Six Impossible Episodes: Ghost Stories

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Before we start, We're gonna
go to Barcelona very soon. Yeah, just a few weeks off. Yes,

(00:26):
we are going to Barcelona November two through ninth. And
I know this is last minute, but I also know
there are folks who fly by the seat of their
plants and make some travel arrangements late in the game.
We do have still a few spaces available on that trip,
so if you've been thinking, man, I just need to

(00:47):
get away and have a little time saved up in
all of that, like, check it out. If you go
to Defined Destinations dot com. Right on the homepage, just
this trip says Barcelona six Night Adventure. You can also
go to Defined Destinations dot Com slash Barcelona Dashed twenty
twenty three. We are both very excited. We're getting to

(01:13):
that point in the imminent travel of being excited and busy,
if that makes sense. Yes, I we're in the fall,
which is always my heavy travel time as I run
around and do various halloweeny events. So I have not
let myself get completely Barcelona excited. Yet sure, because I

(01:35):
have other trips, but every time I go somewhere, I
end up telling someone that we're about to go, and
all I hear is how much we are going to
love it. And I have not been in a very
long time. So if you would like to love it
with us, you still can right our tour planner Michael,
who has made all these arrangements for us, has said

(01:57):
that Spain is beautiful in nova, so very much looking
forward to it. We have lots of walking tours, We're
going to do food tours, a Flamenco show, breakfast ised
is included every morning. And this is the third time
that we've gone on a trip with Michael, and these
are kind of a nice mix of scheduled, planned things

(02:22):
to do and also downtime or explore on your own,
and so we've had a great time all three times. Yeah,
I know that I will have a great time because
he is very good at giving you a balance of
planned things and time to just hang out and do
whatever excites you the most. But rest assured, so Gratta
Familia is on the list. So yes, one more time.

(02:46):
That is that defined destinations dot Com if folks have
been thinking, hey, I need to do something with this
time off before the end of the year, and now
we can change the subject completely to today's episode. Over
the years, we've gotten just a ton of listener requests

(03:06):
for various ghost stories, and we have done some whole
episodes on the ghost story theme, like the Greenbrier Ghost
and the Bellwitch, and we've also talked about some places
that are said to be haunted, like the island of Pavlia.
A lot of the suggestions that we've gotten on the scene, though,
don't really work out as a full episode, so October

(03:28):
seemed like a very good time to do an installment
of six impossible episodes when we talk about things that
maybe are a little too thin to build a whole
episode around. This time all about ghosts and hauntings, and
a lot of these are very well known in the
places where they originated, but maybe not outside of those

(03:48):
places unless you are just really into ghost lore. Uh.
As a side note, when I was going through our
many suggestions to pull this episode together, I noticed that
we have a lot that are specifically about haunted hotels
and ghost towns. So there aren't any hotels or ghost

(04:08):
towns in this episode, but those may come around for
their own episode in the future, and just a heads up.
As being a ghost episode, there is of course a
lot of murder and violence happening and a number of
these stories do also involve suicide in some way. So
with that we will get started, and our first ghost

(04:30):
is from New South Wales, Australia. This was suggested by
Cay Scott. In October of eighteen twenty six, a farmer
named John Farley was walking home late one night and
he saw a man sitting on the railing of a bridge.
As he got closer, he realized that that man was
someone he recognized, a man named Fred Fisher, who had

(04:50):
been missing for about four months. Farley said Fisher was
surrounded in a strange light with a bloody wound on
his head, and that he pointed in the direction of
a nearby creek before fading away. When Farley had this encounter,
most people thought that Fisher was dead. He had been
born in London in seventeen ninety two and then at

(05:12):
the age of twenty four, he was facing a fourteen
year transportation to Australia after obtaining some forged banknotes in
eighteen twenty two, after serving almost half of that sentence,
Fisher applied for a ticket of leave, which was a
document that could be granted to people who had been
serving their sentence in Australia with good behavior. A ticket

(05:35):
of leave granted some rights that convicted people didn't have otherwise,
like the right to buy property, the right for people
to work for themselves, as long as the person that
had that ticket kept following all the other rules and requirements.
And once he had his ticket of leave, Fisher moved
to Campbelltown became a prosperous farmer. Campbelltown is within the

(05:58):
Sydney Metropolitan Area today, but at this time it was
really just getting started as a town. In eighteen twenty five,
Fisher hired a carpenter named William Brooker to build an
inn for him, and these two men got into a
dispute over money. Brooker took the matter to the magistrate,
who found in his favor, but it seems like he

(06:19):
thought Fisher still owed him money. One night, Brooker barged
into the inn, apparently intoxicated, and demanded to be paid.
This escalated into a physical fight in which Fisher stabbed Brooker.
Fisher was charged with assault, and he was worried about
what would happen to his property in farms if he
was convicted, especially if he wound up with a lengthy

