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55710642-the-official-guide-to-randonautica

Don’t miss past episodes:

I found the owls (Randonautica Series)

I talk about some of the strangeness and patterns that have emerged during my own randonauting trips. Plus, I tell the story of some freaky fire-related synchronicities that have happened since last week.

I found the owls (Randonautica Series): I talk about some of the strangeness and patterns that have emerged during my own randonauting trips. Plus, I tell the story of some freaky fire-related synchronicities that have happened since last week.

Highlights include:
• Three fires I’ve encountered since recording the last episode
• Ominous warnings from Randonautica
• Lots of owl lawn decorations!

Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get cool stuff: https://www.patreon.com/buriedsecretspodcast

Episode Script for I found the owls (Randonautica Series)

Intro

In the last couple episodes, I talked about some experiences of synchronicity that I’d experienced while randonauting, as well as randonaut’s seeming fixation with bringing me back to a place that I was both obsessed with and repelled by, the part of the Hell Gate by Astoria Park.
In this episode, I wanted to talk about some of the themes I’ve seen crop up repeatedly while randonauting.
However, before I get into the episode, I wanted to talk about several weird synchronicities that happened in the last week or so:
- Firefighters in building (week of 5/2? Or end of week before)
- Exploding battery (5/5)
- Fire a block away (5/9)
- The synchronicities seem to support my idea that the more you talk about randonauting, the more synchronicities you encounter. Especially since last week I talked a lot about accidents involving fire.
Also, disclaimer, while I’ve said again and again in this series how important it is to write down your randonauting experiences immediately after having them, I apparently, and in typical form, did not follow my own advice. In retrospect, I know why this happened: a lot of the I’ve gone randonauting at night while running, and then I get home and need to hurry up and take a shower and go to bed, but I am annoyed at my past self. So, again, write down your trips if you’re able to, because that’s what’s going to allow you to see patterns.
Anyway, I’m going to draw from the 16 trips that I did take detailed notes for.

Recurring Patterns

Here are the patterns I’ve found recur most often for me:
- It takes me to an extremely literal interpretation of my intention
- It brings me to an alternative version of what I asked for (maybe because it couldn’t bring me to what I asked for for some reason?)
- It takes me somewhere I’ve been thinking about
- It seems to have a sense of humor
Let’s go through these one-by-one

Extremely literal interpretations of my intention

Here are some examples:
- Intention: something to make me feel at peace
  - it sent me to a yoga studio
  - It’s hard to take that intention more literally than literally bringing someone to a yoga studio
- Intention: reconnect with nature
  - It brought me to a tree-lined street in Sunnyside, which is a neighborhood in western Queens. There was a big line of people waiting at a church or community center (weird to see at that point in the pandemic, unsure of what the line was for, but I assume some sort of aid.) I went around the block to avoid the crowd and ended up at Sunnyside Gardens, which of course have lovely gardens.
  - I also saw a blue mylar balloon at Sunnyside Gardens, which felt like a wink, like it was like, “I heard you like these, so here you go.”
- Intention: star
  - It sent me to Crescent Street. Immediately I thought, that’s like a crescent moon, which is in the sky next to the stars. Many businesses there are adorned with moons.
  - Then, I passed a temple with a star of David (one carved one over the doorway, two stained glass windows); that was notable since there aren’t many temples in Astoria. I know of two of them, and Yelp agrees, though I could be wrong. But at any rate, there are a bunch of churches here and very few temples, so it stood out to me that it brought me by a temple with the “star” intention.
  - On my run back, I noticed an arched window on a door with a star (or half a star) inlaid into the flat bottom part of the arch.
  - During the run, I swung by Astoria park, which is where you’d go if you wanted to stargaze. I only noticed a few stars in the sky, plus something that seemed like a satellite.
  - Unrelated, but there were the remains of a ritual or shrine in the middle of the sidewalk by the water, with lots of white candles. It was a slightly broken circle of 7-day candles, and smaller white candles melted into sand and pebbles in the middle. They weren’t lit. It’s not so unusual to see 7-day candles burning along the Astoria waterfront, but they aren’t an everyday occurrence, so they stood out to me.
- Intention: ghost
  - The exact point was at the hidden cemetery behind St. George’s Church.
  - I also ran by a bunch of the old Astoria mansions, which have a very haunted vibe, and a ton of Halloween decorations, because it was September.
- Intention: diamond
  - On my way to the point, I took a wrong turn, which made me pass a fenced-in large driveway/small parking lot with a fence made of vertical iron bars with diamond shaped adornments that were painted a metallic gold. They looked recently painted, no chipped paint. That, to me, felt like a very clear response to the intention.
  - Unrelated, it also brought be to a part of the neighborhood that I don’t go to very often, which resulted in me seeing a bunch of really unique Halloween decorations that I never would have seen otherwise. Those include: a house with inflatable dragons, a headless horseman, an a looming pumpkin-headed man underneath a vine-covered part of the Hell Gate Bridge viaduct.
- Intention: owl
  - I got to the point and there was just a long, dark side yard passageway. Disappointed, I headed away, crossing to the other side of the street and walking north toward Astoria Boulevard. Then I saw a tiny metal own on a stick in a garden. Beneath it was the word “autumn.” I took a picture, and then I noticed a plastica owl, which looked sort of like a scarecrow-style owl. I was excited to have seen two whole owls! There were other figurines and statues in the yard, so I photographed some of the non-owl ones. Just as I was turning to leave, I saw another owl, another plastic, sort of realistic/scarecrow type. I took a picture of it, and then I saw in the background another owl, a weird one made of cloth. It hung from the brick wall of the house. It was anthropomorphic, wearing an apron and bow at her neck, with arms, but the face was distinctly an owl, with a beak, wide eyes, and that sort of chevron-shaped crest of feather on top (sewn from a contrasting fabric.) It looked almost homemade. So that was four owls in the yard near the point.
- Intention: owl (I did this immediately after the previous one, starting from the point with four owls)
  - From there, I set off to another point. On the way there, I passed plenty of other lawn figurines: pink flamingos, eagles, gnomes, fairies, frogs, and turtles. But no owls. The building at the point was a large tenement-style place, with an alleyway behind it. Nothing owl-like there.
  - Disappointed, I went for a walk at Astoria Park. On my way home, instead of going my usual route, I walked back the way I came. A few blocks away from the point, I spotted a cute ornamental owl hanging from a tree, which I hadn’t noticed before. It looked hand-painted.
  - Then, as I took pictures of other garden statues, I spotted two more owls toward the fence by the backyard. They were both of the scarecrow variety, plastic and realistic-looking. One sat at around ground level, its head moved to stare at the fence, and the other was up on top of a flagpole in the backyard, facing away from the sidewalk. Three owls this time!
  - Note: I didn’t see owl figurines anywhere else during this 5-mile walk, aside from those two yards near the points that Randonautica sent me to.

Alternative version of what I asked for

Sometimes, Randonautica brings me to what I consider a surrogate for my intention. So it’s not the exact intention, but it’s something close. Sometimes I wonder if maybe because it couldn’t bring me to what I asked for for some reason, but who knows why this happens.
The weird thing is that this has happened when I’ve set intentions that I know have corresponding objects within the radius I set, but it doesn’t bring me to the things I know about, instead bringing me to something similar, but not quite the same. I like to do this sometimes just to test it out and see if it’ll bring me to the thing that I know exists and more literally represents the intention. I’m not sure if maybe it doesn’t like me testing it, or what, but sometimes I almost feel like it’s choosing something similar but not exact just to spite me, or tease me. Then again, maybe I’m attributing more agency to it than it deserves. I just can’t help feeling that whatever force animates Randonautica is a little mischievous and snarky.
Intention: owl
- I was disappointed not to see an owl near the point, but I kept running, and then, a bird swooped low over me. It glided almost like how an owl would, quietly and without flapping much. It turned so it was out of sight, and then came back toward me. I saw then that it was a juvenile seagull behaving in a very owl-like way.
Intention: ghost
- I did this trip in September, so there were tons of ghost Halloween decorations that I knew were near where I was starting out from. Curious whether Randonautica would send me there, I set the intention of “ghost.”
- Instead of bringing me to any of the ghost decorations I knew were around, it brought me by:
  - a plush snowman in a tree (I don’t know why someone, in September, put a snowman in a tree, but it was hovering there just above eye level as I ran by),
  - a funeral home,
  - just past the point, I saw religious images in a window, including a very ghostly, ethereal Jesus, and what looked like a saint card for a female saint who I didn’t recognize, but who was dressed like a nun.
- To me, all of those things represented a ghost in different ways.
  - The snowman plush was a white object vaguely resembling a ghost, “hovering” above me in the tree
  - The funeral home is an obvious one
  - The religious images looked ghostly, but also you can think about the holy ghost in that context as well

Somewhere I’ve been thinking about

I think I mentioned this is a prior episode, but multiple times, I’d considered going somewhere, decided against it, and then Randonautica brought me there anyway, sometimes even ignoring my original intention.
My theory for why this happens is that while I set an intention, some part of my mind was still thinking of the original place that I had considered going to. So then instead of following my intention, it sends me to that place.
Let’s get into some examples.
Intention: something to make me feel at peace
- This was the same day that I mentioned earlier, where it sent me to the yoga studio. Then, from the yoga studio, I set the same intention again.
- That day, I had thought about going to Roosevelt Island, but then decided against it. Roosevelt Island was way far outside of the original radius I had set. However, the first point brought me a lot closer to Roosevelt Island.
- For the second point, it brought me to a random warehouse. I was disappointed because it clearly had nothing to do with my intention. And then I realized that the warehouse it had brought me to was only a few blocks away from the bridge to Roosevelt Island. So I decided to go to the island, since I was already so close.
- This was a clever one, I think, because it found a way to bring me to the place I’d been thinking about even though it’d been too far away from my starting point.
Intention: go on an adventure
- That day, I’d considered going to the Lent-Riker-Smith Homestead, but I decided not to because it was further than I felt like running that evening.
- This was early on in my randonauting, before I realized you could change the radius, so when I requested a point Randonautica directed me to the car rental place at Laguardia airport, which was 4 blocks away from the homestead.
- I still didn’t go because it was too far, but this struck me as really funny, like the animating force behind Randonautica had a sense of humor.
- Not only did it want me to go to the place I’d been thinking about going, but I said I wanted to go on an adventure, and it said, “oh, okay, I’ll send you on an adventure–go to the airport and get on a plane, or at least in a car.”
Intention: chose an intention based on a tarot card (9 of Wands reversed, which I read as burnout, doubt, pointless struggle, needing to set boundaries). Ao I decided to ask it to show me something that evokes a sense of wonder and encourages me to focus on the stuff I’m excited about (paranormal, occult, history.)
- It sent me to a car repair shop that was right next to St. Michael’s Cemetery.
- Earlier in the day, I considered going to the cemetery but decided against it. Since I was already so close to the cemetery–I was as close as Randonautica could have sent me based on the radius I gave it, which did not include the cemetery–I decided to drop by.
- I thought it’d be closed, but it turns out it was open till 5 pm so I was able to go in for a half hour or so.
- Also, on the way there, I saw: a house with windows covered with astrological symbols and moons, a building with classical women’s heads except one was worn down and one looked like Cernunnos (I just rewatched Hellier the day before), a mural of the Hell Gate Bridge, street art being painted, a gate made of arrows, and a bunch of other stuff.
- All of that was also very on the nose for my intention of showing me paranormal, occult, and historical stuff that I was excited about

A sense of humor

I think the previous examples also give a taste of what I at least interpret as a sense of humor that tends to run through these trips.

Other weird randonauting trips

One other odd thing that I’ve noticed is that multiple times, Randonautica has brought me to the home of someone I know. Of course I do know a decent number of people in the neighborhood, but still. There are almost 100,000 people who live in my neighborhood, so it strikes me as odd when it chooses to bring me to the home of someone I know.
There have always been very real, clear reasons why Randonautica has sent me to the homes of people I knew, but I’m not going to get very deep into those reasons.
I’ll just give one example:
- Intention: dragon
  - This trip happened shortly after the events at the Hell Gate that I talked about in the last episode, after which things started to go a little askew in some parts of my life.
  - Randonautica sent me to the home of my boss (at the time.)
  - I thought that was kind of funny, and I sort of chastised Randonautica for being kind of rude. I was kinda like, c’mon, my boss is a nice person, I would never describe them as a dragon.
  - I won’t go into more detail than this, but, a couple months later, when I was laid off from that job, I suddenly realized that it was a very specific warning that I should have heeded.
  - Instead of asking myself what Randonautica was maybe trying to tell me, I ignored any potential message and was just like, “well, that’s funny, but off topic.”
  - Now, I’m not saying that there’s anything I necessarily could or would have done differently had I heeded the warning. But I think that if I had been more willing to engage with what Randonautica was trying to tell me, I would have noticed some things that were going on a little more quickly, and I probably could have been more psychologically prepared for what would unfold over the next few months.
  - So, let that be a lesson to you: If Randonautica leads you to something where there’s a clear potential message, but it seems outlandish or like you don’t want to believe it, just allow yourself to consider the possibility that it might be trying to tell you something.
    - And of course, at the same time, don’t let your interpretations of your randonauting trips drive too much of your behavior or decision making.
    - Like I said, if I had heeded the warning, nothing of my outward behavior at work would have changed. But I might have started applying for jobs and psychologically preparing myself for the possibility that my time at that job was going to end. I think that just those two behaviors might have saved me months of anxiety; or at least they might have alleviated a bit of that anxiety.

Outro

And that’s it for Randonautica! If you end up doing some randonauting and find some interesting stuff, please let me know! I’ve already heard some cool stories from folks trying Randonautica out after listening to these episodes, so please keep ‘em coming.
Next time, I’ll finally begin my promised deep dive into the Old Alton Bridge.
But until then, you can:
- Follow me on instagram:
- Check out the show notes with sources and scripts for the shows at buriedsecretspodcast.com
- Rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or Spotify
- Email me at buriedsecretspodcast@gmail.com
- I also have a patreon now!

Sources consulted RE: The Despair Meme and the Hell Gate

Books consulted: The Despair Meme and the Hell Gate

The Official Guide to Randonautica: Everything You Need to Know about Creating Your Random Adventure Story by Joshua Lengfelder and Auburn Salcedo (2021): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55710642-the-official-guide-to-randonautica

Don’t miss past episodes:

The Trickster and the Goatman (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

The Old Alton Bridge, or Goatman’s Bridge, is a famously haunted site in north Texas. But in my research, I’ve discovered that everything may not be as it seems at the Old Alton Bridge . . .

The Trickster and the Goatman: The Old Alton Bridge, or Goatman’s Bridge, is a famously haunted site in north Texas. It has been featured in Buzzfeed Unsolved and Ghost Adventures, and the urban legends about the bridge are well-known in the paranormal world. But in my research, I’ve discovered that everything may not be as it seems at the Old Alton Bridge . . .

Highlights include:
• a Reddit troll who makes some wild claims about the bridge
• what it was like growing up in north Texas
• a look at trickster elements of the paranormal

Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to the Secret Library, map of Haunted NYC, Solo Estes Session Kit, and more: https://www.patreon.com/buriedsecretspodcast

Episode Script for The Trickster and the Goatman (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Intro

I’m excited to dive into this series on the famous Old Alton Bridge, also known as the Goatman’s Bridge, located near Denton, Texas. This bridge is a real doozy.
- Popular urban legends about the bridge abound. In case you aren’t familiar, I’ll list some of them now, though a lot of this series will focus on how, of course, you shouldn’t believe everything you hear.
  - People talk about a terrifying Goatman, sometimes speaking of him as if he’s a cryptid, sometimes comparing him to a demon, and other times connecting him to a historical figure who may have lived near the bridge and been brutally murdered on the bridge
  - Some say they see glowing red eyes in the woods.
  - Others claim to have been pelted by unseen rocks.
  - Visitors have also said they’ve heard growls, hoof beats, and mysterious laughter.
  - Folks have said that they heard a voice saying to get off the bridge, or have had sudden violent urges while visiting.
  - There are also rumors of abandoned cars being found near there, with their occupants supposedly missing.
  - Crucially, Buzzfeed Unsolved and Ghost Adventures have both investigated the bridge, spreading stories of its haunting far and wide
I initially thought that I’d just do one quick episode about the Old Alton Bridge, but as usual, the more I dug into the topic, the more weird stuff I found. I imagine that this series will probably end up being nine or ten episodes, but I’m still working on research for the later ones, so we’ll see.
This series will cover a lot of ground:
- I’ll cover the true, horrific, and sort of forgotten history of the area, the details of the terrible events that are supposed to have led to the bridge becoming haunted, as well as a recent tragic, suspicious death in the area.
- I’m also going to do a deep dive into all of the paranormal claims that people have made about the bridge. I have a huge spreadsheet where I’ve gathered up tons of claims so I can really assess and analyze them and I have some thoughts about what’s going on in the area.
  - But just so you know what we’re looking at here: we’ve got a lot of standard urban legends about doing different things to summon the bridge’s Goat Man, like knocking on it three times or driving over the bridge at night. There are also plenty of typical paranormal claims, like the ones I mentioned earlier.
- But there’s also another weird element woven into this story. The backstories to this haunting are strangely specific yet also unconfirmable. For example, there are specific named people, something that’s rare for urban legends, but no one can confirm that the people ever existed. And there are further complications and potential trickster elements to the story which I will really dig into.
But first, I wanted to introduce myself real quick. The episodes that I do about more famous urban legends tend to attract a lot of new listeners, so if you’re new here, welcome!
- Like I said in the intro, my name’s Chris. I live in Queens, a borough of New York City, and I grew up in North Texas. Specifically, I grew up in Denton County, where the Old Alton Bridge is.
- In this podcast, I mostly do really deep dives into paranormal topics, especially topics tied to local history. I have a particular focus on New York City since I’ve lived here my entire adult life, but I’ve also done episodes about famous hauntings in Salem, Asheville, and Las Vegas.
- I consider myself a skeptical believer, meaning that I think that the paranormal exists but I’m not dogmatic about it. I am also not willing to take urban legends at face value.
  - I want to dig deeper and see what weird stuff I can find beneath the surface of the stories that we tell ourselves.
  - Also, I don’t believe that all hauntings are caused by ghosts.
  - I think the paranormal is much stranger than what popular culture would lead us to believe, and that hauntings, UFOs, cryptids, and other weirdness are all connected.
  - I’m also interested in looking at what urban legends do, like what function they serve for the people who tell them and believe them, where they come from, etc.
  - I have no interest in trying to get anyone to believe anything in particular, or trying to convince anyone of any specific view.
  - I think it’s important to develop strong critical thinking skills when engaging with the paranormal, so I present the information I can find, give my own opinion, and have no real investment in whether folks agree with me.
- Also, I have a pretty strong focus on history, and believe that it’s pointless to analyze the paranormal in an area without also deep diving into the location’s history. I just don’t think that one can be separated from the other.
- My goal here is to uncover interesting and weird things and hidden bits of history, and to have fun doing it.
- Oh, also, I try to plan these series so if you decide to skip around and listen to them out of order, they’ll still make sense, but of course you’ll get the most out of them if you listen to them in order.
- Now let’s get into the Old Alton Bridge.

My experience of Texas history

I lived in Texas for about 17 years, and left after high school.
I grew up in the suburbs of Dallas. My family moved to my hometown in the early 1990s, and I remember watching the area rapidly develop. Fields of sunflowers became strip malls. Roads, which needed to be expanded every few years because so many people were moving to the area, were constantly under construction.
The Dallas area, with its convenient proximity to DFW airport, attracted a ton of workers in tech, engineering, finance, and other prestigious fields. Maybe about half of the people I grew up with were from Texas, whereas the rest of us had been born elsewhere and moved to the metroplex because of all the good jobs there. Also, at the time, the cost of living was pretty low, though that isn’t really true anymore.
Like any newly developed suburb, my hometown was a sort of strange place to grow up.
Obviously this is all just my own opinion, but the combination of rapid development and an influx of new people who weren’t from the area created a sense of being completely dislocated from history.
There was an implicit sense that history happened somewhere else.
You could go into Dallas or Fort Worth and see the museums, the old buildings, and that sort of thing. But for those of us who lived in these suburbs that sprang up in the 1990s, there was this sense that the place we lived grew up out of nothing.
Of course, like a mushroom appearing after heavy rain, suburbs like the one I grew up in may have seemed to come from nowhere, but they didn’t. With mushrooms, first there is a spore, leading to a network of mycelium running underground. The fruit body, or mushroom, that you see above ground is just a tiny part of a larger, hidden entity that has been growing for some time and has a life cycle that is easy to overlook. If you overlook what you can’t readily see, then you miss most of what’s really going on.
- https://grocycle.com/mushroom-life-cycle/
Labored metaphors aside, that’s what I see going on in places like my hometown. Or, at least, that’s how I, as a kid, perceived it. It’s easy to think that you live separately from history, and that was my experience as a kid there.
- Obviously there are a lot of people who are interested in history everywhere, I would just say that the history isn’t as easy to see somewhere like my hometown as it is to see somewhere like New York City, where I live now.
- In New York, you’re constantly confronted with history, whether it’s the age of the buildings you live and work in, or the experience of going to a park that was laid out in the 19th century.
- Whereas if you live in a newly developed suburb, where there are very few buildings that predate the 1990s, then your experience of history will be different.
It’s easy to feel like somewhere like New York City (or many other cities around the world) is “older” than somewhere like my hometown, and has less history.
Obviously, that’s untrue. Every part of the earth is as old as the rest of it. The area that my hometown now sits on has a long history of existence, and a long history of human habitation, but much of that history has been effaced or not recorded with the same enthusiasm as the history as somewhere like New York City.
But that doesn’t mean that history never happened.
In recent years, since starting this podcast, I have been taking a closer look at the history of my hometown.
- For example, when I was at my parents’ house for Christmas last year, I found a number of important historical sites within walking distance of the house I grew up in.
- When I was younger, I’d believed that nothing in my hometown predated the late 20th century. But I was proven wrong when I was confronted with multiple cemeteries containing burials dating to the 19th century.
When I was a bored teenager, I could have visited these sites and learned more about the history, but I didn’t, even though I was interested in history. I just assumed it was absent and focused on the history of other places. The more fool me.
By the way, bored teenagers will play a somewhat important story that I’m going to tell about the Old Alton Bridge, because it is a location swaddled in urban legends that have been gleefully woven by kids with nothing better to do.
- All this being said, of course history is harder to research somewhere where less of it was written down in books and newspapers.
- It becomes even harder when perhaps some powerful figures in the past may have wanted some of it to be suppressed, something that I will talk about in depth in a couple weeks.
- If you’ve heard the popular paranormal stories about the Goatman’s Bridge and you think you know the story, I’ve dug up some new information that calls some of the popular stories into question and also shines a light on some other horrific stuff.
- Also, like I mentioned, there’s certainly a trickster element at work here, and I’ve encountered a surprising number of important synchronicities during my research of the topic, which you can look forward to me unraveling in detail.
- So let’s talk a bit about the trickster.

The Trickster

- There’s a really great book called The Trickster and the Paranormal by George P. Hansen, which is exactly what it sounds like, an examination of the tricker elements in paranormal phenomena. It’s an excellent book.
  - However, I will warn you that it’s very academic. But that also means it’s extremely thorough and well cited. If you’re interested in the subject and up for a challenging read, definitely pick it up.
  - For me, the book has really helped to solidify the idea that the paranormal is permanently liminal, on the wrong side of respectability and believability. The paranormal will always involve elements of doubt and confusion. And things will come along to discredit anything that seems particularly solid in the field, preventing it from being mainstreamed.
    - Basically, the paranormal isn’t fringe because it’s fake; it’s fringe because by definition, the paranormal must be fringe.
  - As I’ve been researching the Old Alton Bridge, I’ve thought of bits of The Trickster and the Paranormal again and again, and it’s really helped me make sense–or, rather, accept some of the weirdness–of the hauntings.
- This just completely blew my mind, but while I was doing research and writing the scripts for these episodes, someone appeared on reddit and claimed that he made up the whole haunting, or, rather, that he popularized it online and beefed it up some.
  - I was delighted by this wrinkle in the story, because it fit so well into this archetypal trickster figure in the paranormal, and in general it just makes things more interesting.
- So what happened? On March 4, 2022, a reddit user who I’m going to call Bob (which is not his real name) shared a link to a video and/or a playlist containing a video that he claims contains the real story behind the Goatman’s Bridge. I went to his user page and saw that he posted it 23 times on different threads.
  - Some of the posts he commented on were about the Old Alton Bridge, Texas Hauntings, or similar topics. Others were totally unrelated, and just seemed to contain a keyword that made it come up in his search.
  - On some posts, he included an intriguing line, like “I turned a false legend about a relatively unknown old bridge in Texas into a place many refer to now as the “most haunted place in America”” and “Here is another story nobody wants to hear…about how a fake legend of a haunted bridge turned into the most haunted bridge in america.” and “I followed a false legend about a haunted bridge and manifested it into reality. It is now known as the most haunted place in America.” and “Its easy to communicate with the spirits there, I taught them how to turn that place into the most haunted bridge in America! Check this out”
- However, based on a reply that someone posted the next day, the video was deleted within 24 hours. I was only able to find one commenter who said that they had seen the video, and that was from the day it was posted.
- I found his posts 14 days after their creation.
- Bob’s youtube channel has also been deleted, and he hasn’t posted on reddit under that account since March 4. He’d had the account since 2018, but the only other visible thing that he’d posted was something on a World of Warcraft subreddit. Also on March 4, 2022, he got into a few arguments with people about metaphysical topics, but as of recording, he hasn’t been back since. I also have tried to contact him through reddit, but he hasn’t answered, and I can’t find any other way to get in touch with him.
- As far as I can tell, it seems like, in March of this year, he made a youtube video about the Old Alton Bridge, wanted to drive traffic to it by posting on reddit, but then for some reason decided to delete it. The video was called “The First Goatmans Bridge Video Ever Uploaded on Youtube – 2011 – YouTube.” It’s unclear if the video was just a reupload of the original video he made in 2011, or if he added additional commentary.
- Now, I don’t want to give away any personally identifiable information about Bob; I’m not here to dox anyone. That also means that I’m not going to post links to his posts and videos in the show notes that are publicly available on my website.
  - But I believe this person is in his mid-thirties, which I only mention because it’s relevant: Because of his age, some of the local urban legends probably predate him.
  - He’s not claiming to have invented it wholecloth, but it seems that he claims to have popularized the legend online.
  - Another relevant detail is that, based on his online activity, he has been interested in conspiracy theories, UFOs, meditation, and other metaphysical topics since at least 2011.
- Now, I’m not very interested in Bob as a person, but I am interested in what this says about the Old Alton Bridge and urban legends. He mentions that the Old Alton Bridge is one of the most famous haunted places in Texas these days, but it isn’t mentioned in older books about the paranormal and legends in Texas. He says that’s because it just wasn’t a very famous urban legend before he spread it online.
  - I can confirm that the Old Alton Bridge and the Goatman weren’t mentioned in the older books that I have access to about the paranormal or urban legends in Texas:
    - I have two books by folklorist J. Frank Dobie, Legends of Texas Volume II: Pirates’ Gold and Other Tales, and Tales of Old-Time Texas, and the only stories they have about the area are about Sam Bass. Dobie describes Sam Bass as a sort of Texan Robin Hood, an outlaw who was apparently well liked and spent some time in Denton County. However, no goatman.
    - Best Tales of Texas Ghosts by Docia Schultz Williams was published in 1998 and has plenty of stories of ghosts in the Dallas area, but no mention of Denton County or the Old Alton Bridge at all.
    - The Big Book of Texas Ghost Stories by Alan Brown, published in 2012, doesn’t mention the Old Alton Bridge.
    - Haunted Texas: Ghosts and Strange Phenomena of the Lone Star State by Alan Brown, published in 2008, has no mention of the Old Alton Bridge, even though it does mention another Denton haunting, the haunting of the University of North Texas’ Bruce Hall.
  - On the other hand, the book Haunted Plano, Texas by Mary Jacobs, which was published in 2018, has a whole section about the Old Alton Bridge, even though it isn’t in Plano. There is a Plano Goat Man legend dating to at least the 70s or 80s which she mentions in the book, but in the subsection about the Old Alton Bridge Goatman, there’s no date given for when that legend began.
    - In a future episode in this series, I’ll go into more detail about some of the other Texas Goat Men, since there are a few of them.
  - The Goatman’s Bridge’s absence from older books does support Bob’s claim that the current stories of the haunting may be of somewhat recent manufacture.
- One thing I want to investigate throughout this series is: do I believe Bob?
  - Even if I don’t believe all of the details of Bob’s stories, his claims about the legend seeming to change around the late 2000s/early 2010 seems plausible.
  - So I’ve been trying to pinpoint when exactly the different legends about the Old Alton Bridge came about.
- My current hypothesis is that it was a local urban legend that was popularized by the internet, and then recently skyrocketed to fame by being covered in Ghost Adventures and Buzzfeed Unsolved.
  - That would also help to explain how I’d never heard of the bridge or its legends despite having grown up near it.
  - Now, even if parts of the urban legend were made up, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t haunted and there’s nothing paranormal there, but I do have a feeling that there’s something artificial about the location’s fame.
- At this point, I don’t believe Bob’s claim of having made up or created this urban legend, not really. Some sort of urban legend clearly did exist about that bridge before he came around.
- That being said, as a counterpoint to my own statement, I wanted to read this bit from The Tricker and the Paranormal. This passage describes how often, when hoaxers come out, people often don’t believe them. Even though someone has admitted to making it all up, they still believe the story.
- This is in the context of UFO hoaxes, but I think it’s relevant here:
“The paranormal, by its nature, is enmeshed in frauds and hoaxes, especially in cases with high public visibility. . . . Exposes of hoaxes are often not satisfactorily convincing for everyone. Even a full confession by perpetrators can be inadequate to convince die-hards that they had been hoodwinked.” (TATP 249)
So, am I a chump who’s been hoodwinked by the many myths and legends of the Old Alton Bridge? Maybe. I certainly don’t know.
But back to Bob: I think it’s a bummer that he deleted his videos, but at the same time, he might not have caught my attention if he hadn’t. Maybe I would have just watched his video and been like, eh, this just seems like someone trying to drum up eyeballs for their youtube video, and that wouldn’t have been compelling to me at all.
- Also, while I’m intrigued by someone doing so much promotion of a video and then quickly deleting it, it doesn’t read as that strange to me. I have ADHD and am pretty familiar with the impulse to embark on a big project only to change my mind a few days later. It also strikes me as something that an anxious person might do. Of course, there could be another explanation for this, but I’m inclined to go with Occam’s razor on this one.
In the end, though, if I were to find out that the legend has been faked, that sort of doesn’t matter.
- This is a death of the author type situation, where if the Old Alton Bridge legends were embellished by one or more people online and then spread like wildfire, it doesn’t really matter.
- So many people have gone to the bridge and tried to communicate with things that if it wasn’t already a sort of thin place, I imagine that amount of human activity trying to engage with the paranormal would get something’s attention.
- Also, a look at the terrible history of the place as told by urban legends reveals a part of history that is often overlooked and is worth delving into.
- In looking into this, I learned things about the area that I grew up in that I didn’t learn by living there, or in my years of Texas history education in school.
- So, in future episodes, I will talk all about the disturbing legends of the area, and the horrific things that have happened there in the distant and not-so-distant past.
- Next week’s episode will be about the history of the bridge, as well as what it was like when I visited it in December 2021.

Sources consulted RE: The Trickster and the Goatman (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Books consulted: The Trickster and the Goatman (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Don’t miss past episodes:

Goatman’s Bridge Series: Sources and Episode List

Here’re the sources I used in the Goatman’s Bridge series. (The individual episode pages linked below may contain some additional sources.)

Check out the whole series:

Sources consulted RE: Goatman’s Bridge Series

Books consulted:

Websites and articles consulted:

http://www.historyofbridges.com/facts-about-bridges/pratt-truss/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/pratt-truss
https://www.totalsoftwater.com/2015/02/water-table-falls/
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth542517/m1/1/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth542517/m1/5/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abutment
https://www.google.com/maps/uv?pb=!1s0x864dccb9ff3e525b%3A0x427c899463ab2996!3m1!7e115!5sGoogle%20Search!15sCgIgAQ&hl=en&imagekey=!1e10!2sAF1QipPh_cTXSUG69zbAbFGZkRo6XXPER_0mfH1fFFa5&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiT1q-Vwsr2AhU9jokEHXUSD6IQ9fkHKAF6BAgBECY
https://dentoncountyhistoryandculture.wordpress.com/2017/10/27/a-historic-haunt-old-alton-bridge/
https://www.yelp.com/biz/old-alton-bridge-denton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Alton_Bridge
https://www.discoverdenton.com/listing/old-alton-bridge/764/
https://www.dallasobserver.com/arts/buzzfeed-supernatural-investigators-visit-denton-bridge-to-see-if-its-really-haunted-by-a-half-goat-half-demon-10051546
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/tx-alton/
https://web.archive.org/web/20170401150304/http://sites.google.com/site/trailsofdentoncounty/Home/the-trails-of-highland-village/elm-fork-trail—old-alton-bridge/old-alton-bridge
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/gh-lallorona/
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/tx-alton/
https://web.archive.org/web/20170401150304/http://sites.google.com/site/trailsofdentoncounty/Home/the-trails-of-highland-village/elm-fork-trail—old-alton-bridge/old-alton-bridge
https://dentoncountyhistoryandculture.wordpress.com/2017/10/27/a-historic-haunt-old-alton-bridge/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Alton_Bridge
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/goatmans-bridge
https://www.ghostsofdenton.com/blog/old-alton-bridge
https://wedentondoit.com/blog/2013/10/18/back-in-the-day-goatmans-bridge
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/tx-alton/
https://texashillcountry.com/goatman-bridge-history-hauntings-denton-alton-bridge/
Images: https://texashistory.unt.edu/search/?q5=%22Goatman%27s%20Bridge%22&t5=dc_subject&searchType=advanced
https://texashistory.unt.edu/search/?q=old+alton+bridge&t=fulltext&sort=&fq=
Retrospect, Winter 2009: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth542410/m1/2/?q=old%20alton%20bridge
A Guide to the Research and Documentation of Local Texas Bridges: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1222743/m1/5/?q=old%20alton%20bridge
Retrospect, July, August, September, 2003 : https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth542517/m1/5/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
Retrospect, Spring and Summer 2012: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth542490/m1/3/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
North Texas Daily (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 99, No. 38, Ed. 1 Wednesday, March 28, 2012: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth255897/m1/1/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
Retrospect, Spring 2010: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth542485/m1/2/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
North Texas Daily (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 94, No. 34, Ed. 1 Friday, October 23, 2009: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth145732/m1/6/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
North Texas Daily (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 91, No. 19, Ed. 1 Thursday, September 28, 2006: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth145373/m1/5/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
Texas Highways, Volume 52 Number 11, November 2005 Page: 26: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth838481/m1/30/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
Texas Highways, Volume 52 Number 11, November 2005 Page: 23: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth838481/m1/27/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
Texas Highways, Volume 52 Number 11, November 2005 Page: 25: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth838481/m1/29/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
Texas Highways, Volume 52 Number 11, November 2005 Page: 27: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth838481/m1/31/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
On The Record, Vol. 3, No. 3, Ed. 1 Friday, August 12, 2011 Page: 29 of 44: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth209156/m1/29/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
Goatmansbridge.com (defunct):
- https://web.archive.org/web/20100101000000*/goatmansbridge.com
- https://web.archive.org/web/20100617152737/http://www.goatmansbridge.com/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20100922141701/http://goatmansbridge.com/Paranormal-activity.html
“Paranormal investigators not afraid to scare up some ghosts” 10:49 PM CDT on Saturday, October 28, 2006 By ROY APPLETON / The Dallas Morning News https://web.archive.org/web/20100619005059/http://www.goatmansbridge.com/DallasNewspage.html
North Texas Daily (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 105, No. 7, Ed. 1 Thursday, October 8, 2015 Page: 1 of 8: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth861503/m1/1/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
North Texas Daily (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 105, No. 7, Ed. 1 Thursday, October 8, 2015 Page: 5 of 8: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth861503/m1/5/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
http://www.texasescapes.com/CentralTexasTownsNorth/Alton-Texas.htm
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/alton-tx-denton-county
https://starlocalmedia.com/lakecitiessun/old-alton-bridge-a-legend-in-denton-county/article_32390a5e-5bb8-11e4-859b-fb074b8b933f.html
https://cw33.com/news/dfw-ghost-stories-does-the-goatman-haunt-old-alton-bridge/
Texas Parks & Wildlife, Volume 78, Number 3, April 2020 Page: 8: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1364370/m1/8/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
https://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/2017-10-27/day-trips-old-alton-bridge-denton/
Drone shots of the bridge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMOttet8pQU
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth542490/m1/3/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
The Tall Grass West Of Town: Racial Violence In Denton County During The Rise Of The Second Ku Klux Klan by Micah Carlson Crittenden, which was a University of North Texas masters thesis published in May 2020: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1703339/m2/1/high_res_d/CRITTENDEN-THESIS-2020.pdf
“Removing the Danger in a Business Way”: The History and Memory of Quakertown, Denton, Texas, by Chelsea Stallings, masters thesis at the University of North Texas in 2015: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc804840/m2/1/high_res_d/thesis.pdf
https://omeka.library.unt.edu/s/black-denton/page/kkk
Hauntology Man, a thesis by UNT student Adam Michael Wright: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1157557/m1/13/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2019/01/10/how-secrets-of-the-old-denton-county-klan-were-discovered-by-four-unt-history-students/
Uncovering St. John’s: https://omeka.library.unt.edu/s/stjohns/page/welcome
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2018/02/16/a-lonely-watchdog-in-denton-suddenly-finds-new-allies-as-he-fights-to-update-a-dark-history/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Beautiful_movement
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/777095.White_Lilacs
Additional source about Quakertown: http://www.dentonhistory.net/page32/Quaker.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dealey_Plaza
https://www.texasobserver.org/troubled-times/
https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/texas-troubles
https://web-clear.unt.edu/course_projects/HIST2610/content/CaseStudy/TexasTroubles_old/CS4_texastroubles_list.htm
https://www.tsl.texas.gov/exhibits/civilwar/trouble.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denton,_Texas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denton_Confederate_Soldier_Monument
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/denton-county-courthouse-confederate-monument-moving-inside-to-town-square-museum/2607739/
https://dfw.cbslocal.com/2017/08/16/denton-man-fight-confederate-monument/
https://wedentondoit.com/blog/2013/10/18/back-in-the-day-goatmans-bridge
https://factschology.com/mmm-podcast-articles/demon-goatmans-bridge-texas
https://www.haunts.com/goatman’shauntedfarm
https://allcryptid.fandom.com/wiki/Goatman
https://livingbluetx.com/2020/11/what-happened-to-lermont-stower-jones/?cn-reloaded=1
http://www.thedentonite.com/culture/parents-of-drowned-teenager-dissatisfied-with-investigation
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/virtual-fundraiser-to-honor-life-of-black-teen-who-died-under-unusual-circumstances-11992063
https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1703339/m2/1/high_res_d/CRITTENDEN-THESIS-2020.pdf
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/virtual-fundraiser-to-honor-life-of-black-teen-who-died-under-unusual-circumstances-11992063
http://www.thedentonite.com/culture/parents-of-drowned-teenager-dissatisfied-with-investigation
https://livingbluetx.com/2020/11/what-happened-to-lermont-stower-jones/?cn-reloaded=1
https://dentonrc.com/news/at-least-one-fled-old-alton-bridge-after-teen-s-disappearance/article_5434fe7b-53ac-502a-b694-68a020988c87.html
https://dentonrc.com/news/authorities-release-autopsy-of-teen-found-near-old-alton-bridge/article_de86e69b-5b24-5426-b056-f04aea40fed8.html
https://www.fox4news.com/news/officials-denton-teen-died-after-jumping-into-creek
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/195193576/lermont-charmale-stowers-jones
https://artandseek.org/calendar/event/106334/below-the-surface-justice-for-lermont-stowers-jones-virtual
https://www.crosstimbersgazette.com/2018/11/20/teens-body-recovered-from-hickory-creek/
https://dentonrc.com/news/family-seeking-funds-for-private-investigation-into-a-denton-high-seniors-2018-death/article_0422aa8a-40b3-5b08-b271-13dae80e4cb6.html
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/virtual-fundraiser-to-honor-life-of-black-teen-who-died-under-unusual-circumstances-11992063
Defunct: https://www.gofundme.com/f/justice-for-lermont-stowersjones
Defunct? https://justiceformont.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatman
https://sites.psu.edu/urbanlegends/2019/01/25/the-goatman/
https://allcryptid.fandom.com/wiki/Goatman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_(god)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faun
https://hauntedauckland.com/site/goatman/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DarknessPrevails/comments/bg7wbh/the_goatman_of_new_zealand/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothman
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/4486761-What-did-we-see-last-night
https://cryptidz.fandom.com/wiki/Goatman
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https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-terrifying-goatman-who-haunts-maryland-4885f3814fca
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Lick_Monster
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I went to Goatman’s Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

In December 2021, I visited the Old Alton Bridge. Here’s what it’s like to visit the famously haunted bridge, as well as the history of the bridge itself.

I went to Goatman’s Bridge: In December 2021, I visited the Old Alton Bridge. Here’s what it’s like to visit the famously haunted bridge, as well as the history of the bridge itself.

Highlights include:
• Lots of mud
• Some bridge trivia
• Some . . . interesting . . . reviews of the bridge that I found

CONTENT NOTE: I talk about gun use in this episode (not about people getting shot, but about people shooting guns near the bridge because they’re bored.) If you don’t want to hear about that, then definitely skip this episode. You should be fine to pick back up on the series in the next episode.

Subscribe on Patreon to support the show and get access to the Secret Library, map of Haunted NYC, Solo Estes Session Kit, and more: https://www.patreon.com/buriedsecretspodcast

Episode Script for I went to Goatman’s Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Intro
- In this episode, I want to talk about the history of the Old Alton Bridge, or Goatman’s Bridge, and the first, and so far only, time I’ve visited it.
- Mention: Youtube takedown
Old Alton Bridge History
- What is the Old Alton Bridge?
  - The Old Alton Bridge was constructed in 1884.
  - It’s the only remaining iron Pratt-truss bridge in the county.
    - If you aren’t familiar with Pratt-truss bridges, the style was invented in 1844, and many bridges were constructed in the style up into the early 20th century. When I see a picture of that type of bridge, I think of them as railroad bridges. It’s basically a flat bridge (as in, not arched), that has vertical wooden parts, with diagonal iron parts connecting the wooden parts to the bottom of the bridge.
    - http://www.historyofbridges.com/facts-about-bridges/pratt-truss/
    - https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/pratt-truss
    - https://www.garrettsbridges.com/design/pratt-truss/
  - The bridge is 145 feet long, and it’s over a sort of river, the Hickory Creek Tributary, at Copper Canyon Road, though the road was rerouted in 1997 or maybe 2001 (sources differ), when a new concrete and steel bridge was built.
  - The bridge was built using a kit from the King Iron Bridge Manufacturing Company in Ohio, which apparently supplied many bridges in Texas and around North America. I just love the idea of building a bridge from a kit.
  - The purpose of the bridge was to create a path for travelers who were going between the larger towns of Denton and Dallas, and it was called the Old Alton Bridge because it was right near a small town called Alton. The location of the bridge had formerly been a popular ford for crossing cattle.
    - At the time the bridge was built, Alton, which had been the county seat from 1850-1856, was in a decline. I read on legendsofamerica.com that at its inception, the town of Alton was laid out, and they sold lots, but that none of the planned public buildings were built. Apparently there was only one residence in town, the home of one W.C. Baines, who had a farmstead there for a while. So county business just happened at his house.
    - However, it sounds like the area lacked potable water, despite being near Pecan Creek and Hickory Creek, so they moved the county seat again, calling the new location Alton. The new Alton ended up growing a bit, and it had a hotel, stores, some homes, a blacksmith’s shop, a school, a church, a saloon, a hotel, and even some doctors and lawyers.
    - However, apparently most people were still unhappy with it as the location of the county seat. So the county seat was moved again, in 1857, to Denton, which was more centrally located and had a better water supply.
      - I don’t 100% understand what was going on with the water, but apparently there were issues in the area with falling water tables, which led to the frequent water shortages.
        
        https://www.totalsoftwater.com/2015/02/water-table-falls/
    - Many of the businesses in Alton moved to Denton. Even the post office closed in 1859, less than 10 years after the new town of Alton had been established.
      - Nowadays, all that’s left of the town is the Hickory Creek Baptist Church, and the Old Alton Cemetery, which dates back to 1852 and is next to the church. However, I believe that the original church building is long gone.
    - So, fast forward to 1884, when the Old Alton Bridge was built.
    - I read in some sources that the hope was that the bridge would help revitalize that area, but it sounds like Alton was basically abandoned at that point.
    - It sounds like the bridge was frequently used to carry traffic from the old postal road, and the Ranger patrol trail.
  - At first, horses were used to cross the bridge, but then later on, once cars were a thing, the bridge was used by cars.
    - It was a single-lane bridge, so up until the new bridge was opened, cars had to honk their horns before crossing, and take turns crossing from each direction. It sounds like it must have been a real pain.
    - It’s wild to me that I was living in the area, very close to the bridge, at the time when the old bridge was still in use.
    - It was apparently heavily used up until 1997, when it was declared unsafe for vehicular traffic. The bridge was renovated in 1998. Then the Old Alton Bridge was closed, and a new bridge was opened right next to it.
    - In 2000, the Old Alton Bridge was restored again. They added guard rails to the approaches to the bridge, and steel lattice to the sides, to keep pedestrians from falling off the bridge. They also repainted and refinished it.
      - Before the restoration, the wooden deck of the bridge had been rotting, and the abutments were falling.
      - I didn’t know what an abutment was, but apparently it’s the substructure at either end of a bridge or dam which supports the bridge’s superstructure. So in this case, I believe it would be the pillar-type things that are below the bridge supporting it.
      - I will say, despite the two renovations a couple decades ago, the bridge has certainly seen better days. I’m sure it’s perfectly safe, but I was actually fairly surprised to hear that there had been such a recent restoration of the wooden deck in particular, since that’s looking a little rough these days.
        
        https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth542517/m1/1/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
        
        https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth542517/m1/5/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
        
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abutment
  - The bridge had been added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1988, and it finally became a Texas Historic Landmark in 2010.
  - Nowadays, it’s part of a hiking trail and a bridle trail for horses.
Visiting the bridge
- I first heard of the Old Alton Bridge in 2019, when I heard a podcast episode about it. (I think it was an episode of Graveyard Tales.) At that point, I’d been living in NYC for more than a decade, and was surprised to hear of an apparently famous haunted bridge in my old neck of the woods. It seemed like something I should have heard of before.
  - What surprised me was that the Old Alton Bridge, which is near Denton, Texas, is very close to where I grew up.
    - I wasn’t much of a driver when I was a teenager, but it was so close that I would have been completely comfortable driving there, technically I could have even biked there, and almost nothing in Texas is biking distance.
    - I was bummed out that I hadn’t heard of it until 2019. I was pretty bored growing up, so it would have been cool to check out somewhere interesting like this trail, which is naturally very popular among teenagers in the area.
- Then, in 2020, I was googling for urban legends near my hometown in Texas and found the story of the Old Alton Bridge. I was excited to check it out, so I planned to go there when visiting my parents for Christmas, but that plan was scuttled when we couldn’t travel because of COVID.
  - So then last Christmas, in 2021, I was finally in Texas with my family. I very innocently suggested that we go for a hike at the Elm Fork Hiking and Equestrian Trail, a nearby place that I heard was good . . . and of course that place was the location of the Old Alton Bridge.
    - I thought my family would assume that I wanted to go there for paranormal reasons, but I guess they just took me for my word when I said I wanted to go to this hiking trail, which just happens to have an interesting historic bridge.
  - Now, I thought the trail was a little muddy but otherwise fine, but my wife and my mom weren’t so happy with the location. They were just like, “What is this weird place that you dragged us to?” Which is fair.
  - We didn’t spend that much time at the bridge; we walked around, took some pictures, and then walked maybe a quarter mile down one of the hiking trails, but it was extremely muddy, and I felt guilty dragging everyone there, so then we turned back and left. I didn’t do any kind of paranormal investigation or anything while I was there, but it was definitely cool to see it.
  - I posted a picture of the bridge on Instagram to see if anyone recognized it, and I was surprised by how many people knew it, since I grew up nearby but hadn’t been familiar with it. However, apparently it’s very well known for being on an episode of Ghost Adventures and Buzzfeed Unsolved: Supernatural, which I’ve never really watched, but which I know are super popular.
Yelp and Google reviews
- Later in the series, when I examine all of the specific claims of the paranormal that I’ve been able to find about the Old Alton Bridge. I’ve done a deep dive into Yelp and Google reviews, YouTube comments, and basically anything that mentions the paranormal there. But just to help set the stage and get some other people’s thoughts on what it’s like to visit the bridge, I wanted to read a few yelp and google reviews to illustrate the type of vibe that the area had:
  - Christine M. from Gainesville, TX, gave it 3 stars in 2019, saying:
    - “We signed up for a ghost tour on a Friday night froM 7-11.. we encountered a bunch of teens smoking out and a car driving by shooting a handgun out the window ( drive by shooting in the park) who does that … it’s a cool place other then that” (Yelp)
  - Richard L. from Frisco, TX, gave it 1 star in 2021 and said:
    - “I am mystified by these positive reviews. This is a great place to do two things: get eaten alive by mosquitoes, or be murdered. I came here to take photos. If you enjoy pics of broken televisions and pornographic graffiti, it’s a fantastic opportunity. Otherwise, do not stop here unless your car dies. Even then, stay in the car, wait for AAA, and pray.” (Yelp)
  - Travis M. from Dallas rated it 5 stars in 2018, with what I assume is a sarcastic review:
    - “Great experience! We went there late at night and there were plenty of locals who were more than happy to lead us off into the woods down dark paths with no cell service. For casual encounters with crackheads and the occasional supernatural sighting that’s probably just a robbery taking place look no further! Bring your family and your favorite self defense tool.” (Yelp)
  - Russell O says:
    - “Too many teenagers screaming and using profanity. Might be better on a weeknight. Other than that, the trail is interesting. Lots of history there.”
    - 3 stars (Google)
  - But the reviews aren’t all bad.
    - Kaitlin B said:
      - “Whether you’re “just here for the cult stuff,” the history, or the hiking, you really can’t lose. As long as you’re expecting the graffiti, it’s not a bad place to go for a easy hiking trail. It hugs the water. The trail was a lot less secluded than I was expecting. I went on a Tuesday morning and came across several hikers. I wouldn’t necessarily bring children to the actual bridge. When I went, the bridge itself had what appeared to be prop blood on it. But if you live in the area, it’s a nice little piece of history (and ghost story).”
      - 5 stars (Google)
- As you may have observed, lot of reviewers complained about the graffiti on the bridge.
  - Ally K, who visited in 2019, posted a picture of a pentagram spray painted on the bridge’s wooden deck. When I visited, I did see a pentagram, but it was painted in the concrete near the new bridge.
    - https://www.google.com/maps/uv?pb=!1s0x864dccb9ff3e525b%3A0x427c899463ab2996!3m1!7e115!5sGoogle%20Search!15sCgIgAQ&hl=en&imagekey=!1e10!2sAF1QipPh_cTXSUG69zbAbFGZkRo6XXPER_0mfH1fFFa5&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiT1q-Vwsr2AhU9jokEHXUSD6IQ9fkHKAF6BAgBECY
  - I assume these pentagrams were spray painted by teenagers who want to be edgy, not by actual satanists, though who knows.
    - Though to be clear, if the graffiti was by actual satanists, I wouldn’t have a problem with that. It just seems like a really juvenile thing to do, so my money is on the teenagers.
    - I will say that based on the number of reviews complaining about the graffiti, if you wanted to annoy adults, vandalism would be an effective way to do it.
  - Which, again, is why it seems like a thing teenagers would be doing. Also, none of the graffiti that I saw there was particularly skillfully done, so I doubt they were the work of adults.
  - A reviewer named Jay C describes the vibe of the bridge very well: “The bridge itself has been somewhat disrespected but in a kind Gen Z type way.” I totally agree with that.
  - One reviewer said it could get pretty crowded with people taking wedding and graduation photos, which is a really interesting creative choice to me, but one that I respect.
  - Many reviewers also said there were lots of mosquitos, one person (who was a reptile fan) said it was a great place to see snakes, and a bug enthusiast said it’s a great place to find cool beetles and millipedes.
    - Oh also, there was one review that just said “Too many spiders” three stars.
    - Folks have said that you should beware of poison ivy and poison oak, but there are also beautiful plants including wild passion flowers. I had no idea those grew in that area, but some folks posted really beautiful pictures of them. Apparently there are also mustang grapes.
  - Also, reviewers have said that there are wild boar and bobcats in the area, so when we’re thinking about things that might be roaming around in the woods that people might mistake for something paranormal, keep in mind that there are plenty of animals around. I would assume that there are also coyotes, since there are plenty in the area, but I don’t think I saw anyone mention them.
  - Other things you should know if you visit is that apparently there aren’t restroom facilities there. And you should bring plenty of water because I’m not sure that there are water fountains; I didn’t see any, at least.
- I feel like some of these reviews are a little extreme, but since so many people have guns and are bored, they might not be 100% off base about the area around the Old Alton Bridge being dangerous because of irresponsible humans, at least sometimes.
Outro
- That’s the history of the bridge, and what it’s like visiting it today.
- Next time, I want to get into the most popular legends behind the Old Alton Bridge’s hauntings.

Sources consulted RE: I went to Goatman’s Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Books consulted: I went to Goatman’s Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Don’t miss past episodes:

This Way to the Goatman (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

One of the most famous urban legends about the Goatman’s Bridge (aka the Old Alton Bridge) has roots in a hidden, unpleasant part of the county’s history. This episode looks at the legend of the Goatman and the history underpinning the story.

CONTENT NOTE: This episode contains discussions of racially motivated murders and white supremacist hate groups.

Episode Script for This Way to the Goatman (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Intro to This Way to the Goatman (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

In this episode, I’ll get into one of the most popular stories related by urban legends about the bridge.
- The story goes that the bridge is nicknamed the Goat Man’s Bridge because of a pretty horrific story that involves a Black man being lynched by the KKK. So, content warning for the rest of this episode.
- Honestly, the history of this area is very rough.
- Also, I mentioned this in the first episode of this series, but just a reminder that I grew up in Denton County, where all of the things I’m going to be talking about took place. This episode will be exploring a lot of stuff that I learned about where I’m from, which I had no idea about until doing this research. While I’ve lived in NYC for my entire adult life, I even went back to Denton to get married: my wife and I got married at a converted grocery warehouse just off Denton Square, where the county courthouse is, and very close to where some of the stuff I’ll be talking about takes place.
- I mention all of this just to say that I get that this history is hard to hear and grapple with, especially if you’re learning about somewhere you’re from. But I think it’s really important to better understand local history. Also, I believe that knowing an area’s history is vital to researching the paranormal there.

“Never confuse the facts of a story with the truth of a tale” – Dr. Shaun Treat, former professor at the University of North Texas and founder of the Denton Haunts historical ghost tour, quoted in Hauntology Man, a thesis by UNT student Adam Michael Wright

https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1157557/m1/13/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22

The Murder of Oscar Washburn

Let’s talk about the most famous story related to the bridge’s history, the murder of Oscar Washburn.
The story goes that a Black man named Oscar Washburn, who was a goat farmer who lived nearby, was lynched by the KKK in 1938. (Or some sources say 1937.)
- People have tried to find records confirming that someone named Oscar Washburn lived there, but researchers haven’t been successful yet.
- The legend says that Washburn and his family moved into a home a bit north of the bridge. He was well respected by everyone in the area, and was seen as a dependable and honest businessman. People nicknamed him the Goatman. On the bridge, he hung a sign that said “This way to the Goatman.”
- However, local Klansmen saw his success and didn’t like that a Black businessman was doing well.
- So in August 1938, Klansmen who held positions in the local government crossed the bridge, driving with their headlights off I assume to surprise him. They then kidnapped Washburn from his home and hanged him from the Old Alton Bridge.
- The story goes that when they looked down to make sure he had died, the noose was empty.
- They panicked, thinking he had survived and get revenge. So they went back to his home and murdered his wife and children.
- Some stories say that the KKK burned down his house with his wife and children inside to try to “bait” Washburn into emerging from hiding, if he was hiding.
- No one ever saw Washburn again.
- There’s an implication that maybe something paranormal happened that made him disappear from the noose, but it’s always phrased kind of vaguely.
- The local legend also says that if you are descended from Klan members and go to the bridge at night and honk your horn three times, the Goatman will appear and get his revenge.
  - https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1703339/m2/1/high_res_d/CRITTENDEN-THESIS-2020.pdf
Now, like I mentioned in the first episode, there is a trickster element at work in the stories of the Old Alton Bridge hauntings, so you shouldn’t believe everything you hear about the bridge. If I had to make a guess based on some stuff that I’ll get into a few episodes from now, when I really dig into the veracity of the urban legends, I would say that I probably don’t think that Oscar Washburn existed.
But, before you discount this legend, it’s important to understand that Washburn’s story isn’t the only story of a lynching that happened in the area, which I’ll talk about more in the next episode.
Whether or not Washburn existed, the KKK had a huge presence in Denton and worked to terrorize and destroy Black communities in the area.
And, as the KKK often was, they were, unfortunately, effective and brutal.

The KKK in Denton

- For a long time, there has been a narrative that racial violence didn’t happen in Denton county. I came across that assertion in several things that I read. However, recently, some additional information has been unearthed.
  - For this part of the episode, one of my main sources will be a 150-page paper called The Tall Grass West Of Town: Racial Violence In Denton County During The Rise Of The Second Ku Klux Klan by Micah Carlson Crittenden, which was a University of North Texas masters thesis published in May 2020.
    - https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1703339/m2/1/high_res_d/CRITTENDEN-THESIS-2020.pdf
  - I wanted to read a bit of the paper that talks about the myths about there not being racial violence in the area:
    - “For six months I was told that Denton County was not racially violent and had internalized that belief by fellow students who grew up in the area, Denton County officials, and residents. I believed them when they told me that Denton had both very little slavery and subsequently, very little racial strife, because the narrative was so widespread.”
  - She would go on to find that there was a nearly one-in-nine chance of Black Dentonites being arrested, facing violence, or being murdered during 1909-1925. So obviously racial violence was extremely common in Denton at the time.
  - According to her research, between 1860-1880, people in Denton County lunched at least 17 men and one boy, and apparently there are accounts alluding to others without naming the victim’s names..
- The Dallas Morning News published an article about four students (including Crittenden) at the University of North Texas (which is in Denton) who discovered a horrific part of the area’s history.
  - These students wanted to research the St. John’s community of Pilot Point, which was a place where freed enslaved people and their families from Alabama and Missouri moved after the Civil War.
  - However, when they were looking at the census records, they saw that between 1910 and 1930, there was a huge decrease in the number of Black people living there. So they set off to find out what had decimated the Black community.
  - They spent months researching it, and determined that Black people in the area were intentionally driven away. Some people were scared off, whereas others were likely abducted and lynched.
  - In 1922, Texas had more racial lynchings than any other state. On the other hand, in many other states, the number of lynchings was thought to have declined somewhat after 1919.
    - https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1703339/m2/1/high_res_d/CRITTENDEN-THESIS-2020.pdf
  - The KKK was extremely active in Denton, Fort Worth, and Dallas.
    - Denton did not have its own KKK chapter at first, but Dallas’ had Klavern No. 66 and Fort Worth had Klavern No. 101. Nearby Oak Cliff also had its own chapter. It’s likely that one of those chapters included Denton residents, but Denton would later form its own chapter of the Klan, No. 136.
      - Source: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc804840/m2/1/high_res_d/thesis.pdf
      - https://omeka.library.unt.edu/s/black-denton/page/kkk
  - Let’s pause for some brief background on the KKK in the early 20th century.
    - So, the first version of the KKK came about after the Civil War, during reconstruction. Its goal was to overthrow Republican state governments, and they did that through violence against Black people and voter intimidation. That version of the KKK was eventually suppressed by the federal government.
      - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_Act
    - The second Klan started in Georgia in 1915.
      - If you, like me, have taken many film classes, you might remember that The Birth of a Nation came out in 1915. The film, which you learn about in film classes because it pioneered a lot of film techniques, is notoriously racist in its depiction of Black people, and portrays the KKK as heroic and noble.
        
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation
The Birth of a Nation had a huge impact on fanning the flames of white supremacy. To read from wikipedia, the KKK:
- - - - “grew after 1920 and flourished nationwide in the early and mid-1920s, including urban areas of the Midwest and West. Taking inspiration from D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation, which mythologized the founding of the first Klan, it employed marketing techniques and a popular fraternal organization structure. ”
    - The second version of the KKK was a white supremacist organization, so they hated Black people, and they also disliked Jewish people, Catholics, and southern and eastern European immigrants like Italians, Russians, and Lithuanians.
    - They introduced some news ways of intimidating people such as mass parades, like the one in Denton. They also burned crosses and wore the robes and pointed hoods, which came from The Birth of a Nation and the book that the film was based on.
    - Supposedly, by the mid-1920s, the Klan had between 3 and 8 million members.
      - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan#Second_KKK
- Anyway, back to the research that the UNT students did. They found some awful news articles.
  - One 1922 article entitled “Prisoners Spirited from Unguarded Jail” and printed in The Dallas Express said that two Black men, who were accused of stealing horses and put into the jail, were kidnapped.
  - Someone left an unsigned note on the door of the local newspaper office that said “Both Negroes got what they had coming. Let this be a warning to all Negro loafers. Negroes get a job or leave town.”
  - The article went on to say that two additional Black people had disappeared from the jail and hadn’t been heard from since.
- The students noticed a pattern, which was when Black people were accused of crimes, while there would often be intense and sensational articles at the beginning, the coverage would suddenly just stop. No coverage of the trial, and often the accused people’s names weren’t mentioned. Black people were being disappeared. They would be accused of a crime, put into jail, kidnapped from jail, and then murdered by the KKK.
  - Crittenden, who wrote her thesis about this, found that in the 1920s, the KKK and Denton law enforcement formed a partnership to enact racial violence and cover it up.
  - Sheriff, City Marshall, County Attorney, and District Judge were all members of Klavern 136
  - Also, in case you’re wondering, the alleged crimes would be things like stealing a silver pencil, borrowing a coat, or vagrancy. So incredibly minor crimes that certainly shouldn’t carry a death sentence.
    - Even if someone wasn’t lynched, they often would face huge fines, which required them to work on “chain gangs,” as part of the convict lease system. If that sounds a little bit like slavery, there’s a reason for that. Also, sidenote, as I’ve talked about in prior episodes, that still happens today.
    - https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1703339/m2/1/high_res_d/CRITTENDEN-THESIS-2020.pdf
- This was a pretty common occurrence during the Jim Crow era.
  - Someone would be accused of a crime, brought to jail, and then the jailer would “just happen” to not be around when the KKK came to abduct and murder the Black victim.
  - There were never any witnesses to these abductions. And of course there was no damage to the doors or cells, which means that someone entered with a key.
- So to be clear, the Klan wasn’t breaking into jails, overpowering jailers, and kidnapping people who had been accused (but not convicted) of crimes.
  - They were being allowed in, with authorities knowing full well what would happen to the KKK’s victims.
  - The KKK was just a part of the system of “Jim Crow justice.”
  - There was usually no investigation, no attempt to solve the murders.
- Like I said, the KKK was a huge force in Denton. Around Christmas 1921, the Klan made its first major public appearance in Denton. This was the first major action by Klavern 136, the Denton chapter of the Klan.
  - One article described the scene thusly: “Just before 9 o’clock over 300 white-robed and hooded figures, headed by a torch of red fire, appeared and paraded the streets for nearly two hours. They moved in silence, and the crowd looked on almost as silently.”
  - Now, from what I’ve read, the torch was actually a burning cross. They apparently also had a sign that said “Denton Klan, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”
  - Several thousand people showed up to watch the parade.
  - https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1703339/m2/1/high_res_d/CRITTENDEN-THESIS-2020.pdf
  - https://omeka.library.unt.edu/s/black-denton/page/kkk
- The researchers did a review of all mentions of the KKK in Denton newspapers and records between 1917 and 1928.
  - They were mentioned 303 times.
  - They also reviewed all reports of a Black person being arrested in Denton county from 1909 and 1925, and they cross-referenced the two lists.
  - Unsurprisingly, they found that Klan violence got worse whenever any kind of crime allegedly involving Black people happened, which seems to indicate a close relationship between the KKK and the cops.
- If you want to know more about this, I’ll include links with additional information in the shownotes:
  - https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2019/01/10/how-secrets-of-the-old-denton-county-klan-were-discovered-by-four-unt-history-students/
  - Uncovering St. John’s: https://omeka.library.unt.edu/s/stjohns/page/welcome

Quakertown

There’s another bit of Denton history that I wanted to cover here as well, the story of Quakertown.
- I got a lot of this info from an excellent Dallas Morning News article which I’ll include in the shownotes.
  - https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2018/02/16/a-lonely-watchdog-in-denton-suddenly-finds-new-allies-as-he-fights-to-update-a-dark-history/
- The other major source I used for this information was a thesis by Chelsea Stallings called “Removing the Danger in a Business Way”: The History and Memory of Quakertown, Denton, Texas, written for her masters at the University of North Texas in Denton in 2015. I will include a link to that in the shownotes. If you’re interested in this topic at all, I recommend that you check it out. It’s 132 pages long and is very comprehensive. Also, it goes into way, way more detail on all of this than I do, so if you want to see any of the points that I make elaborated, check it out.
  - https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc804840/m2/1/high_res_d/thesis.pdf
Back in the early 20th century, there was a bustling community in Denton called Quakertown, which was made up of 80 middle-class Black families.
- There were a few other Black neighborhood, including Peach Orchard Hill, which was a mile and a half northeast of Denton Square, and another community on Egan and Congress Streets northwest of downtown.
- But Quakertown was the largest Black neighborhood in the area. It had an especially good location, pretty near Denton Square, which is where the businesses and jobs were.
  - There was also a good school there, the Frederick Douglass Colored School (or Fred Douglass School), which had been established in 1878. The school would later be burned to the ground, in 1913.
    - It is believed that white arsonists did it; the building didn’t have gas or electricity, and there was no reason for it to burn the way it did.
    - The school was later rebuilt, but at a different location several miles away.
  - The North Texas region in general also had great soil for agriculture, and the land was cheap.
  - However, one of the most important things about Quakertown’s location was that it was near Pecan Creek (one of the creeks off of the Trinity River’s Elm Fork). White people probably didn’t want to live there because the area tended to flood, so it was acceptable for Black people to live there.
- It was called Quakertown as an homage to Quakers, who were abolitionists.
Quakertown became the Black community’s business district. The population was middle class and doing well financially; many residents owned their own homes, had jobs, and many of them owned their own businesses.
- Fifteen residents had been enslaved, and by 1920, they owned their own homes.
- A number of residents owned cars.
- A lot of the streets and sidewalks in the area were paved, and the neighborhood had telephone and electric lines.
- Folks who lived there wore the latest fashions and had beautiful gardens.
- As of 1918, Quakertown had a doctor’s office, restaurants, a general store, funeral home, school, barbershop, churches, community organizations and lodges, etc.
- The residents of Quakertown were affluent and doing well.
But this is the south in the 1920s, and white people were not happy to see prosperous Black people in their midst.
- To read from Stallings’ thesis:
  - “This type of black self-sufficiency existed outside of the white vision, and was most likely the exact reason white Denton began vocalizing disapproval of the black community in 1920. Among other things, the white vision in the early twentieth century stipulated black dependency on whites. These race relations were tightly controlled with fear and violence in the Jim Crow South.”
- The point of Jim Crow was to make Black people second-class citizens. This was accomplished through things like ensuring that Black people couldn’t participate in politics, stealing Black people’s land, setting up the sharecropping system (which left people in debt and unable to be self-sufficient), and hate crimes and lynchings, etc.
  - Hate crimes and lynchings were extremely common back then. Stallings writes:
    - “Recorded numbers indicate that between 1882 and 1968, 3,446 lynchings of African Americans occurred, almost three times as many lynchings of whites. An overwhelming majority of the total lynchings, 74%, occurred in states of the former Confederacy, and of those, 86% were black. Also of the total lynchings, 59% occurred in the seven states that make up the Deep South. Of those, 87% were black.”
    - She also writes about how the racial violence against Black people was because Black people were successful. The goal was to keep Black people down.
- No one in Quakertown was a sharecropper, but it’s likely that many of the Black people in the county, outside of Denton, were sharecroppers.
If you know a lot about American history, then when you think of the 1920s, you likely immediately think of white supremacy, the resurgence of the KKK, and hate crimes, particularly hate crimes targeting middle-class Black people.
- For example, in recent years, the Tulsa massacre has become pretty well known. In 1921, in one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in American history white terrorists burned down 35 blocks of a Black neighborhood called the Greenwood District in Tulsa, destroying one of the wealthiest Black communities in the US, which had been nicknamed “Black Wall Street.” Between 75-300 people were killed, with 800 people injured. After the attack, 10,000 residents were homeless, and many of the survivors left Tulsa.
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
- Of course, this tide of violence wasn’t unique to the 1920s. In 1898, there was a white supremacist coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, which displaced the biracial government in Wilmington. At the time, Wilmington had been a majority-Black city, and many of the Black residents were middle class professionals. If you want to know more about that, there’s an excellent book by David Zucchino called Wilmington’s Lie that tells the story.
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898
So, what happened right before the 1920s that might have whipped up some white supremacist fervor?
- Like I mentioned earlier, the second iteration of the KKK was formed in the 19teens and 20s.
- And it’s not coincidence that at the same time, local people were doing additional things to further enshrine white supremacist ideaology.
- For example, in 1918, the Daughters of the Confederacy put up a monument at Denton Square, by the courthouse, in honor of the Confederate States of America.
- Also, the Denton Record-Chronicle, the main newspaper in the area, was operated by one Will C. Edwards, who, according to Crittenden, was a Klan candidate for the Texas State House of Representatives in 1922 and Lieutenant Governor in 1924. So, as Crittenden points out, because the newspaper was run by a Klan member, it’s safe to say that the DRC’s reporting around this time period should be considered propaganda.
  - The paper repeatedly printed articles mentioning The Birth of a Nation, literally for years after it was released. In 1917, two years after the film’s release, Denton’s all-white, female College of Industrial Arts (or CIA), which was a block away from Quakertown, screened The Birth of a Nation. At the time, the DRC reprinted a quote from the Beaumont Enterprise: “This is a time when a glimpse of the past will help us solve the problems of the future. The Birth of a Nation will inspire noble thoughts and patriotic deeds.” The DRC also breathlessly covered the 1919 race riots.
  - To quote Stallings:
    - “The most accessible news source for Dentonites in 1919 painted a picture of violent, aggressive African Americans. These continuous portrayals in the news of victimized white men and militant black men, combined with the glowing editorial reviews of The Birth of a Nation, contributed to white Denton’s perceptions of their own black communities and created racial tension, despite the absence of any actual riots [in Denton].”
By 1920, against the backdrop of the resurgence of the KKK, the white residents of Denton had had enough: the residents of Quakertown were doing too well socially and economically, which was unacceptable to them.
- So they very explicitly and directly employed a number of tactics to intimidate and drive out the Black residents of Quakertown.
- Stallings’ thesis describes a “white coalition” made up of local politicians and their wives, prominent citizens, and members of city clubs and organizations, who “came together to construct a reason to remove the black community out of fear because of its proximity to the white women’s college, the College of Industrial Arts.”
In 1920, the president of the College of Industrial Arts, started telling people that they should “rid the college of the menace of the negro quarters in close proximity.” He proposed the idea at a rotary club meeting, and Denton’s white leaders decided that they wanted to build a city park there. The entire plan had also been advanced and aided by the local Women’s Club, who had also been involved in the erection of the confederate monument in Denton Square.
- The idea was that they had always wanted a park to hold the county fair, but they just hadn’t found the perfect place for it.
- Also, Dallas had embraced the “City Beautiful” urban planning movement, and had several parks, so Denton wanted this park so they could better compete with Dallas.
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Beautiful_movement
- In reality, the most important thing about this desire for a park was just that white people in power didn’t like that a bunch of young white women, who were living away from home for the first time, would be living near a Black neighborhood.
To be clear: Quakertown had been around for 40 years; the College of Industrial Arts had only existed for 20 years. They decided to build the college near Quakertown and then take the residents’ land, not the other way around.
In 1921, the government and voters held a bond election to pay for the park project. People who lived in Quakertown weren’t allowed to vote in that election.
To read from Stallings’ paper:
- “This time the white coalition was not limited to Denton’s powerful and elite. Everyday white citizens banded together, ensuring the black community was relocated to the outskirts of town. Participation from the enlarged white front ranged from simply signing a petition to carrying out KKK violence against the black community.”
Here’s what the KKK had to say about Quakertown. They contributed $50 to a city charity and left a note for the Denton Record-Chronicle, saying: “The KKK stands for law and order. It stands for the protection of the sanctity of the home and the purity of young girls–college girls who are without the immediate parental guidance.”
- Per Stallings: “The language of their note–specifically the line of the “purity of young girls”–evoked the aforementioned racist rhetoric of The Birth of a Nation and hinted that white womanhood at CIA was compromised by the neighboring black community.”
Again, the KKK was very active around this time, and did a lot to threaten and intimidate Black residents. Stallings’ paper goes into great detail about all of that.
The white Dentonites used the bond money to buy property in Quakertown, move people’s home and businesses, or just seize them, in order to build the park.
Following the seizure of their homes and businesses, the residents of Quakertown were evicted and forcibly moved to Solomon Hill.
- Per Stallings:
  - “This area, which was near an open sewage pit, has been described by local historians as “a converted cow pasture with no utilities and a severe mosquito problem.””
Some former Quakertown residents left Denton altogether.
The Civic Center Park opened in the late 1920s in Denton
While Black residents weren’t officially banned from the new park that was built where they used to live, they certainly didn’t feel welcome to do so.
The story of Quakertown was actually lost for a time.
- It sounds like the story of Quakertown wasn’t really told among the residents of Solomon Hill, I assume because it was too painful.
- And of course the white population of the area forgot about it too.
However, in 1989, a cistern containing old bottles and aluminum cans was discovered in Civic Center Park. People wondered what the story was behind the artifacts, and who lived there previously. Local historians and students started researching and the story of Quakertown emerged.
Since then, there have been a number of efforts to memorialize Quakertown, from plaques to renaming Civic Center Park to be called Quakertown Park.
If you’re from the area and this whole story sounds vaguely familiar, you might be thinking of a book called White Lilacs by Carolyn Meyer. The book calls Denton “Dillon” and Quakertown “Freedomtown,” but it’s based on what happened in Quakertown. The book was added to middle school curriculum at Denton middle schools in 2001. I can’t for the life of me remember if I read it when I was younger, but I recognize its old cover from the 1990s so I’ve definitely seen it around.
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/777095.White_Lilacs
Additional source about Quakertown: http://www.dentonhistory.net/page32/Quaker.html

Outro to This Way to the Goatman (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

And that’s the story of Quakertown and the KKK in Denton.
Let’s loop back to the legends of the Old Alton Bridge.
- You can see why the story about the Klansmen murdering a successful black man and his family became such a core part of this site’s lore.
- Whether or not that specific story is true, we know that Black men were kidnapped and murdered by Klansmen, and we know that white residents of the area worked to destroy a thriving black community precisely because the community was thriving.
I’ve read through many, many comment sections, threads, and reviews of the Old Alton Bridge, and there are always trolls saying that the Oscar Washburn story is made up, and there’s often this implication that people shouldn’t be telling this tale of racist violence.
- But the thing is, racist violence did happen in Denton and the surrounding area.
- While it might be more pleasant for some people to pretend that it didn’t happen, trolls’ feelings about the matter won’t change the facts.
So, whether or not Oscar Washburn was a real historical figure, his basic story happened to many people in the area around the Old Alton Bridge.
- Also, I think it’s important to note that, as Crittenden points out in her paper, local newspapers went out of their way to obscure the names of Black people who were kidnapped and lynched during the 1920s, so to me, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine that could happen in the 1930s.
  - In fact, Crittenden talks about her search for records about the people who were lynched in Denton County. To give you a taste of how incomplete records were, here’s what she went through:
    - She requested law enforcement records from the city of Pilot Point, but they’d been kept in a room underneath a weather tower and were destroyed by water
    - She requested all records from 1865-1930 from the Denton County Sheriff’s Department. They said that all of the records prior to 1950 had been destroyed, because the county wasn’t required to keep them.
    - She then asked them for records relating to the records’ destruction, and got nothing.
    - She contacted the Pilot Point Post-Signal for issues of the newspaper from the 1920s, but they said they had no copies of their own newspaper prior to the 1970s.
    - She contacted the Library of Pilot Point and asked for the newspapers from their archives, but the City of Pilot Point said that they had no copies of it from before 1964.
    - She contacted the City of Pilot Point and asked for legal records, and they said that the city might have some copies of tickets from the 20s in a vault, but the rest of their judicial records were destroyed. She never received any records from the city of Pilot Point.
    - She drew a parallel between how there were a number of fires on Denton Square in the county’s early days, and in the 1920s, the buildings that held the Denton KKK chapter’s records were burned down.
    - So, yeah, there’s record loss, and it’s not a coincidence that this part of the area’s history conveniently vanished for so long.
    - And all of this is why I’m going into such detail here, but, again, if you want to know more I strongly recommend that you read Crittenden’s paper for a much more robust account of all of this.
So, to get back to the Old Alton Bridge story:
- To quote Crittenden once more: “Despite the best efforts of white supremacist sympathizers at containment, the truth leaks out through folklore. Stories like that of the Goatman signal to a violent past without direct indictment of the participants.”
Oscar Washburn isn’t the only Black person who was said to be murdered at the site of the Old Alton Bridge. Next time, I’ll talk about another legendary death, as well as a recent death that happened under somewhat suspicious circumstances.

Sources consulted RE: This Way to the Goatman (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Visit the series page for additional sources.

Sources consulted for This Way to the Goatman (Goatman’s Bridge Series):

The Tall Grass West Of Town: Racial Violence In Denton County During The Rise Of The Second Ku Klux Klan by Micah Carlson Crittenden, which was a University of North Texas masters thesis published in May 2020: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1703339/m2/1/high_res_d/CRITTENDEN-THESIS-2020.pdf
“Removing the Danger in a Business Way”: The History and Memory of Quakertown, Denton, Texas, by Chelsea Stallings, masters thesis at the University of North Texas in 2015: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc804840/m2/1/high_res_d/thesis.pdf
https://omeka.library.unt.edu/s/black-denton/page/kkk
Hauntology Man, a thesis by UNT student Adam Michael Wright: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1157557/m1/13/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2019/01/10/how-secrets-of-the-old-denton-county-klan-were-discovered-by-four-unt-history-students/
Uncovering St. John’s: https://omeka.library.unt.edu/s/stjohns/page/welcome
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2018/02/16/a-lonely-watchdog-in-denton-suddenly-finds-new-allies-as-he-fights-to-update-a-dark-history/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Beautiful_movement
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/777095.White_Lilacs
Additional source about Quakertown: http://www.dentonhistory.net/page32/Quaker.html

Don’t miss past episodes:

Death at the Goatman’s Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

A look at one legend behind the Goatman’s Bridge, the period of history that inspired it, and a suspicious recent death at the bridge.

Death at the Goatman’s Bridge: A look at one legend behind the Goatman’s Bridge, the period of history that inspired it, and a suspicious recent death at the bridge.

Highlights include:

• The Texas Troubles
• Attempts to bury history
• Mass hysteria and bloodthirsty vigilantes
• Some creepypasta-style urban legends

CONTENT NOTE: This episode contains discussions of racially motivated murders and white supremacist hate groups.

Episode Script for Death at the Goatman’s Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Intro for Death at the Goatman’s Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Content note for this episode: I will be talking about white supremacist violence, chattel slavery, and racism.
Last time, I talked about the possibly apocryphal story of the murder of Oscar Washburn, a Black man who was supposedly lynched by the Klan in the 1930s.
- I also talked about how the KKK were extremely active in Denton, to the point of doing public parades. They made a practice of kidnapping and murdering Black people with the tacit permission of law enforcement. Also, white supremacy led to the destruction of a Black community called Quakertown in Denton.
  - That’s helpful context to have in mind getting into today’s episode, where we will go back in history to the 1860s and look at a period of Texas history that I had never heard of called “the Texas Troubles,” which ties in directly to another legend about the haunting of the Old Alton Bridge.

The Texas Troubles and the Murder of Jack Kendall

Let’s get into the Texas Troubles and the murder of Jack Kendall. Remember that the Old Alton Bridge was built in the 1880s, so this story happens prior to the bridge’s construction.
- So, despite being from Texas and having taken several years of Texas history in school, I have no memory of learning about the Texas Troubles. I had never heard of them before doing this research. Texas has been known to pretty heavily rewrite history textbooks, though, so that might be why this somehow escaped my notice.
- There’s a really great article in the Texas Observer (https://www.texasobserver.org/troubled-times/) from 2010 that I want to read a bit from. This is kind of a long passage, but I think it’s really important context for when you’re looking at the history of the area, and the article is really well written:
  - “Texas would like to forget it was a slave-holding state. The nation saw that this spring as some members of the State Board of Education tried to erase the word slavery from several parts of the social-studies curriculum. According to the still-dominant narrative here, slavery was no big deal in Texas. As University of North Texas historian Randolph Campbell puts it, “Without slavery, Texas gets to be a Western state,” one that joined the Confederacy for reasons of principle only. History that contradicts this narrative is conveniently forgotten.
- The article goes on to talk about how, according to the census, by 1860, almost 200,000 enslaved people lived in Texas, making up ⅓ of the population.
- In 1860, there was a major drought and heat wave in a lot of the South, which didn’t help the uneasy political atmosphere at the time.
  - Wells were drying up and crops were dying.
  - To continue reading from the article:
    - “On July 8, most of Dallas’s 678 residents were sweating out their siestas indoors when a fire broke out at Wallace Peak’s drugstore downtown. The townspeople could do little but run outdoors as hot winds blew the flames from one dry wooden building to the next. By the time the fire burned out, half the town’s business district was destroyed.
    - “Similar fires happened at almost the same time in Denton and the hamlet of Pilot Point. The excitable editor of the (burned-down) Dallas Herald, Charles Pryor, sent letters to several newspapers about an alleged abolitionist plot afoot in Texas that aimed to burn the state down.
    - “The response was swift and inflammatory. . . .
    - “That was a call to form vigilance committees, secretive bodies usually elected by the men of a town or county to bypass normal jurisprudence. “We will hang every man who does not live above suspicion,” wrote “J.W.S.” of Fort Worth’s vigilance committee to the New York Day Book in August 1860. “It is better for us to hang ninety-nine innocent (suspicious) men than to let one guilty one pass, for the guilty one endangers the peace of society.
  - Night patrols formed, and the committees started deciding that some enslaved people seemed like suspects, as well as potential abolitionists. So in addition to Black enslaved people, white people from the North, foreigners, and Mexican Americans were targets.
  - From the article:
    - “One man in Marshall wrote his father: “Every man that travels this country is taken up and examined, and if he does not give a good account of himself, he is strung up to the nearest tree.”. . .
  - In Dallas, on July 23, the vigilance committee met in the county courthouse. Some members wanted to hang all enslaved people in the entire county, but that idea was struck down because it would “entail a great loss of property.” So instead, they decided to target three enslaved Black men, Patrick Jennings, Sam Smith and “Old Cato.”
  - All three men were hanged the next day on the bank of the Trinity River. Because the river had been rerouted, the exact river bank doesn’t exist anymore, but apparently Dealey Plaza is the closest place.
- If that site sounds familiar, it’s because Dealey Plaza is where JFK was assassinated.
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dealey_Plaza
- So I read this article and was like, jeeze, how have I never heard about this? I did a very unscientific survey of a couple other folks I went to school with–one of whom is a history buff with a photographic memory–and confirmed that none of us remember learning about it, despite what was supposed to be a comprehensive education in Texas history.
- There’s a lot more to the story of the Texas Troubles. For example, it sounds like the fires may have been caused by faulty matches that were stored in a way that caused them to catch fire on their own in the heat. It’s wild that an accident could have caused a panic that lead to the deaths of many innocent people.
  - But if you want to know more about this, I just want to strongly encourage you to read the whole article. I’ll include a link in the shownotes, but if you want to just look it up, it has a simple URL: https://www.texasobserver.org/troubled-times/
- I also read on the Texas State Historical Association (tshaonline.org) that at least 30 people died in the Texas Troubles, but that death count may have actually been closer to 100. Both Black and white people were killed. The impression I get is that white Texans assumed that enslaved people didn’t have the vision to do an insurrection, so they assumed that white abolitionists were the brains behind the imaginary insurrection.
  - Also, Texas voted to join the Confederacy in February 1861, and historians seem to think that the Texas Troubles played a large part in radicalizing the white population of Texas, who only two years before, had elected Sam Houston to be governor on a pro-union platform.
  - https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/texas-troubles
  - https://web-clear.unt.edu/course_projects/HIST2610/content/CaseStudy/TexasTroubles_old/CS4_texastroubles_list.htm
  - https://www.tsl.texas.gov/exhibits/civilwar/trouble.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denton,_Texas
The Texas Observer article addresses this lack of knowledge about the event, so I wanted to read a bit more:
- “. . . If we’ve forgotten the Texas Troubles, we can first thank many of the participants themselves. One secessionist editor who published the “evidence” of the abolitionist plot later went on to write the first history of Dallas County. By then, in 1887, he could barely bring himself to mention the events of 1860. To write of that time, he said, “would be to open a question, the discussion of which should be left to a later day.”
- “That day is still being put off. Randolph Campbell laughs at the thought of the state organizing any kind of public discussion or exhibition on the Texas Troubles 150 years later. “It would be murderously difficult,” he said.
- “Campbell touches on the Troubles in his book An Empire for Slavery. The book also matter-of-factly describes how, at the time, it was nothing odd for a Texan to hold the title “Negro and Real Estate Broker,” and how the leased labor of slaves put young white heirs through college.”
Growing up in Texas, I really feel like Texas’ role in the Civil War was downplayed, at least in history class.
- There was this real sense that Texas is not the South, and that it’s kind of its own thing, which is closer to the west.
- I honestly didn’t really think about that much until 2019, when my wife and I got married. Our wedding was in Denton, right by Denton Square, where the courthouse is, and after the wedding, we were taking pictures around there, and I remember noticing, for the first time, a confederate soldier statue there. When I went back in 2021, however, the statue was gone, thankfully. Turns out it was taken down in June 2020.
So anyway, what does this have to do with the Old Alton Bridge?
- Well, it’s tied in with an urban legend that’s similar to the Oscar Washburn story that I told last week, though this one is a bit more sensational.
- The story goes that in 1860, during the panic surrounding the Texas Troubles, some cowboys from nearby Copper Canyon murdered an enslaved Creole goat-herder named Jack Kendall. They hanged him from a tall tree near the creek, right around where the bridge is now. But they were incompetent, unsurprisingly, and supposedly they accidentally decapated him in the process.
- It has been said that Kendall’s headless body stood up and ripped off the head of a nearby goat to replace his own head, which was still in the noose. Since Kendall was Creole, the legend says that his body was reanimated via voodoo, a claim that sets off some racism alarm bells in my brain.
  - https://wedentondoit.com/blog/2013/10/18/back-in-the-day-goatmans-bridge
- There’s also a version of the story that says that Kendall came back as a zombie and ate his family, which also sounds very made up.
  - https://factschology.com/mmm-podcast-articles/demon-goatmans-bridge-texas
- I also found a pretty screwed up, really made up sounding version of the Jack Kendall story that I will share, but with the caveat that it seems even less reliable than your typical unreliable urban legend. I’m really only repeating it in the interest of fully exploring the rumors around the topic, but I don’t take this one seriously in the slightest.
  - On some not-very-reputable-seeming websites, there’s a story about a Jack “Goat Man” Kendall, who is not said to be Black in this version; his race isn’t specified, so it seems like the tellers are assuming that he was white.
  - Anyway, Kendall was supposedly a goat herder who smelled like goats because he spent so much time around them, and because he wore a goatskin, and the people around the area didn’t like to be around him because of the smell.
  - One version of the story said that his flock was made up of “large black orange red and green eyed goats.”
  - One version said that the local townspeople avoided him, whereas another said that “Many of the merchants in Denton, Marshall, Henderson and as far as Galveston and also Shreveport, Louisiana thought this old man to be very strange and often he was the topic of conversation as far as New Orleans.”
  - One version said that that he was having sex with the goats, and the Goatman was the offspring of that.
  - Another version said he was murdered by the townspeople because he was having sex with the goats, and then came back and haunted them as the Goatman.
  - To be honest, this version sounds like complete BS, and like it’s probably a creepypasta (or a made up internet urban legend.)
    - The grammar on the accounts that I found is horrendous and the way they’re written sounds totally scattershot and imprecise.
    - Plus, to add to the air of sensationalism and unreliability, one of the websites that I found the story on has the very 2002 special effect of pixel art bugs crawling all over the screen, and then you have to hover your mouse over them to kill them so you can read the article, and then they lay on the bottom of the screen on their backs, with their legs twitching. I remember when that kind of thing was all over the internet, but it’s been a while, so while the website is an interesting time capsule, I don’t trust a word it says.
  - However, I did want to mention some of the more obviously fake legends about the bridge’s paranormal origin story, so there you go.

The Death of Lermont Stowers-Jones

I’m not going to get really in depth into this next story, because it’s a recent death, and it’s really, really awful. But there have been lots of claims of deaths at the Old Alton Bridge, but the only confirmed death I could find was the story of Lermont Stowers-Jones in 2018.
While this story isn’t connected to the tales of hauntings, and as I’ve mentioned in past episodes, it’s in terrible taste to try to insinuate hauntings into recent deaths, this story is tied to the bridge’s racist history, so I wanted to talk about it.
I guess I should give a caveat here that everything I’m about to say here is alleged.
This is a really awful story, and this death didn’t show up on a lot of the newspaper searches I did, I think because it was probably too recent.
- On November 20, 2018, a 17-year-old kid named Lermont Stowers-Jones, whose nickname was Mont, was found dead in Hickory Creek.
  - Lermont Stowers-Jones’ family described him as compassionate and charismatic. He enjoyed playing the keyboard and often performed at the church where his family went, Pleasant Grove Baptist Church. He was on the A-B Honor Roll at Denton High School, and planned to go to college and go into criminal justice.
  - I’m going to call Lermont Stowers-Jones Mont from here on out, since I’ll be talking about other people with the same last name.
  - On November 19, 2018, someone had called 911 and said that Mont jumped from the Old Alton Bridge into the creek and didn’t resurface.
  - The initial impression was that this was maybe a tale of teenage hijinks gone wrong, but there’s a lot of strange, suspicious stuff about this story, and his family have told reporters that they believe his death was not an accident.
  - Like for example, the Denton PD was never dispatched to the scene or involved in the investigation.
    - That’s because technically the Old Alton Bridge is on county land.
    - So instead, the Denton County Game Wardens conducted the investigation, which just seems bizarre to me.
  - Even before digging into this story, just reading the basic stories in the Denton Record-Chronicle, I thought it was weird. We’re talking about the Old Alton Bridge, a place where tons of teenagers have partied in the past, but where, as far as I could find, only one teenager in recent history has died. It’s odd to me that it didn’t seem more notable, or even suspicious.
  - There’s an article on a website called livingbluetx.com which goes into a ton of detail about the story, so I’ll include a link to that in the shownotes. https://livingbluetx.com/2020/11/what-happened-to-lermont-stower-jones/?cn-reloaded=1
    - If what that article says is true, then it certainly sounds like he was murdered and that there was no investigation.
  - An article in The Dentonite fleshes out this story a bit more. The reporter interviewed Mont’s parents, Lermon Jones and Amy Stowers-Jones, in April 2019, about four or five months after his death. Both of them expressed distress with the story they were told, which was that he had died after jumping off of the bridge.
  - For example, Mont’s mother said:
    - “Lermont wouldn’t have jumped off a bridge. He was scared of heights. He wouldn’t even ride the rides at Six Flags. . . . I know my son wouldn’t have jumped in muddy water because we go fishing a lot. . . . He wouldn’t even stick his feet in water just to go out there and get the hook a couple feet down.”
  - They also said they saw discrepancies with the accounts they heard from the police and the witnesses.
  - They weren’t the only ones with concerns.
    - Lermont Stowers-Jones’ cousin, Angela James, who had been acting as spokesperson for the family, said that the time of the 911 call didn’t quite coincide with the timeline that the witnesses described.
  - Lermont Stowers-Jones’ father said that he heard someone use a racial slur in the background of the 911 call.
    - He said: “I have heard that 911 call,” Jones said. “Get that [n-word] is what they said.”
  - It sounds like there had been a dispute between Mont and one of his classmates at Denton High School, which might have come into play here.
    - Angela James said: “There were threats. They made reports to the police station, they made contact with the school. Someone told him they were going to harm him.”
      - http://www.thedentonite.com/culture/parents-of-drowned-teenager-dissatisfied-with-investigation
    - The article on livingbluetx.com goes into way more detail on this, but for example, a white student had recently been expelled for saying he was going to bring a gun to school and kill Lermont Stowers-Jones.
    - According to a 2021 article in the Dallas Observer, for the weeks leading up to his death, Mont had experienced daily racial harassment and death threats, which he’d reported to the police and the high school.
    - https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/virtual-fundraiser-to-honor-life-of-black-teen-who-died-under-unusual-circumstances-11992063
  - Also, the family thought that the location of their son’s death was suspicious, since it’s famous for being the site of a lynching.
  - Mont’s father said: “I googled it and that’s when I found the history. It sounds a little too coincidental.”
  - The family also said that the police made some screwed up assumptions about Mont’s behavior.
    - The cops initially said they suspected that he had been using heroin, but of course a toxicology report disproved that.
    - Supposedly traces of weed were in his system, but the toxicology report labeled that as unverified.
  - Also, according to that Dallas Observer article, after his death, the sheriff’s department started parking their vehicles across the street from the family’s home, which they took as a threat.
    - After that, the family had to move and install security systems and cameras because they were so afraid.
    - Now, maybe you’re wondering why a Black family might feel unsafe because the sheriff’s department has people hanging out around their house.
    - Last week, I went into a lot of detail about the historical connections between law enforcement and the KKK, and how they collaborated in murdering innocent Black people.
    - I want to return to one of the sources I used extensively last week, In The Tall Grass West Of Town: Racial Violence In Denton County During The Rise Of The Second Ku Klux Klan by Micah Carlson Crittenden. Per Crittenden’s paper:
      - “October 17, 2006, the Counter Terrorism Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation released an unclassified Intelligence Assessment on the infiltration of local law enforcement by white supremacist groups. Therein they warn that work to counter white supremacy cannot reliably be conducted by local law enforcement because many police forces have been infiltrated by white supremacist groups and ideology. This highlights the importance of an open examination of racial violence, unencumbered by use of a rope. With a clearly established relationship between the Ku Klux Klan and the Denton County Sheriff’s Department in the 1920s, this work asks a question of our present: what has structurally changed in the oversight of law enforcement since 1920?”
      - https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1703339/m2/1/high_res_d/CRITTENDEN-THESIS-2020.pdf
  - The Dentonite article closes with a quote from his mother:
    - “I know for a fact my son was murdered. I feel like this city just completely failed us.”
  - According to the article, they planned to hire a lawyer once the cops filed a final report on the case, but as far as I could tell, I don’t think that much has happened on that front since his death.
  - This is a really awful case, and it seems suspicious as hell to me, and if you want to know more, read the Dallas Observer, Dentonite, and Living Blue Texas articles about his death, which I’ll include in the shownotes.
    - https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/virtual-fundraiser-to-honor-life-of-black-teen-who-died-under-unusual-circumstances-11992063
    - http://www.thedentonite.com/culture/parents-of-drowned-teenager-dissatisfied-with-investigation
    - https://livingbluetx.com/2020/11/what-happened-to-lermont-stower-jones/?cn-reloaded=1
    - https://dentonrc.com/news/at-least-one-fled-old-alton-bridge-after-teen-s-disappearance/article_5434fe7b-53ac-502a-b694-68a020988c87.html
    - https://dentonrc.com/news/authorities-release-autopsy-of-teen-found-near-old-alton-bridge/article_de86e69b-5b24-5426-b056-f04aea40fed8.html
    - https://www.fox4news.com/news/officials-denton-teen-died-after-jumping-into-creek
    - https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/195193576/lermont-charmale-stowers-jones
    - https://artandseek.org/calendar/event/106334/below-the-surface-justice-for-lermont-stowers-jones-virtual
    - https://www.crosstimbersgazette.com/2018/11/20/teens-body-recovered-from-hickory-creek/
    - https://dentonrc.com/news/family-seeking-funds-for-private-investigation-into-a-denton-high-seniors-2018-death/article_0422aa8a-40b3-5b08-b271-13dae80e4cb6.html
    - https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/virtual-fundraiser-to-honor-life-of-black-teen-who-died-under-unusual-circumstances-11992063
    - Defunct: https://www.gofundme.com/f/justice-for-lermont-stowersjones
    - Defunct? https://justiceformont.com/
  - But at any rate, I think this really underscores the location’s ties to racism and anti-Black violence, both in the past, and to this day.
  - There are a couple websites (justiceformont.com and a gofundme page) that have donation links to try to raise money to help Mont’s family fight for justice for him, but it looks like they’re currently inactive; it’s not totally clear how you can support the family right now, but if I find out anything, I’ll update the shownotes at buriedsecretspodcast.com with that info.

Sources consulted RE: Death at the Goatman’s Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Visit the series page for additional sources.

Sources consulted for Death at the Goatman’s Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series):

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Who is the Goatman? (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

North Texas has four different Goatman legends, including the Old Alton Bridge Goatman. Here’s a look at those stories, as well as other urban legends about goatmen around the world.

Who is the Goatman? North Texas has four different Goatman legends, including the Old Alton Bridge Goatman. Here’s a look at those stories, as well as other urban legends about goatmen around the world.

As I continue my series on the Old Alton Bridge, or Goatman’s Bridge, I take a little detour to look at different goatmen throughout history. What similarities are there between the Old Alton Bridge and others? Why are there so many Goatman stories?

Highlights include:
• Satyrs
• Pan
• The Pope Lick Monster
• Vanishing hitchhikers

Episode Script for Who is the Goatman? (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Intro for Who is the Goatman? (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

The last couple episodes have been a little heavy, so this time, I wanted to have some fun. So I’ve gathered up some goatman stories for you. I’ll talk about ancient goatmen, international goatmen, other American goatmen, and other Texas goatmen. A lot of these stories are pretty silly and fun.
Mention going back to every other week drop schedule.

Ancient Goat Men

Before we get into the Old Alton Bridge-specific phenomena, I did want to pause to talk about Goatman, or Goatmen, in general. Because this story isn’t the only goat man story out there. While he isn’t as popular as rumored creatures like Bigfoot, the Goatman seems to be considered a cryptid.
So where did this idea of Goatmen start?
- If you want to go really far back, think about the satyrs of Greek mythology, which were male nature spirits that initially were sort of part human, part horse, but then they started getting conflated with the god Pan, who had goat legs and horns. I’m not going to get into a huge digression about Pan here, but he was a sort of nature god, and if you want to know more about that, you should check out season 2 of Hellier, where they really explore the lore surrounding Pan.
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyr
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_(god)
- In addition to satyrs, fauns were a thing in Greek and Roman mythology.
  - They were half-human, half-goat creatures that were typically bipedal, with human heads, torsos, and arms, but the horns, tail, and legs of a goat.
    - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faun
  - So that’s starting to sound a bit like the modern cryptid-style Goatman.
- And of course, depictions of Satan tend to be a bit faun-like. You know, the cloven hooves, horns, maybe a goat face, maybe a human face.
  - And there’s this idea that Christianity transformed the old god of Pan into the devil in order to squash the older pagan religions and ways of living, etc.
    - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_(god)#Identification_with_Satan

International Goatmen (of Mystery?)

There are a number of urban legends from around the world tied to Goat Men.
- I found stories of a Goatman, or Hoofman, in New Zealand, for example. He’s been seen at different locations in New Zealand.
  - It sounds like Māori folks say they’re Kaitiaki, a guardian entity that protects forests and lakes. From HauntedAuckland.com:
    - “One ‘guardian’ I received information about was from the Maniapoto tribe. His name is Tarapikau. Known as being a traveller, he is said to occupy Maungatautari, a mountain range nestled in between Te Awamutu and Putaruru. He is believed to have originated from the Rangitoto ranges, King Country. I am told that this Goatman is one of two twins. One brings good, the other inflicting misfortune and death ‘because he’s impatient’.”
  - I thought this idea of the good and evil twin was really interesting.
  - This Goatman entity also sometimes comes in the form of a hitchiker.
  - Per HauntedAuckland.com:
    - “‘You stop and give him a lift, but just a short way up the road he asks to get out,’ said one believer/witness. ‘Sometimes he just disappears from the car, having safely gotten you past the stretch of road you were about to have an accident on. Just seeing him on a dangerous piece of road has avoided you from an accident about to happen, most probably right where he stood.’”
    - https://hauntedauckland.com/site/goatman/
  - I also found an account on reddit of someone having the experience of him as a hitchhiker who disappeared.
    - https://www.reddit.com/r/DarknessPrevails/comments/bg7wbh/the_goatman_of_new_zealand/
  - The vanishing hitchhiker is one of the most famous urban legend tropes around, at least in the US. In fact, folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand wrote the book The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and their Meanings, which talks extensively about that trope. He calls it “the classic automobile legend.” In the US version of the legend, the hitchhiker is usually the ghost of a dead person. Sometimes the hitchhiker makes a prophecy before disappearing.
  - One question that I had was how did people not notice that the person was a Goatman before he got in the car? Since I assume if you saw a goatman, you probably wouldn’t want to stop the car and let him in. Here’s a bit more from HauntedAuckland.com that explains this bit:
    - “A strange looking man in a trench coat was hitchhiking the Waituhi Saddle Road in the early hours, in pitch-black darkness. My uncle picked him up. He didn’t say a word, just silence. As the truck headed on down the road towards Turangi, the man thumped on the door of the truck to be let off. When the truck came to a stop, the man jumped off the truck and disappeared into the night. My uncle said to me, ‘All you heard was clip … clop … clip … clop.’
    - “Somehow, his lower half isn’t distinguishable until he’s in your car. He’s very smelly. If you don’t pick him up, something bad will happen.”
  - In the New Zealand story, apparently some people think that he is an ancestor or spirit, so that sort of dovetails with the idea of the ghostly hitchhiker.
  - In the comments section of the HauntedAuckland.com article, there were some really interesting stories, including one about a Goat Woman, which I wanted to read:
    - “I grew up in rarotonga, cook islands and lived there until i was 18. There was talk of a goat woman there who would sometimes appear at night and on the road in front of you, dressed in a white, wedding like dress and standing upright on two hooves. She had a womans upper body and goat legs visible below her dress. If you saw her, you were to turn back and go in the direction you just came from. Those that carried on thru…were involved in major accidents and some died. But not before telling about the goat woman. I personally never saw her.”
I was looking for other international Goatmen (searching stuff like “Goatman Europe”) and I found an article in the British tabloid the Mirror that was amusing enough to share.
- In February 2022, a “six-foot goat man” was supposedly seen near a village called Staverton, in Northamptonshire.
- To me, one of the funniest parts of this story is that the witness went on Mumsnet to share her story.
  - She asked fellow forum-goers what they thought she might have seen, and there were amazing suggestions.
    - One person said it could have been a deer with a chronic wasting disease, which supposedly can make them look creepy and humanoid?
    - A bunch of people said it was probably a kangaroo or wallaby, which is very funny to me, because this sighting was in England. Though some people said that there’d been confirmed white wallaby sightings in Warwickshire
    - Some people suggested herons, which was interesting to me, because people have claimed that the Mothman and the Jersey Devil are actually just been sandhill cranes
      - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothman
      - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_Devil
    - One person suggested that it could just be someone wearing a strange fancy dress, which I really liked because it had echoes of Woman in White sightings
    - Then people started suggesting Slenderman, Goatman, Sasquatch, the Pope Lick Monster, Skinwalker, etc. I thought the OP’s response to this was hilarious, because of what must be a typo:
      - “Not a kangaroo, goatman, slenderman, sasquatch. These things don’t exist.”
      - I absolutely love the idea that kangaroos don’t exist.
    - Other people said it could have been a very tall rabbit
    - Or a thin bear
  - So after all this, I guess I should actually read the original post. See what you think:
    - “We had been away for a few nights and travelled back quite late. Towards the end of our journey, this was about 2am, we were driving along an A road in a rural area when something crossed the road in front of us in full headlights for about 3 seconds. It was about the height of a person, maybe 6 feet or over, but had short powerful legs and hips which seemed to move in a circular fluid fashion. It was not a deer because it stood on two legs. This was in the midlands and the area is traditional rolling fields and woodland. In this particular spot there are no houses or buildings, nearest is over a mile away. We drove back today as its only 7 miles from home to look at the road layout and whatever it was moved into a wide bowl shaped field dropping down to a stream. Any ideas?”
  - For any curious listeners from the UK, they were driving on the A425.
  - In the end, though, the OP said that it definitely wasn’t human, but it seemed like a combination of a goat and a deer.
  - I’m kinda agonistic on this one, and am not very inclined to believe the Mirror’s sensationalism. But I still thought the story was fun.
- https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/4486761-What-did-we-see-last-night
- https://www.northantslive.news/news/northamptonshire-news/hunt-6ft-man-goat-northamptonshire-6699514

Goatmen in the United States

There are a number of different Goatmen who’ve been seen in the US, and I have a feeling that my list is not comprehensive. But I found stories in Maryland, Kentucky, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
- https://cryptidz.fandom.com/wiki/Goatman
I think that the most famous goatman is probably the Maryland Goatman
- The story goes that a scientist working at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center was experimenting with animal DNA. One day, some goat DNA made contact with his blood and he turned into a half-man, half-goat creature.
- I find this hilarious, because I’m like–if every time you made contact with animal DNA, part of you turned into an animal, then almost everyone in the US would be at least part chicken-person and part cow-person, because eating animals definitely puts you in contact with their DNA? The silly science here in just a delight.
- Anyway, supposedly the Maryland goatman roams from Fletchertown Road to Governor’s Bridge Road. If you park near the bridge at night and turn off your lights, you might see the goatman. Sound familiar? It’s very, very similar to the Old Alton Bridge legend about crossing the bridge with your lights off.
- Some people say that the Goatman carries an ax. He’s supposed to be 7-8 feet tall, as well.
- Wikipedia says that the stories began in the 1970s, but it seems like the first sighting of the Maryland Goatman was in 1957. I’ll include a link in the shownotes to an article on the website Phantoms and Monsters that lists a bunch of Maryland Goatman sightings:
  - https://www.phantomsandmonsters.com/2016/04/supposed-maryland-goatman-observed-by.html
- He’s supposedly been caught on camera once.
- In the 1970s, he supposedly beheaded a dog, and it looks like that got a lot of press attention and really helped spread the stories.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatman_(urban_legend)
- https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/maryland/goatman-md/
- https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-terrifying-goatman-who-haunts-maryland-4885f3814fca
- https://cryptidz.fandom.com/wiki/Maryland_Goatman
The Pope Lick Monster is another famous one
- Also called the Goatman, this monster is supposedly part man, part goat, and part sheep. He lives beneath a railroad bridge over the Pope Lick Creek in Louisville, Kentucky.
- One version of the story goes that he hypnotizes or uses voice mimicry to lure people onto the bridge to be killed by a passing train.
- Some people say that he jumps onto the top of trains as they pass by.
- Others claim that he attacks people with a blood-stained ax, and when people see him, they’re so upset that they jump off the bridge to their deaths.
- Some legends claim that he was a circus freak who wanted to get revenge after being mistreated. Others say that he’s the reincarnated form of a local farmer who sacrificed goats for satanic powers. I feel like it’s not a story about a goat in the south without some good old satanist flavor. There’s some of that in the Old Alton Bridge legends as well, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned that yet. But don’t worry, I’ll get to it.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Lick_Monster
- https://cryptidz.fandom.com/wiki/Pope_Lick_Monster
The book Encyclopedia of Monsters by Daniel Cohen talks about a goatman in Prince George’s County, Virginia, who is a sort of lover’s lane monster who attacks teenagers who are making out in their car. This has some similarities to the Maryland story
- The book says that this goatman has several origin stories. Maybe he’s a primeval creature that’s always been around there, or maybe he was a government experiment gone wrong. The area is near DC, so the story goes that a researcher was doing experiments on goats at a government facility, when things went terribly wrong, and he turned into a “half-goat, half-human monster.” The researcher fled into the woods, and, sort of like Frankenstein’s monster, grew to “hate the human race that now scorns him.” And that’s why he attacks young couples’ cars.
- Some people say that he attacks cars with an ax, and others say he does it with his bare hands.
- He’s blamed for killing dogs and other pets
Wisconsin Goatman
- I was reading an old forum thread from the mid-2000s, because that’s apparently how I do research, and it mentioned a Wisconsin Goatman. Here’s the story from theshadowlands.net:
  - “The local legend behind that is one of a Goatman. Yes a goatman. Legend has it that back in the 60’s or 70’s maybe even earlier that there used to be a “makeout” couch located halfway down the rd. While late one night after high school prom a young couple was down there and the goatman killed them and the couch was covered with thier remains. Also a myth with the road is you can travel it one was and it will be so many miles long you can turn aroung go back to the other end and the length of the road will be dramatically different As legend has it.”
  - http://www.theshadowlands.net/places/wisconsin.htm
- The person on the forum said, about the rumored location of the legend:
- “There’s this old creepy, unpaved road called “Marsh Road” and we had only heard creepy stories about it. Went there a few times with friends, and it was always creepy, but nothing ever happened. Weird sounds, a seemingly unexplainable thump againt our van, but nothing real weird. . . This sounds like complete BS, and almost certainly is. We had seen the couch on the road, and thought it was odd, but nothing more. Strangely enough, it seemed like sometimes the couch wasn’t there, but it would be the next time. That can be chalked up to poor memory though.
- The one thing that did happen, which I just remembered, was completely explainable, but still very very weird. We had gone out to the road, and the majority of the road was lined with small tires. Literally hundreds of them. They completely lined the part of the road that had driveways (dirty driveways to houses way, way back from the road), but they never blocked the driveways. They started to thin out, but they would still mark the driveways, with one tire on each side of the entrance to each driveway.
- The next night we went back and they were all gone. If it was a prank, it wasn’t too funny or cool, just strange. But it must have taken a very long time to line this whole road with tires, and to get rid of them. Again, completely explainable, but bizarre nonetheless.”
  - https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/topic/60089-goatmans-bridge-denton-tx-with-pics/page/2/#comments
In Pennsylvania, there’s the Waterford Sheepman
- Like many urban legends that I’ve come across while doing this podcast, stories of the Waterford Sheepman seem to have first arisen in the early 1970s. Though, similar to the Old Alton Bridge Goatman, apparently most written stuff about the Sheepman is from 2012 and later. It sounds like it was initially just an urban legend that circulated orally.
- Apparently, most Sheepman sightings have occurred on the Waterford Covered Bridge, or the Old Kissing Bridge.
- One story recounts someone driving a convertible with a friend, and as they headed toward the bridge, it started to rain. So they went to the covered bridge for shelter, and got out to manually put up the roof of the convertible.
  - Just then, they heard footsteps. When they turned around, they saw a 6 or 7’ tall monster with grayish-white hair, horns like a goat’s or ram’s, and fangs. It was walking upright on goatlike legs, and had hands like a human’s but with claws.
  - The creature attacked them, and they went back to the car and hurried away. Supposedly, the roof of the car was all torn up from the assault.
- There maybe have been about 100 Sheepman sightings between the 1960s and 2012, but, as with a lot of the Old Alton Bridge stories, I’m pretty suspicious of the veracity of some of the claims.
- Maybe worth noting: I think the idea of a Goatman guarding a bridge is interesting. It pops up in a lot of these stories, including, of course, the Old Alton Bridge. Bridges are liminal spaces. And they’re creepy, especially when located in the middle of nowhere, where many of these are or were. But also, I can’t help wondering if it has anything to do with the old fairy tale about the three goats who have to cross the bridge that’s guarded by a troll.
  - Only in these urban legends, the troll and the goats have been conflated into the Goatman.
  - I think the fairy tale is pretty famous, but just in case, if you want to read it, they’ll be links in the shownotes. The story is officially called the Three Billy Goats Gruff.
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Billy_Goats_Gruff
  - https://americanliterature.com/childrens-stories/the-three-billy-goats-gruff
  - https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/type0122e.html
- Related to the sheepman, apparently there’s a cryptid called a Sheepsquatch which is pretty similar to a sheep man or goatman.
  - https://cryptidz.fandom.com/wiki/Sheepsquatch

Texas Goatmen

There are even multiple Goatmen in North Texas. I’ve found stories about four separate North Texas Goatmen: The Old Alton Bridge Goatman, the Lake Worth Monster, the Plano Goatman, and the White Rock Lake Goatman. I don’t know why, but apparently us North Texans really like Goatmen?
Lake Worth Monster
- The Lake Worth Monster was supposedly a Goatman, described as “half-man, half-goat, with fur and scales” and claws.
- My main source for this next bit is a Dallas Morning News article, which I’ll include a link to in the shownotes.
  - http://res.dallasnews.com/interactives/goatman/
- The goatman was supposedly seen at Lake Worth in North Texas, back in 1969.
  - The story is that in the summer of 1969, teenagers went to Greer Island, whis is off the West Fork of the Trinity River in Fort Worth, adjacent to Lake Worth, which was a popular hangout spot. On July 9, three couples were parked there, and a monster jumped onto their car from the trees above them. The monster tried to grab one of the women, but they sped away before the monster could kidnap her. So, another lover’s lane monster.
  - At the time, the police dispatcher told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, “We’ve had reports about this thing for about two months, but we’ve always laughed them off as pranks.”
  - But this report was harder to ignore, because there was an 18-inch gash in the side of the car, and the teens were really shaken. So the police investigated.
  - When the story hit the newspapers the next day, everyone got really into it.
  - This is Texas we’re talking about, so, as the Dallas Morning News puts in, “truckloads of men with guns headed toward Greer Island to hunt the thing.”
  - Curious people and reporters came too.
  - According toRick Pratt, the director of the Green Island Nature Center at the time, people brought drinks, partied, and tried to hunt the monster. He said, “Here was a Sasquatch of our very own. It was a party, what the hell, let’s go.”
  - On July 10, the monster appeared again and was spotted by a few dozen people. The monster was up on a cliff. People said he looked angry, and I could imagine why. And then he threw a tire 500 feet. Everyone (including some sheriff’s deputies who were there at the time) ran away.
  - According to the Dallas Morning News, “One witness said the monster gave off a “pitiful cry, like something was hurting him.””
- The book Encyclopedia of Monsters by Daniel Cohen says that there was a rumor that prior to colonization, there were indigenous legends about a monster near Lake Worth, but they haven’t been verified. I assume they’re made up.
- Apparently the Lake Worth monster was a popular story at summer camps in the area. Counselors would tell people that if they listened closely, they could hear the monster’s cry on nights like tonight. Standard fun campfire story stuff.
- Since 1969, a lot of people have assumed that the monster was a prank. Here’s why:
  - The sightings stopped once the school year started, so people assumed it was just bored kids getting up to trouble during the summer.
  - In 2005, someone wrote an anonymous letter to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, claiming that they were one of three classmates who went out to Lake Worth to scare people using a tinfoil mask.
  - Then, in 2009, an unidentified man claimed to have been the person who pretended to be the monster and threw the tire.
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Worth_Monster
- There are a lot of differences between the phenomena at Old Alton Bridge and the Lake Worth Monster, since the Lake Worth Monster sighting was big news, printed up in a bunch of newspapers.
  - The Lake Worth Monster sounds pretty hoax-y, though who knows. It could have been real phenomena that people just talked about in a cheesy way.
  - Also, unlike the Old Alton Bridge, there doesn’t seem to be a grim backstory behind the Lake Worth Monster. It has much more bigfoot vibes.
  - However, it isn’t lost on me that there are two famous Goatmen in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. The two sites are about 1 hour drive away from each other, which is very close in Texas terms.
- Interestingly, the monster is supposed to have white hair. That kind of gives it a sheepsquatch vibe. Though there have been reports of white bigfoots, so that was an interesting detail.
  - To learn more about white bigfoot, check out the book Where the Footprints End: High Strangeness and the BIgfoot Phenomenon Volume I: Folklore by Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner.
  - According to the book, white bigfoot type creatures have been reported in Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico, California, and Washington.
  - And, as the book points out, there are connections between women in white and ghosts and white bigfoot. I won’t go into all of that here, but check that book out for a really cool analysis.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Worth_Nature_Center_and_Refuge
Plano Goatman
- I learned about this one from Haunted Plano, Texas by Mary Jacobs, which was published in 2018. Plano is a fairly large suburb of Dallas, and it’s pretty well known around the country, because there are a lot of corporate headquarters there (like Frito-Lay, JCPenny, Pizza Hut, and Toyota’s North American headquarters.) It’s well-known enough that when I tell people in NYC I’m from the suburbs of Dallas, I’m often asked if I’m from Plano.
  - Anyway, one relevant detail about Plano is that part of it lies in Denton county. So I think it’s interesting that Denton County has two Goatman stories that I know of.
  - This urban legend apparently originated in Plano in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
  - Here’s the story from the Plano Star Courier:
    - ““The way I remember it is there was a goat farmer back in the late 1940s who went to school in Plano,” said Kenny Smith, a former Plano resident who works at a radio station in Tyler. “Evidently he had a herd of goats and teenagers went onto his land and decapitated [them]. It screwed him up bad enough where there were incidents in 1950 [in which] a couple teenagers disappeared. It even got to the point where there were kids that were drowning in the creek where Dublin Road crossed at the time. Legend has it this farmer possibly could have been responsible for all these freakish disappearances and these problems with these teenagers around that time.”
    - “Smith said the story eventually grew and infiltrated the high school, and high school athletes began using “Goat Man’s Bridge” for initiation purposes.
    - ““If you had the [guts] to not believe the legend or myth about those specific happenings, then you could spend the night on the bridge,” he said. “I never heard of anyone who was stupid [enough] to do that. … If you spent a night on the bridge the ghost of the Goat Man would get you.”
    - “The bridge, which was allegedly near where Plano East High School was built in 1981, was torn down, but the legend of Goat Man lives on in various forms.”
  - The article also quotes another person who talks about the Goat Man at a local park: ““We were told if we trespassed on the golf course that this half-goat, half-man would chase you and throw horse apples at you. He was a child of the former owners of the property when it was a farm. Supposedly several kids who tried it had died – don’t let the Goat Man catch you.””
  - https://starlocalmedia.com/planocourier/news/beware-of-the-goat-man/article_10f6b97c-613f-11e4-b3ec-27abec9a198f.html
- Here’s another story, from Haunted Plano, Texas by Mary Jacobs:
  - “One Planoite remembers driving with friends to the bridge to listen for the Goat Man.
  - “We had to roll down the windows, unlock the doors, kill the engine and remove the keys from the ignition,” she said. “The driver had to give the keys to someone in the backseat. Needless to say, we did not stay long. I swear we could hear ‘hoof ’ sounds on the rocks.” Even though it was a long time ago, she added, the memory still spooks her.”
  - The bridge was torn down in the 1980s.
  - The book also reports that people have admitted to pretending to be the Goat Man to prank their friends. I’ve noticed a bit of pranking in accounts about the Old Alton Bridge, as well.
White Rock Lake Goatman
- The White Rock Lake Goatman was new to me.
- White Rock Lake is a well-known haunted lake in the area, however. The lake is in northeast Dallas. It’s right next to the Dallas Arboretum, where I go pretty much every time I visit my parents in Texas.
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rock_Lake
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Arboretum_and_Botanical_Garden
- In her 1998 book Best Tales of Texas Ghosts, Docia Schultz Williams talks about the tale of the White Lady of White Rock Lake. She has appeared in the form of a vanishing hitchhiker, “a pretty girl in a soaking wet white evening dress.
  - When a sympathetic motorist stops to offer her a ride, she gets in the back seat and gives an address in an area which was one of Dallas’ most prestigious neighborhoods back in the 1920s, out on Gaston Avenue. But soon she disappears, and the startled motorist is left with only a wet seat to attest to her having been in their car. Several people have said she leaves a wrap in the car that bears a 1920s Neiman Marcus label!”
  - That’s just classic vanishing hitchhiker stuff.
  - Supposedly the white lady has also shown up at local people’s doors. Typically, she asks to use the phone and then disappears.
  - There have also been reports of seeing her in the water.
- But anyway, the Goatman seems like a more recent legend. It seems like the story may have been popularized by author Nick Redfern. He’s written a number of popular books on paranormal and conspiracy theory-type topics, and apparently he lived right near White Rock Lake from 2003-2008.
  - Supposedly, this Goatman was seen in the 1970s and 1980s, lurking around the trees after sunset. He had the typical Goatman appearance.
  - https://paranormal-world.fandom.com/wiki/Grinning_Goatman_of_White_Rock_Lake
  - https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/11/goat-man-panic-in-the-lone-star-state/
  - http://weirdus.com/states/texas/bizarre_beasts/goatman_of_white_rock_lake/index.php
  - https://truehorrorstoriesoftexas.com/legend-of-the-lady-in-white-white-rock-lake-texas/
  - https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/09/strange-paranormal-phenomena-at-white-rock-lake/
  - https://1dustytrack.blogspot.com/2012/05/goat-man-of-white-rock-lake.html

Sources consulted RE: Who is the Goatman? (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Visit the series page for additional sources.

Sources consulted for Who is the Goatman? (Goatman’s Bridge Series):

Don’t miss past episodes:

“I Seen the Devil” (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

A deep dive into strangeness associated with the Goatman’s Bridge, featuring weird stories that I found on forums and comment sections, including a devil sighting, a ghost driver, lights turning red, terrifying laughter, Bigfoot-type phenomena, and more.

“I Seen the Devil”: A deep dive into strangeness associated with the Goatman’s Bridge, featuring weird stories that I found on forums and comment sections, including a devil sighting, a ghost driver, lights turning red, terrifying laughter, Bigfoot-type phenomena, and more.

Highlights include:

A ghostly driver redirecting a car to a cemetery
Disembodied voices
Will-o’-the-wisps
Glowing eyes

Episode Script for “I Seen the Devil” (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Intro for “I Seen the Devil” (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

This time, I want to talk about the specific phenomena that people have claimed to have witnessed at Goatman’s bridge.
I’ll be going through the list of the typical phenomena that the legends list, and I’ll include some accounts I found online from reading through old forums and comment sections.
But just to start us out right, I want to read my favorite comment that I found.
- Heather S. Google reviews https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=old%20alton%20bridge#lrd=0x864dccb9ff3e525b:0x427c899463ab2996,1 5 years ago I was heading to the game store walking from hickory. Visiting a cousin. It was late at night. Ill never go back. I swear i seen some unhuman like furry man on the edge of that water edge. A good 40-45 feet away. Looked like he had horns too like a goat. I swear i seen the devil. Ill never go back. Never
  - I forgot to write this down, but I’m pretty sure she gave it a 2 star review.

Rumored Phenomena

- The most famous supposed phenomena, which you can tell was popular prior to the new bridge being opened, is that if you visit the bridge at night, stop your car, and honk twice, you’ll see the Goat Man’s glowing red eyes in the darkness.
  - Of course, if you wanted to cross the bridge at all back then you needed to honk at least once, so you really wouldn’t be going out of your way to end up “summoning” the goat man in this situation.
    - I’ve also read on some websites that this only works if you do it on halloween.
  - Some stories say that if you cross the bridge at night without headlights, the Goatman will meet you on the other side of the bridge. That’s supposedly because the Klansmen crossed the bridge without headlights on when they came to lynch Washburn.
  - There’s also a rumor about how if you knock on the bridge’s trusses 3 times, you’ll summon the Goatman.
  - I read a couple different places that the Goatman will only appear to descendants of the KKK members who murdered Washburn, though the majority of accounts don’t make that claim.
    - https://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/2017-10-27/day-trips-old-alton-bridge-denton/
- Some paranormal rumors include:
  - People seeing a shadow of the Goat Man holding two goat heads in his arms, the goat man herding ghost goats across the bridge, and a sort of cryptid-type appearance of someone who’s half-goat, half-man, with glowing eyes and horns.
  - I’ve actually found a number of people claiming to see glowing eyes, which definitely could be eye-shine from animals, potentially (and I’ll get into more depth on the wildlife in a later episode). But here are some accounts I found about glowing eyes or glowing lights in the woods.
    - Allan G.
      - https://goatmansbridge.blogspot.com/ https://goatmansbridge.blogspot.com/2010/07/goatmans-bridge-paranormal-activity.html July 12, 2011
      - I grew up on Teasley Lane..not very far from Old Alton Bridge….I have only encountered “The Goatman” once. I was a 10th grader in Oct of 1996, me and some freinds were hanging out by the bridge late at night,and heard horrible laughter and saw glowing eyes from the woods(we had all cut our teeth hearing the stories/legend since our childhood)…Trust me we ran like hell and didnt stop until we reached “Southridge Baptist Church” parking lot. But ever since that night I cant help but get goose bumps and cross myself every time I pass by that Bridge…an after thought does anybidy know where I can find more info on the weeping woman mentioned on this site?…anyway very cool website..glad I found it!!
    - Yanira V Youtube comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZfGlyLQnA 1 month ago
      - A lot of my family members have seen this same entity , some with “fire eyes “ or “red glowing eyes “ im not sure what it could be but its best not to fear what we cannot understand
    - mahee Google reviews https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=old%20alton%20bridge#lrd=0x864dccb9ff3e525b:0x427c899463ab2996 ,1 2 years ago
      - “DONT GO. THERES A GOATMAN, HAUNTED!
      - No one will believe me but he apparently takes it victims and micics their voices. I was walking alone around 1am to explore and i heard voices saying “”you can run?”” And i looked around and didn’t see anything except glowing ball? Eyes maybe? And theres no way something over 6 feet with glowing eyes be human, so i ran. BE AWARE, BE CAREFUL“
    - Blong L
    - Google reviews https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=old%20alton%20bridge#lrd=0x864dccb9ff3e525b:0x427c899463ab2996,1 2 years ago This place is haunted, DO NOT bring your Family here!!! There’s something Dark & Evil lurking around here!!! Don’t attempt to provoke whatever dark entity is there! Ghost Adventure crew has been attacked here and even other ghost investigators as well. It is a strong evil spirit here, if you’re lucky you might not spot it. Something tall and malicious is stalking this area almost everyone who came here says so when they experience the horror… People got attacked and throw off their feet by unseen force at night. You don’t believe me then go there and investigate it for yourself you’ll regret it! Not going there ever anymore! I only went there to explore and hike with my family but when we came back it was getting dark and we were joking around about the ghost stories and urban legends of the bridge and had our fair share of poltergeist when a branch was thrown towards us when no one is around that late. We just ran when that happen and my sister saw a glowing orb of mist hovering by the tree lines and it was not a fire fly. Because it was moving so fast it faded out slowly away towards the water and glowed for like a good 8 second, and fireflies blinks their lights and they don’t hold it on like that. Plus there were no fireflies the whole entire time there during mid Fall. That was the only light orb we saw and it happened after the branch was thrown. Be safe than sorry, please learn more about staying here late before you go there! It can be bareable during the day but it still gives you the goosebumps! Don’t provoke whatever is there, unless you want it to attack you. Non believers go ahead and dare yourself to stay overnight if you want, you will be physically be attacked or touched by an unseen being. Alot of people had experiences there and you can find many stories from the locals nearby their own scary encounter.
  - Reminds me of a will o the wisp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will-o%27-the-wisp
  - Some people say that car doors lock and unlock and that they experience other electrical problems with their cars or other equipment that they bring out there (a lot of drained camera and recorder batteries, which is pretty standard haunted location stuf).
    - Edward https://goatmansbridge.blogspot.com/ https://goatmansbridge.blogspot.com/2010/07/goatmans-bridge-paranormal-activity.html August 7, 2012
“I graduated from Lewisville High School in the early 80’s and a visit to Goatman’s Bridge was virtually part of the curriculum. Had an interesting incident there in 1986, while taking my girlfriend and two other friends from Dallas to the bridge late one night:
As we approached the bridge from Copper Canyon just onto Old Alton Rd., I slowed down and began telling the legend to the three girls. After 30 yards or so, the headlights on my ’80 Mustang suddenly went out–completely on their own. A little spooked, I jiggled the switch to no avail as the girls laughed at what they thought was part of the act. Thinking I was going to have to backtrack to find some external light to see what I was doing while trying to get the headlights working, I put the car into reverse and crept backward. After about 5 feet, the lights came back on by themselves! I exclaimed “”that’s really weird”” and confessed that I wasn’t responsible for the lighting aspect of the show, then stopped the car to forge ahead on our adventure toward the bridge. I put the car in gear and lunged forward a few feet and THE LIGHTS WENT OUT AGAIN! At this point, the girls were screaming and I was sufficiently creeped out myself, so I backed up to leave…AND AGAIN THE HEADLIGHTS CAME ON! Without any semblance of an explanation and more than a little terrified, I peeled out of there with the shrieking girls as fast as I could get the car going on the (at the time) gravel road.
- - - - I am sure there is a scientific explanation for the events that night, but I have never found it. I had never had difficulty with the headlights on that car before or after that night. Do I believe that there was some sort of paranormal activity surrounding my car’s electrical system? No. I don’t think I’ve ever been more frightened though. To this day, the events of that evening are a real mystery.“
    - Here’s a fun Old Alton Bridge story I found posted on a forum in 2007:
      - “I’ve been to Goatman’s many of times. I live right off of Swisher about 2 miles from the bridge. I haven’t been there in years but trust me, there’s something or someone there! My friends and I used to go there all the time back in high school. [This was when you could still drive over the bridge.. there was no new bridge yet] Now, I’ve never seen the “Goatman” but I’ve witnessed and experienced many other strange happenings. For one, whenever we would start getting close to the bridge, [while driving], the dashboard lights would start getting dimmer and dimmer, then go out completely, including the headlights. The locks would start locking and unlocking themselves. There was a couple of times, and if I hadn’t been there myself I wouldn’t believe it, but the truck we were in seemed to be and WAS driving itself! My friend who was driving was freaked out and lifted his feet up on the seat and you could see the gas pedal going up and down. When he let go of the steering wheel it was jerking itself back and forth really hard. I was there. I saw this happening! and finally it “drove” us into a ditch and we were stuck. All the while, the inside overhead light was glowing bright red as if there was a red lightbulb inside. Then, while we were stuck, [the truck wouldn’t start], we starting hearing this kind of popping sound. I don’t know how to explain it, it was really weird. It kept getting louder and closer but we couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Finally, the truck started and we got the hell out of there.
“Another time, [and don’t ask why we kept going back], we were going from another direction, through Flower Mound. Going that way you have to pass an old graveyard to get to Goatman’s. All of a sudden the truck was “driving” itself again and pulled into the graveyard on it’s own. It pulled in and the engine started reving and the horn started honking. Then it just reversed itself and MADE US go the direction towards the bridge. It was jerking back and forth and the red light was glowing again inside the truck. Ok, this was when that “Offspring” c.d. with that “You gotta keep ’em seperated” song was really popular. We had that in and it was turned all the way down. In the intro it says something along the lines of “…music good enough to calm the savage beast…”… well, the radio started turning up and it was skipping over and over again, saying “savage beast… savage beast… savage beast…” and getting louder and louder. The headlights turned out and the door started locking and unlocking again. That’s when we left!
“The most recent time I went, it was still daylight.. the sun was just starting to set. The new bridge was there so we had to get out and walk over the old one. I took a friend with me and we just wanted to walk across the bridge and back again. Well, we walked across and then I started hearing a banging underneath the bridge. Under my feet. There’s no man in the world tall enough to reach the top of the bridge from underneath it. So, we started walking back across. As we walked, the banging followed us further and further and louder and louder. It remained right underneath our feet as we walked [then ran] back to the car. I haven’t been back since. Not because I’m scared, but because I’m a mother now and I haven’t had a chance. I have a few friends than are non-believers and will be taking them soon. If you’re a believer and in for a true haunted place. I suggest Goatman’s Bridge.”
- - - - https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/topic/60089-goatmans-bridge-denton-tx-with-pics/page/2/#comments
    - Here’s a story from a forum 2008:
      - “Wow, it has been a long time. I was just messing around on the computer and typed in Goat Man’s Bridge and this was here. Just for ****’s and giggles I can share with you my knowlege and experiences. Before I go further, I will tell you that time has passed and I have seen online current pictures of the bridge along with the new concrete one next to it. Even the scenery has changed. It looks like the lake it right there over the trees. There appears to be less forest area around the bridge itself, but sure enough this is the bridge. If anyone has past and/or current daytime pics, please post them.
      - I no longer live in Texas, but I did grow up there and went to High School there. I lived just down the road from Goatman’s Bridge in Highland Village. I attended Marcus and Lewisville High Schools. I used to party down by Goatman’s in high school and my friend and I also would go hunting in and out of the woods surrounding the bridge and the local area. Growing up, I too had heard the legend and all the stories. I never “saw” anything strange, but did experience some strange things. It was in the mid 1980’s while in high school. Now I don’t want to sound like a story teller and I am not trying to set the scene for a scary story. During the day the place looked just like old back road country. At night the place was darker than hell, and it didn’t help that there was an old cemetary near by, and the old dirt roads were enclosed by trees covering over you like a long tunnel of darkness. It was kind of scary and it added to the stories. Nothing ever out of the ordinary other than hearing strange noises that were either night creatures or our minds just playing there roles in being scared. Except, one night my buddy, his girlfriend, and I drove out there during the summer break to party. No one was there, just us. It was a warm, but not too hot summer night, and as usual it was pitch black. We had drove around the area looking for other party people, but no luck. We had drove over the bridge several times during our search. Since we couldn’t find anyone, my buddy just pulled his girl’s pinto hatchback onto the bridge and we parked there in the middle. We just chilled, talked, and went over the stories about the bridge that night, we parked there with the radio on low. We all got out of the car, sat on the hood and continued talking. My buddy told a story that if you pee’d of the bridge that it would never hit the creek water below and there would be no sounds of splashing. He tried it, and sure enough, no noise. The bridge is not that high above the water so we should have heard something. As we chilled there, some strange noises in the distance started getting louder, like the were getting closer. Then we heard some rustling out in the woods. (As I write this, I find myself thinking that anyone reading this probably thinks it’s some Blair Witch BS story, but it’s not). Then, the temperature dropped to not freezing, but cold enough that we had fog coming from our mouths as we talked. At this point, we were starting to get spooked and scared. We decided to leave. We got in the car but now it wouldn’t start. Could have been the battery, I don’t know. After all, we did have the radio on low. We kept trying to start the car, but no luck. The sounds around us started really scaring us. His girlfriend was telling him to quit screwing around, and he said he wasn’t. Finally, the car started and we drove off the bridge, but as we drove away we all noticed that the temperature started rising back to being warm like it had before it dropped.
      - Anyway, that is the only thing that I had ever experienced at Goatman’s. Strange enough for me, but true. It is on you if you believe me or not, but I was there and experienced it. There was another, strange thing that happened near there while I was hunting with my friend in the backwoods. We heard what sounded like a man moaning, like he was in pain or something. No words, just moaning. We couldn’t tell were it was coming from, but it spooked us out there by ourselves. That did not happen at the bridge, but wasn’t too far from it. I, myself, when told of stories like this try to keep an open mind because of my own strange experiences. At times, I ask myself was it real and I think about the song from the Ghetto Boys – My Mind Is Playing Tricks On Me.
      - I live in California now, but would like to hear what others have experienced or witnessed regarding Goatman’s. Also, like I mentioned above, pics would be great.
      - Racer X”
      - https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/topic/60089-goatmans-bridge-denton-tx-with-pics/page/2/#comments
  - People have heard growls, hoof beats, mysterious laughter, and other sounds.
    - Al M. Youtube comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZfGlyLQnA 7 months ago I grew up here and been here all my life… the story has it that there was a black man in the 20s or 30s that was know in town as the goat man because he sold goats to everyone he lived on the other side of the bridge. He put a sign up that said this way to the goat man. White town folks didn’t like that so they went one night to his house and pulled him from his family. They hung him from the bridge. next day they went to pull his body down but it wasn’t there. So they went to the family and killed them all thinking they were the ones that moved the body. Now, Goat man haunts the woods and the bridge. Said to be a ghost that is half goat and half man. There are other stories of people disappearing. its been said that you would go to the end of the bridge and turn off your lights, as the town folks did the night they killed him, he would appear at the other end and something bad would happen. Now they have placed barricades so no one can drive out to it. People go out there and party and to seek thrills and try to have super natural experiences. When we were kids we would kinda party there we would hear things like splashing in the water like someone fell in but no one was around. we would hear hooves on the wooden bridge and nothing would be there. we could hear chains being dragged but could never pin point were it came from.
    - disaster308 unexplained-mysteries.com https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/topic/60089-goatmans-bridge-denton-tx-with-pics/ 2006
      - “””my friends and i read about the goatman bridge the other night and decided to explore it for ourselves… oh man. we went at about 10 or 11 at night, so it was really dark, and really creepy. we just stayed and sat on the bridge for a while, and we did hear the splashing in the water, although we didnt think much of it (maybe frogs? or fish jumping?). the one realllllly creepy thing was we heard laughing. and it wasnt normal laughing, it was like evil, menacing laughing coming from multiple directions. we had a dog with us, and even the dog was freaked out. we left shortly after that.
      - i didnt grow up around here, but i was telling a friend that had our story later, and he told me that he knew of the bridge. definatley a place to go check out.
      - does anyone know of any other local haunted places?? i’d love to know and go check them out.”””
    - This person described a super weird sound
      - deej89 unexplained-mysteries.com https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/topic/60089-goatmans-bridge-denton-tx-with-pics/ 2006
      - “””So I just stumbled on this thread from google. Tonight my room mates and I went to the goat bridge. I’ve been there once before and needless to say it was creepy, but nothing out of the ordinary happened.
      - Tonight was definitely different. My room mates and I went out to the bridge at about 9:30. We parked down the drive and started walking. We walked across the bridge and nothing seemed strange. Then we continued down the path venturing into the woods- and once again nothing was strange. We did have a flashlight but we didn’t use it. So we headed back across. We head back to the car then notice a path off to the right. If you’re heading towards the bridge from the drive it on the left. The path is blocked by a low metal bar so four wheelers can’t get on it. Anyways, we start walking. After maybe 40 or so feet down the trail we all get a pretty weird feeling. Just a real eery feeling. We stopped for a while but continued on. The trail opens up out of the woods and curves to the left. We rounded it and found ourselves about a 15 minute walk behind a brightly lit building (the one you see when you make the sharp right turn heading to the bridge). The entire time we had the creepiest feeling that someone was watching us. We heard this faint noise that sounded like water trickling and continued to walk. We soon realized that the noise was in no way water trickling. It was kind of indescribable. It sounded like wood being slap together mixed with a very crackling fire noise- something I’ve never heard. We kept walking and it got louder. We stopped and it still got louder. That was when we decided it was time to leave. The walk back was nerve racketing, but nothing happened.
      - So has anyone heard anything about the woods around the bridge? I would like to go back out there with some equipment (I’m an RTVF major at UNT and have some nice camera and audio equip.). Anyone up for getting a little group together?”””
    - locobolio unexplained-mysteries.com https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/topic/60089-goatmans-bridge-denton-tx-with-pics/ 2007
      - my last trip to goatmans. we were about 3/4 mile from the bridge, where the road was blocked at one point in time(i believe its opened up now to the bridge, and in use) standing around our vehicles that were parked on the side of the road. in our conversations we kept hearing a strange noise, way off in the distance. we would hear it about every five minutes, and each time we heard it, it was a little bit closer. this occurred several time, and then all of a sudden this noise sounded like it was right behind us. that was enough to scare the mess out of a few of us, and the others followed and jumped into the cars, and took off.
upon looking a little bit later, we came across a bigfoot scream online, which sounded just like what we heard! no-one could beleive it….did we really have a bigfoot encounter? and is this really another part of the goatman story?
- - - has anyone heard of or experienced any of this at goatmans bridge?”
  - John B. Google reviews https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=old%20alton%20bridge#lrd=0x864dccb9ff3e525b:0x427c899463ab2996,1 4 years ago Okay this place is haunted. No other way to say it. My girlfriend and I went a little bit before 3am, there were 3 groups one was leaving and the other appeared to be high school kids. We walked to the bridge with the high schoolers, they were being loud so we decided to walk to the end of the bridge away from them. When we went back to the bridge they were gone, so we stopped in the middle of the bridge and listened for a minute. This is when it all started happening. We heard some voices coming from the woods it was clear but we couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then we started heading to the end of the bridge and stopped again. That’s when we heard a voice that sounded like it was underwater, it was really loud and continuous and sounded like it was coming from all around us. We ran to the car and waited there for a minute or two then heard it again from the trail we were just on and it was getting louder and closer so we got in our car and left. I had my GoPro on recording the entire time. When I reviewed the footage I heard a voice that said “DON’T RUN” so naturally we’re going back.
  - This story is just weird, because I don’t know what this person was doing out and about so late at night with their niece. Who knows if this is made up or what. ca mpy Google reviews https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=old%20alton%20bridge#lrd=0x864dccb9ff3e525b:0x427c899463ab2996,1 2 years ago Was really disturbing, I went here for a peaceful midnight stroll with my 10-year-old niece. It was around 12am when we got there, And we started to walk on the bridge, but as soon as we did. We heard a growling noise in the background . She got really scared, so we hurried up; I saw glowing yellow eyes in the trees, I didn’t tell my niece because it would freak her out. I’m not sure what happened but I am never going back. i’m not sure what happened but I am never going back
- Folks have said that they heard a voice saying to get off the bridge, or have had sudden violent urges while visiting.
- There are also rumors of bad smells. Oh, and since I read that bigfoot-related comment, I guess it’s worth mentioning that bad smells often accompany bigfoot sightings.
  - Maddie R. Youtube comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZfGlyLQnA 3 months ago
    - i actually live in Denton and ive been here many times, i believe this tale bc of the things ive experienced once i smelt sulfur which is a sign of a negative energy. rly cool place tho!
- There are also a lot of reports that I can only really describe as “bad vibes”
  - Joshua S. Google reviews https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=old%20alton%20bridge#lrd=0x864dccb9ff3e525b:0x427c899463ab2996,1 1 year ago Was there for less than 20 minutes, constantly felt like I was gonna pass out, and someone was watching me. I thought I heard a growl at one point. Pretty sure this place was on Ghost Adventures lmao.
- People have claimed to be touched or to have rocks thrown at them.
  - I found a bunch of stories about this online, though here are a few.
  - Lauren j Youtube comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZfGlyLQnA 2 months ago
    - I literally never comment but when I went to college in denton me and my friends used to go there a lot to hang out and the bridge has graffiti all over it. It was always super creepy and when I was sitting on it once I felt something push my back and there was no one close to me

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Satanic Rituals at the Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

A look at the urban legends claiming that cultish activity has occurred at Texas’ famously haunted Old Alton Bridge, or Goatman’s Bridge.

Satanic Rituals at the Bridge: A look at the urban legends claiming that cultish activity has occurred at Texas’ famously haunted Old Alton Bridge, or Goatman’s Bridge.

Content note: This episode contains discussions of urban legends about animal abuse, as well as white supremacist hate groups.

Highlights include:
• Some possible debunkings
• A creepy abandoned house
• Rumors of rituals in the woods
• A look at one of the Buzzfeed Unsolved claims

Episode Script for “I Seen the Devil” (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Intro for Satanic Rituals at the Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

- Now, I alluded to this last time, but there have been stories of satanic rituals at the Goatman’s Bridge.
- I don’t put a ton of stock in stories of satanic rituals at supposedly haunted sites. Especially when it comes to places in the Bible Belt. At least when I was growing up there, there was a certain population of people who made everything about Satan, somehow or another. But I found a few comments online talking about different groups doing rituals or meeting there. Some of those groups are pretty sinister (you know, like the KKK), and some seemed harmless. Just for the record: I give no credence to the stuff that ignorant people say about Satanists. I think it’s mostly made up stories to weaponize against people who are on the margins of society for one reason or another, and it has nothing to do with actual Satanists, who, to be clear, I have no problem with. So if you’ve come here to listen to fearmongering and ignorance about Satanism, you’ve come to the wrong place. I’m here to explore and think about these urban legends and what they say about the larger story of the hauntings of the Goatman’s Bridge.
- I’ve talked about the connection between stories about goatmen and Satan, so that’s another reason why it’d make sense for there to be satanic rumors about the bridge.
- I just want to walk through some of the legends I found online RE: rituals (satanic and otherwise), as well as rumors about Satanists and KKK members gathering there
- Let’s set the stage with a quick overview of one person’s memory of the legend; this is from dfwurbanwildlife.com https://dfwurbanwildlife.com/2013/10/28/chris-jacksons-dfw-urban-wildlife/journal-the-legend-of-goatmans-bridge/ :
  - “I must have been around eleven or twelve years old when I first heard about Goatman’s Bridge. I was told vague and enigmatic stories about dense woods, a lonely dirt road running through a tunnel of trees, and an old haunted bridge. These dark tales were accompanied by rumors of satanic rituals, burning crosses, and the Klu Klux Klan that made the place sound mysterious, foreboding, and dangerous. ”
- It sounds like there’s always been ambient stories about Satanic rituals at the bridge, especially because of the Satanic Panic that swept through the US in the 1980s and into the 90s. This is a huge topic that a lot of people have covered really well, so I’m not going to get super into that here. If you want to know more, maybe check out some of the episodes of the podcast You’re Wrong About that deal with the satanic panic, since they go pretty in depth about it.
  - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic
- Nowadays, I think that the biggest and most-repeated concrete claim of Satanic stuff happening at the bridge comes from the 2017 Buzzfeed Unsolved episode about the bridge. In the episode, they claimed that a local cop told them that nearby pet stores stopped selling cats in the area because they were being bought to be sacrified. One of the hosts told the Dallas Observer: “One local police offer says that pet stores around the area stopped selling cats due to the amount of sacrificed cats being found in these woods.”
  - Now, I have no idea if that’s true. I also have no idea if there might be another explanation for it, like for example, maybe a coyote or bobcat was killing cats in the woods, though without more information about who made these claims, what condition the cats’ bodies were in (like if they seemed partially eaten or not), I can only speculate.
  - https://allthatsinteresting.com/goatmans-bridge
  - https://www.dallasobserver.com/arts/buzzfeed-supernatural-investigators-visit-denton-bridge-to-see-if-its-really-haunted-by-a-half-goat-half-demon-10051546
- Now, I think it’s worth noting that this type of urban legend exists elsewhere. There’s a the popular rumor about Satanists sacrificing cats on Halloween. For example, the Daily News, a tabloid here in New York published an article in 1999 called “Halloween’s no treat for coveted black cats”:
“”This is a time when blood rituals take place,” said Hedy Litke, director of animal placement at the ASPCA. “Black cats are often sacrificed.”
“Such is their popularity that many shelters in New York and around the country ban adoptions of black cats in the weeks and days preceding Oct. 31 to protect them from potentially grisly endings. “Black cats are in demand at this time of year,” said Sandra DeFeo of the Humane Society, which prohibits adoptions of black cats during most of October and the beginning of November. ”
- - https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/halloween-no-treat-coveted-black-cats-article-1.851295
- I will say this, however: the debunking website Snopes has an entry about, and it says it’s an urban legend. Per snopes:
“Unfortunately, Halloween has also been a time when some people acquire pets — particularly cats — to use as living decorations or for displays of fun and sport, only to discard or abandon them afterwards (as often happens with chicks and rabbits at Easter time). Accordingly, many animal shelters have taken steps in recent years to limit or eliminate the adoption of cats in the days leading up to Halloween by either deferring feline adoptions until after Halloween or by more carefully scrutinizing the prospective adopters.
One of the more widely-cited justifications for the implementation of more stringent adoption policies by animal shelters around Halloween is the claim that cats in general — and black cats in particular — are avidly sought by members of “satanic cults” who engage in the mutilation, torture, and killing of cats in celebrations associated or coincident with Halloween. That animal shelter policy has been influenced by a widespread belief in satanic cat-sacrificing rituals at Halloween is beyond dispute; the issue here is whether such activity is really as prevalent as the belief in it is.
First of all, depending upon which source you believe, the alleged practice of sacrificing black cats began with “Druid priests,” “pagans,” or the (Christian) “Church” . . .
When questioned about their October policies, most animal shelter and humane society representatives affirm their belief that steps are necessary to prevent cats from becoming sacrificial Halloween victims but offer no tangible evidence that the phenomenon is real beyond their belief in it . . .
Although no law enforcement agency or animal protection group we contacted could provide statistics about Halloween-related animal killings or abuse, the consensus is that although incidents of animal abuse may rise slightly around Halloween, it’s a year-around problem, and it has far more to do with poorly-behaved kids than with organized “satanic cults””
- The snopes piece also has snippets from some pretty ridiculous articles, like for example there’s one that claims that 12-14 cases of cat torture or mutilation happened in an area, 5 of which were killed by humans, who they thought were neighborhood teens. To continue from snopes:
  - “Note that the article cited above refers to “12 to 14 cat torture and mutilation cases” but avers that only five of the cats were confirmed to have been killed by “humans.” If the other seven to nine cases had not been linked to human activity, then why were they reported as incidents of “torture and mutilation”? The fact is that cats are frequently killed by larger animals such as coyotes and through a variety of accidental means, but both types of deaths (and unexplained disappearances) are often mistakenly chalked up to the work of “satanic cults” and described as cases of “torture and mutilation” when the deaths occur around Halloween.”
- Also, I just gotta say, I wrote the part in my script about the cats probably being killed by coyotes before reading this Snopes article
- So, again, the Snopes article is basically like, this is an urban legend, there’s no evidence, when it does seem to happen, it’s bored teenagers and nothing satanic. It does point out that it’s prob a good idea for shelters to be cautious around Halloween anyway, because people might decide that they want to temporarily adopt a black cat for decorative purposes, but that’s very different from ritual sacrifice.
- https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cat-o-nine-tales/
Alright, so that’s the biggest claim about animal sacrifices either debunked or complicated, depending on your POV. What other rumors are going around online about the bridge and cults?
Olls Youtube comment
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZfGlyLQnA
- 4 months ago
- I go to school here and the amount of people holding ceremonies at this place is creeeeeepy 🙁 my local friend says that while he doubts that this place was originally cursed, the amount of bad energy here by now is insane.
This is just an odd one:
- Ranboo But Not Youtube comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZfGlyLQnA 5 months ago
- I live in texas and been to the goat mans bridge(not that far from it) it’s not that scary but when I went on a trail with a few of my friends it stated getting scary and the sun was getting real low so we had to head back(just to mention we had no flash lights or food) when we were heading back on the same trail there was glow sticks everywhere on the ground and what looked like a huge pile of grass and weeds were laid flat. I have no idea what happens right there but that wasn’t there when we came down the path.
This youtube commenter alludes to the idea that animal sacrifice happens near the bridge. Supposedly it’s so prevalent that the sales of certain animals have been prohibited nearby. While I’ve heard this repeated, I haven’t found anything corroborating it. I also can’t find anything supporting this claim of certain animals avoiding the area.
- Dallas 1-1 Youtube comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZfGlyLQnA 9 months ago (edited)
- I used to live by there. And every time passing by night I would get a dark feeling angry or easily irritated. Almost like a large spot of negative energy. There is a reason no pet stores in a 10 mile radius sell cats or goats. In the area do to people sacrificing them. Dear and birds also avoid the area .”
Nick H Google reviews
- https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=old%20alton%20bridge#lrd=0x864dccb9ff3e525b:0x427c899463ab2996,1
- 3 years ago
- You need to be very careful coming to this bridge, not only is it very haunted, but the wilderness around can be very dangerous as well. Numerous sacrifices have been made on the bridge, attempts to reach the spirits and demons with Ouija boards have been made. Not only do you have the Goatman to worry about but other restless spirits as well. We have EVP documentation of growls, blood curdling screams, and voices. My brother ended up with three scratch marks down his back when he knocked twice on the bridge .Demons are very real and you don’t need to mess with them! Just warning you now. This place is evil
Yee-ol-boy Reddit
- https://www.reddit.com/r/mrballen/comments/rqmjp6/you_should_do_a_video_on_goatmans_bridge_ive_been/ 3 months ago
- You should do a video on goatman’s bridge, i’ve been to a lot of haunted locations, & that one at night was the only one that actually scared me. It was also the only one that I found a sacrifice along the cliffs edge of the river. It was a pig and it had one of those stars and unlit candles.
This story seems to allude to rituals occurring:
- alexalee unexplained-mysteries.com https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/topic/60089-goatmans-bridge-denton-tx-with-pics/ 2010
- “i recently visited the goatmans bridge in denton texas, my friend and i went around dusk and just decided to go in with an open mind and explore a little bit. we went to the bridge and noticed huge burn marks on it in a complete perfect circle as well as red paint on the bridge, which we thought was odd. we continued over the bridge to the other side where we wandered down the path for a bit, not noticing anything we walked back towards the bridge and our car. we noticed a few marks on the ground that didnt seem to be there before but brushed them off as not being anything of importance just something we didnt see previously. once back to the car we were getting ready to leave when i noticed odd cuts all over my arms and some on my side as well as a few on my legs that had not been there before, i did not touch any shrubs or trees so it was odd. within the next day these cuts turned into larger gashes with added rashes and spots around them. has anyone experienced anything like this with any sites before? i know for a fact that i did not brush up against anything and did not have these cuts before going to the site
I wasn’t sure how to categorize this story, but I figured it was worth sharing because it includes a dead animal:
- Weezeeba unexplained-mysteries.com https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/topic/60089-goatmans-bridge-denton-tx-with-pics/ 2010 “A few friends and I went there just last night. One other person and I heard some odd noises under the bridge but we figured it was just fish or frogs. The other two, on our way back to the car, felt zaps on their backs while going under the bar to the lot. In the exact same places. We heard a zap so we either have it that some dip****z were trowing poppers or since it was a metal bar it was electricity and the crossing of the bridge a few times caused it. The strangest and most eerie thing though was driving back we saw a fresh kill laying in the road. Not roadkill, but the ribs were exposed and blood was still pooling around it. My friend was not wearing her glasses and freaked out and thought it was a goat head. 😛 We are going to go back a few more times with my cameras. We want to find a thermocam. And we plan on scaring some more friends pretty badly. XD

Alright, so those were claims about Satanists and the Old Alton Bridge. I’ve already talked extensively about the KKK’s history in North Texas in this series, most comprehensively in the episode “This Way to the Goatman,” so if you want to know more about that, listen to that episode.

So, let’s talk about KKK activity in the area nowadays just to give these claims some context:
- So, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that studies hate groups, KKK hate group enrollment declined in 2021 and 2020 and they expect it to continue declining this year.
  - https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan
- In 2019, CBS reported that at least 80 residents of a North Texas city received KKK flyers that were randomly thrown into their driveways.
  - https://www.cbsnews.com/dfw/news/kkk-flyers-appear-north-texas-homes/
- In 2014, Mic.com reported that Dallas had two active KKK chapters
  - https://www.mic.com/articles/87585/the-complete-list-of-american-cities-where-the-kkk-is-known-to-operate
  - https://www.keranews.org/texas-news/2016-08-02/there-are-84-active-hate-groups-in-texas-the-most-of-any-state
- It does sound like there was a decent amount of Klan activity in the US in general in the 1980s, enough that the SPLC created “Klanwatch” in 1981, to monitor Klan activity across the country. In 1998, they renamed it and expanded it to monitor additional hate groups.
  - https://www.splcenter.org/about-us/our-history/splc-history-1980s
- So it sounds like there hadn’t been much Klan activity in the area in recent years, but there hasn’t been none.
- Oh, and importantly, I should mentioned: When Ghost Adventures filmed their episode in July 2016, they did a historical reenactment that included people dressed as klansmen, so that made some headlines because some people didn’t realize that it was for a TV show and thought there were actual klansmen in the woods. So this is an interesting case of an urban legend inspiring people to investigate and recreate the urban legend as part of their investigation, which then serves to reinforce that urban legend.
  - https://www.chron.com/culture/tv/article/KKK-rumors-in-Denton-Texas-are-far-stranger-than-8391025.php
  - https://cw33.com/cw33/pic-makes-some-believe-theres-kkk-activity-in-denton/
Let’s get into some of the stories that people had:
James B. youtube comment
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIrnzzTmP0s 8 years ago
- Still remember going out there in the 80’s. Only one time did I see anything weird, and that was a KKK rally. Long time ago. Interesting thing at night the water produces fog around the bridge and helps the story. Fun growing up in the area.
There’s a lot going on in this next comment, including urban legends about both Satanists and KKK members.
- Mattzig unexplained-mysteries.com https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/topic/60089-goatmans-bridge-denton-tx-with-pics/ 2006
- “””me and my friends went up there couple nights ago, we live in lewisville… we went up to the bridge… and what we hard was there is supposedly an old abbandonded church if you follow the trail off the bridge… where satanists and kkk members sacrifice sh** and what not…
- wierd crap went on…
- we got there and like… we went on the bridge and we heard drums, is the best way i can describe it, something hitting something else keeping a constant beat. my friend took pics, and when he did the drums stopped… then we heard the sound of like a saw cutting through something. my friends batteries died and he put new batteries in but they died almost instantly. my friend had gone there the night before and killed a copperhead with a crowbar. we went there and couldnt find it. also, we met a couple ppl and they took us to an abandoned house and its all kinda collapsed and crap but it was still pretty interesting. my friend and his cousin also were on the bridge the night before and they heard a loud thump and saw some kind of hairy thing crawling across one side of the bridge to the other… my friend got pics of it but it was on a cell fone and it was soo dark you can hardly see it… we are going back this weekend.”””
locobolio unexplained-mysteries.com https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/topic/60089-goatmans-bridge-denton-tx-with-pics/ 2007
- “local texan here, have been out to goatmans bridge several times in my life. to back up some of what i have read in the postings, as we have walked some of the trails out there, we have heard noises…sounds like something was watching/following close by. this is easily explained by….’its out in the country’ you hear lots of things out there.
- I do have a question regarding some of chrisgeo’s pics. on the one about the lights, can you provide a little more info. the stories about this place not only include a place of satan worship, but also a history of klan meetings. one of the pictures looks like what i would guess a meeting like that might look like from far off(thanks to the movie bad boys 2) just a thought. a couple of things also from my experiences out there also, on certain instances while walking in the woods again, we also heard sounds of heavy breathing as we walked….not just in one spot, but almost moving with us….(yes we might have been breathing a little hard, but this was not us!!) anyone else experience this?

Sources consulted RE: Satanic Rituals at the Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Visit the series page for additional sources.

Sources consulted for Satanic Rituals at the Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

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Rewriting Urban Legends (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

An attempt to trace the current tales of the Goatman’s Bridge to their source: a 2008 YouTube video that contained seemingly new information about the urban legend, including some information that linked the story to the Mothman legends.

Rewriting Urban Legends: An attempt to trace the current tales of the Goatman’s Bridge to their source: a 2008 YouTube video that contained seemingly new information about the urban legend, including some information that linked the story to the Mothman legends.

Highlights include:
• Thoughts about how the internet transforms and changes urban legends
• A little digital gumshoeing
• Some Mothman easter eggs

Episode Script for Rewriting Urban Legends (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

DISCLAIMER: I’m providing this version of the script for accessibility purposes. It hasn’t been proofread, so please excuse typos. (Especially because I use dictation software for a lot of my script writing!) There are also some things that may differ between the final episode and this draft script. Please treat the episode audio as the final product.

I’d like to loop back to some of the trickster stories I mentioned in the first episode of this series.
I’d like to go through a timeline of the Goatman’s Bridge legend as it’s now known. My understanding is that the legend had been circulating for some time, but as I talked about in the first episode of this series, there was a clear difference between pre-July 2008 stories about the Goatman’s bridge, and post-July 2008 stories. My sense is that this was the moment when one version of the story was codified into something resembling the “truth,” at least as far as the internet was concerned. And also, as far as I’ve been able to tell, that’s when the Goatman was given the name Oscar Washburn.

The Youtube video

On July 25, 2008, someone who I’m going to call Leland (not his real name) posted a 2-minute youtube video telling the story of the Old Alton Bridge.
“However, the goatman’s bridge is haunted. I went there back in highschool with a group of people. We walked down one of the paths, and I swear something started chasing us! It might have just been a racoon or something…but it was moving in our direction, and we all bolted out of there! Running across the bridge back to the car and then on that gravel is damn scary. I always thought that the Goatman was a black goat farmer, lynched by the KKK for putting a sign up on the bridge. And I am pretty sure that it took place in the 1930s, not 1800s, because the bridge wasn’t built until 1884 i think. There are news reports of abandoned cars on the bridge from the 1960s for sure.”
- haven’t been able to find mentions of Oscar Washburn prior to 2008. But I did find someone with the same screen name as Leland’s youtube channel name posting the story on a forum on March 4, 2008, though without the name Oscar Washburn.
The video makes a number of claims, including this bit, which appears in the viedo as well as the first line of the video description, which has a transcript of the voiceover: November 15th 1967: police discover an abandoned car beside Old Alton Bridge, five miles south of Denton, Texas. A rash of mysterious disappearances are becoming alarmingly routine on a chilling stretch of road that is known by locals as “the Goatman’s bridge.”
- It sounds like the first comment was on July 2, 2010, on randomconnections.com. The comment also said that the car was a Mustang, because of course it was, and it says that “there were lots of people that reported other missing persons linked to the Goatman’s bridge and the Goat man” with no additional detail. Apparently this commenter left a link a website, goatmansbridge.com which repeated the claim with no citation. (http://www.randomconnections.com/paranormal-activity/)
  - from his website: “November 15th 1967: police discover an abandoned car beside Old Alton Bridge, five miles south of Denton, Texas. A rash of mysterious disappearances are becoming alarmingly routine on a chilling stretch of road that is known by locals as “the Goatman’s bridge.””
  - https://web.archive.org/web/20100617152737/http://www.goatmansbridge.com/
- Weirdly, November 15th 1967 is exactly 1 month before the Silver Bridge collapsed in Point Pleasant, West Virginia
- If you’re interested in the moth man at all, you’re probably familiar with silver bridge collapse. But just in case you aren’t up to date with the moth man lore, basically from November 15, 1966 to December 15, 1967, there were a series of incidents that were said to involve the moth man. People saw the moth man around the area and it was said that he sort of presaged the collapse of the silver bridge on December 15, 1967, which is a really tragic incident where 46 people died.
- So it’s just a strange, unlikely “coincidence” that there’s a connection between the dates of the moth man siding and this supposedly disappearance near the goat man’s bridge. And it’s not lost on me that there’s a connection between the two legends: both involve a animal man hybrid as well as a bridge. And both are popular urban legends, so if someone in 2010 wanted to make up this story, they probably were the type of person who was familiar with the moth man legend, so this might be a little Easter egg put in there.I was lucky enough to stumble upon a website called factschology.com, which had an article describing the deep dive that the podcast Myths, Mysteries, and Monsters went on to try to confirm this story. This person couldn’t find newspaper articles to back up the story, but found where the rumor seemed to have started online. Apparently, in 2010, there was a person who commented on a bunch of websites, basically anything that mentioned the bridge that year. The person said: “There have been several disappearances on and around Old Alton Bridge. Most notably, one that occurred November 15th 1967. The Denton newspaper at the time did an article on a car found abandoned on the bridge.”
The video also links to the Association for the Study of Unexplained Phenomenon (ASUP) website (http://www.asup-inc.org/oldaltonbridgecase.htm); the original website is down, but you can still read it on the wayback machine. Notably, the article mentions neither Oscar Washburn nor a disappearance in 1967.
Also, I wanted to read this excerpt from the site: As most folk tales often do, the bridge takes on newer and more fanciful claims with every passing year. Some say that the bridge was once the site of an execution, another of a lynching; others say that an old goat herder was murdered on this spot, while still others believe it is the earthbound spirits of those killed in the Sam Bass – Texas Ranger’s shootout nearby. There are even claims of satanic devil worship being performed on the site, raising the specter of the devil himself on the bridge. https://web.archive.org/web/20100920155235/http://www.asup-inc.org/oldaltonbridgecase.htm
The site also tells this story about a possible historical Goat Man: “In some research we found that in the late 1800s there was a man that reportedly lived out near the bridge, who owned several goats. The residents of what are now the cities of Argyle and Denton thought the man to be a bit of a loner and rather odd, but no one really knew all that much about him. The legend goes that he had a wife, who died mysteriously and that one night a group of drunken cowboys found the old man out crossing the bridge, herding his goats and drove the animals off the bridge, killing them in the fall. Apparently, hearing about this, the County Sheriff went out to check on the man’s welfare, but found neither the man nor the goats, dead or alive. Shortly afterwards, so the stories go, a family was passing over the bridge at night and encountered the old man, or at least his apparition, standing in front of them, a goats head tucked under each arm. But all of this is Internet talk, without corroboration,” Blair explains. The Sheriff’s archives made no mention of the event.
- Also, for the record, there have also been reports of the lynchings of white people in the area, so I have seems some older stories that seemed to claim that a white goatman had been lynched.
- There have been four known lynching events of white people in Denton County since its founding, and the reason for white lynchings was typically horse theft. According to Micah Carlson Crittenden’s University of North Texas masters thesis published in May 2020, The Tall Grass West Of Town: Racial Violence In Denton County During The Rise Of The Second Ku Klux Klan: “Due to shifts in the public perception of white criminality and lynching as a violation of due process, white lynchings in Denton County stopped in 1880 and never resumed.”This meshes with some other older reports I found on the bridge, in which the goatman seems to be white (or at least his race isn’t mentioned).
There are also some other mentions of the bridge hauntings, which aren’t part of the popular legends now: Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, the secondary visits have raised more questions than they might otherwise have answered, including additional photographic anomalies and cold spots on bright, sunny days where the physical environmental data would suggest it impossible. They have also recorded the sound of horses hooves crossing the bridge, when there were no horses present and one investigator, walking with her German shepherd dog, has seen a horseman, dressed in dark clothing, galloping toward them, then disappearing, without leaving tracks on the path. “Both the dog and I heard and saw him, but he disappeared as he made a turn under some bushes and didn’t emerge on the other side. The ground was damp and hoof prints should have been obvious, but I couldn’t find any!”
It’s fascinating to me that the video links to a paranormal investigation site that doesn’t really back up its claims.
Folks online have said that the video just added some additional background details to the existing legend. But it’s wild that those details have congealed into this almost monolithic urban legend nowadays.
- Now, this person said that he didn’t upload the video. I have since been able to independently confirm that the youtube channel belongs to someone who he knew, but that it wasn’t him who uploaded the video.
- So, just to be clear: If you google this and find people mention the person who supposedly uploaded the video, that information is incorrect. For all I know, since they knew each other, they could have worked on the video together, but I don’t really have evidence of that so can’t and won’t speculate. Also, here’s a weird synchronicity. Some folks online have given a name for the person who supposedly uploaded this video. The name sounded familiar to me, so I texted one of two people who I went to high school with who I’m still in touch with. And sure enough, my friend was like, oh yeah, that person was my next-door neighbor when we were growing up, and we’re friends. It’s just a bizarre synchronicity, because I’m only still in touch with two people who I went to high school with, and both of them grew up on the same street as this person.

The rumor spreads

So, anyway, starting from this initial rumor that was immortalized in the form of a YouTube video, the new version of the legend started to spread widely. By August 27, 2008, a commentor on the website pbase.com mentioned Oscar Washburn and the specific date, November 15, 1967, that was mentioned in the YouTube video: https://www.pbase.com/image/80955292
By 2009, people had posted the youtube video to the same forum thread that Leland had originally posted on a handful of times, and by the last page of the thread, people were mentioning Oscar Washburn by name

Sources consulted RE: Satanic Rituals at the Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Visit the series page for additional sources.

Sources consulted for Satanic Rituals at the Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Don’t miss past episodes:

Folk News and the Haunted Old Alton Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Folk News and the Haunted Old Alton Bridge: A look at what urban legends, especially the Goatman’s Bridge urban legends, do in society, including urban legends as “folk news.” Plus, some possible debunkings of some of the Old Alton Bridge phenomena.

Content note: This episode contains discussions of white supremacist hate groups.

Highlights include:
• Reflections on the legends on the bridge
• Debunkings and hoaxers
• A haunted house that operates near the bridge

Episode Script for Folk News and the Haunted Old Alton Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Like I mentioned last time, there’s a lot more I could say about the Old Alton Bridge. For example, when I was listening back to last week’s episode, it struck me that Bob seems to be linked to the the tulpa/egregore communities online, and that the Goatman has some tulpa-like qualities. I also have some stuff to say about how Buzzfeed Unsolved in particular has created a whole nother layer of folklore and urban legends about the bridge. For example, in their episode about the bridge, they talk about how there’s supposedly an entity called Steve near the bridge, which I hadn’t seen mentioned before that, but which people mention online all the time now, especially in reviews and comments. And that’s really interesting to me.
Maybe I’ll explore that another time. But I gotta talk about something else for a bit after this series, this has been a bit of a rough one.
- In this episode, I want to share some of my final (for now) thoughts about the bridge, as well as talk a little bit more about debunkings and pranksters.

Debunkings and Pranksters

I saw a number of reviews and comments online about people pranking each other, so it felt worth talking about real quick. For example, there were plenty of comments like:
- “Fun to visit at night. Pretty easy to spook your friends” https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=old%20alton%20bridge#lrd=0x864dccb9ff3e525b:0x427c899463ab2996,1
- “Was there today with my friends. Definitely not that scary. Went at 1am when it was raining. Nothing happened we walked around and some other guys came up too. Some people were playing country music after we got there. Said hi to some people. Might go back and mess around with bluetooth speakers.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZfGlyLQnA
So just know that plenty of people are probably messing around and playing pranks on each other.
also worth knowing: Sometimes a haunted house called The Dark Path is staged in the woods near the Old Alton Bridge. According to one listing that advertised the attraction in the Sanger News: “the historic Old Alton Bridge and surrounding forest were locations of horrific murders, suicides, disappearances, séances, ghost sightings and paranormal investigations since 1938.” https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1238569/m1/5/zoom/?q=%22old%20alton%20bridge%22&resolution=3&lat=7083.752707203783&lon=3503.9566847394735
Now let’s look at some debunkings. Some of these I’ve mentioned before, but it felt worth mentioning them all in one place
- Note: I saw one google review from someone who grew up near the bridge and said there used to be lots of fireflies nearby, but that they hadn’t seen them in the area since then. But that’s a possible debunking for lights in the woods.
- Brian E (https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=old%20alton%20bridge#lrd=0x864dccb9ff3e525b:0x427c899463ab2996,1)

“I grew up just down <span>the</span> road a mile <span>or</span> two. Loved night <span>time</span> ghost stories <span>on</span> <span>the</span> bridge, <span>and</span> catching lightning bugs <span>by</span> <span>the</span> dozens. I still remember driving <span>over</span> <span>that</span> old bridge. Haven’t seen <span>the</span> lightning bugs <span>in</span> <span>the</span> thousands like they use <span>to</span> be out there ever again, so sad. Cool piece <span>of</span> history <span>that</span> you can touch. Remember <span>the</span> goat man <span>is</span> always watching.”

One person claimed that the goatman is just a goat MYDODGEYUTUBENAME Youtube comment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZfGlyLQnA 3 weeks ago

The goat man is merely just a goat walking on its hind legs. You rarely see it happen but goats can go it. In fact there was a Facebook video just going around in March 2022 of the very thing. A goat walking on its hind legs, standing upright and looking spooky. Debunking comment on buzzfeed unsolved video
“Some friends and I went about 10 to 15 years ago armed with a video camera, an emf detecor, and voice recorder and did a “paranormal investigation ” and found weird noises (cats), water splashing under the bridge (turtles) and the red eyes in the distance are car tail lights from a road several miles away. We did not find anything “paranormal” although we wanted to. I think i still jave all the footage on a vhs c tape” reddit.com/r/Denton/comments/ibhs12/hey_guys_let_me_know_if_this_is_or_is_not_the/
“Also, this is Texas so no doubts of coyotes- and there’s a farm near the bridge and it’s also used as a horse trail. Sooo.. like a million animals before a demon lol.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZfGlyLQnA
“interesting thing about the screaming they keep hearing, is that cougars/mountain lions sounds HORRIFICALLY like a woman screaming. So there was probably a cougar stalking around the woods in the area.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZfGlyLQnA
“Listen I was rewatching this and I’m looking at the video, and I love how you can actually see eyes when they’re asking who’s there and about the cult add. If you look to the right of the screen, you can see two yellow eyes there which is cool cause it’s most likely the fox who’s “screaming” as the scream is def a fox screaming” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZfGlyLQnA
“I live nearby this. It isn’t haunted, but between fireflies, bedding deer making creepy noises, and car headlights from the highway people get creeped out.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZfGlyLQnA
“So, I was showing some episodes to my brother, and when we saw the part where the bush moved and there was something that sounded like a scream, he paused it and showed me a video of a mountain lion trying to roar (here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxo8X5uIWRE ). Fun fact, it sounds uncannily like a woman screaming bloody murder. So while there might not have been a demon encounter, you guys were likely very close to death. The presence of the camera crew and use of the (very loud) spirit box likely kept you safe.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZfGlyLQnA
“Showed this to my mom who grew up in the country not far from Denton and she said the scream was either a bobcat or a mountain lion” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEZfGlyLQnA
This one just made me laugh:
- “Did anyone see the ghost adventures episode on goat man’s? They acted like it was super haunted. Meanwhile I walked it at night and the worst thing that happened was all the damn spiders.”

Wrap up

Now, here’s a time where you can catch me in an inconsistency. I know I’ve complained in the past about how it seems like, at least in the ghost stories in NYC, so many of them that are attributed to a certain person are supposed to be white historical figures (often enslavers), and I’ve mentioned my discomfort with the idea of people being written out of both written history and urban legends. Now, I haven’t done as much paranormal research in the south and the west, so maybe that’s a less common phenomenon outside of NYC?
But at any rate, I feel weird about this urban legend, centering around a Black man, as well.
That’s because there’s this horrifying tale of a lynching that has been transformed into a creepy campfire-style urban legend for legend trippers and drunk teenagers to tell.
I know I’ve talked about this in the past, in the episode about the supposed “Curse of the Fordham Ram,” but one question I’m interested in is: do people use tales of urban legends and hauntings to obfuscate horrific things that they feel uncomfortable or maybe even guilty about?
It seems like there’s maybe something psychological at work there, but I’m more interested in what that does to people’s conception of history and the past.
In the United States, the version of history taught by the education system can often be a bit lacking, and, at least in my experience having gone to public schools in Texas, tends to downplay some of the truly horrific parts of the slave trade, reconstruction, white supremacy and the rise of the KKK, etc. And then, in addition to that, there are these stories transmuting terrible parts of history into a “creepy story,” a legend that you don’t need to engage with if you don’t want to. Because if it’s a ghost story, then it’s easy to say, “oh, it’s a made up story, ghosts aren’t real.” But then at the same time, in a story like the Old Alton Bridge’s Goatman, you can also sort of lump the racial violence into the same zone of urban legend un-reality that also encompasses ghosts and goatmen-type cryptids.
From: In The Tall Grass West Of Town: Racial Violence In Denton County During The Rise Of The Second Ku Klux Klan by Micah Carlson Crittenden, May 2020 (University of North Texas masters thesis), a paper about the rise of the KKK in Denton County: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1703339/m2/1/high_res_d/CRITTENDEN-THESIS-2020.pdf

“For a tale to catch steam, it must resonate with reality even as it injects a mystical component into everyday life. Through the story of the Goatman it can be surmised that Denton County residents believed the local Ku Klux Klan was not only in existence, but capable of the brutal murder of the Washburn family in 1938. They also believed the existence of a moderately successful Black farmer was enough to enrage hooded white citizens into the commission of heinous acts of violence. These acts would only be possible through the dehumanization of Black families, even those well known to the membership of the KKK.”
Later in the paper:

“There is a complex code of silence surrounding racial violence in Denton County. Privately, the Black community was all too aware of the crimes committed against itself and yet, a public silence was required by the white supremacist power structure. The same dichotomy is observable in the white population. The perpetrators of racial violence were members of the white community and therefore knew of the crimes as they were committed; however, like the masked costume of the Ku Klux Klan, white knowledge of these crimes was capped. It does not appear to this researcher that anyone discussed racial violence in Denton County in a public forum during the 1920s. This divide between private and public acknowledgement has led to a modern ignorance of local racial terrorism. Yet, despite the best efforts of white supremacist sympathizers at containment, the truth leaks out through folklore. Stories like that of the Goatman signal to a violent past without direct indictment of the participants.”
I talked in previous episodes about Washburn being a character created from a composite of many similar people who were murdered by the Klan, rather than being an actual historical figure himself.
Now I want to take a look at some local Denton folks who have written very eloquently about what all of this Goatman’s Bridge legend stuff means.
An article in the blog We Denton Do It (https://wedentondoit.com/blog/2013/10/18/back-in-the-day-goatmans-bridge), written by Shaun Treat, who founded the Denton Haunts historical ghost tour, concluded with a nice summary of some conclusions that can be drawn from the Old Alton Bridge stories:

“You won’t find the names of Oscar Washburn or Jack Kendall in any historical records. Most ghosts are given names because we need to feel like we can know them. As a mentor once wisely advised, never let the facts of a story obscure the truths in the tale. If history is the self-congratulatory narrative of a community written by its victorious elite, then our ghosts will often problematize and haunt such tidy romanticisms of back in the day. “A handful of states have a Goatman tale, with Texas having a few itself, but each expresses unique reminders of threats from a forgotten past. Liminal areas of crossing can be full of possibility and danger, present injustices are informed by past prejudices, and there are critters – like snakes or gators – down in the creek that young’uns might outta be leery of. The Goatman isn’t just a haunting campfire tale, it’s also a reminder that an ignorance of our history is no protection from its everlasting consequences.”
There was also a great writeup from last year on steampunklibrarian.blog (https://steampunklibrarian.blog/2021/10/21/folklorethursday-goatmans-bridge/) that I wanted to read here. The author of this post, Elizabeth Headrick, had lived in Denton for 12 years, and had been a student at Texas Women’s University for 7 years, so was very steeped in the culture of the area. This is probably the best analysis I’ve found on the subject, and it very eloquently puts into words some stuff I’d been trying to articulate:

“The simple fact of the matter is that, while Washburn may or may not have existed, racial injustice, up to and including lynching, did exist in Denton county, for a very long time. And we all know this, even if many of Denton’s white residents choose to ignore and deny these very real facts. But certain facts can’t be ignored or denied, like the fact that things were so bad in Texas that it was named the #1 state for lynchings in 1922. And the Klan was very much a presence here in Denton, with over 300 hooded figures showing up in the streets of this town a few days before Christmas in 1921 for a torchlit parade. “And even when straight murder wasn’t on the table, Denton had other ways of asserting white racial dominance, including the 1922 “removal” of a thriving community of Black freedmen and women called Quakertown, in order to make way for the Texas Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls of the State of Texas in the Arts and Sciences, later to be known as Texas Woman’s University. “The real horror of the Goatman lies in the fact that he stands as a cutout for the racial violence that Denton county has exacted on its Black residents. The actual person of Oscar Washburn may not have existed, but so many more men like him did exist. They struggled to create lives in a community that didn’t welcome them and they were killed for base and meaningless reasons. “By taking this Black man, who was said to have been murdered in this way, and giving him the “demonic” visage of a goat, he is dehumanized, the fact of his race removed, so that he can be considered scary, something for ghost hunters to search for so they can get a good story, all while giving only the vaguest pass to the acts of violence that precipitated his demonic nature. The terror of his death matters less than the terror that he causes in his afterlife. And that should tell us something about the ghost stories we create.”

I also wanted to read a bit from the book The Vanishing Hitchhiker by Jan Harold Brunvand:

“In order to be retained in a culture, any form of folklore must fill some genuine need, whether this be the need for an entertaining escape from reality, or a desire to validate by anecdotal examples some of the culture’s ideals and institutions. For legends in general, a major function has always been the attempt to explain unusual or supernatural happenings in the natural world. . . urban legends gratify our desire to know about and try to understand bizarre, frightening, and potentially dangerous or embarrassing events that may have happened.. . . Informal rumors and stories fill in the gaps left by professional news reporting, and these marvelous, though generally false, “true” tales may be said to be carrying the folk-news–along with some editorial matter–from person to person even in today’s highly technological world.” (12-13)

So, what function do the legends about the Old Alton Bridge have? To me, the last part of what I just read resonates the most, this idea of carrying on folk-news, stories that may have been repressed or left out by traditional sources.

At least for me personally, that is how the legends have functioned. I became interested in this paranormal tale, only to learn about a horrific history about the area I grew up in. That history–the legacy of slavery, the Texas Troubles of 1860, the many lynchings–were all things that somehow were left out of my education. And whether or not Washburn or Kendall were real people, the stories of their horrific murders led to me to learn about other horrific murders in the area that were very real and confirmed by the historical record.

Sources consulted RE: Folk News and the Haunted Old Alton Bridge (Goatman’s Bridge Series)

Sources listed in the shownotes; visit the series page for additional sources.

Don’t miss past episodes:

On mylar balloons and forgotten futures (episode shownotes)

Some thoughts about mylar balloons, what they represent in the paranormal, and what else they might mean in terms of our world and our future.

Listen to the episode audio here.

Read the essay-formatted version of this episode here.

Some thoughts about mylar balloons, what they represent in the paranormal, and what else they might mean in terms of our world and our future.

Highlights include:

mylar balloons’ history in the paranormal and position as garbage
the idea of being haunted by trash
the power of imagination
some solarpunk reading recs

Episode Script for on mylar balloons and forgotten futures

DISCLAIMER: I’m providing this version of the script for accessibility purposes. It hasn’t been proofread, so please excuse typos. (Especially because I use dictation software for a lot of my script writing!) There are also some things that may differ between the final episode and this draft script–some of this transcript may feel a bit incomplete. Please treat the episode audio as the final product.

Mylar balloons as synchronicity

mentions of mylar balloons on Hellier and Strange Familiars
Connections have been made between mylar balloons and bigfoot: http://squatchable.com/article.asp?id=595
my own experiences
- Randonautica
I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that when I searched “mylar balloon paranormal” there were some results that mentioned that some people mistake mylar balloons for ghosts, UFOs, etc, since they’re shiny objects that float around

Mylar balloons as trash

I’ve been reading tons of books about reuse and repair and the environment and stuff and many of them have mentioned mylar balloons as a common sight when it comes to waste.

haunted by trash
- mummified trash in dumps (Garbology by Edward Humes)
- mylar balloon as a symbol of being haunted by trash
Excerpt From: “The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan: Discover the Joy of Spending Less, Sharing More, and Living Generously” by Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller
Read this book on Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/book/449739458

When we looked more closely at the sand beneath our feet, we found a couple of three-millimeter-wide plastic discs. (We later discovered these are called nurdles, and they are industrial feedstock for all plastic products.) It soon became clear that the discs made up an alarming percentage of the beach-scape that day. As the kids ran along the logs, yelling out with glee about their newfound game, refusing to touch the “plaastic saand” with their feet, we trained our gaze to look at what else was commingling with the sand, shells, driftwood, and seaweed around us. We found larger bits of plastic debris that were even more disturbing: syringes, a green army man that Finn was happy to add to his collection, coffee stirrers, PVC pipe, pens just like Cleo’s from home, light switch covers, a Mylar helium birthday balloon like the one that Ava lost at a friend’s party when it slipped free from her fingers the week before, cigarette lighters, a bright yellow baby toy just like one Mira remembered having, car bumpers, and tampon applicators—ob-jects of our everyday lives, all made of plastic, all washed up on our shoreline.

After reading that, I wanted to do a bit more digging and see who else was talking about finding mylar balloons out and about in nature.
I ended up coming across a thread on arizonahuntingforums.com, from March 2022. I like this because it was hunter’s talking about it, not hippies or anything. But I thought they painted a really good picture of what it’s like to be in the woods and come across tons of mylar balloons, because apparently that is a thing.
- https://www.arizonahuntingforums.com/threads/mylar-balloons-trash.23821/

A Buddy and I went out scouting/ shed hunting over the weekend.
We saw some great areas that we may hunt come August for bow.
But we also saw, and I come across this every time I am in the woods, not one but two mylar balloons. Ironically, they both said, “You are Special” A special kind of idiot for releasing them into the air.
My daughter and her girl scout troop have actually been trying to push for legislation to educate and stop the release of balloons into the air as they, inevitably, find their way into wild places. They were able to take it all the way to the capital building where they spoke on the subject.
I guess my point is not really a point but a venting due to how often I come across this.
We collected both balloons and carried them with us through our hike then proceeded to collect a trash bags worth of garbage in the few hundred yard area near where we parked our car - mostly beer cans/ bottles. People cannot be bothered to venture deeper into the woods - fortunately - to drink. Nor can they be bothered to collect their trash.

Replies:

I hear you Robert, Everytime I go to Tonto creek to fish, so much trash, hook wrappers, bait jars, lids, worm containers, you get the point. If you carry it in, carry it out, takes so little time to do it. And YES Ive seen my share of Mylar balloons.

Another:

I find those balloons in the middle of the desert in 28 all the time. They catch your eye easy because the sun reflects off them a mile away. No one bothers to think where they land after being released.

Another:

I did a whole rant on Mylar balloons when posting some hiking photos on another site. I find them in the most remote locations and they never seem to die. They need to be outlawed as an environmental hazard.

Another

Well fellers, here is a point that we are in total agreement. Here on the coast, you can’t go on the beach or offshore any distance without finding some sort of released balloon or other such trash- I include Wal Mart bags here in particular. And the worst part is, here on the Gulf our sea turtles which are having a hard enough time surviving come upon these floating balloons and they look just like a jellyfish which is prime sea turtle food. the poor turtles eat the plastic and they die a terrible death from their guts being clogged with the trash.
Brothers, you are all singing the right song- these damned balloon- and plastic Wal Mart bags- ought to be banned and taken off the open market.

Another (RK)

The thing about the mylar balloons is that they can get to parts of the planet that Walmart bags are unlikely to. Those helium filled balloons can literally find their way to every nook and cranny of the most remote wilderness areas. It is pretty disheartening to find a spot that may not have seen human foot traffic in a hundred years or perhaps much more, but there is a f** mylar balloon.

Another:

100% RK!
I tend to hike fairly deep into the woods and will always find. I have yet to go on a hike, scout, hunt and not come across one, often 2-3!

-Another:

I believe picking up mylar balloons is a good way to turn the luck on a hunting trip for the better.

Another:

My spooky Milar balloon story, and I may have told this before I don’t recall.
My son-in-law and I are driving down a forest service road at 0-dark 30 on the way to a turkey setup. We are both only about half awake and he is driving. All of a sudden, a flashing, sparkly item floats across the road ahead of us about two feet off the road surface. I think I spit out coffee but my comment was “what the hell is that?” The thing is flashing like a set of LED light bars on a police car. I’m thinking Roswell but as we get closer we see it is a half inflated Mylar balloon floating and rotating in the breeze as it crosses the road.

My son and I were out dove hunting. The doves were flying and the shooting fast. I caught motion above me. Low and behold, a mylar baloon making its final decent.

Found another one today after work… tangled in a juniper bush. They’re everywhere out here. The wind blows from the south west and there’s almost nothing southwest of me so probably from Phoenix or Tucson years ago.

Those balloons make a lot of trash, I tuna fish off San Diego and Mexico, every graduation year, and plan on seeing them off the coast as we fish everywhere. I could pick up 10-20 of them most weekends in the summer after graduation about 10-30 miles off the coast. Odd that straws are banned there yet you can buy mylar balloons and release them, knowing there is a strong chance they’ll be in the ocean in days, yet they were all about straws killing things off their coast. I wanted to mail those balloons to Sacramento when I lived there and ask them why they banned straws and bags yet let mylar balloons float for weeks or months in the ocean till they sink or wash up

But I guess mylar balloons are such a widespread issue and are found so often out and about in nature that there are a lot of websites dedicated to spreading the word about how environmentally damaging they are. There’s even one called mylarmistake.com.
And I say this not to try to debunk paranormal experiences that anyone has had with mylar balloons. But I do think it’s really important to keep in mind that it turns out that mylar balloons are just really common out in nature. so as always, with the paranormal it is important to know kind of the likelihood is something, because if you’re observing a synchronicity, it might feel less and less like a synchronicity the more you realize how commonplace an object is. That being said, things like Hellier, to me, have a really convincing argument for mylar balloons being tied to the paranormal and synchronicities.

https://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2022/03/dirty-30-mylar-balloon-pollution-collected-by-herkimer-county-office.html

https://citizensustainable.com/balloons-environment/

https://www.conserve-energy-future.com/are-balloons-recyclable.php

https://www.thriftyfun.com/Mylar-Balloon-Uses-Guide.html

http://mylarmistake.com/

Dangers of mylar balloons

So I think from the passages from that hunting forum that I read, you can get a sense of how people who are into exploring the outdoors feel about mylar balloons. You know, outdoorsmen are not fans, which makes sense. But in addition to them being litter, and eyesores, they are also potentially dangerous.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mylar-balloons-and-power-lines-a-potentially-explosive-mix/

Mylar balloons have also proved to be a constant menace to utilities and fire departments. Their silvery coating serves as a conductor for electricity, which means they can short transformers and melt wires just by coming near a high-voltage line. . . .
The California utility recorded 80 outages in February involving balloons and 217 in June. Last year, it tallied more than 1,000 outages related to mylar balloons, including dozens of incidents involving downed power lines.
“There have been times when they make contact that there is this gigantic explosion,” the SCE spokesman said, citing one such blast in July 2017 in Long Beach, not far from where utility crews were working. “The supervisor had them come down away from the area, but it could have been really dangerous.”
. . . {First Energy} blames mylar balloons for more than 200 power outages in 2018 and 2019 across its service area, which includes parts of Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Imagination and the paranormal

So why am I talking about this? Well, it’s partially because I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about the power of imagination, and I’ve been reading books about imagination and trying to make the world a better place while also reading stuff talking about the environment and mentioning mylar balloons.
If you’re listening to this, you probably have a lot of imagination. That’s because being interested in the paranormal requires imagination.
And no, I’m not saying that the paranormal is all made up. What I’m saying is that the paranormal and the occult is all about the things that are at work in this world that we can’t see and there about an alternate way of experiencing reality.
You have the whole world telling you that the only things that are real are what you can see and measure. But the paranormal is all about things that are harder to measure scientifically or harder to explain or are just out of sight and accessed through unusual means. So you have to have a lot of imagination and a lot of vision to have the courage to consider that there’s something else out there.
And I would argue that if you are interested in history, you have to have a lot of imagination as well. Because to study history and to learn about history you have to be able to imagine things being different from how they are now.
There’s a great book called From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want by Rob Hopkins, which I’ll talk about more in a bit. But the book talks about how nowadays people’s imaginations are constrained. People are taught not to be imaginative, but also stress literally damages the part of your brain that allows you to imagine things. So in a world where we need more creative solutions for difficult problems than we ever have needed before, we are ending up with a population of people who are finding it more and more difficult to imagine. I don’t know about you, when I think about times my life and I’ve been extremely stressed out, those are times in my life where I didn’t even have the mental space to imagine anything. I couldn’t really imagine anything getting better in my own life, much less the world. And I think that most people are like that, because that’s literally our brains work.
But if you have no imagination, then you end up rooted in the here and the now and in the measurable and you are confined by the restraints that are put around you by the consensus of what reality is. So to be interested in history or the paranormal, you must be able to imagine a world that’s different from the one where in right now. And that sort of imagination is exactly what I want to talk about here.
Right now, we are in a world where pretty much everything is bad. Kind of anywhere you want to look, whether it’s the environment or politics or public health or the cost of living crisis, things are terrible and the consensus is that things are going to keep getting worse and worse and worse. But what if it were possible for things to get better? Can you even imagine a world where things could get better?
I think that a lot of people who imagine a better world are just imagining a past world. They’re imagining maybe the 90s or the 60s or some other time when they think things were better than they are now.
But, to quote my Cajun grandparents, “there’s no such thing as the good old days” and they should know because they grew up in Louisiana without air-conditioning and indoor plumbing. We don’t need to regress to a previous time when maybe some small number people might have had things better than they do now, but most people still were struggling. Instead, we can imagine a better future. And that’s what I want talk about here.
So anyway, let’s loop back to the mylar balloon.
- The mylar balloon something that is meaningful in the paranormal, but in a more realistic sense, mylar balloons are just the thing that you encounter a lot out and about in nature. And that’s because people release them without thinking about what kind of damage it’s doing.
- So I could just say that when you see a mylar balloon out in the woods, you shouldn’t think of synchronicity, you should think about litter and the environment.
- But that’s not what I’m saying here.
- I think that it is important to think about the environment.
- But it’s just as important to think about how things could be improved as it is to think about how things are bad and getting worse.

Forgotten Futures

Right now, things are feeling pretty bleak. And I say this not to try to freak anybody out or bum anybody out, but to say that were up against a lot and it’s worth pausing and trying to find a way to feel more hopeful about things. Because otherwise you just end up miserable and crushed and unable to even imagine a less miserable fate.

From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want by Rob Hopkins:

In August 2018, the journalist Will Hutton reported on a new colloquialism being used by doctors in the United States and United Kingdom to describe ‘a tangled mix of economic, social and emotional problems’, which ‘consists of low mood caused by adverse life cir- cumstances’. ‘Shit life syndrome’ (SLS), as the doctors call it, is when ‘finding meaning in life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emo- tional resources … It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising in- equality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.’¹ Although Hutton was primarily describing SLS as an argument against austerity and growing inequality, it seems to describe how an awful lot of people, rich or poor, are feeling these days.

Excerpt From: “Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion” by Tansy E. Hoskins. https://www.scribd.com/book/314635741

I agree with the activist economist Michael Albert who wrote: ‘Our negative or critical messages don’t generate anger and action but only pile up more evidence that the enemy is beyond reach.’⁴¹

From the intro of From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want by Rob Hopkins, What if things turned out okay? The author imagines a nice future.

I wake, well rested, in the straw-bale-walled apartment my family and I call home. Built fifteen years ago as part of a sustainable-con-struction initiative throughout our city, the three-storey-high apartment complex costs virtually nothing to heat, its basement hosts composting units for all the building’s toilets, and the solar panels on the roof generate all our electricity needs. I wake my kids, get them dressed and fed and accompany them to school – a walk that takes us through shared gardens with a diversity of food crops, including young ruby chard whose deep red leaves radiate like stained glass caught in the brilliant sun of this late spring morning. The streets are quiet, due to sparse motorised traffic, and they are lined with fruit and nut trees in early blossom. The air smells of spring. Each bus stop we pass is surrounded by a garden on three sides, part of the Edible Bus Stop network that now includes most bus stops across the United Kingdom. Anyone can graze while they wait for the bus. In our community, the kids seem to have radically different feelings about school than they did ten years ago. The education department’s decision to eliminate testing, to give ample space for unstructured play and to provide students with opportunities within the community to acquire meaningful skills that enable them to live happy and healthy lives by their own definition means that most kids here now love going to school. My son, for example, recently upped his cooking skills by spending a week at a local restaurant. My kids and I approach the school through intensive food gardens, planted and managed by the students, and walk into a building where we are greeted by the smell of baking bread and the sound of happy chatter. After we say our goodbyes, I pick up a public bicycle and head into the city on one of our cycle networks. With more bicycles and fewer cars on the road, air quality has improved, and public health along with it. I call into my favourite bakery to buy bread. Launched fifteen years ago on the premise that ‘baking is the new Prozac’, the bakery’s mission is to provide meaningful work opportunities for people who lack housing and job security, and who struggle with mental health.¹ The bakery prioritises local produce, grows a thriving rooftop garden and uses bicycle-powered delivery around town.² With the bakery’s support, many of its employees have launched other successful businesses across the city.

https://www.scribd.com/book/427041315

solarpunk vs dystopia (ppl are so focused on dystopia and fear that they forget to focus on the future they want to live in)
Moore Jackson cemetery
And my hope is that by the time I’m done talking about the topic of imagination and the possibility of forgotten, better futures, when you see a mylar balloon, you think about synchronicity and all the things that could represent the paranormal. But I also hope that you could use it as a trigger to remind yourself to think about how things could be better in the future.
The more we suppress our imagination and the more we tell ourselves that things can’t improve, the more screwed over we are. And if we humans have any hope of improving the state of things, we have to have the courage and imagination to envision a world where things are better. And that means being able to see beyond what governments and corporations and the hegemonic structures of our world tell us is the only option.
When it comes to mylar balloons, I’d like to challenge you to use it as a prompt to pause and think about what sort of forgotten future you’d like to reclaim, what sorts of what ifs you’d like to dream into being.
I’m planning to explore this a little bit more in a future episode, but I wanted to at least get this conversation started. I would love to hear people’s thoughts about this topic, because something I’ve been thinking about a ton lately. And for me, just finding a way to imagine a future in which not everything is completely screwed up, has become an important component of my mental health maintenance, I guess you would call it. I’ve read a huge number of books about this this year, and I’ll plan to put together a list of some of those books in case anyone’s curious I guess the next episode I do about this, but in the meantime, here are some places that might be helpful to learn more about this idea.

Where to start: People to read, watch, or listen to

Andrewism (https://www.youtube.com/c/Andrewism)
Cory Doctorow’s podcast (https://craphound.com/podcast/)
From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want by Rob Hopkins
Becky Chambers, especially the Monk and Robot series (starting with A Psalm for the Wild-Built) and Record of a Spaceborn Few

Sleep Paralysis in Scranton (Haunted Scranton)

I tell the story of a weird paranormal experience I had during a recent trip to Scranton, PA.

Highlights include:

my first sleep paralysis experience
a strange roadside creek
my thoughts about Scranton

Listen to the episode here or anywhere you get podcasts.

Ghosts of Scranton - my trip

DISCLAIMER: I’m providing this version of the script for accessibility purposes. It hasn’t been proofread, so please excuse typos. (Especially because I use dictation software for a lot of my script writing!) There are also some things that may differ between the final episode and this draft script—some of this transcript may feel a bit incomplete. Please treat the episode audio as the final product.

My experiences

If you follow me on Instagram, you might know that I recently went to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to attend a friend’s wedding. You also might have noticed that I was posting a lot about it that first day, when I initially arrived there, and then got real quiet afterwards. And there is a reason for that. When I first planned this trip to Scranton, I was excited because the city has multiple train museums and is famously haunted, and I had all these plans about what I was going to do. Also, I just love a city that has fallen from glory and is full of the ruins of a better past. See my episodes about Beacon, New York, for more of that.
But all of my plans got derailed, and the first night I was there, I found myself in maybe the most frightening paranormal experience that I have had.
Before the trip, I had initially been disappointed, because I waited to the last minute to book my travel, and the hotel block that had been reserved for the wedding, which happened to be at the most famously haunted hotel in Scranton, was totally full. But apparently I had nothing to worry about, because my air B&B had plenty of creepy stuff waiting for me.
This is the first of probably two or three episodes that I’m going to do about haunted Scranton. I’m gonna talk all about my own experiences in Scranton first, and then I will talk a little bit about some of the ghost stories about other locations in Scranton.
But before I get into my own experiences in Scranton, I just want to give a really quick bit of background about Scranton.
If you live in the United States, I think it’s safe to say that you probably know Scranton from US version of The Office. I know that The Office was an incredibly popular show here in the US, but for anyone who hasn’t seen it, who maybe lives elsewhere, the office was a workplace comedy that was based in the regional sales and admin office of a paper company. And a lot of the show is about the drudgery of work, good and bad coworkers, and one really crucial part of the show is the location where it is set, which is Scranton.
In the show, Scranton is made out to be this kind of depressing place to live. It’s the sort of place that the characters seem to feel stuck in or want to escape from. And there is a lot of local color in the show, so for example in the opening credits of the show, you see the Penn Paper building in Scranton, which is a real building that houses a real paper company. And there’s a Scranton rap where they call out some of the sites that you can see in Scranton, including the Anthracite Museum. So I kind of feel like in the US, Scranton is almost like a joke, because it is so closely associated with the office and they don’t exactly make it seem like a great place to be.
https://www.wnep.com/article/news/local/lackawanna-county/penn-paper-supply-marks-100-years-scranton-douglas-fink-kathy-mckeel-bob-durkin-lackawanna-county-andy-buckley/523-5025c6e2-8107-4264-8f5f-23e1a15132ef
https://genius.com/The-office-usa-lazy-scranton-lyrics
So while The Office makes Scranton look like a depressing suburb, Scranton actually has a really interesting history and I feel like it’s been unfairly maligned. In the 19th century, the area was very prosperous because of coal mining and the train industry, because there was a lot of iron ore there that you could make train tracks out of, etc. Scranton is nicknamed the Electric City, because it had the first electrified streetcar trolleys in the United States.
It was large and prosperous city. by 1900, Scranton had about 100,000 people living there, and it was the third largest city in Pennsylvania, and the 38th largest city in the United States. I believe that the height of Scranton’s population was in 1920, when 137,000 people lived there. For contrast, 76,000 people lived in Scranton in 2020.
Scranton’s story is similar to the story of many towns in the United States that were big industrial hubs, and then work dwindled and jobs went away and people moved away and things just kind of slipped into disarray and depression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scranton,_Pennsylvania
Scranton is really interesting because it still has all these beautiful buildings and landmarks, but other aspects of its glory days have been dismantled.
For example there isn’t even a train that goes from Scranton to New York City anymore, even though I think that would only be a couple hour train ride, maybe 2 to 3 hours. So many of the things that Scranton was famous for, have been mothballed basically, or totally removed. So people like me, who can’t drive, either have to take an unreliable bus to Scranton, or do what I did, which was to fly to Scranton. Scranton is only 100 miles away from New York City, so it is a 23 minute plane ride. The airplane — which held 50 people — was so small that it wasn’t pulled up to the regular gate at Newark, so we had to take a shuttle bus to get from the gate to the airplane, and the process of taking the shuttle bus to the airplane took longer than the actual in air time of the flight. It’s almost like someone sat down and was like, how can we cut off the city that was extremely connected to things, and make it really difficult to come here. I know that’s not really how it works, but it is a good example of how inefficient a lot of our modern transportation systems are and how public transportation used to be much more comprehensive. (Again, see also my episode about Mount Beacon, where I talk about a lost tourist railway.)
Also, one thing tangentially related thing that foiled some of my Scranton plans was that I had planned to walk around several different parts of Scranton. I’d had routes planned to walk between different things I wanted to see, but then I got there I discovered something that was truly baffling to me, which is that there are not sidewalks in a lot of Scranton. There seem to be some downtown, but then they just disappear. There were stretches of road that had crossing signs and walk signs at the intersections, but there was no sidewalk connecting those together. So there were some moments, especially on my first day there, when I found myself walking along the side of the road on what I thought was a sidewalk and then I realized it was a shoulder, and the shoulder went away, then I was just standing in a stranger’s driveway but had no way of continuing on my walk. And I just had to call a lyft to pick me up from the side of the road. So if you, like me, do not drive, I guess don’t assume that every city or suburb has sidewalks. It almost feels like there used to be sidewalks there, because there were the pedestrian lights for crossing intersections, but maybe the sidewalks went the way of the train and were removed at some point. So, yeah, some of the transportation infrastructure related to Scranton is baffling.
So all of this brings us to my experience in Scranton. Even though it was only a 23 minute plane ride, it still took me hours to get to Newark from where I live in Queens, and I spent a decent amount time waiting for the flight, and Newark is a truly awful airport. I swear it gets worse every time I go there. So by the time I landed in Scranton, or Wilkes-Barre, I suppose, I was not in amazing shape. I’ve mentioned this before, but I am not neurotypical, and sometimes when I am particularly exhausted and have been exposed to overwhelming sensory stuff, I end up in very bad shape. I had a few hours to kill before I could check into my air B&B, so I walked around a couple parks, including Nay Aug park, which I’ll talk about later. I don’t think I realized how out of it I was until I got to the air B&B and I had to spend sort of a long time sitting in a dark room in complete silence, staring at the wall. But eventually I was in good enough shape to at least turn on some music and play a couple games of solitaire — because I always like to travel with a deck of cards — and kind of settle in. The reason why I’m giving all the detail is because I do think it’s valuable to have this as context for some of the paranormal stuff that I experienced that night.
Now I guess I should tell you about this air B&B. With the hotels in the area mostly booked, I didn’t have a ton of options when it came to lodging. It seems like very few tourists go to Scranton; I was surprised to find that everyone I encountered while out and about thought I was from there; lyft drivers were asking me for directions, my preferred routes, etc. This made a pretty big contrast to what it’s like visiting the suburban Texas town I grew up in, where everyone immediately makes it pretty obvious that they know I’m from out of town. I think that’s because I have a buzzcut, dress all in black, and have a bunch of tattoos. But even though I didn’t see anyone else who looked like me in Scranton, the automatic assumption was that I was from there. Which was kinda nice, actually. (And everyone I encountered was nice, like friendly in a PA way.) But I think it just speaks to how there’s this assumption that no one from out of town would go to Scranton.
but anyway, to get back the where I was staying: this place looked nice enough. And it was, to be clear. It was a nice apartment and for the most part it was a perfectly pleasant place to stay. It was an attic apartment, so that added a little bit to a creepy ambience, perhaps.
But one of the weirdest things about this air B&B was that it was located on a street that was named after running water. I don’t want to say more than that, because I don’t give away the location of this air B&B. But I was very surprised to see, when I got out of the lyft to go into the air B&B, that the reason why the street was named after running water was because there was a small creek in between the street and the sidewalk. So basically to get from the street to the house, you had to cross a small bit of running water. I didn’t think about that from a paranormal perspective until much later, after I was already home.
But there are a lot of stories about people having paranormal experiences around running water, and there’s something very symbolic about stepping over a small creek in order to get to a building, especially since the building ended up being haunted. It was almost like a crossing of the Rubicon or something.
So here I am, staying alone in an attic apartment next to some running water. I go to sleep around 10 PM, But as I’m going to bed, I get this really weird feeling about the right side of the room, this corner of the room next to one of the closets. And kinda between the closet and the bed. It’s also worth noting that that part of the room was far away from the radiator; it was on the other side of the room.
I can’t really describe the feeling I got except that it was a bad vibe. And it caused me a little bit of stress when I was trying to go to sleep. Because I’m one of those people who always likes to sleep facing towards the door. But if I faced towards the door I would have my back to this area on the other side of the room that I didn’t feel good about. And I really had a lot of trouble deciding which way to lay. I finally decided to face towards the door, because that’s what I always do, but I kept thinking about this other corner of the room.
So went to sleep, and I woke up again maybe around 11:30 or so because the radiator was banging. This is an older building that was built about 100 years ago, so it has the trademark noisy radiators. But I will say that I’ve never been somewhere with radiators that were quite that loud. Some of the Fordham University radiators give it a run for its money, but I still think this air B&B has Fordham beat.
I’m used to banging radiators though because I live in a building that is about 100 years old and has noisy radiators. But as I was lying awake, I got this feeling that was very similar to the feeling I got when I was staying in Salem at the haunted Hawthorne Hotel. I think I talked about this during the episodes that I did about the Hawthorne hotel, but it was the sense that someone was in the room with me — or something — but as long as I didn’t open my eyes and look around to try to find it, I would be okay and it couldn’t get me. I had my phone and headphones next to me in bed so I really quickly without looking around at all put them on so that way I would have something to block out the noise and also I just had this really uneasy feeling and I needed to feel comforted. So I put on the most comforting album that I could think of while half-asleep, which if you’re curious, is Selected Ambient Works 85-92 by Aphex Twin. So I put that album on repeat, closed my eyes again, and kind of drifted in and out of sleep.
Eventually, even with my headphones in, I woke up and heard this weird noise, like someone shifting around on a leather couch–you know that almost squeaking sound you get when your bare legs move on a leather couch. But it was really loud.
I tried to get up, but couldn’t, and it was dark so I couldn’t see anything. My body felt really heavy. I tried to lift my arms for a while, maybe a few minutes, but I couldn’t.
The noise was coming from the right side of the bed, from an area in front of one of the two closet doors, the area that I’d felt uneasy about earlier.
But I really felt like there was something there in that corner of the room. It felt like there was someone or something in the room with me.
Eventually, I felt like the thing left or backed off, and I was able to move and turn on the light.
And that’s when I realized that I had had my first experience of sleep paralysis. It’s funny, because maybe a week before the Scranton trip, I was talking to Fen from the podcast Follow the Woo, and Fen asked me if I had ever experienced sleep paralysis and I was like nope! I’ve always been very glad to have never experienced sleep paralysis. So much for that.
Anyway, I think that was maybe around midnight.
I tried to get back to sleep and I just couldn’t. (I did have the light on at this point, and I kept it on for the rest of the night.) For the most part, for reference, I am a pretty good sleeper. And if I wake up during the night it is always between the hours of 3 and 5 AM. I know that correlates to the lungs in the body clock, so I assume it has something to do with my asthma or allergies. Anyway, it was very unusual for me to wake up that early in the night, and I thought I would have no trouble getting back to sleep. But I was wrong. I tried really hard to get back to sleep, I did all my usual things to get to sleep, some meditation, etc., but no dice. And it’s safe to say that I was feeling fairly scared, perhaps irrationally so. And that is also an unusual experience for me. I felt almost like whatever presence had been in the room had backed off but wasn’t totally gone. I just felt like something was watching me, but it wasn’t actively doing anything. It was just waiting to see what I was going to do. I was uneasy enough that I put off walking across the apartment to use the restroom, because I didn’t even want to get out of bed and turn my back to that part of the room in order to walk out the door. Finally, I gave up on trying to sleep and just started reading, because a lot of time I fall asleep while reading.
And just as I was finishing my book around 5 AM, I finally started dozing off. So at this point, I had been awake for hours and I was so relieved that is finally going to get to sleep a little bit before the day started.
But just as my eyes were fluttering closed, I heard a voice. I would describe it as a mechanical voice, almost like someone speaking through a vocoder or some other weird mechanical voice like through a spirit box, though of course I was not using a spirit box. The sound seemed to come right from the place that I felt uneasy about.
I have an auditory processing disorder so I often hear something, mishear it, and then a few seconds later — maybe 10 seconds or so later — I understand what was really said. I’m just pretty slow to process things. So initially, I thought that the voice said “so are we” but then once my brain had a chance to catch up to my ears, it very clearly had been “go away.”
Throughout all of this, I hadn’t seen anything visual in that corner, though when I had sleep paralysis I wasn’t able see anything because it was too dark. But I definitely got the sense that something was there and it had been speaking to me.
After the sun came up, I was able to doze off for a little bit, though not very long. And once it was light again the apartment felt fine. I had noticed that to what I got there initially. During the daylight hours it had seemed fine, and then as soon as it got dark it started to feel bad.
So that was my first night in Scranton. My first of two nights, I might add. I was definitely dreading the next night, for sure.
I had planned to do some things in Scranton. Check out the train museums, for example. Walk around the sort of downtown area of Scranton see some of the cool buildings. But I just couldn’t. I ended up going for a walk over by Lake Scranton and then just rested until my friend’s wedding.
So then after the wedding, I get back to the apartment and I am just completely exhausted. I just wanted to sleep. So I thought, okay, what can I do in order to deal with this issue. Because as much as I always think I want to encounter the paranormal, I don’t want to at the expense of a good night’s sleep. I also don’t want to when it’s really scary and I’m alone.
so before I went to bed, I did two things:

first, I appealed to the Virgin Mary for protection. I am not a practicing Catholic anymore but I definitely still have a lot of faith in the Catholic pantheon, in particular in the Virgin Mary, who I’ve been told via dreams that I should appeal to if I ever need help, or psychic protection, etc. I think the night before when I had been awake and freaked out, I was just too out of it to think to do this, but it’s really what I should’ve done in the first place. I’m always a little bit cagey about talking about this sort of religious side of things, but I also feel like I can’t tell this story honestly without mentioning this, and it also doesn’t really feel right for me not to give her credit.
And then after that, I just had a conversation with any entity that might be present in the room. I basically explained that I wanted to communicate and I apologized if I may have offended this entity, and I explained that I didn’t mean any disrespect but I was just staying there for a couple days. I I said that I would be checking out by 11 AM the next morning and they wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore after that. And I just asked that this entity let me have a good night sleep. I just explained that I was really really tired I just wanted to sleep. And then I thanked anything present listening to me and I went to bed.

And even though the radiator was still extremely loud — so loud that I had to put in my headphones and put on a podcast in order for me to go to sleep at all, because the radiator was loud and the landlord’s dog was barking continually until 11 pm — despite the racket, after I fell asleep, I stayed asleep. I also left the light on all night, but was able to sleep despite that. I didn’t wake up even once throughout the entire night. I slept really well. I didn’t get a bad vibe as I was drifting off to sleep or when I woke up or anything. It felt like a totally normal room, and it felt like a completely different room than the one I had spent the previous night in.
So I don’t know which of the two things that I did worked the most, or if doing both of those things together was what was so effective, but I guess somebody was listening to me, and I was very grateful for that. Oh, it’s also worth mentioning that I did try to do the tower of light method of psychic self defense the first night. And it had a lot of luck with that working with people, like I use a version of the tower of light usually when someone you know walks up to me on the street I don’t talk to them, and I’ve had people literally turn around and walk away, but I found it pretty ineffective in this instance. Or at least I think it was ineffective. Who knows, maybe I would’ve felt worse if I hadn’t done that. But I found that I had a lot of trouble focusing on the visualization for the tower of light when I was in that space on that first night and feeling so uncomfortable, and I don’t usually have problems with visualizations or anything. So it just felt like something was off there, and that feels worth mentioning.
And then the next day I checked on the air B&B and killed a little bit of time at Nay Aug Park, the part that I had spent some time in my first got there, and which is supposedly haunted in which I’ll talk about next time. It’s a really cool park with a treehouse in a covered bridge and waterfall all kinds of cool stuff.
And then I went to the airport and I can say that the Wilkes-Barre airport is the polar opposite of Newark. I think it had maybe eight flights coming in and out of it the whole day and it they were just quietly playing 80s music over the speakers and there were no loud TVs or crowds of people and then some people came by with therapy dogs to cheer people up because the airport sucks. So my trip back to New York was a lot better than my trip out, because I have a good fortune of waiting in a incredibly pleasant airport, so hats off to the Wilkes-Barre airport.
That was my Scranton trip. It was a pretty quick turnaround, just a couple of days, and I had planned out a whole itinerary for myself that I really deviated from, but now that it’s about a week later as I’m recording this, honestly I’m glad it turned out the way it did. I think I was overly ambitious with my plans in the first place, but also the paranormal aspect of all this is just so interesting to me. I still can’t get over the fact that this attic apartment that I was staying in could only be reached by crossing over running water, for example. And while I’m not happy exactly to have experienced my first sleep paralysis, I can’t say that it was a unique experience that I hope will not be repeated and was interesting. And now when people ask me if I have experienced sleep paralysis, I can say yeah, I have.
So anyway, in my usual form I thought this was gonna be one episode, that I thought okay I can cover Scranton to episodes, but now I’m feeling like I probably need three episodes of talk about Scranton. Just because it is such an interesting place and I really enjoyed being there and doing the research for my trip. I just love a place that’s kind of fallen from its prior glory, but which hold so much history and kind of tells us so much about a certain point in the not so distant past.
In the next episode, and probably the episode after that, I’ll talk about some of the famously haunted places in Scranton. I only went to a couple of them, but my general feeling about Scranton is that is probably way more haunted than anyone gives it credit for. That is, if my experience is in any way representative of the general vibe in Scranton.

Ghosts of Nay Aug Park and the Lackawanna Station Hotel (Haunted Scranton)

A dive into some of Scranton’s haunted locations, including the Lackawanna Station Hotel and Nay Aug Park. Plus, a haunted real estate listing.

Highlights include:

two defunct amusement parks
ghosts that love to haunt minor league baseball players
a weird treehouse
a mine that was never used
one of the worst zoos in the US

Listen to the episode here or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Check out the first episode in this series about Haunted Scranton.

Ghosts of Nay Aug Park and the Lackawanna Station Hotel Episode Script

DISCLAIMER: I’m providing this version of the script for accessibility purposes. It hasn’t been proofread, so please excuse typos. (Especially because I use dictation software for a lot of my script writing!) There are also some things that may differ between the final episode and this draft script—some of this transcript may feel a bit incomplete. Please treat the episode audio as the final product.

Scranton’s haunted history

In the last episode, I talked about my experience of spending a weekend in Scranton in early October of this year. I’d heard that Scranton was haunted, and boy did my experience bear that out.
Now I want to talk some more about some of the weird haunted sites and also just weird and forgotten history of Scranton. In this episode I’m going to talk about the haunted old train station/hotel that is supposedly one was haunted places in Scranton. I’m gonna talk about a really cool park that has housed two separate defunct amusement parks, a defunct zoo, and now currently still has a model coal mine and also in recent decades has gotten a cool covered bridge in a treehouse. I want to talk about haunted Museum. And I also want to talk about a few other things. I found some fun articles while I was doing research about haunted Scranton, which deal a little bit more with some haunted homes in the area. So, I thought that would be a fun place to start out.
So, let’s start out with some haunted houses.
Wilkes-Barre/Scranton ranks no. 1 in real-life ‘haunted’ houses By Mizenko, Melanie, Times Leader, The (Wilkes-Barre, PA), Oct 13, 2016:

Lawnstarter.com, a website which covers various issues related to landscaping, gardening and home care, has named the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre metro area number one for real-life ‘haunted’ houses.
For Lawnstarter.com, haunted means old and vacant. That’s the data the website used – the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015 American Community Survey about the number of homes built before 1940 and the number of vacant homes.
John Egan, editor-in-chief of Lawnstarter, said the site’s blog entity looked at 259,918 homes throughout Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties.
According to Lawnstarter, older homes and vacant homes have a perceived, if not actual, chance of being haunted.
The investigation showed the two counties have 96,993 homes built in 1939 or before, for a percentage of 37.3. The number of vacant homes in the region is 38,718 – or 14.9 percent.
“When we were done crunching the numbers, it turned out that Scranton/Wilkes-Barre has the most potentially haunted houses on a percentage basis among the 100 largest metro areas in the country,” Egan said.
Scranton/Wilkes-Barre ranks ahead of metro areas, including New York City and New Orleans.

RE: a home in Dunmore, a town next to Scranton:
Sellers host open house for haunted Dunmore home by: Falchek, David, Citizens’ Voice, The (Wilkes-Barre, PA), Dec 30, 2013

The Beatles’ songs and fresh-baked cookies lifted spirits during a “slightly haunted home” open house at 1217 Marion St., Dunmore, but not many visitors were buying the spooky tales.
The home received international attention after a Zillow.com real estate listing described occasional footsteps, faint screams and shadowy images in the Victorian home.
As with any open house, visitors were concerned about issues such as closet space, the electrical system and the neighborhood.
Ann Bloom of Scranton dismissed the paranormal claims. She is in the market for a four-bedroom home. However, an antique rocking horse covered in a white sheet in the attic seemed unintentionally – or perhaps intentionally – creepy.
“At least it didn’t start rocking on its own,” she joked. Her daughters Abigail and Cecilia were not as ready to write off the possibility of a haunting, and after a while in the house, seemed ready to leave.
As Gene Terenzio Sr. of Lake Ariel reviewed the partial refinishing of the third floor, he called the alleged haunting “a bunch of crap.” While he believes in evil spirits influencing people to do bad things, he doesn’t think those spirits “make themselves known.”
Owner Greg Leeson grumbles as much about inquiries seeking to formally confirm the haunting as those trying to challenge it. He portrays himself as a skeptic.
“People want to come through with a recorder and think they are going to catch a ghost,” he said, noting he ignores or denies inquiries from “ghost hunters.” He brushes off accusations that he’s a desperate seller trying to draw attention to the home. He added the notes about the house as an afterthought, he said. Recently, he was interviewed by an Australian news outlet.
“I don’t care what people may say, and they are entitled to their opinion,” he said. “I suppose there are several explanations for what happened here.”
For a skeptic, Leeson knows the paranormal lingo. When a visitor mentioned electronic voice phenomenon, or EVP, sounds emerging from background noise or static that resemble speech, Leeson said he heard them in the house. Their baby monitor occasionally carried sounds that seemed like someone trying to speak to their daughter.
They have a newborn son and a baby monitor back in use, but haven’t noticed any EVPs, he said.

The Lackawanna Station Hotel

I mentioned this hotel last time, because I was in Scranton for a wedding and there is a block booked at this hotel, but I was procrastinating on booking my travel, so I wasn’t able to stay at this hotel because the hotel was totally booked. But I believe this is the nicest hotel in Scranton, it’s operated by Radisson, but it has a long history as a train station. And it is supposedly one of the most haunted places in Scranton. I didn’t actually get to go inside the hotel, because as I mentioned in my last episode, my Scranton trip ended up being a little bit more low-key than I had planned, because I was exhausted from being up all night the first night I was there. But I was in a lyft that drove by the hotel, so at least got to see it from the outside. Anyway, the history of this hotel super fascinating, so let’s get into it.
- Main source for this bit: Haunted Scranton: After Dark in the Electric City by A.C. Bernardi
George Scranton, the founder of the Lackawanna iron and coal company (which built rails for the railroads), built the Leggett’s Gap Railroad. Later, the railroad merged with the Delaware and Cobbs Gap Railroad, creating the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad Company (DL&W)
the DL&W was the first railroad that went to the area and brought the rest of the country the iron and coal that Scranton produced. By the early 1900s, four major railroads transported goods and passengers throughout the area, so they needed to build a large train station.
They built the new station at 700 Lackawanna Ave., about seven blocks east of the old station, which was a lot smaller, and was located at the corner of Lackawanna and Franklin Avenue
the building is six stories and was built in the Beaux-Arts style in 1908. (Originally, it was only five stories, but in the 1920s, they added a 6th floor for additional office space)
the station only took 14 months to build, and it cost $600,000 ($21 million today)
the building is made of brick and steel, with concrete floors and partitions. The exterior is faced with Indiana limestone, and the façade has an 8-foot-wide bronze clock that is located between two carvings of large eagles
when they got rid of the railroads, the building fell into disrepair and was closed in January 1970. In December 1977, they started renovating the building, and then it really opened in 1983 as a hotel. In 1995 it became the Radisson Lackawanna station hotel. They preserved a lot of the original features.
used to, the hotel tried to hide the ghost stories, but now, possibly because ghost stories are so popular and legend tripping is so popular, they let it be included in newspaper articles and allow the local ghost walking tour to go to the hotel
during World War I, the basement was a morgue for dead soldiers, whose bodies were on the way to their final resting places. Supposedly this area is haunted by a young boy who wears a top hat. Staff and visitors have seen the boy, but no one really knows who he is, and the boys too young to have fought in World War I. Some people think that maybe the boy died in some other way, and his body was being brought back to his hometown via train and was temporarily being stored there.
Guests say that the sixth floor is the most active of the upper floors. Some people say they have been visited by a Black bellhop, who asks them if everything was okay and then disappears right in front of them. Some people think that maybe he was a previous employee who still makes his rounds. Other guests on the floor say that light switches have turned on and off repeatedly, and there have been extreme changes in temperature, usually freezing cold, with no obvious cause
in 2006, some minor league baseball players were in town for some games against the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre team. One of the players that he woke up at 2 AM, and the room was freezing cold, and he couldn’t move. He said it felt like he was being held down by a force that he could not see for 20 to 30 seconds. He wasn’t able to free himself by struggling. As soon as he was released, he turned on the lights and looked in the bathroom mirror and saw what seemed to be red claw marks on his forearms and biceps. He was so freaked out that he stayed up until his roommate came back from the bars that he had been out at.
During the same trip, at around midnight, several teammates were walking in the hallway on the sixth floor, and they saw a man who was leaning over the railing six floors over the dining room. He turned to the players he told him that he been killed in a car accident, and then his head spun around 360°, and they watched them fall over the railing and disappear in midflight. The players weren’t drinking at the time, and they said they were telling the truth.
During another trip, two roommates were staying in a room, and one was in the bathroom using the sink and the lights turned off. He turned the light switch back on, and then it turned off again by itself. He was freaked out, so he called out to his roommate and said what happened. The other player turned the lights back on and they were both surprised to see the switch, by itself, flip on and off for about 10 seconds rapidly. They felt like something paranormal was going on and they had heard similar stories, so they asked the front desk to move them to another room
some former employees have also said that they think this floor is haunted, and other guests have had weird experiences too
one member of the Lackawanna Historical Society said that several years ago, he was at a high school reunion at the hotel, and he stayed in one of the rooms overnight. He awoke late at night to a freezing cold room, but he fell asleep again and nothing else seemed to happen at that time. But when he woke up again in the morning and washed his face, he saw that he had a black eye. He said he hadn’t fallen or hit his face on anything the night before and no one had hit him. He thinks that he is attacked by a spirit, but the author of the book points out that it could have been a blood vessel rupturing near his eye by itself
there’s only one known unusual death in the building, which happened during the renovation in the late 70s. A dead unhoused man was found in the building
From Philly Mag article:

I caught a snippet of a Dodgers-Red Sox game in August. Scully’s voice still sounded like apple pie and a scoop of vanilla ice cream as he shared a little story about Red Sox starting pitcher David Price. When Price was in the Tampa Bay Rays’ minor league system, he and a teammate had an experience in a hotel that spooked them something terrible, so much so that they booked another room elsewhere.
It was told for a quick chuckle in between batters, one of those front porch conversations you can only find during a baseball game. A Google search turned up the full story. Price and fellow pitcher Wade Davis played for the Durham Bulls in 2009, and a road trip brought them to Scranton to face the New York Yankees’ Triple-A club. The Bulls were supposed to spend a few nights at the Radisson Lackawanna Station Hotel. Davis explained the rest to an MLB.com writer:
“We started hearing knocking on the door,” Davis said, “but no one was ever there.
“We tried to get to sleep but it got really hot in the room. We turned the air conditioner to cool and it would go back to hot. Turn it down as cold as it could get, and it would turn up. Then we started hearing some weird noises, stuff out of the walls — can’t describe them. Kind of like screams.”
Well, by 7:30 the next morning, both Price and Davis were down in the lobby with suitcases packed. They checked out and checked into a Ramada down the street.
“That’s how serious it was —_ we’re never up at 7:30 after a game,” Davis said. “But we sure were that morning. All the stuff that went on_—_ not cool.”_
Price claimed he didn’t remember the nighttime disturbance, but Davis insisted the two men still discuss it. (Davis now pitches for the Kansas City Royals; a team spokesman tells me the pitcher is “not really interested in re-telling that story.”) I was surprised that a pro athlete had been willing to put his name to a ghost story, given all the eye-rolls and ball busting it surely invited. But Davis wasn’t the only one.
Ryan Tatusko (http://www.baseball-reference.com/register/player.cgi?id=tatusk001rya)** spent seven years bouncing around the minor leagues after he was drafted as a pitcher by the Texas Rangers in 2007. He played a couple of seasons on the Washington Nationals’ Triple-A team, which often ended up in Scranton. “Stayed there quite a few nights,” he tells me. “It is a creepy hotel.” Tatusko is quick to note that he didn’t have any personal brushes with things going bump in the night, but other teammates did. One described how he and his wife watched a glass slide across a table in the hotel and shatter when it hit the ground.
“We even had a coach so freaked out that he checked out of the hotel mid-road trip to stay in a different one,” Tatusko says. “He said when he was walking to his room he saw someone coming [from] the opposite direction, so he just kind of shimmied to the side and said excuse me, and then when he looked behind him, there was no one there.”
Tatusko can’t remember the coach’s name — it’s been a few years — but the guy acknowledged that he’d had a few drinks before he ran into the guest who disappeared in the blink of an eye. “Before you even go to Scranton, everybody talks about the hotel, so everybody already has something made up in their minds and is already scared,” Tatusko says. He might have a point — mind over matter, and all that. The Paranormal Activity film franchise was going strong around that time, too, so stories about unexplained disturbances were on the pop culture radar. But there are other anecdotes about players who encountered flickering lights and phantom staffers at the hotel. You wonder if grown men would really bolt from their rooms if there was nothing more here than whisper-down-the-lane tales. . . .

the article continues at the hotel bar:

Ah, what the hell. I ask Marie if she’s ever had any ghostly encounters here. She hasn’t. I talk with her manager, Amanda Kluxen, who acknowledges that a young bartender was left plenty unnerved by a pair of experiences she had a few years ago. One involved an older man who peeked his head into the bar when the bartender was wrapping up her shift. She looked up, and he vanished. He was nowhere to be found outside. “She was kind of rattled,” Kluxen says. Another time, the woman was in the basement and claimed she heard a child screaming from somewhere nearby. “So she ended up running out of the basement,” Kluxen says, trying to move the conversation along as politely as possible.
Additional sources:

Philly Mag article
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2016/10/29/lackawanna-station-hotel-scranton-haunted/
https://web.archive.org/web/20150926061037/http://retroroadmap.com/spot/historic-lackawanna-train-station-is-a-radisson-hotel-scranton-pa/
old pic of area where hotel is now: https://digitalarchives.powerlibrary.org/papd/islandora/object/papd%3Apscrl-flmtcm_2052

Nay Aug Park

This is a really beautiful park in Scranton. The name apparently means “noisy brook” in a native language, though I haven’t been able to confirm which one. But I think the area was inhabited by the Munsee Lenape. So my guess is that it would be in the Munsee dialect, but I’m not sure.
there is this beautiful river that runs through Nay Aug Park, Roaring Brook. It flows through the gorge and there’s a waterfall and it’s really cool looking. There are several places nowadays are you can look out at the brook, from below and above, and the park has some really nice walking trails and easy hiking trails. It also has some interesting stuff like a covered bridge, a model mine, a treehouse, now defunct zoo, and a pool that has seen better days and is currently filled in, and an old amusement park. It definitely has Central Park vibes
- Pic of gorge: https://digitalarchives.powerlibrary.org/psa/islandora/object/psa%3Apc_17429
- https://digitalarchives.powerlibrary.org/psa/islandora/object/psa%3Apc_17108
And that makes sense, because as I mentioned this last time, the park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who laid out Central Park.
Nay Aug Park was built in 1893
- https://nayaugpark.org/about/
The park is supposedly haunted by the ghosts of people who died swimming in the gorge that is in the park. There is a river with some rapids in a waterfall and I can imagine why that would be dangerous, for sure.
Now, I haven’t found so many stories of hauntings in the park, though after I talk about the park itself, I will talk about the museum that’s located in the park that has some stories of hauntings. But let me tell you, that park felt pretty haunted to me. Obviously, this is just vibes based, so take it with a big grain of salt, but the park felt beautiful and it’s vibe is kind of right on that line between feeling almost enchanted and haunted, you know. Of course, when I visited, the leaves were starting to change in it was kind of gloomy and drizzly the first day, and then when I went back couple days later it was brighter. But it felt extremely peaceful but also very heavy, is maybe the word I’m looking for? It felt like there was a weight there. And maybe I’m just thinking of and observing the weight of history, because the park had a long history even just in his lifetime as a park, which I’ll talk about next. But I don’t know, there’s this part of me that’s like, maybe it’s haunted by more than its own history. Though I didn’t have any specific paranormal experiences in the park itself.
Gorge/waterfall height, plus other good background info: http://americanbyways.com/destination/nay-aug-falls/mo0re
- add more info/history about the park: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nay_Aug_Park
- https://nayaugpark.org/

Brooks Model Mine

One of the most interesting things that I saw when I visited the park was a mine. I mentioned in the last episode that Scranton was made very wealthy through coal mining, and it was considered I think the anthracite capital of the world for basically the second half of the 19th century.
So, because of that part of Scranton’s history, in 1902, still at the height of coal mining in the area, a banker named Reese Brooks, who had come out of the coal mining industry, built a model mine. It was never used for commercial mining, but it is a 150-foot-long mine and there is a real coal deposit in there.
The mine is right next to the Everhart Museum, and it’s near a couple other interesting historical items. There are some carts that I think are kind of like the carts that minors would put coal in, and they be brought out of a mine. And it is also near an old streetcar trolley which is in a sort of cage right next to the mine.
The story of this model mine kind of follows the story of a lot of things in Scranton. It was built during Scranton’s glory days, and it closed in 1975. And it hasn’t really been open since. My understanding is that it is currently being restored by a group in the area and the plan is to reopen it to people and see what coal mining was like. (There is a coal mine tour elsewhere in Scranton, which I wasn’t able to do because they did not allow backpacks and I was coming straight from the airport so I had my backpack with me, but still, coal mining was important of the area’s history that it makes sense that there should be this model mine that would be open to the public as well.) It sounds like the plan is to open the mine again for tourists in the spring, so pretty soon.
But I was just so charmed and intrigued by this mine. I feel like this is the strangeness of Scranton, like there’s things that you wouldn’t really see anywhere else — at least not anywhere else that I go — that are just there and are just little reminders of the area’s history. Maybe it’s because I live in New York City, where real estate is so expensive and everything is so overdeveloped, but so much history in that be getting torn down here, so it’s so fascinating for these little forgotten pockets of history to appear other places.
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/37817925/reese-g-brooks-obituary-scranton-times/
https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/news/renovation-work-goes-on-at-scrantons-brooks-mine/collection_b0146869-63af-5499-a1af-c2e82e2361a4.html
https://nayaugpark.org/attractions/brooks-mine/
https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=112816
https://historicalmarkerproject.com/markers/HM24N3_brooks-model-coal-mine_Scranton-PA.html
https://www.wnep.com/article/news/local/lackawanna-county/brooks-mine-reopens-at-nay-aug-park-scranton-wnep-history/523-1b1856a5-2f08-4b79-9210-dda55c1a240f

Scranton’s Luna Park

There was an old amusement park right near Nay Aug Park called Luna Park that was around for about 10 years, from 1906 to 1916. If you’re into New York City history, you might remember that Coney Island once had a Luna Park, I believe the amusement park that still there is called Luna Park, though it’s very different from the old one. But this Luna Park had nothing to do with the New York City one. It sounds like there were a number of Luna parks, including one in nearby Carbondale Pennsylvania, which was popular as well. The creator of Scranton’s Luna Park opened one in Pittsburgh and one in Cleveland a little earlier, in 1905, and then in 1906, they opened this Scranton location, a Washington DC location, and Indianapolis location, and then in 1907, they opened one in Mexico City. They were all called Luna Park and featured vaudeville, circus acts, a dance hall, and different exhibits. Scranton’s Luna Park was built for $300,000 in 1906, which is like $8.3 million in today’s dollars.
Luna Park was considered a “trolley park” which is a term I hadn’t heard before, but I guess starting in the 19th century, picnic areas and recreation spots in general would open at the end of streetcar lines in big cities. The idea here was that they would give people a reason to ride streetcars during the weekend, even when they weren’t commuting. Coney Island was an example of this - in the 1820s, there was a horse-drawn streetcar line that brought people there. And then eventually it turned into an amusement park, and amusement parks became more of a thing. And apparently by the early 20th century, there were tons of trolley parks and amusement parks which were, like Scranton’s, inspired by Coney Island’s amusement parks. And these parks were really popular up through the 1920s. At least according to Wikipedia, the reason for the popularity of these parks was that people didn’t have to work as long hours as they use to, I assume because labor unions were more of a thing and workers were getting more rights, and at the same time, people had more disposable income because they were being paid a more fair wage. But then, the villain of any story appeared - the car, and as cars became more popular, people weren’t as interested in trolley parks in urban areas, in large part because they didn’t have parking. But then amusement parks in general had a big decline during the Great Depression anyway. Interestingly, Wikipedia lists the trolley parks are still in operation: it lists 15 of them, and five of those are in Pennsylvania, so I just thought it was interesting that so many of them that still remain are in PA.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_park
Anyway, Scranton’s Luna Park was one of these trolley parks. If you’re into the aesthetics of old amusement parks, as I am, it’s worth googling Scranton Luna Park because there are some awesome old postcards you can see online that show what it used to look like. One thing I really like is the front entrance was like this arched walkway with a crescent moon up on top and he would walk through that up onto this long bridge that reminds me a lot of the treehouse that is in Nay Aug Park now. I have no idea if it was an inspiration, but has a really similar vibe, even though the treehouse is very rustic looking whereas Luna Park looked very cool and modern for 1906.
- https://digitalarchives.powerlibrary.org/psa/islandora/object/psa%3Apc_17093
The plan was for Luna Park to have several sections. The first one would be a part of the roaring Brook that was dammed and would be used for boating and swimming and stuff. Then the second part would have a sort of log flume situation and a pool that would be called “the Lagoon.” In the third section was a picnic pavilion.
There were all sorts of fun attractions — I don’t know about you, but I just love a vintage amusement park and all of its silly attractions.
- I know that in 1906, the park offered daily airship rides.
  - “Daily Flights in an Airship.” Carbondale Daily News. 19 Jun 1906, Tue · Page 6
- There was a scenic Railway, there were attractions called fun things like “Blarney Castle,” “shades and shadows,” “Temple of mystery,” “Edisonia” (which is like a generic term for a attraction that exhibits Thomas Edison’s inventions, like the phonograph, Vitascope, Kinetoscope, and that sort of thing.), “Trip to Rockaway,” “Hale’s tours of the world,” and many other things.
- This is a digression, and I might be really getting into some deep lore here, but if you’ve seen the 1948 Max Ophuls film Letter from an Unknown Woman, you’ll be familiar with Hale’s Tour of the World, because Joan Fontaine’s character and whoever the male lead was go to an amusement park in Vienna and they ride on Hale’s tour the world because it was a really common amusement park ride that basically simulated being on a train. It was really common amusement park ride in the very early 20th century. Basically, the people on the ride would not move, but there would be a panorama that would move around them and make it look like they were on a moving train. And there would also be a wind machine sound effects in the contraption would be rocking.
- one of my favorite anecdotes from Luna Park was that there was an attraction called “Ford’s ostrich farm,” which opened in August 1909. And the attraction became so popular that crowd control became a big issue, because people would look at the ostriches for hours. They were completely transfixed by the ostriches. These are people after my own heart. I love birds. But I guess Ford was upset because someone accused his dog of attacking a messenger, so he closed his exhibit before the season ended, and that was a really big financial loss to the park, because it was such a popular attraction.
Unfortunately, the park fell upon hard times, as often happens in the stories of amusement parks. If you’re a longtime listener, you might remember the crystal palace episodes I did back in 2020 or maybe early 2021, about the New York crystal palace, and if you have listened to those you might have a hint of some of the things that happen here. You know, financing issues (in Luna Park’s case, rent was skyrocketing and the bank that had the parks cash deposits failed), and of course there was inconsistent attendance, and eventually, a fire.
In August 1916, there was a fire. They didn’t know how it started. Some people said it was electrical, or from ashes that a railroad steam locomotive had dumped, but it was right near the place that incinerated the parks wastepaper, which had had one serious fire already, and also the building where the wastepaper was burned also contained a sign in paint shop where they stored flammable materials. The fire spread and burned all through the night and could be seen from miles away. They tried to build the park back up, but it just wasn’t in the cards.
I guess there is still a few traces of the park, but there’s apparently almost nothing left. We’re talking like ruins and stones and cement left over from foundations, that sort of thing. It sounds like a nearby highway expansion as well as just 100 years passing have pretty much killed anything left of the park. But if you Google it, you can find some pictures of what is left.
It reminds me a little bit of the old attractions that were on top of Mount Beacon, in Beacon, New York, which I talked about in my ghost of Mount beacon episode. There used to be this really cool resort and casino and all the stuff up there and and there’s basically just foundations left, like the biggest thing that’s left standing there is just the powerhouse for the old railway that would take people up the mountain. (And, you guessed it, Mount Beacon’s attractions were destroyed by a fire as well.)

Nay Aug Amusement Park

Then, in the 1950s, a new amusement park was opened in Nay Aug Park. It sounds like it was opened on a site that had been a dance hall in the 1930s and 1940s.
it had a wooden roller coaster, carousel, a miniature version of the Lackawanna Railroad, bumper cars, boats, arcade games like pinball and ski ball, and that sort of thing, and it existed until the 1990s.
There’s not a ton of pictures or information about this newer amusement park, but I’ll include links to some in the shownotes.
- Nay Aug Amusement Park photos: https://ingest-digitalarchives.powerlibrary.org/papd/islandora/search/nay aug park?type=dismax
https://digitalarchives.powerlibrary.org/papd/islandora/object/papd%3Apscrl-naap_8
http://www.ridezone.com/defunct/parks/PA/nayaug/index.htm
http://nepalostparks.com/parks/alphabetical/
https://www.facebook.com/people/Nay-Aug-Amusement-Park-Research-Project/100068565982587/
https://www.pennlive.com/entertainment/2016/10/abandoned_amusement_parks_pa.html
https://www.pahomepage.com/news/eyewitness-to-history/eyewitness-to-history-nay-aug-rides/

Nay Aug Park Zoo (defunct)

For a time, Scranton had its own zoo, which was located in this park. The zoo opened in the 1920s, and then was closed in the 1980s.
- - I found an article from 1983 called “Nay Aug: As Zoos Go, It’s Not the Waldorf” that talks about it being placed on the Humane Society’s top 10 list of “substandard zoos,” meaning that it didn’t “meet even one criterion of an acceptable zoological garden.” At the time, the zoo had 119 animals–and it’s housed in a small building.
- Tyrone Daily Herald (Tyrone, Pennsylvania) · Fri, Aug 5, 1983 · Page 8 https://newscomwc.newspapers.com/image/10001754
After the zoo closed, there was a wildlife center that opened there in 2003. Supposedly in 2008, Time magazine called it the fourth most abusive zoo in America, though I read that on Wikipedia and there is no citation. That wildlife center closed in 2009. Since then, the zoo building has been used for nonprofit that I believe sprays and neuters feral cats in the area. And it’s a beautiful building, though it’s very small for zoo, but I’m glad they didn’t tear down the building because it looks really cool.
I found this interesting article from 2009, around the time when the wildlife center was shut down, and I wanted to read a little bit from it because it had some interesting anecdotes about the zoo and kind of what happened to it.
- OPINION: Follow jungle law Genesis fiasco bares a simple truth: Scranton unable to host wild animals at Nay Aug By: Kelly, Chris, Times-Tribune, The (Scranton, PA), Apr 12, 2009

The first time I visited the Nay Aug Park Zoo, it had been closed for more than a decade.
My tour guide was George Lowry, who spent 36 years there as superintendent of exhibits. George is a great character and an even better storyteller, and in the hour we spent rummaging the rusted bones of the facility, he did his best to recreate the place where he spent what he called the “happiest years” of his life.
I had never seen the bustling, vibrant zoo George remembered, and there were no obvious traces left. The place looked like an abandoned prison, haunted by ghosts too broken to moan. I couldn’t imagine hardened criminals being housed there, let alone wild animals. . . .
George’s eyes lit up when he talked about the zoo, and never more brightly than when the topic was Toni, the small, sweet-natured Asian elephant who became the final forlorn resident of a 70-year-old zoo that never grew up. When the Nay Aug Park Zoo opened in 1920, it was one of the best in the country. By the time attendance and funding deficits forced it to close in 1989, it was routinely rated among the worst.
Once a source of civic pride, the zoo became a malignant embarrassment to a city woefully unprepared for the future and stubbornly clinging to its past. The process that led to Toni’s liberation from Nay Aug was protracted and painful. Despite the lack of other elephants and chronic arthritis worsened by the concrete floor of her small enclosure, a small but vocal group of citizens wasn’t ready to let go of the last living link to their memories of the zoo and led a doomed petition drive to keep her here.

https://nayaugpark.org/attractions/zoo/

Old Pool

I mentioned earlier that the Roaring Brook was very dangerous to swim in and supposedly the park is haunted by some the people who drowned while swimming there. I assume that’s why in 1909 the city built something called Lake Lincoln. It was basically a dirt-bottom pool that they dug out, and then in 1929 they added a concrete bottom and circulation system. And then in 1967, they built two new Olympic -sized swimming pools. The only reason why mention this is because now, when you visit, it seems that the pool has seen better days. When I visited, there was a water slide that went down into what just looked like a gravel field. It seemed that the pool has been filled in and I think — so I’m not sure – think that they are going to renovate and reopen the pool. But I’m not totally sure.
I did look it up when I was doing the research for this though and it sounds like the waterslide has been torn down since I visited. I was there around October 8, and I did this research October 28, and in that time, they demolished the waterslide. Apparently, there’s a lot of confusion about whether they will rebuild the pool or not. But it sounds like they destroyed the slide because it needed to be repaired and the manufacturer went out of business, and they can’t get parts to repair the slide.
I mention this mostly as just another example of the ways in which Scranton is haunted by a more prosperous past.
https://nayaugpark.org/about/
https://www.wnep.com/article/news/local/lackawanna-county/progress-on-nay-aug-pool-project-demolition-splash-pads-water-slides/523-e518b544-14ca-415b-bcc6-aea796d0af8b
https://www.yahoo.com/now/nay-aug-water-slides-demolished-040100384.html
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/water-slides-come-down-at-nay-aug-park/ar-AA136RwB

Kanjorski Covered Bridge (2007)

When I think of Pennsylvania, I think of covered bridges. I don’t know that they’re a specifically Pennsylvanian thing, but they really feel that way to me. But basically, the idea is that back in the day, people would build wooden bridges, but they would rot because of exposure to the elements. So, they would only last maybe 20 years or so. But if you covered the bridge, it could last more than 100 years. So that’s why there’s still some pretty old covered bridges around.
However, the covered bridge in this park is actually from 2007. I’m just gonna touch I really quickly, because I wasn’t able to find a lot of history on it, but it connects the two banks of Roaring Brook and it’s really cool looking. Both days I went to the park, I stood on the bridge for pretty long time and looked down at the water. The view is great from the bridge, it’s beautiful, and the first day I was at the park it was drizzly and starting to get dark and the lights came on the bridge and was very atmospheric. It really had a nice kind of cryptidcore aesthetic that I really appreciated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covered_bridge
https://nayaugpark.org/attractions/kanjorski-covered-bridge/

Dave Wenzel Tree House (2007)

Like the covered bridge, the treehouse in the park is one of the coolest attractions but also has very little information about it online. It was also built in 2007, and it has some great views–it’s located about 150 feet above the gorge. I know that the treehouse used to have some trees growing up around it that helped support it, but I think those trees have come down since then. I say that just based on looking at pictures, because in the older pictures there was a tree in the middle the treehouse, and when I went there was no tree in the middle the treehouse, and I had wondered why it was called the treehouse. (It was closed for a couple years while they made renovations.) I also read something that claimed that the treehouse had a hidden door, which is very cool, but which I didn’t see while I was there.
https://nayaugpark.org/attractions/dave-wenzel-tree-house/
It’s really cool looking, it almost feels like something out of a fantasy novel. It’s kind of rustic — it is wheelchair accessible, though, which is great — and it just has this awesome view of the whole surrounding area.
https://recmanagement.com/feature/200805aw1e

Ghosts in the Museum (Haunted Scranton)

Stories of the haunted Everhart Museum, a former hotel, a historic home, and a pub in Scranton, PA. Plus a couple cool urban legends about a stone couch and a lady in black.

Stories of a haunted museum, a former hotel, a historic home, and a pub in Scranton, PA. Plus a couple cool urban legends about a stone couch and a lady in black.

Highlights include:
- a nun psychopomp
- a child who followed a ghost into the basement
- a ghost that sneaks up on people in a storage closet
- a mannequin that moves on its own

Listen to the episode here or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Check out the others episodes in this series about Haunted Scranton:

Episode Script

DISCLAIMER: I’m providing this version of the script for accessibility purposes. It hasn’t been proofread, so please excuse typos. (Especially because I use dictation software for a lot of my script writing!) There are also some things that may differ between the final episode and this draft script—some of this transcript may feel a bit incomplete. Please treat the episode audio as the final product.

Main source for this episode: Haunted Scranton: After Dark in the Electric City by A.C. Bernardi

Everhart Museum

Inside Nay Aug park, there is also a museum. I have no idea why I didn’t go inside the museum, since I spent a lot of time just hanging out at the park two of the days that I was at Scranton. I can only say that I wasn’t really thinking clearly and was feeling exhausted, so while I walked around museum and took pictures of the outside of it, it didn’t even cross my mind that I could go inside. Go figure. I guess part of it too is that both times I had my backpack, I wasn’t sure if they had a coat check or not. And I was just feeling too exhausted to figure any of that out.
But the museum is the largest public museum in all of northeastern Pennsylvania. It apparently has artifacts, and stuff relating to natural history, science, and fine art. It also has a library.
The museum was founded by one Isaiah Fawkes Everhart, which is a name for an eccentric 19th-century academic if I’ve ever heard one. He was a medical doctor who lived in Scranton, and he was also a taxidermist, because of course he was. I guess the taxidermy birds in the collection came from Everhart’s personal collection of taxidermy birds. Everhart apparently had this dream of collecting specimens of Pennsylvania’s nativebirds, and so he built one of the finest and largest collections in the United States, according to Wikipedia.
The museum opened in 1908, and at the time there were no other museums in Northeastern Pennsylvania. When the museum first opened, it was mostly just Everhart’s stuffed birds.
there’s this huge bronze statue out in front of the museum of Everhart. Weirdly, five days after the bronze statue was dedicated, Everhart died. And apparently he died inside the museum. I’ve read that he fell to his death, but I haven’t been able to find details about that.
This is what the Everhart Museum website says:

On April 14, 1911, Dr. Everhart slipped and fell on the floor on the Museum fracturing his right hip. He died of complications of this injury at his home on Franklin Avenue in Scranton on May 26, 1911.
- https://everhart-museum.org/dr-isaiah-fawkes-everhart/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Fawkes_Everhart
- https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/22048038/isaiah-fawkes-everhart

And of course, the museum is supposedly haunted by Everhart himself
Ghost walk tours highlight Scranton’s weird, grisly history By: Nissley, Erin L. Times-Tribune, The (Scranton, PA). 07/06/2010. (AN: 2W62060597568):

Other stories on the tour included the bizarre murder plot hatched in 1900 by the son of Scranton philanthropist and naturalist Dr. Isaiah Everhart, who donated the museum at Nay Aug Park that bears his name. Mr. Jaye said Dr. Everhart’s ghost wanders the halls of the museum.

https://nayaugpark.org/attractions/everhart-museum/
https://accessnepa.com/pages-from-the-past/everhart-break-in-still-a-mystery
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everhart_Museum
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/arts/design/the-case-of-the-purloined-unauthenticated-pollock.html
https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/a-spooky-night-at-the-museum-everhart-in-scranton-flashlight-tours-explore-myths-superstitions/article_1abdaecd-ad5e-5e37-a10e-f6cd9bdfb66e.html
A spooky night at the museum: Everhart in Scranton flashlight tours explore myths, superstitions BY JIM LOCKWOOD, The Times-Tribune, June 14, 2022:

SCRANTON — A spooky flashlight tour Saturday at the Everhart Museum at Nay Aug Park shed some light on myths and superstitions surrounding various subjects in the building’s collections.

Staff created a special tour for Halloween exploring some of the objects in the museum’s galleries, including rocks, minerals and birds that generally have links to superstitions or myths, said Stefanie Colarusso, the museum’s director of programs and events.

Tours of parts of the first and second floors ended with a presentation in the basement by John and Keriann Balucha of Wyoming Valley Ghost Tours, discussing their paranormal investigation of the museum conducted in the summer of 2019.

John Balucha showed video images from an infrared camera set up overnight inside the museum. At one point during the night, clicking noises accompanied the battery power of the camera waning and the video going dark. Later, the camera wobbled, tilted and tipped over onto the floor, where Balucha found it the next morning.

The Baluchas enjoy trying to identify such phenomena.

“I think it’s important because a lot of people obviously are afraid of death, and I think there’s some comfort — if we could find some evidence of afterlife — I think that’s comforting, to a degree,” John Balucha said.

**Colarusso can’t say for sure whether the museum is haunted. But she has her suspicions.

“There’s some fun little tidbits, ghost stories, I guess you could call them, and a little bit of activity,” Colarusso said. “I am not scared of the building personally. You get a funny feeling, occasionally. I’m here a lot at night, so you know. We definitely have older artifacts that could carry some different energy, I guess you could say.”

Chrissy Grunza, a member of the museum’s summer program staff who volunteered as a tour guide Saturday, said she has heard knocks and once saw a penny inexplicably fly out of a DVD player and across a room in the basement.

“When our classroom used to be downstairs, every time I would say Dr. Everhart’s name, somebody would knock on the back wall,” Grunza said. “Nothing upstairs, it was mostly downstairs in the basement. But I tried to convince myself this is just myself playing mind games.”**

https://www.whenyouworkatamuseum.com/post/150442798259/im-going-to-turn-this-submission-into-a-script/amp
http://wb-scranton-movies.blogspot.com/2007/11/luzerne-and-lackawanna-counties-ghosts.html?m=1
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://open.spotify.com/show/54pMFcKV6ct5LiEJZgXY1s&ved=2ahUKEwivz-2py9_6AhWKjIkEHVWJD6M4HhAWegQIChAB&usg=AOvVaw1Wl7uE38E2VhXkeh4tMCPH
https://portage.sparkpa.org/eg/opac/record/8277674
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/440302.rss&ved=2ahUKEwinyOHRy9_6AhVBj4kEHV3hBO04MhAWegQIChAB&usg=AOvVaw3Hh4PURRilfeAvcRcGICst
https://everhart-museum.org/short-history-of-everhart/
I also found a story on ghostsoldiers.tv that described a visit to the Everhart Museum during a D-Day Exhibit; the author of the website describes some EVPs that they got while visiting the exhibit. The EVPs seemed to related to D-Day and/or WWII.
- http://ghostsoldiers.tv/id82.html

The Hotel Jermyn

located at 326 Spruce St.
this is a Romanesque style building, which was built on the site of the Forest House hotel, which had been built in the 1850s. Forrest house was named after the woods that were in the area, and which were cleared in order to build the building. It was a boardinghouse at first, and then they added a 4th floor to it and it became really popular as Scranton became more popular.
So then they built the Hotel Jermyn. They started construction in 1894, and it took about two years to build. But on April 20, 1895, a carpenter named Charlie Weiss fell down 80 feet from where he was working and died. The hotel opened on April 8, 1896, about a year later and it was a really grand opening. It sounds like 10,000 people visited when it first opened. And the hotel had 250 rooms for guests to stay in. They were really modern rooms, with hot and cold running water, steam heat, electric lights, and gas. In 100 of the rooms in the hotel had private bathrooms.
it was such a grand place that Eisenhower stayed there once. There are also used to be a nightclub called the Omar room which had a 26 piece orchestra ensemble that played there
eventually, the building was converted to become apartments for elderly people and disabled people, and that still mostly what it’s used for.
At one point, the Electric City Theater Company, which no longer exists, turned one of the hotel ballrooms into a theater, and they would perform plays there. And, as many theaters tend to be, they discovered that their theater was haunted.
There are of course a lot of theater traditions, including having a ghost light lit. And they did have a ghost light in the theater.
Apparently different mediums, psychics, and sensitive people have detected ghosts there. Supposedly the carpenter who died has been seen there, as has a local priest and actor who had a heart attack while he was performing there.
But the most famous ghosts there is someone named Eleanor. Now, even before the theater was there, people in the building had seen Eleanor, including the elderly people who live there and people who worked in that part of the building. Eleanor is supposedly an actress or some sort of performer from the 1920s or 1930s who died while staying at the hotel. Supposedly she had fallen from one of the windows on the six or seven floor. There are different legends about her death, some claiming that it was an accident, and some cleaning that was a suicide. But then of course some people think it was a murder.
The story goes that Eleanor was a beautiful performer who often went to Scranton to perform in the theaters there, and a wealthy, important man in Scranton was into her, and even though he was married, they had an affair. But then Eleanor found out that she was pregnant, and told him, and he pushed her out of the window and she died when she hit the sidewalk below. However, there is no evidence of this story in the historical record.
I can’t help thinking about how similar this sounds to the story of one of the ghosts at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina, which I covered in a previous episode [https://www.buriedsecretspodcast.com/haunted-grove-park-inn-asheville-north-carolina/]
however, when people in the theater have talked about Eleanor, strange things have happened, like lights turning on and off for flickering. Eleanor also supposedly would take small items that belonged to the actors or to the productions, which resulted in things like missing props. There is a story about an actress who lost an important prop, and then ended up asking out loud for Eleanor to give the prop back, because she really needed it, and then of course a couple minutes later, she found the brush sitting on the lid of the trashcan in the room, which she had specifically looked at previously, when she opened the trashcan to see if it was there.
there’s also a story about a particularly sensitive 7-year-old girl who has actually seen Eleanor. Apparently she saw her in a mirror, and her clothing sounded like it was probably from the 1930s or so
there was also story about an actress who came in from out of town and was going to star in a high-profile production, but she got a really bad vibe there, feeling fear and dread and general uneasiness there. She also sometimes saw a woman standing by herself in the back the theater. And she ended up breaking her contract because she felt too uncomfortable there

The Catlin House

located at 232 Monroe Ave, which is on the University of Scranton campus
it’s a Tudor revival building
it was built in 1912
it was a 16 room house for the Scranton lawyer and banker George Catlin and Helen, his second wife
George Catlin was a lawyer in New York City, but then he decided to move his family to Scranton in 1870. They don’t know why he did it, but it was probably because Scranton was having such a big boom. So he switched from law to finance. However, his wife did have family in the area (this is his first wife, Mary Woodrow Archbald)
after Mary died, George married Helen and they built the house. George never had any kids, but they would hold a lot of parties and stuff
George died in the house on June 8, 1935, when he was 90. He died of a brief illness
Helen died in 1942, at her sister’s house
the building is now the headquarters of the Lackawanna Historical Society
the house was left to the historical society
some people think that the home is haunted because of all the historical items that are now held there
members of the historical society say that they have experienced uneasy feelings, and sightings of full-body apparitions
the phenomena have happened throughout the whole building, from the basement to the third floor
a lot of people are kind of scared of the basement, where people feel drafts and cold spots that appear and disappear randomly. They’ve heard disembodied voices, felt feelings of dread and feel like they’re being watched by someone who they can’t see. Some sensitive people have said that the spirits of the workers who built the house are in the basement, but it’s not clear why
there are no documented tragic accidents or strange things that happened during the house’s construction. To their knowledge, no one is buried underneath the house.
Some people say that the second floor has a “heaviness.” The old servants quarters used to be there, and now it is a tiny office and there are rooms that contain costumes and mannequins
an adjacent room, also on the second floor, “the fashion room,” has lots of displays of old dresses and clothes. A lot of people have felt uncomfortable in there, especially inside a large closet in the room. One volunteer was putting boxes in the closet and suddenly felt like he wasn’t alone anymore. When he looked behind him, no one was there, so he went back to work. After a couple moments, the man felt someone watching him again, but he didn’t turn around because it seemed like the person was in the closet with him. When he looked up, one of the antique gowns that had been hanging suddenly seemed to be filled by the form of a body, with no legs or feet. The volunteer ran out of the room
another time, a volunteer was sorting clothing in the same closet and suddenly had a sense that she had been transported back in time. She heard the whistle of a steam engine. The author the book theorizes that this might’ve been some sort of time warp, where the past and present overlaps briefly
one volunteer has said that at the annual holiday open house, when the house is decorated with lots of holiday decorations, the volunteer, who said that she was sensitive to spirits was sitting at a table in the back room on the first floor, which is the office for staff. She was talking to a few friends and then she saw two women dressed in elaborate early 1900s gowns, who suddenly appeared near the back door way. They walked past the table that she was sitting at through a hallway that leads to the library room. The woman said she didn’t remember hearing the door to the outside open, and she also didn’t feel the cold air from the door opening, and the closed door that the figures walked through was totally blocked on the other side by a bookshelf in the library room. Nobody else saw it, but the woman believe that she saw two ghosts that are tied in with house’s history.
Another volunteer had something weird happened in the second-floor bathroom, which is right next to the fashion room closet. The bathroom looks like it did when the family was still living there, and it’s not a working bathroom. It’s just a display. There is a mannequin that’s dressed in old timey clothing. As this woman was walking by the bathroom, she felt like someone was looking at her from in the room. So she stopped and looked into the bathroom, thinking she was probably just imagining things. But then the mannequin’s head seemed to slowly rise, and like it was looking at her.
Article with info about the Scranton After Dark Paranormal Investigative Team:
- Paranormal investigators look into downtown Scranton By: Falchek, David. Times-Tribune, The (Scranton, PA). 10/18/2010. (AN: 2W6911873147)

The group’s leader, Tony, discussed the Electronic Voice Phenomena, EVP’s, recordings the group collect which, after later examination, include sounds that appear to be human voices. Tony goes into a location with a recorder, trying to cajole a spirit into talking or making a noise. In examples collected from the Catlin House, home of the Lackawanna Historical Society, a voice says something Tony has interpreted as “a horse length…this one goes first.” Another appeared to say “I’ll let you know,” when Tony asked to speak to it. He said EVPs are often from “unintelligent” spirits, echoing past conversations. Some sound human, but appear to be in foreign languages. They have never found one speaking backward.

The Banshee Pub

320 Penn Ave.
this is supposedly one of the most haunted buildings in Scranton. It’s a three-story brick building
the pub is supposed to be haunted by the spirits of some people who had lived in Scranton and died of the Spanish flu, because bodies might have been stored in the basement, because funeral parlors couldn’t keep up with the demand for space because of the amount of people who were dying. Now, it has not been confirmed that the dry goods store that was at 320 Penn Ave., Eisner and sons, was actually used for this purpose. People just think it might have been. Also, it’s worth noting that the Scranton private hospital was right behind the building back then, and a lot of people who had the Spanish flu were treated there. There also used to be a funeral parlor near there, so it seems like 320 Penn Ave. would’ve been a convenient place to store bodies
apparently the pub has a really vintage vibe, and they were able to salvage a bunch of wood from the original interior when they first open the pub in 2000, so it has a lot of the innards of the building as it was and I guess it also has a bit of a creepy vibe
unsurprisingly, people had uneasy feelings and just got a bad vibe in the basement area
people have said that they had seen shadows appear and disappear in the basement, moving across the walls, often in people’s peripheral vision. But sometimes they have been seen straight on.
One worker had an unsettling experience in the basement, when she went down there in the air suddenly got very very cold, and then she felt a intense pain in her shoulder and ran back upstairs. And when she told her coworkers what happened, they saw that her shoulder was turning red and the pattern of the redness looked a lot like a human bite
both workers and customers of the pub have said that they’d seen apparitions on the buildings first and second floors. They’ve also seen a tall man wearing an old looking black overcoat and a top hat standing at the bottom of the staircase in the first floor. He looks like he is in his 30s or 40s, and he just looks out in the main bar area, seeming kind of confused, and then he disappears
there is a scary story about a woman and her eight-year-old son who went to the pub to have lunch, and the woman was talking the waitress, who was an old friend, and she didn’t notice that her son had disappeared. She looked around and saw that he was going down the staircase that went down into the basement. So she and the waitress followed him and they saw him standing alone next to a wall. She asked why he left and he said that a man in black who was carrying a rope asked him to follow him. But they didn’t see any man in black there
there’s also story about a ghostly young girl who’s maybe four or five years old, who wears a white dress and is often seen in the banquet room on the second floor, or the staircase to the third floor. Some people have heard her laughter when the bar is closing or about to close and is mostly empty. People also said they’ve heard her footsteps walking down empty staircases. There doesn’t seem to be a theory about who she is, but people say she’s friendly
another thing worth noting is that according to the 1879 to 1880 edition of the Scranton city directory, there used to be an undertaker whose business was at 320 Penn Ave. The undertaker’s name was R. Schoenfeeld. His business also sold furniture and coffins
Per the Food Network: “In 1910, the building housed a wholesale dry goods company and, because of its proximity to area hospitals, was also used as a temporary morgue space during the 1918 influenza epidemic. … Staff have felt hands on shoulders despite no one being behind them, seen glasses randomly breaking and heard tables moving on the second floor (despite no one being there),” Food Network wrote. Scranton restaurant named most haunted in state By: Heaney West, Caitlin. Times-Tribune, The (Scranton, PA). 10/18/2019.

Bonus urban legend: the “Stone Couch” and “Lady in Black” in Hazleton

‘Stone couch’ rock formation in Luzerne County believed to be haunted site By: Whalen, Jill. Times-Tribune, The (Scranton, PA). 10/28/2019. (AN: 2W61513169657)

There’s a curious rock formation on the road from Eckley Miners’ Village to Buck Mountain that folks call “The Stone Couch.”

Some believe the rocks were intentionally put there, while others think they’re a natural formation. Whatever the case, the position of the rocks resemble a couch.

“Old folklore has a woman with a sick baby waiting on the stone couch for a stagecoach ride to take the baby to a doctor and her baby dies,” said Freeland area resident Charlie Gallagher. “The grief-stricken woman then killed herself there. At least that’s the story I was told.”

And rumor has it that at night, you can hear the ghost of the woman crying for her baby.

To take it a step further, urban legend holds that if you sit on the “couch” once, you will get scratched. If you sit on it twice, something bad will happen to someone close to you. If you sit on it a third time, you will die.

That’s also what Jeremy Petrachonis of Hazleton has heard.

“I have heard that rumor/story about the ‘death couch,’ and I know a few people who have done it, and none of them died, but one got the flu shortly after, so I guess that was some bad luck,” said Petrachonis, a haunted history buff.

He also heard about a ghostly presence at the former St. Joseph Hospital in Hazleton. He referred to it as “The Lady in Black.”

“Legend has it that there was a nun many years ago, who was always at the hospital, especially to serve Last Rites to dying patients. She primarily belonged to the Diocese of Scranton, working with the St. Joseph parish,” Petrachonis relayed. And as the story goes, the nun also spent much time in the hospital’s chapel.

When the woman died, patients and staff began seeing a “dark shadow” or silhouette in the hospital’s rooms and halls, he said.

Petrachonis, a member of St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church and former altar boy, guessed that some shy away from talking about the sighting because it was a Christian hospital – and religion and ghosts don’t go hand-in-hand.

By the time he had heard the story, the hospital had closed.

“So it doesn’t go too far, except as an urban legend, but I would love to know if anyone else has physically seen ‘The Lady in Black,’” he wondered.

The Exorcist Statue and Other Scranton Hauntings (Haunted Scranton)

What if, after you died, a close friend of yours made a bust commemorating you, spending years trying to make the piece of art capture your very essence? What if some of your ashes were put into said statue, which was then displayed in a prominent public area? Might you haunt that statue? Well, that’s what happened to Jason Miller, Scranton native and the actor who played Father Karras in The Exorcist. And Scranton residents have claimed that things have gotten weird.

That’s just one of the many strange stories I explore in this episode about some of the most interesting haunted sites in Scranton, PA.

Highlights include:

A grand masonic temple with many ghost stories
A haunted trolley car (!!)
A gruesome murder

P.S. This episode has nothing to do with Scranton’s lost Luna Park but I covered the park earlier in the series and I wanted to draw its old gate so here you go anyway.

Listen to the episode here or anywhere you get podcasts.

Check out the others episodes in this series about Haunted Scranton:

Episode Script

DISCLAIMER: I’m providing this version of the script for accessibility purposes. It hasn’t been proofread, so please excuse typos. (Especially because I use dictation software for a lot of my script writing!) There are also some things that may differ between the final episode and this draft script—some of this transcript may feel a bit incomplete. Please treat the episode audio as the final product.

Main source for this episode: Haunted Scranton: After Dark in the Electric City by A.C. Bernardi

Scranton Cultural Center at the Masonic Temple

Location: 420 Washington Ave.
The masonic temple opened in 1930. It’s a very grand neo-Gothic and Romanesque building, designed by the same person who designed Rockefeller Center in New York City, one Raymond Hood. It is built out of Indiana limestone and has carvings of dragons and Masonic symbols. The author of Haunted Scranton: After Dark in the Electric City speculates that the limestone that the building is constructed out of might have something to do with its paranormal aspects.

Apparently this is a huge building: it is 180,000 ft.², 10 stories tall, but only five of those stories are accessible via elevator for some reason. It has two theaters, several meeting halls, and grand ballroom, in addition to a lot of other stuff. It also has a subbasement that stretches 60 feet below the basement floor. Psychics and mediums who have walked around the building have claimed that there are secret chambers hidden in the walls. And some people think that there are treasures or interesting relics hidden away there.

According to NEPAscene.com, multiple groups of paranormal investigators have observed strange phenomena. (https://nepascene.com/2014/10/9-most-haunted-places-nepa/)

Several paranormal groups have also investigated the Scranton Cultural Center and have had unexplainable encounters. “We were in one of the Mason rooms, and within maybe 5-6 minutes, the temperature dropped from 71 degrees to 65 degrees. And it was a big room,” says Alicia VanDuzer, member of the Society for Paranormal Research and Investigation (S.P.R.I.). VanDuzer also spoke of an EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) her team was able to capture. “We got a voice saying what we thought as, ‘Are you speaking for us, Tyler?’ There was no one in our group or employee named Tyler. We found out later on that Tyler is actually a Mason title, not a name. It is the person who sits outside the Mason meeting room and relays messages from the outside after a meeting has already started.”

Harry and Jeannette Weinberg Theater

One of the theaters in the building has a seat that is reserved for a ghost named Sarah. She’s often seen sitting in a seat in a private balcony on the left side of the stage. I love this; it’s very Phantom of the Opera. Sarah is a young white girl, between 8 and 10 years old, and people think that she is some relative of a prominent Scranton area resident from the 1930s and 1940s. (Not a specific resident; just someone wealthy and well-known.) They see her most often during performances when that part of the theater isn’t being used by guests. But other staff and the cleaning crew have also glimpsed her after hours.

People have also seen weird lights and shadows. One person saw a faint bluish white light glowing in the dark balcony.

Casey Library

Since the 1960s, people have seen an apparition on the second floor in a room that’s now known as the Casey Library. Sometimes people walk in to see a man dressed in a dark cloak with the hood pulled over his head sitting in one of the chairs in the library. Usually this happens when someone has just walked through the library. Then they go to walk back through and there hadn’t been anyone there before, but now this guy’s there. Apparently his clothes look sort of like a Masonic robe. He never seems to notice the person who’s walked in. Then he just disappears. People don’t seem to feel threatened by this figure, though they tend to feel a little freaked out. The room was a quiet study room when it was used by the Masons.

Lackawanna County Jail

The Lackawanna County Jail was built in the 1880s. It was originally meant to hold hundred and 10 prisoners, but in 1999, they expanded it to hold 1200 prisoners. The new part of the jail is built on top of an old burial site. People have claimed that a former warden still patrols the area in ghostly form.

There’s also a story about a female guard who heard screaming coming from a nearby cell. Though she expected to see a fight, when she got to the cell, she didn’t see anything. Instead, she saw a frightened female prisoner in the corner of the cell. The prisoner said that she had been sleeping and then awoke to see a man’s face pressed up against the glass of the window on the door of her cell. He didn’t say anything to her, but he stared at her really intensely and had a threatening vibe. Sure that he wanted to harm her, and was afraid that he would get into the cell, the prisoner started screaming.
But, of course, after hearing the story, the guard said that no one had gone in or out of that cell block all night. And the guard hadn’t seen anyone in the hallway when she was going there. The prisoner said that other female inmates had seen this ghostly man; he was fairly well known in the jail.

Haunted Car # 46

Location: 300 Cliff St.

Scranton’s Trolley Museum is inside a former machine shop for the Dickson Manufacturing Company, which made locomotives and stationary steam engines. At its height, in the late 1890s, the Dickson manufacturing company had 1,200 employees, and they made 100 locomotives every year, and they distributed nationwide.

It’s now part of the Steamtown National Historic Site, which is at the old railyard, and in 1999, they opened the Electric City Trolley Museum.

Inside the museum, there is a trolley—car number 46—that’s supposedly haunted. It’s a double truck, double and, closed car. It was one of 22 similar cars that were built in 1907 by the St. Louis car company, and which ran on the Philadelphia and Western Railway. It’s the last car that still exist from this generation of trolley cars, which ran on a high standard third rail system between Upper Darby and Strafford, Pennsylvania.

People believe that the car is haunted by a woman named Nancy. The story goes that she was very sick and was riding the streetcar to her family’s place in Philadelphia. But she died in transit. People say that because this was emotionally difficult thing for her—both dying, and the fact that she couldn’t get back to Philly to see her family before dying—she still haunts the car.

People have heard a woman’s voice called their name while they were alone in the building. Employees heard heavy doors slamming shut, even after the museum was closed to the public. Mediums have claimed to see a woman sitting in the back of the car. Once, someone asked the spirit whether she was trapped in that car and wanted to leave, and they heard a disembodied sigh in the car. However, researchers have been unable to prove Nancy’s existence from historical documents.

People have also encountered other paranormal things in the museum. They’ve had similar experiences in the room next to the room that car 46 is in, near statues of an early 1900s coal miner and breaker boy. Supposedly there is a male spirit who roams freely within the building, and the story goes that he was one of the original builders of car 46. He likes to play tricks on people and surprise people, and has moved items around throughout the building.

The Colonnade

Location: the corner of Mulberry Street and Jefferson Avenue (401 Jefferson Avenue)
This was a fancy Victorian mansion that was built in the 1870s. Eventually, the house was sold, and in 1963, the building became the home of a funeral director who also ran his mortuary business out of the house for at least 10 years after that. At the same time, the second and third floors were used as efficiency apartments (efficiency apartment is like a studio apartment but less nice—it sounds like a New York City studio apartment).

In 1979, the parlor had to be moved because of zoning issues so then it was just used as a home and apartments. Then in 2006, the home was purchased and renovated and now it is an event venue and bed and breakfast.

As often happens, the renovations seemed to awaken something paranormal. First, when they were taking pictures of the building to prepare for renovations, a boy showed up in the pictures, even though there had not been a child around while they were taking the pictures. The young boy was standing on a side porch, looking right at the person taking the photograph. He had dark hair and seemed like he was maybe eight or nine years old, and he was dressed in white knickerbockers and white knee-high stockings, which are obviously very dated. Supposedly his spirit likes to run around the building, jump up and down the beds, and has a special liking for the front bedroom on the south side of the house.

A medium has since visited and said that they sensed the presence of a child. They don’t think that the kid died in the building, just that he lived there for a while, and perhaps he returned to the building because he liked it so much.

Courthouse Square

Murder near the courthouse

Location: 231 Raymond Ct., which apparently is near 126 Franklin Ave today

One story about Courthouse Square involves a November 1932 murder. One Joseph Kosh had just been released from a prison in Auburn, New York, and he met Victoria Smolinsky, alias Marie King, a woman who owned a brothel in town. They seemed to get along at first and they had Thanksgiving dinner together, but he wanted to spend the night, and she didn’t want him to, so the next morning he came back to her place with a 15-inch long bread knife, that he had stolen, and he stabbed her 20 times. Then he was arrested and I guess really fought back, and he tried to kill himself a bunch of times, before being executed.
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/3980072/scranton-killer-is-executed/

Gallows

The gallows were apparently where the John Mitchell memorial statue is nowadays, behind the courthouse on Adams Avenue.

Courthouse Building

Many people have claimed to see ghosts in the courthouse. Those include overnight workers seeing lights turning on and off again in locked rooms that no one was inside. The third floor office that used to be the marriage license office apparently is particularly haunted. People hear footsteps in hallways that are empty, there are cold spots, and in the bell tower, sheriffs have supposedly said that they’d seen moving shadows and they felt like they have been watched.

In the early 2000s, one janitor saw a lady in white in a dark hallway on the second floor. It’s unclear who this woman in white is supposed to be. But the worker who saw her said that he had just finished working, and he was about to leave. Then he remembered he’d left some of his stuff on the second floor. Nobody else was around, but on the second floor in the hallway he saw a “white semitransparent figure” that appeared to be a woman floating toward him slowly. He was freaked out, but didn’t run. The woman in white passed overhead and didn’t seem to see him. Other workers have said they’ve seen her and had similar experiences. Apparently a transparent man and a ghost couple have been seen on the first floor the building, as well.

205 North Washington Avenue (across the street from the courthouse)

This building is across the street from the courthouse, and apparently the ground floor is a Subway restaurant, and then the two floors above that have some lawyers offices.
Some of the office workers have claimed to see ghosts there. One lawyer said that he heard shuffling noises and footsteps in the hallway at night after everyone had left. He’d get up to see if anyone was there, and of course there wouldn’t be anyone. This happened so often that he just got used to it whenever he was there late at night. Some workers also said that they have experienced cold spots and they’ve heard keys jingling even though no one was around. The author of Haunted Scranton suggests that may be this is some sort of ghostly janitor.

Bust of Jason Miller

This might be my favorite of the Scranton hauntings.

Jason Miller was a playwright and actor who played Father Karras in The Exorcist. He was from Scranton and moved back there when he was older, dying there in 2001 when he was in his 60s. And now there’s a bust of him in Scranton. But this isn’t just any bust.
From the website oddthingsiveseen.com: https://www.oddthingsiveseen.com/2008/12/jason-miller-bust.html :
> far from merely being honored with a random hometown-boy-turned-marginally-notable bust tucked away in the lobby of some local theater due to the earnest efforts of some minor lobbying group coinciding with the whims of some local politician, Miller was the entire inspiration behind the recent creation of the Piazza dell’Arte, a courtyard-like monument directly beneath the Spruce Street side of the looming tower of the Lackawanna Courthouse.

Apparently the bust is hollow and contains Miller’s ashes. However, wikipedia claims that Miller’s ashes appeared on set in a 2011 Broadway revival of That Champion Season, a play that Miller wrote (which was set in Scranton), whereas the bust was built in 2008, so I’m not sure exactly where his ashes are now, or if maybe they were divided
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Miller_(playwright)
- https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/19839

The bust was sculpted by Miller’s friend Paul Sorvino, who was an actor who was in a bunch of things. (Probably most notably, he was Paul Cicero in Goodfellas.) But he was also a talented cast-bronze sculptor; who would’ve guessed?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Sorvino

There’s an interesting article that talks about the amount of effort and attention Sorvino put into the sculpture, which I think is relevant from a paranormal point of view.
- https://nepascene.com/2011/03/archives-paul-sorvino-remembers-artistic-brother-jason-miller-broadway-revives-championship-season/

As a professional sculptor, Sorvino was asked by the city to create a bronze bust of his longtime friend, unveiled in December of 2008. It took him a year to capture his friend as he remembered him, giving it three separate tries and countless hours of studying his pictures and pausing his films. . . .
“Any competent sculptor can make something look reasonably like the subject. The question is, ‘When is it going to be born? When is it going to have life?’ I must have worked on those eyes for a month alone,” Sorvino said. . . . He said he wanted the statue to_be_Miller, not just resemble him, and as much as the bust overlooking Courthouse Square encompasses Miller’s passion for the city, it also represents the passion of its sculptor.
“It was almost a mission for my dear, dear departed friend and for all those people who wanted this in Scranton. In a way, it’s my love letter to him, but it allows me to let Jason keep giving his love back to them. He loved Scranton very, very, very much. It was the only place he felt home,” Sorvino continued.
“I’m very happy that I got a chance, the opportunity, to express that to the town, which I love, and to my dear friend, who I loved.”
Even today, it still brings him back to that one fateful meeting, that one singular “haunted” look, over four decades ago.
“The face on the statue, if you look directly into his eyes, is almost exactly the impression of the face that I saw the first time I laid eyes on him.”

I find this quote interesting, because when you hear about supposedly haunted statues, they aren’t usually made by a close friend of the person they’re commemorating. And you can tell that Sorvino put so much attention and care into the work—could that give something a “haunted” aspect, or enhance a haunting?
The sculpture is also located really close to an apartment building where Miller lived for a bit.
From the article Ghost walk tours highlight Scranton’s weird, grisly history by Nissley, Erin L. Times-Tribune, The (Scranton, PA). 07/06/2010. (AN: 2W62060597568)

They also stopped at the bust of actor/playwright Jason Miller, a Scranton native who died at Farley’s bar May 13, 2001.

Mr. Jaye told the group that some people swear they can hear the bust whisper “the power of Christ compels you,” Mr. Miller’s famous line from “The Exorcist.” Several of the people on the tour took turns leaning close to the sculpture, but no one reported hearing anything.

All this being said, I tend to think that anything associated with The Exorcist gets associated with stories of hauntings (see my episodes about Fordham). But still, I don’t think that means that the bust isn’t haunted. Maybe the weirdness surrounding The Exorcist really stretches far enough to cause far-flung hauntings.

Andy Gavin’s Eatery and Pub

Location: 1392 N. Washington Ave.; this is right across the street from the Lackawanna County prison

This is a really beautiful, Victorian looking house that has three stories and tower and it was built sometime between 1887 and 1890.

Since the 1980s, people have reported that there have been ghosts at this location. A previous owner said that he encountered some weirdness while he was renovating rooms on the second and third floors, turning them into apartments to rent out.

He was painting a room and it was really hot, and suddenly he felt some very cold air blowing on him. He said it felt like he had walked into a freezer. But he couldn’t figure out what was going on and couldn’t find a source for the cold air. He looked around to see if someone could be playing a prank on him somehow (it’s unclear to me whether this had central air, but I would be very surprised if it did), but he didn’t see anybody. So he went back to work, and the chill went away. But of course it came back. In this time, in addition to the cold air, he heard a man’s voice very close to his right ear. He couldn’t understand what the man was saying, but he said it sounded gruff. And he ran out. He never went alone to the second or third floors of the building again. And then he sold the building in 1988.

The current owner bought it in 1988, and one night the owner’s son and some of his friends were having a party and played with the Ouija board and they wanted to try to communicate with whatever ghost lived in the house. When they asked the ghost what his name was, the board spelled out George. Through further Ouija board sessions, they learned that George was supposedly a coalminer who lived there in the late 19th century, who supposedly killed himself in one of the top floors of the building. As they continue communicating with George to the Ouija board, things got scarier. And after a while, it sounds like they’re getting a bad enough vibe from George that they stopped using the Ouija board indicate with him. And of course, when the owner’s son asked a priest what to do with the board, he blessed the board and he told him to burn it, and he did that. Supposedly the owner with the help of several priests has tried to get rid of any spirits in the building, but it sounds like George is still around. But employees seem to find him pretty harmless, it’s only he’s more just mischievous.

There has supposedly been some poltergeist activity in the building as well. Stacked chairs end up getting unstacked, tables are moved, the jukebox turns on and off, silverware jumps off the tables on its own. There’ve also been reports of an apparition. And supposedly people feel uncomfortable in the restroom and feel that they’re being watched. Some people have said that the door of the bathroom stall has closed itself and latched itself on its own, and the toilets has flushed by itself.

People who have rented the apartment on the second floor have claimed to experience cold spots and having the furniture moved.
From NEPAscene.com: (https://nepascene.com/2014/10/9-most-haunted-places-nepa/)

“Glasses fly off the shelves; tables get moved while no one is the room. The bartender will put the chairs up on the tables after they’ve closed and everyone has left, and when he comes back up from the basement, the chairs will be back down again,” VanDuzer says of the some of the incidents that have occurred in the pub.

West Mountain Sanitarium

From NEPAscene.com: ( https://nepascene.com/2014/10/9-most-haunted-places-nepa/ )

The West Mountain Sanitarium (originally named the Lackawanna County Tuberculosis Hospital) opened its doors in 1903 as a hospital to help patients suffering from tuberculosis. During the time it was operational, it seemed to be ahead of its time in treatments. The hospital had state-of-the-art radiology and laboratory departments, its own fields and farms, an artesian well, and it was noted for its open air treatments.
The hospital closed in 1971, and the now decrepit sanitarium is filled with rumors of those who had lost their lives there that still haunt the grounds. Its remote location has attracted mischievous teenagers who have covered the grounds with graffiti and set the property on fire. It has also become a hotbed for paranormal investigators, many who have captured EVPs and ghostly images.
NEPA Paranormal had a particularly odd evening there. As they were investigating a basement within the men’s quarters, one investigator had asked, “How did you die?” As the question was asked, the team was able to smell smoke. They looked out and witnessed smoke billowing into the room and could see flames directly behind it. They ran as fast as they could to the main path of the sanitarium. Once they turned around to comprehend what they had witnessed, the fire was gone. Katie Christopher, case manager and co-founder of NEPA Paranormal, states, “We could still feel the smoke in our lungs,” even though there was no smoke to be seen.

Archived page with more info: https://web.archive.org/web/20181022042940/http://www.nepaparanormal.com:80/page13.php

Judge and Jury Bar

Location: 503 Linden St
From the article Ghost walk tours highlight Scranton’s weird, grisly history by Nissley, Erin L. Times-Tribune, The (Scranton, PA). 07/06/2010. (AN: 2W62060597568):

The group that stopped at the corner of Linden Street and Dix Court on a recent overcast Saturday evening attracted more than a little attention from passersby, mostly because of the man wearing a dapper top hat and carrying what appeared to be an old-fashioned miner’s lantern.
The man in the top hat, Dave Jaye, ignored the stares and the Bruce Springsteen song pouring from the Judge and Jury bar as he launched into the first of many ghost stories he will tell on a 90-minute ghost walk in downtown Scranton.
The group fell silent as he and fellow paranormal enthusiast T.K. Gillette talked about inadequate fire escapes and rapidly spreading flames that led to dozens of deaths at the Imperial Underwear Co. on Jan. 17, 1908. Plastic gadgets handed out to some of the ghost walk participants flashed and beeped quietly, alerting the group to the presence of possible supernatural activity.

Lackawanna mine

This is an old mine in Scranton’s McDade Park, which you can go down into and tour.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lackawanna_Coal_Mine

The website ghostsoldiers.tv claims that the mine is haunted. They say they’ve captured EVPs and got a photograph that included an orb. I’ll include a link in the shownotes where you can read their full report and listen to the EVPs:
- http://ghostsoldiers.tv/id24.html

The Hidden History of William B. Umstead State Park in Raleigh, North Carolina

This episode explores the forgotten history of William B. Umstead State Park in Raleigh, North Carolina, which is full of hidden cemeteries, ghostly gardens, and unexpected stories.

When we go to “spend time in nature,” we like to think that the parks that we visit are separate from the bustling cities that we live in. But in reality, parks are as human-made and full of history as any landmarked building. You just have to look a little more closely to uncover that history.

This episode explores the forgotten history of William B. Umstead State Park in Raleigh, North Carolina, which is full of hidden cemeteries, ghostly gardens, and unexpected stories.

Highlights include:

the connection that Umstead State Park has to the evacuation of Dunkirk during WWII
the gardens that remain hidden in the woods even after houses have been torn down
cemeteries in the woods

P.S. I forgot to mention that there’s a book about the park’s history called Stories In Stone: Memories From A Bygone Farming Community In North Carolina by Tom Weber (2011) that I can’t find for the life of me. If you have a lead on getting a copy of it, please let me know!

Listen to the episode here or anywhere you get podcasts.

Episode Script

DISCLAIMER: I’m providing this version of the script for accessibility purposes. It hasn’t been proofread, so please excuse typos. (Especially because I use dictation software for a lot of my script writing!) There are also some things that may differ between the final episode and this draft script—some of this transcript may feel a bit incomplete. Please treat the episode audio as the final product.

I talked about North Carolina a few times on the podcast. While I have never lived in North Carolina for more than a few months at a time, my wife and I spent much of 2020 living with my sister and her husband in Raleigh North Carolina. Because of this, I’ve spent a decent amount of time hiking around the area, because there’s just a beautiful array of different state parks and greenways in the area. So during 2020 I went on a number of hikes in Umstead State Park in Raleigh as well as some hikes in Eno River State Park in Durham, though I didn’t go to Eno River State Park as often, because it was just further away.

I want to go over their history as well as talk about some of the paranormal investigation type stuff I’ve done there and, in particular, I want to talk about my trip to Raleigh over Halloween weekend 2021. Because not only did I have some unusual experiences, mostly in Eno River State Park, especially in this one hidden cemetery there that is famous for having paranormal activity, but the trip itself just ended up getting a little bit weird. A lot of bad and weird stuff happened while we were there and when I think back to that time it feels like this bad pocket of bad vibes.

This episode, I’m gonna really focus more on the history of Umstead State Park and talk about what the park is like now. And then in the next episode I’ll probably just focus on Eno River State Park and its history and what it’s like now. And then in the third episode of the series I’m going to talk about the solo Estes sessions that I did in the park, the EVP sessions that I did there, an interesting interaction I had with someone who I met in the park, as well as just some of the weird stuff that happened during my last visit to North Carolina.

Now, a word to the wise: I have a tendency to go a little overboard sometimes with the series that I do and sometimes end up being a bit longer than I expect. So as always, take my general roadmap of where planning to go for this miniseries with a grain of salt.

So, first let’s talk about Umstead State Park.

William B. Umstead State Park

Umstead State Park is a 5,599-acre park located in between the cities of Raleigh, Cary, and Durham. It’s part of the East Coast Greenway, which is a trail system that goes between Maine and Florida. I’m pretty sure that I have hiked all of the hiking trails in the park; there are about 20 miles of those, the longest of which is the 7.2-mile-long Sycamore Trail. There are also about 13 miles of multiuse trails which can be used for biking, horseback riding, as well as hiking. If you find yourself in the triangle, I highly recommend that you check out this park. It’s seriously one of my favorite places to hike. And I’ll say the hikes are not difficult at all, but it’s worth remembering that the area is very hilly, so if you’re like me and you’re not used to hills, you might be slightly sore at least the first time you hike it.

So that’s the park today. Let’s look at its history. The park was established in 1937, and prior to that, people lived on that land, of course. I believe that the indigenous people who lived there were the Tuscarora, the Catawba, the Lumbee, and the Occaneechi. (https://native-land.ca/ ) there were some important trade trails, including the Occaneechi trail north of what is currently the park and the Pee Dee Trail south of there.

In 1774, colonizers started getting land grants for the area. The forests were cleared, and at first the farming went well there. But unfortunately the cultivation practices were not the best at the time, and they were doing one crop production, which screwed up the soil. That’s according to Wikipedia. I found a 1995 government report registering the park with the National Register of Historic Places that I’ll be referencing a lot that said that corn and cotton were the two main crops that were grown there until the 1880s. The report also said that the colonizers had “denuded” the area of trees because they cut down so many when building different buildings there. And the report said that because they got rid of the parts of the forest, that allowed a lot of erosion, and the erosion is what destroyed the soils and made the land unstable. Because the land had been so damaged, by the early 1900s, it was mostly just subsistence farming that was happening there. And people continued to over cut the trees that were there, and they would sell them, or use them for fuel, building materials, and cooking. (https://files.nc.gov/ncdcr/nr/WA0721.pdf )

In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, farmers tried to grow cotton by the creek there, which is called Crabtree Creek, and it just wasn’t happening. At that point, the land was considered sub marginal, which means not suitable for farming. The government report also talked about how the farmers would live there were black and white, but basically everyone who lived on the land was really struggling. They had large families and tiny farms on bad land, it was just a bad situation.

In 1934, federal and state agencies bought the land, since it was sort of useless when it came to farming at that point, and the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration built the park. You know these were programs during the Great Depression to give people jobs while also building infrastructure. If you live in the United States, probably no matter where you live, you’ll notice a lot of public works that were built in the 1930s it was through these programs.

In 1950, 1000 acres, so like 1/5 of the park was designated a separate park for black people called Reedy Creek State Park. From what I read, it sounds like prior to that, the park was at least somewhat integrated? (https://www.ncdcr.gov/blog/2019/02/08/african-americans-and-state-parks ) I read about some cabins that were designated for black campers were built in the late 1930s and early 1940s. (https://files.nc.gov/ncdcr/nr/WA0721.pdf) I think there may have been that one camp called Camp Whispering Pines where black people were allowed to camp, but it’s kind of unclear to me about who was allowed to hike on the trails prior to 1950. But in 1950, there was Crabtree Creek which divided the park into the two different areas, and while the creek could be crossed really easily, to read from SouthbySoutheast.blog: “Writing about improvements to the parks in 1950, the Raleigh News & Observer provided a perverse note of reassurance to white parents that a large forested buffer would separate the white and African American youth camps, stating that the two camps would be more than a mile apart at the Crabtree Creek dividing line.” Umstead was actually only one of two state Park’s in North Carolina that were designated for black people to use, and then a third one was opened in 1961. (https://southbysoutheast.blog/2020/07/04/odd-times-at-the-odd-fellows-tract-part-ii/ )

But in 1966, the park for white people, the Crabtree Creek area, which had been renamed for former Gov. William B. Umstead, and the Reedy Creek Park were combined and opened for everyone. So the whole park was just called William B. Umstead State Park.

Nowadays, if you go to the park, it’s still obvious that it once was a segregated park, because there are the two entrances on either side of the park and you can’t drive from one entrance to the other. There are roads throughout the park, especially on the Crabtree Creek side where you can drive to different parts of the park, but you can’t actually drive from one side to the other.

So while you’re in the park, you can still see remnants of the farmers who used to live on that land. You might be walking along a trail and you look off to the side and you see the foundation of a house or some sort of building. You can also see chimneys, as well.

Ghost Gardens

I’ve read that if you’re there at the right time of year, you can look out into the woods and see these patches of tulips or daffodils. In that would indicate where people’s front yards were. Because even though their homes are gone, it’s not like they dug up the bulbs from these perennials, so they keep coming up year after year, even almost 100 years later. I just love that idea of the sort of ghost gardens. I think there’s something so beautiful about how these remnants of nature have held on even after these human habitations have disappeared and the human crops have disappeared. There are still these tulips. I haven’t been there during the right time of year, I think to see them. If you are there during that time of year, definitely keep an eye out for that as you hike. Apparently oak trees also indicate where someone’s front yard might have been as well.

Also, apparently there are some other plants that indicate where people used to live. The report that I’m recording from a bunch in this says that off the Graylyn Trail, there used to be some homes: “Before the CCC destroyed them, there were as many as eight houses on either side of the road. With the exception of the King family cemetery, wisteria vines and mimosa trees mark the locations of some of the homestead sites.” (https://files.nc.gov/ncdcr/nr/WA0721.pdf p. 27)

Dynamite Sheds

There are apparently also two explosives magazines that had been built there for holding dynamite. I’ve seen is called dynamite sheds in government reports. They were built by the CCC in 1936, so they would’ve housed dynamite that they used in constructing the park. The walls were more than 2 ½ feet thick and the roofs were made out of cement. They’re hidden in the woods, and that made out of brick with a flat roof, no windows, thick walls, and a missing door so you can just look in. One is located off of the Sycamore trail, I’m not sure where the other one is. I haven’t noticed these, not that I can remember. (https://www.wral.com/abandoned-mills-homes-graves-hidden-in-woods-at-umstead-park-date-back-to-1800s/19029798/ )

The Company Mill

There is also a millstone off of one of the Company Mill Trail, which was from the mill that was on that land. I believe that a park historian found the millstone in the creek in 1994. (https://sites.google.com/view/takeahike/nc/state-parks-and-forests/william-b-umstead-state-park?pli=1 ) You can also still see part of the dam that was there.

The original Company Mill was a large 2 ½ story building made from stone brick and wood and it was built on a high stone basement. And people would travel from miles around to go to the mill and get their grains ground. People would also hang out and gossip there as well. The 1850 census said that the mill produced 1,166 barrels of flour, and I’m assuming that’s an annual number, but I don’t actually know. The mill was still operating up until the 1920s. Initially, when the park was being built, they considered making the area that had been dammed up a boating area. But then there was a big flood which apparently destroyed most of the rest of the mill.

Cemeteries

Now, perhaps even more relevant to our interests here, there are three cemeteries hidden in the woods of this park. Those include the Young Family Cemetery, the King Family Cemetery, and the Warren Family Cemetery.

The Young Family Cemetery

The Young Family Cemetery is right off the trail head of the Loblolly trail, which starts at the right side of the Reedy Creek parking lot. You basically walk 1/10 of a mile on the Loblolly trail and then the cemetery will be on your right. It has a rusty fence around it, and it is not in good shape. The people buried there seem to have died in the 19th and early 20th century. (https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2444292/young-family-cemetery )

the Warren Family Cemetery

The Warren Family Cemetery is sort of in the middle of the park. It’s off one of the bridle trails, like one of the multiuse trails. It’s a sort of long hike into the park, but you’ll find it on the north side of the Reedy Creek trail. Right near it, there’s a bulletin board that has info about the history of the family and there are some cool pictures and stuff there. At least 17 people are buried there. One really interesting thing about the cemetery is that the graves are surrounded by rocks. So like there’s the tombstone and then there’s just rocks that someone has placed in a circle on top of each of the graves. I’ve rarely seen that. I don’t know if that’s a southern thing, or North Carolina thing, or just an older thing. But whatever the reason, it’s really interesting looking. These graves are mostly from the 19th and early 20th century. (https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2282271/warren-family-cemetery )

the King Family Cemetery

Then there’s the King Family Cemetery. It is on the east side of the Graylyn multiuse trail. There are about 13 tombstones as well as a couple grave markers. The graves in there are mostly from the 20th century, starting from 1902 or so. There are a handful of graves from the 1920s and 30s and 50s up until the 80s and 90s. And there is even one grave from 2012. My understanding is that members of the family can still be buried in the cemeteries, even though technically it’s park land now. (https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2259286/king-family-cemetery )

The Page Family Cemetery

Also, while I was doing the research for this episode, I stumbled across a Page Family Cemetery which is apparently also in Umstead State Park. I was really surprised to see this, because I have researched these cemeteries so many times over the last few years, and I’ve searched find a grave so many times for the different cemeteries, and I’ve never seen any mention of this cemetery. Like I said, I thought that I had hiked all of the trails in the park, though it sounds like this is off the multiuse trail, and it’s possible that there’s some parts of the multiuse trails that I haven’t walked on, I suppose. But according to find a grave, to get to the Page Family Cemetery, you go in for Reedy Creek Rd. and follow it until it intersects with another trail at mid gate, and in the cemetery is on the right about hundred yards away from the Reedy Creek Trail. The steel chains surrounding it and that there eight graves in there. It sounds like at least some of the burials are from the 19th century. (https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2708410/page-family-cemetery )

Other possible cemeteries

Also, while I was reading about the cemeteries, I saw mention of a Smith Cemetery in a topographical map that I couldn’t really read. I’m not sure that’s just another name for one of the four cemeteries that I know about, or if there’s a separate cemetery called the Smith cemetery. I’ll include a link in the show notes to the map, for anyone who wants to try to decipher that. The report described the cemetery as “Smith Cemetery; typical small, rural, family cemetery with plain granite gravestones interspersed among pine trees. Of the some ten gravestones, about half are damaged.” Elsewhere in the report, it says that the cemetery is occupied by Learys and Smiths and it says that it dates from the early 20th century. (https://files.nc.gov/ncdcr/nr/WA0721.pdf map p. 53, description p. 59)

I also found a mention of a White Family Cemetery off of Sycamore Trail. The report just says, “Along the footpath, the hiker can discern CCC land reclamation improvements: reforested hillsides, and check dams; early 20th century human occupied areas; the White family cemetery and a stone chimney ruins;” (https://files.nc.gov/ncdcr/nr/WA0721.pdf p. 5)

Fun facts

One of the most interesting things that I found out while I was researching this was that apparently in August 1941, for two weeks, the camp that had been abandoned by the CCC, ended up posting 169 British Navy Seaman and two officers. The ship they had been on, the HMS Astoria, was in an undisclosed American port so that they could fix damage that it had sustained during the evacuation of Dunkirk, so this was just a place where they could hang out for couple weeks while they waited for their ship to be fixed.

Also, during World War II, not many people visited the park. That’s because at the time, people were mostly taking private cars or buses to the park, but gas rationing prevented people from doing that sort of thing. So because attendance was so low, the state actually let several army regiments from Camp Butner train troops inside the park during July and August 1943. Almost 7000 soldiers and 500 vehicles trained in the park. And apparently was a very helpful place for them to train, because it had all these hills and wilderness, but there is also a decent number of buildings because there were cabins for camping and stuff so that was the main thing that the park was used for then. Really weird an interesting piece of World War II history there. (https://files.nc.gov/ncdcr/nr/WA0721.pdf p. 44-45)

additional sources:

https://www.ncparks.gov/state-parks/william-b-umstead-state-park
https://www.ncparks.gov/state-parks/william-b-umstead-state-park/trails
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_B._Umstead_State_Park
https://www.nctripping.com/umstead-state-park/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_B._Umstead
William B. Umstead State Park General Management Plan; map of park on final page: https://files.nc.gov/ncparks/481/WIUM GMP FINAL 112117.pdf
1995 application for National Register of Historical Places: https://files.nc.gov/ncdcr/nr/WA0721.pdf
William B. Umstead State Park Master Plan: https://archive.org/details/williambumsteads00unse/page/30/mode/2up
https://www.ourstate.com/a-love-letter-to-william-b-umstead-state-park/
https://umsteadcoalition.org/Updates/9084860
https://waltermagazine.com/current-issue/the-last-families-of-umstead/
https://nccppr.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/NCs_State_Parks_Disregard_and_in_Disrepair.pdf

Ghosts among the ruins: Haunted Eno River State Park in Durham, North Carolina

A look at a place full of cemeteries, ruins, and ghosts of the past. Also actual ghosts. Those too.

Eno River State Park, in Durham, North Carolina, is said to have its fair share of hauntings. I dive into the history of the park, especially the area around the Cabelands Cemetery, which is supposed to be one of the most haunted areas of the park. Plus, I dug up some of the paranormal experiences people have reported in the area.

Highlights include:

Some grim parts of the area’s history
A demonstration of my superb math skills
Hidden cemeteries

Content note: this episode contains a lot of discussion of colonialism and chattel slavery.

Listen to the episode here or anywhere you get podcasts.

Episode Script

DISCLAIMER: I’m providing this version of the script for accessibility purposes. It hasn’t been proofread, so please excuse typos. (Especially because I use dictation software for a lot of my script writing!) There are also some things that may differ between the final episode and this draft script—some of this transcript may feel a bit incomplete. Please treat the episode audio as the final product.

In this episode, I want to talk about Eno River State Park, a beautiful park in Durham, North Carolina, that has tons of stories of hauntings and some cool hidden cemeteries. Eno River State Park is located in Durham, North Carolina. Unlike Umstead State Park, which I talked about last time, I haven’t spent as much time in Eno River State Park. I’ve hiked there maybe four or five times and I have not hiked every trail there.

One thing that is really cool about Eno River State Park is that there are tons of ruins in this park. In the last episode, I talked about some of the minor ruins that you can find off the trail in Umstead park, like foundations of buildings, and part of an old dam, but Eno River State Park really has a lot of cool stuff. There are of course some very cemeteries, including one that is famously haunted, and there are also the ruins of an old pump station, the ruins of a mill, and old chimneys, just to name a few examples. Also, in the summer, there are some really beautiful places to see wildflowers.

It’s pretty big and it’s near a city park; combined, those two parks go run along 14 miles of the Eno River. In terms of the size of the park, it is about 4300 acres, and has 24 miles of hiking trails.

And just in general, Eno River State Park is much better known for being haunted than Umstead State Park is. I mentioned last time that Umstead doesn’t have a lot of stories about hauntings there. But Eno River State Park does, and it definitely has a little bit of a creepier vibe to it. I can’t really say why, but I’ve done a ton of solo hikes and Umstead State Park, and just one solo hike in Eno River State Park, and Eno River State Park definitely had me a little bit less at ease than Umstead did. And that could just be because there are so many stories about hauntings there and because of a little bit of weirdness that happened there when I visited, which I’ll get into next time.
Sources:

Visiting Eno River State Park

If you visit the park, you’ll want to keep in mind which area you want to get to. Unlike Umstead, which just has two entrances, there are like four or five different areas you could park in and go into, and some of them are pretty far away from each other. So if you’re planning to go, look it up in advance and decide what trails you want to take before you decide where you want to park. So if you want to go to the more well-known cemetery that I’m going to a talk about later on, the Cabelands Cemetery, you are going to want to go to the Cabelands part of the park.

Trail info:

History of Eno River State Park

Indigenous history

The Eno River is named after the Eno people who lived on the banks of the river. I should preface this section with the fact that a lot of information we have comes from the writing of European colonizers, so it may not all be entirely accurate to the actual history of some of these tribes.

Based on archaeological evidence, indigenous people settled around the Eno River in the 1400s, so that lines up with the late medieval period in Europe, if you want that for reference, since I rarely talk about history that’s quite that far back.

There’s confirmation that in the 1670s, the Eno and Shakori tribes lived in the area. (https://abc11.com/eno-river-haunted-cabelands-cemetery-ghost/4561458/ ) There was also an Occaneechi Village located there around the same time.

The Occaneechi

I mentioned the Occaneechi last time, but I didn’t get into their history at all. One European historian in 1705 said that the Occaneechi language was treated like a lingua franca, kind of like Latin in Europe at the time, so basically like a language that a lot of people knew regardless of what their first language was. People from different tribes could communicate with each other using their language. Researchers think that they spoke a dialect of Tutelo, which is a Siouan language.

Overall, it doesn’t sound like the Occaneechi lived along the Eno River for very long. They were forced to move there from Virginia around 1676, when they were attacked by a militia of colonizers, and they left the Eno River Valley by 1712.

In the late 1600s, there was a common trade route called the Occaneechi Path, or The Great Trading Path, which the Occaneechi along the Eno River were located near. (https://www.ncpedia.org/great-trading-pathIn the 1660s and 1670s, the Occaneechi were involved in the fur and deerskin trade between European people in Virginia and indigenous people living in the Piedmont area. (https://www.ncpedia.org/occaneechi-indians )

In the 1980s, archaeologists at UNC Chapel Hill excavated the old village and learned a little bit more about what it was like. There were about a dozen houses built in a circle around a central plaza. A sweat lodge stood in the middle of the village. A defensive stockade surrounded the houses, and a cemetery with a lot of graves lay just outside the village. The archaeologists observed that relative to the small size of the village and the short time that they lived there, there were a disproportionately large number of graves, which speaks to how many of the Occaneechi were killed. European diseases and violence were responsible for many of those deaths, though they also experienced some conflict with the Iroquois. (https://www.ncpedia.org/occaneechi-indians )

Today, the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation is a state-recognized tribe in North Carolina and there are about 1,100 enrolled tribal members.

The Eno

The Eno were also Siouan-speaking, but there’s not a lot of information about them. But this follows a fairly typical story of how the genocide in the land that is now the United States went: colonizers came in, native people were killed, and their land was taken.

The accounts I’ve read about the Eno people sort of handwave past what actually caused the decline in their population, though earlier on they did have some conflicts with the Spanish colonizers, and there was a war in the 17-teens that they might have possibly been involved with.

But at any rate, the Eno ended up being absorbed into the Catawba tribe, who are still around today as the federally-recognized Catawba Indian Nation, which is now headquartered in South Carolina and has 3,300 enrolled members. (https://www.ncpedia.org/catawba-indians )

The Shakori

As for the Shakori, I found even less information about them, but it does look like they ended up merging with the Catawba as well. They were also Siouan speaking.

Colonizers

After the Eno, Shakori, and Occaneechi were forced out, colonizers lived along the river. Apparently, there were a lot of Quakers among the early colonizers who lived there in the 1740s and 1750s. The European colonizers set up farms and also ton of grist mills.

One of the more famous people who lived along the Eno around this time was John Cabe. I’m going to really dwell on him here, because the Cabe family is the main family that I want to talk about, in large part because their cemetery is known as being the famously haunted cemetery.

John Cabe was described as a “planter, miller, and politician,” and was probably originally born in Pennsylvania, but moved to the area around the Eno River in the late 1750s. His father was a well off wagoner, so someone who drives a wagon, but John Cabe became very wealthy. In 1780, he bought more than 300 acres of land along the Eno River, but by the time he died in 1818, he had an estate of more than 3000 acres of land. He enslaved 60 people, who I really haven’t seen much about as I’ve been researching all of this. (https://ncpedia.org/biography/cabe-john )

I tried to find information about the people who he enslaved in the existing records from this time, just because it doesn’t sit right with me to have all this information about the enslavers on this plantation on the Eno, but not the people who were enslaved. It feels like a really incomplete history of the land that we’re talking about during the time period we’re concerned with here.

The University of North Carolina has a database called the Digital Library on American Slavery, which is where I got most of this info. I will include a link to that in the show notes: http://dlas.uncg.edu/

So I just wanted to share what I was able to find out about the people who John Cabe enslaved. (http://dlas.uncg.edu/deeds/?s=john+cabe&t=0&l=aa )

First, I found information about an enslaved man named Lewis who ran away from the Cabe family. It’s unclear whether he was ever caught, but several ads were placed in local newspapers, in February and then again in March 1819, giving a reward for kidnapping him. In case you’re curious, the first ad was a $10 reward ($234 today), and the second one just said it would be a liberal award. I’m hoping that the need for multiple ads means he escaped for good, but I don’t know. But here’s what we know about Lewis: he was knowledgeable and skilled in farming and distilling. He escaped on a fairly old bay mare. After escaping, he probably passed as a freedman using the name Lewis Petteford. (http://dlas.uncg.edu/notices/notice/1530/, http://dlas.uncg.edu/notices/notice/1144/ )

After that, the rest of the records I found were deeds from purchasing people who he enslaved:

On January 1, 1806, John Cabe purchased a forty-year-old woman named Tabb from William Moreland, James Norton, and Polly Ashley for five shillings. I had trouble finding an exact conversion for that, but it sounds like five shillings in 1806 is about $20 USD today. (http://dlas.uncg.edu/deeds/deed/NC.ORG.12.305.1/ , https://www.answers.com/Q/In_1803_how_much_was_5_shillings_worth )

On January 2, 1806, John Cabe purchased a two-year-old boy named Tapley from Archibald D. Murphey for 30 British pounds, which is about $4,100 today. Tapley was Tabb’s son. (http://dlas.uncg.edu/deeds/deed/NC.ORG.12.305.2/ )

On January 3, 1806, John Cabe purchased a nine-year-old girl named Easter and a seven-year-old girl named Jenney from William Moreland for 152 British pounds total, which is about $21,000 USD today. Oh, also, William Moreland has come up a couple times: I believe he was related to John Cabe’s second wife, Nancy Moreland Cabe, who married him in 1802. (http://dlas.uncg.edu/deeds/deed/NC.ORG.12.174.1/ )

On the same day, he purchased 37-year-old man named Dick, a fifteen-year-old girl named Rachel, and a five-year-old child named Charles from James Norton for a combined 400 British pounds total, which is about $45,000 USD today. http://dlas.uncg.edu/deeds/deed/NC.ORG.12.175.1/

On December 12, 1806, John Cabe purchased a twenty-year-old woman named Lettice her six-week-old daughter named Anne from William Dillard for 100 British pounds total, which is about $14,000 today. (http://dlas.uncg.edu/deeds/deed/NC.ORG.12.239.1/ )

On January 23, 1808, John Cabe purchased a nine-year-old girl name Mary, who had been brought from Virginia to North Carolina, a seven-year-old girl named Dilce, and a nine-year-old boy named Sam from Leonard Carlton for 200 British pounds total, which is about $27,000 USD today. (http://dlas.uncg.edu/deeds/deed/NC.ORG.12.305.2/ )

On November 21, 1808, John Cabe purchased a forty-year-old woman named Cate and a thirteen-year-old girl named either Diley or Dilsey from Peter House for 75 British pounds, which is about $10,200 USD today. (http://dlas.uncg.edu/deeds/deed/NC.ORG.13.212.1/ )

I’m assuming these records are incomplete, though, because I only found these seven deeds. One thing that really struck me while I was reading this was how little money these people were sold for. I think that’s worth dwelling on for second, because 1) it shows how little value enslavers put on the lives of the people they enslaved, and 2) it’s worth seeing how much profit the plantation owners were getting by enslaving people rather than having paid employees.

I did a bit of back-of-the-envelope math, which should be taken with a grain of salt because I did this quickly while working on the script, just to have a general frame of reference:

I found an old document listing what agricultural workers were paid in Massachusetts in 1806, to use as a comparison. The wages ranged from about $.625-$1.17/day in 1806. But I was able to find a number from 1825 that includes room and board, which might be more accurate for this math. So the room and board wage is a much lower $10-12/month. (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89071501472&view=1up&seq=62 )
12 months * $10-$12 = $120-$144 in 1825 dollars = $3,612-$4,335 in today’s dollars
Looking at John Cabe’s deeds, in today’s USD, he paid between $20 and $15,000 for each person he enslaved. So that means even on the high end, for the $15,000 each that he paid for Dick (who was 37), Rachel (who was 15), and Charles (who was 5), he could expect to force all three of them to do many years of work for what it would cost to pay an employee for just 3-4 years of work.

I’m dwelling on this point because biographies of John Cabe seem to kind of skim over his great wealth, as if it was something that he earned. For example, the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography says: “John attained a real affluence before his death in 1818, when his estate included over three thousand acres of land.” It cites his mill on the Eno River, which was built sometime in the 1770s, as the “source of his prosperity” (in addition to the second mill on the Eno that he built for his son-in-law.) But really, how could anyone not accumulate a huge amount of money when you have enslaved people that you can exploit?

Cabe went on to have nine daughters, at least one of whom was buried at the family cemetery that John Cabe himself was buried in. (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/40493324/john-cabe ) I’ll be looping back to that cemetery in a bit, because it’s the one with all the stories of hauntings.

So, anyway, what happened to the Cabe family?

Per an ABC 11 article (https://abc11.com/eno-river-haunted-cabelands-cemetery-ghost/4561458/ ):

Durham Station, which had previously been a train stop, officially became a town in 1869. “Once Durham had the railroad, (the Eno communities) could not compete economically.” Slowly, farmers and millers were drawn to more urban areas. “By the 1960’s, the Eno River Valley was a large wilderness,” said Cook.

And what of the Cabe family? Christopher Ammon wrote in Hidden Gems of the Eno, “These people were part of two prominent Eno River Families that owned thousands of acres of land, financed several mills, and included state representatives and former mayors of Durham.” Yet this wealthy and influential family “faded into obscurity.”

The rapid progress of Durham’s industry replaced farms and mills. Progress leaped forward – and left the homesteads and mills of the Eno River behind.

At one point, there were more than 30 mills along the Eno River, but by 1940, all those mills had been shut down.

Sources and additional reading

Cemeteries in the woods

Cabelands Cemetery or John Cabe Family Cemetery

This cemetery contains 51 graves, 12 of which are marked. Because Cabe had daughters buried there have different last names. You’ll see a lot of Shields and McCown. If you walk around there, you’ll see indentations in the ground, which is apparently where rotting caskets have caused the ground to sink. There are also little circles of stones around where the body would’ve laid, kind of like in Umstead State Park at one of the cemeteries there. Like I mentioned last time, I haven’t seen these weird stone circles on graves anywhere else, but they’re definitely a thing in the Triangle at least.

https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2317920
https://web.archive.org/web/20220813065609/https://www.enoriver.org/what-we-protecthidden-gems-of-the-eno/october-cabelands-cemetary/https://web.archive.org/web/20200211071213/http://cemeterycensus.com/nc/orng/cem103.htm

William Cabe Slave Cemetery

I’m not totally sure how to get to it, but this cemetery does exist and apparently it is on the grounds of the park. I’ll link the find a grave page that has the coordinates. But as you might expect, we don’t have much information about this cemetery. There are 20 graves that are visible based on depressions in the ground from rotting caskets or fieldstone markers. None of the stones of any inscriptions. Some people who are buried there may have been enslaved by John and William Cabe’s father, Barnaby Cabe. Oh, and apparently, according to find a grave.com, he was a loyalist during the Revolutionary war, as was John Cabe. (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/126962784/barnaby-cabe )

There is also a William Cabe Cemetery, near the slave cemetery, but it is located on private property. I’ll include the find a grave listing for that one too.
https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2318059/william-cabe-slave-cemetery
https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2318054/william-cabe-cemetery

Dunnagan Graveyard

This one’s located along the Dunnagan trail; it has one marked grave and four graves with fieldstones at the head and foot.

https://www.peterdoesparks.com/post/dunnagan-graveyard-at-eno-river-state-park-durham-nc

https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2389966/dunagan-family-cemetery

Piper Family Cemetery

https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2327665/piper-family-cemetery

This is a small family cemetery that is near a picnic area at the state park. I’ll include the find a grave information which gives you instructions on exactly how to get to this cemetery.

I know that the Piper family had a school that used to stand near the current location of the picnic area at Eno River State Park, and I think that’s the same picnic area as the one that the cemeteries next to. (https://abc11.com/eno-river-haunted-cabelands-cemetery-ghost/4561458/ )

Haunted Eno River State Park

By Herb Englishman https://web.archive.org/web/20220813065609/https://www.enoriver.org/what-we-protecthidden-gems-of-the-eno/october-cabelands-cemetary/

In the Cabelands stories abound about the family and how their spirits remain alive today. There is a long abandoned family cemetery about 200 yards off of the trail by the Eno River. Although interesting, there is no aura to it. Graves are where the body returns to the earth and places for the living to visit the deceased. Spirits tend to hang out at places that hold the most significance to them.

The special spot for feeling the energies of the historical site is the homestead area at the edge of the bluff overlooking the Eno River. A massive oak tree lays just before the bluff. There is a distinct warm happy vibe to the land. I have visited the homesite area numerous times and gotten EVP [recordings] every time. A man, a woman, and a girl. The girl seems to be the most talkative. She appears as if she was standing right next to you. On another occasion a man’s voice was heard and you could make out the words: “noise, of about, miller, flags, and years.”

A WRAL article has a lot of great details, talking about how hikers have claimed to hear whispers and screams and see shadow people. https://www.wral.com/the-cabelands-abandoned-cemetery-by-eno-river-carries-ghostly-legends/19342740/

Phantom footsteps in the woods (Paranormal Investigation of Eno River State Park and William B. Umstead State Park)

I’ve been told that if I were in a horror movie, I would die first. Anyway, here’s a look at some solo paranormal investigations I did in two North Carolina state parks: Eno River State Park in Durham and William B. Umstead State Park in Raleigh.

I’ve been told that if I were in a horror movie, I would die first. But can I help it if I’m curious, chaotic, and solitary? Anyway, here’s a look at some solo paranormal investigations I did around Halloween 2021 in two North Carolina state parks: Eno River State Park in Durham and William B. Umstead State Park in Raleigh.

Highlights include:

phantom footsteps
a breath on my neck while I was alone
an abandoned house in the woods
a solo Estes session in an environment where I was being told fairly clearly that I wasn’t wanted

Download the episode here or listen anywhere you get podcasts.

Episode script

Today, you’ll learn some of the reasons why I’ve been told that if I were in a horror movie, I would die first. Though in my defense, when the nice lady told me where the abandoned house in the woods was, I didn’t go. I just did an Estes session in an environment where I was being told fairly clearly that I wasn’t wanted. If I could go back, I might have done things differently.

The trip

Before I get into the Estes sessions and EVP sessions that I did in these two parks, I want to talk about this trip to North Carolina that I went on in October/November 2021. If you listened to my episode about my sleep paralysis experience in Scranton, you’ve heard me talk about how I think that the emotional state that you’re in really affect the paranormal experiences that you have. And this trip was a weird one. When I think back on it, it’s literally hazy and strange feeling, like I’m remembering a memory that’s way older than less than two years ago.

My wife and I flew down from New York to Raleigh, North Carolina, because my sister was trying on wedding dresses. We were there just for a long weekend. It happened to be Halloween weekend.

Also, I’m not sure that this is relevant, but our own wedding anniversary is November 2, which was right after we left North Carolina. So there was some personal significance to this time period, both in terms of my sister going through this big rite of passage, trying on wedding dresses, as well as it being right around the time when my wife and I got married. And I think everyone knows by now that the time around Halloween is thought to be very liminal, the veil is supposed to be thin, and strange things are supposed to be afoot around that time.

On top of all of that, several really bad things happened while we were in North Carolina. My wife and I both had deaths in the family: my wife’s grandma died, and my great aunt — who is really more like my aunt, I knew her pretty well — died. On top of that, and unbeknownst to me, because I’m not perceptive, on the day that my sister tried on wedding dresses, she was in an immense amount of pain. And that night, she ended up having to go to the hospital because she had pancreatitis.

So the general vibe on this trip was somewhat stressful and everyone was upset, rightfully so. It was still really nice to see everyone, and my sister found a wedding dress, miraculously, but I wouldn’t say that it was a trip that went well.

So, naturally, I decided to go for a couple solo hikes and to some paranormal investigation. Why not?

Umstead State Park

On October 28, 2021, I went for a hike in one of my favorite places, William B Umstead State Park, which I talked about a couple of episodes ago. While I was there, I did an Estes session. I sat in the middle of a creek on a large rock near the Sycamore Trail and Potts Branch Trail, not far from the parking lot near the trailhead; maybe 10 or 15 minutes away from there.

I had a pleasant session, that had a few interesting things in it, so I’m gonna play it here. [Explain it a little.] Check out the Solo Estes Method episode for a very detailed description of how I’ve adapted it for my own use when I’m alone.

Also, you’ll see some funny questions thrown in, like “do you like flowers?” I add those to throw myself off when being the receiver. (I don’t want all the questions to be about being a ghost, because then it might prompt me to hear what I want to hear.)

This clip is a little over five minutes long, but it was originally a bit longer. I’ve deleted some of the long pauses of silence during this session, but I haven’t deleted or rearranged any of the questions or answers. The original audio had long stretches of silence and airplane noise, since the park’s near the airport.

[play audio]

Highlights:

When the recording asked “Is there someone who did wrong by you in life?” it responds “mind your back.”
- When the recording asked “Are you sad?” it responded either Fordham or portal, both of which had meaning to me. (For my many complicated feelings about Fordham University, check out my series about that, which I was working on at the time. And if it wasn’t Fordham, it seems to me like it wanted to take me through a portal and show me something—maybe whatever they were sad about, especially because the next response is “come with me.”)
- I got the responses “he’s there” and “blue” as a man in a blue shirt walked by on a nearby trail; I wonder if it was narrating that.
- “What do you wish you could do?” and the response “Wound”
- “What is your name?” I hear a man’s voice say “hello,” and it sounded really close.
- “Were you a prisoner?” I got the responses “love,” “this has been,” “everything,” “and family prayer.” To me, this has the vibe of talking to a wise older person giving me advice, and they’re saying that love and family can get you through the hard times, when you feel trapped and imprisoned. (It was interesting how I felt like I heard “family prayer” directly in my mind rather than through my ears/the spirit box.)

Here were the impressions that I wrote down after the session:

it really seem like there was an intelligence at work in this session. It seemed like there was a person or family destroyed by love affairs, maybe starcrossed ones. The conversation about the trail seemed gentle, but they wanted to warn and protect me (“mind your back.”) I felt that they could see a portal into time that I couldn’t (during the “are you sad?” answers.) It was funny when it started narrating the man walking by. I think they’re trying to comfort me with the normal and well-adjusted part.

But that was all I had when it came to William B. Umstead State Park. The same can not be said for Eno River State Park.

Eno River State Park

The first time I visited the Cabelands cemetery — or tried to — in November 2020, I wasn’t able to find it. It’s not far from the parking lot, but it’s off trail, and it was a little bit confusing to try to figure out where the trail was. There were two different things that look like they could have been the trail, one of which was piled with sticks perpendicular to the path, so I thought maybe that wasn’t it (though spoiler alert, it was), and the other thing that I thought might’ve been the not-trail trail that led to the cemetery was just nothing, I guess.

So I have two people to thank for being able to find the cemetery in 2021.

The first is Alex Matsuo, who you might know on social media as the spooky stuff. She posted a picture of the cemetery on Instagram and I DMed her and said I tried to visit the cemetery, but I wasn’t able to find it, so could she please give me directions. Now, I did have directions, from the EnoRiver.org, but for whatever reason, even with that drawn map, I wasn’t able to figure out exactly how to get there. So I literally got a picture I had taken from the parking lot in December 2020, labeled the different paths leading away from the parking lot and was basically like is it path A or path B. And she very graciously answered my questions.

Alex has a writeup on her website about the park, which I wanted to read a bit from:

This location is near where I live, and it’s probably one of the most active places I’ve been to. This little cemetery is easy to miss if you’re not paying attention while you’re on the hiking trail. While there are only 12 markers, it’s believed there are actually 51 people buried here. The nearby Cabe homestead is also a hotbed of activity. My team and I did an extensive investigation in the area right before COVID-19 hit, and funny enough, we kept getting responses from a spirit that was obsessed with geese. They just kept saying, “Goose. Geese. Goose” repeatedly. Others who have visited this spot have also reported seeing shadow figures and feeling the presence of multiple people. We also heard phantom voices, and strange feelings around the Eno River.

The second person who helped me out was a mysterious stranger in the park. When I was first dropped off at the parking lot by the Cabelands, there was only one other person around, a woman about my age who was walking her dog. She had forgotten her dog’s leash, so she was going to hike off trail. It was North Carolina, so people are very friendly there, so she and I got to talking and I told her I was trying to go to the cemetery, so we walked there together. I was telling her about how I hadn’t realized that this was the right path to the cemetery, because of all the branches and fallen trees that have been laid across the path. She said that they — I assume that people who run the park — had put those there to try to discourage people from going on path, since it wasn’t the main trail.

I stayed at the cemetery and she went on. But a little bit later — no more than 20 minutes, I would say — she came back by the cemetery. I had just been recording a little bit before starting an EVP session, and I had just stopped recording, so I could have the EVP session on a different track. And I was really bummed that I had stopped recording right at that moment. But she told me about some weird stuff she found in the woods, and then right after she left, I recorded a quick recap of what she told me. It’s nothing paranormal, but it definitely was creepy and sort of set the tone for the rest of the day for me.

I’m gonna play the audio file. A couple things to keep in mind: I was whispering at the beginning, because she had just left the cemetery area, and also you’ll hear leaves crunching as I walked around a little bit. I really should have stayed put, because the leaves were very loud, but I didn’t think of that. So sorry about that.

[Audio file of me talking about a weird cabin or encampment that she found in the woods, as well as a deer blind.]

So, here I was, alone in the woods, wondering who else was out there. I am generally very comfortable in solo hikes, but the vibes felt a little bit off in the cemetery, and just being told that by the only other person I’d seen in the area that day was a little bit weird. It would be another two hours or so before I saw another hiker.

For the record, there are the ruins of some old houses and cabins in the area, but I looked at a map and as far as I can tell, it’s:

not Sister’s House
https://markallmywords.wordpress.com/2020/02/09/exploring-sisters-house-eno-river-state-park/
not Cole House
https://markallmywords.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/cole-house-eno-river-state-park/

It’s possible that there is another ruin that is older than it seems in the area. I am not sure, because spoiler alert, I decided not to investigate the abandoned place where someone had been living or the deer blind. It was all well and good for this woman, because she had a big dog, but I decided that I didn’t need to check it out that time.

So then I did EVP session. I am not a huge fan of EVP’s in general. I have talked about this on a prior episode, though don’t ask me which one, because I can’t remember, but I just have a lot of hesitancy around EVPs because it’s easy to hear what you want to hear, and also my hearing is terrible, so I always listen to things and think, well that’s probably not anything.

I’ve only ever gotten one really good EVP, which I do talk about in the Hawthorne Hotel episodes, which were some of the first episodes of the podcast I did, but because of some technical and also other mysterious reasons, the EVP was crystal clear why was listening to it in the hotel room the morning after I got it, but after that it was almost completely inaudible on the phone I had recorded it on. So I don’t quite understand what happened there.

But I decided to do an EVP session to see what I would get.

So I recorded a quick intro, before asking questions. Right off the bat, the recording has some weird sounds that I couldn’t account for, but I don’t know that they were paranormal.

Then, about 5 minutes in, I hear footsteps. You can’t hear them in the audio, but here’s my description at the time. [play clip]

The footsteps seemed to be coming from behind and to the right of me, from the southeast.

Then, about seven and a half minutes in, my right ear just popped. That was the ear that was facing in the direction that I’d heard footsteps from. At the time, I’d been crouched down, taking a picture of a tombstone. It was a bit odd, because my ears don’t pop particularly often. And I believe that popping ears are usually caused by pressure changes, so that felt worth noting.

I hadn’t been aware of this, but apparently other people have reported having their ears pop during EVP sessions and spirit communication in general. But it could have also just been a coincidence.

- reddit thread about popping ears and the paranormal

- article about atmospheric pressure and the paranormal

Around 8:45, the wind picked up and a ton of leaves started falling all around me. It was very dramatic. Then, around 12:24, they slowed down suddenly.

Then I did an actual EVP session, asking questions about the area, the families who’d lived there, etc.

As usual, I didn’t really get much in terms of EVPs, but there were two notable moments:
1) I asked “Are you happy that I’m here visiting you?” and all of a sudden, it got a lot darker, as if a cloud had passed over the sun.
2) I asked “Would any of the McCoys or the Cabes like to tell me about their life, or what they think about me visiting here?” After that, on the recording, the background noise of falling leaves and wind got a lot louder for about 20 seconds and then faded back to normal.

Then I got set up for the Solo Estes session. While I was walking over to the place where I wanted to do it, a leaf hit me right in the face, which struck me as a little funny. Then, I talked on the recording about how, a couple days before, at Umstead State Park, I hadn’t felt the need to have the recorder on very much.

But I got a really lonely and almost desolate feeling at the cemetery, so I kept the recorder running, probably just so I had an excuse to talk. I didn’t feel terrible (I felt much worse by the end of the hike), but in the cemetery, I said I had a sense of “not being entirely alone, but also [being] lonely.”

You can listen to a detailed description of how I do Solo Estes Sessions in the episode that I did about that last year, but I modified my method a bit here. I decided not to use the noise-blocking Vic Firth headphones, because to use them, I’d need to take off my glasses, which I wasn’t comfortable doing. Plus, I wanted to hear some background noise for safety reasons. So instead I just used my regular earbuds.

Same deal as before with this clip: I’ve deleted silence, but nothing else. Just to give you a sense of how much silence I cut out: this was a 20-minute session and the edited clip is a 6.5 minutes long.

Also, while you’re listening to this, there may be some moments where you feel like I should have stopped. But remember, in my defense, that I had no idea which questions were being played, since they were pulled from a randomized/shuffled list of more than 100 questions that I recorded.

[start playing session]

[cut in at 00:00:35 to explain that the question I was talking over was “What do you think of me?”]

Highlights:
- when it felt like someone was maybe breathing on me (on my right side again), though I try to play it off as the wind because I was getting a bit freaked out (In my notes after the session, I describe it as a “localized puff . . . rather than a breeze.”)
- There’s a moment that I kept in, where I ask “have you ever considered the possibility that you are a ghost?” and then the wind picks up a lot and then I hear an alarm and then someone shouting through the spirit box.
- When I ask the very inflammatory question “if you have any sort of supernatural or ghostly powers, have you ever attacked anyone using them?” I get the answer “here” and “young man.”
- When I ask “are you mad?” I get the answers “me,” “open,” “a few,” the wind picks up again, and then I get “following you” (which I initially misheard as “Halloween”) and “someone.” I did look around a bit after that, and I didn’t see anyone else around.
- I’ve noticed before that sometimes when I mishear a word, I hear it again, as if whatever I’m communicating with is correcting me or confirming the word. That happened with “forward” in this session. (Which was said four times, almost consecutively.)
- At the point that it said “that will do” and “get out,” I, an empath (/s), was beginning to suspect that I was not wanted there.
- And then when the recording asked “are you happy?” I got the response “unpleasant,” then I heard a man’s voice talking across different channels, and then I heard “now” twice.
- After that, I got a really strong mental image of a white woman with a two or three children (in clothes from the 1930s or earlier), and she was waving them forward, telling them to come on or hurry up; they seemed leisurely, like they were going on a picnic. Of course, no one was there. (I feel them to my right again. I believe all of the things that happened to my right side occurred when I was facing west.)
- The “New York” and “you know where” felt like they were addressed to me, since I was visiting from NYC.

The “do you like people?” answer of “no” or “move” was somewhat blunt.
- It’s a bit hard to tell, since I was clarifying the no/move thing around the time that this question was asked, but the recording asked “Are you searching for someone or something?” and it said “a fight.”
- the final question is “Is there anything you that you want to tell me?” and then I turn off the recording with questions, and then I get “I know you let me in,” which was slightly creepy.

In my notes after the session, which I wrote down later that evening, I had this to say:

during the session, I was creeped out and kept my gaze mostly fixed on the east, where the woman said the encampment was. Throughout, I swiveled some, trying to keep my eyes out on the environment around me in general.
Responses seemed somewhat sinister. The shouts, the insistent “forward” (I assume telling me to keep going), hearing shouts. The man’s voice, distant and fading in and out of audibility. The breath on my neck, the mental image of the woman, and before the session, my ear popping, all occurred from the west. Was that just because I wasn’t facing that way?
Or was the encampment of red herring to get me to look away from the direction. All in all, it isn’t the most enlightening session, but I definitely feel that something paranormal was afoot and active.

I asked my wife, who wasn’t there, but was very sensitive, what she thought of the session, and here’s what she said:

there is a lot of sadness there, and something wants to move on (“forward”). Something happened to the children, who they couldn’t protect.

I’m not sure that I agree with my wife here, but I also don’t necessarily agree with myself here. I feel like I was kind of trying to downplay things in my notes, because listening back to the session, I was surprised at some of the stuff that came up. It wasn’t enlightening, in terms of learning about the history of the area, but I definitely feel like something paranormal was going on, which is very interesting.

After the session, I did another recording just talking about my thoughts. I don’t always do that, but because I was feeling so shaken, I just wanted to keep talking and feel less alone. So here’s what I had to say then. It was still weirdly dark as I left the cemetery. Throughout the whole session, I kept having the feeling that I would look around and see someone looking out through the woods at me, probably because of what the woman said. I made the decision not to did investigate the abandoned shelter. As I was leaving the cemetery, from the opposite side that I entered it, I saw that someone had tried to block the path out by cutting narrow trees just above the roots, so that the trunk was still attached to the root area, and the whole tree lay over the path. So again, it looks like they’re trying to obscure the trail. After that, I got back to the real trail, but I got a little bit turned around, even though I had been on that trail before. They go just a little bit shaken. But then I continued on the Laurel Bluffs trail toward the pump station trail.

I did end up doing another EVP session later on, by the ruins of the chimney that was just off the trail. But I didn’t really get anything, because there was too much background noise, with the wind and crunching leaves.

I hiked about seven more miles after my Estes session, and I definitely felt worse and worse throughout the day, emotionally. I felt a little bit unsettled during the session, but as time went on, I felt lonelier and lonelier. I mentioned that I saw almost no other people, because it was a Monday, not part of a holiday weekend or anything. By the time I was done with the hike, I was about as unsettled as I often am when I go to a certain part of the Hellgate here in Astoria, Queens. If you want to know more about that, check out my episode about Randonauting and the despair meme, where I talk about that.

It’s also worth noting that this was the day after Halloween. Not sure if it had any effect on my feelings or experiences.

Last time, I said that I would share other accounts of Eno River State Park’s hauntings that I found online. I’m just going to drop those into my next newsletter.