(06:42):
prison sentence, So he gave neighbor and fellow ticket of
leave man George Warrel, power of attorney so that Warrel
could manage things for him. Warrel and Fisher were friends.
Among other things, Fisher and his employees lived with Warrel
because Fisher had not built a house on any of
his arms. Ultimately, a court found that Fisher had been provoked,

(07:04):
so he was given a lighter sentence than he was
afraid that he would be facing, but he still was
sentenced to six months in prison and had to pay
a fine of fifty pounds. He was released from prison,
but then in June of eighteen twenty six, he disappeared.
Warrel told people that Fisher had left for England, maybe

(07:25):
to try to escape another forgery charge. Soon, Warrel was
also selling off Fisher's possessions. This seemed suspicious. In addition
to his sudden disappearance, Fisher only had three years left
on his original fourteen year sentence. It just didn't make
sense that he would suddenly leave Australia and risk everything

(07:47):
he had built. People also didn't think Fisher was the
kind of man who would walk away from a bunch
of valuable property in possessions just for someone else to
profit off of it. On top of all of that,
war had bragged to people about being given control of
Fisher's interests before Fisher went to prison, and he made
it sound more like a gift than a temporary arrangement.

(08:11):
The ship Warrel claimed Fisher had left on also hadn't
actually docked in Sydney, so Warrel was arrested on suspicion
of murder on September seventeenth, eighteen twenty six, and he
claimed that four other men were actually the ones who
had killed Fisher. All four of those men were arrested
as well, but there was no body There was no

(08:33):
real proof that Fisher had come to some kind of harm,
so none of the men immediately faced trial. Soon a
reward was being offered to anybody who could prove that
Fisher had left the colony or could produce his body.
As we said, it was in October of eighteen twenty
six that John Farley said he saw this ghostly apparition

(08:54):
of Fred Fisher sitting on the railing of a bridge.
Farley ran to a nearby hotel called The Harrow and
told people what he had seen, Eventually that included the
police superintendent and the local magistrate. Farley seemed really sincere
and genuinely shaken about this whole experience, but it's not

(09:15):
clear whether people entirely believed his account of this ghost encounter.
Investigators did start taking a deeper look into Fisher's disappearance, though,
prompted in part by a discovery that two boys made
on October twenty fifth. They were cutting across one of
Fisher's farms and noticed bloodstains on a fence. Soon, a

(09:36):
lock of hair and a tooth were found nearby. Police
brought in an Aboriginal tracker known as Namud Gilbert, who
led them to a shallow grave containing Fred Fisher's body.
It was by the creek that Farley had described the
apparition pointing to earlier in October, and that is now
known as Fisher's Ghost Creek. The body was too decomposed

(09:59):
for the features to be recognizable, but the clothing was Fisher's.
George Worrel was arrested and tried for murder. He was
convicted on February second, eighteen twenty seven, and then executed
three days later. He admitted to killing Fisher, but claimed
that it had been an accident. He said that he
had mistaken Fisher for a horse that had gotten into

(10:20):
the wheat crop. People did not really buy this explanation,
if anything, that raises more questions. This is one of
Australia's better known ghost stories and it went on to
inspire a number of stories, plays, in poems. There are
also lots of variations on the basic narrative, many of
them with slightly different names and places. Today, Campbelltown, New

(10:44):
South Wales, holds a festival of Fisher's Ghost every November.
This has been an annual event since nineteen fifty six.
Our next ghost story is maybe more of an urban
legend than a specific ghost story that was suggested by
Rachel and it's from Japan. So according to the lore,

(11:04):
if you go into a girl's bathroom on the third
floor of a school and you knock three times on
the door of the third stall and ask if Hanako
san is there, a ghostly girl may answer you. This
ghost is also known as tware Nohaniko or Hanako of
the toilet. Exactly what happens next in an encounter with

(11:28):
Haniko varies a little from place to place and retelling
to retelling. You might see a ghost or the ghost's
bloody hand, or you might be yanked into the stall,
where the toilet may be a portal into hell. In
some areas, you might be eaten by a three headed lizard.
There is also some variety in exactly which stall hanakohans.

(11:51):
Some sources say it is the first stall, some the
last one, not the third one, and some say this
happens only at certain times of day, including between one
and three am, which would of course make this an
even creepier experience. Yeah, I kind of creeped myself out
a little bit imagining being in like a totally deserted

(12:12):
middle of the night, you know, say, elementary or middle school,
knocking on the bathroom stall door. There are multiple versions
to explain where this ghost came from. The story seems
to have appeared first in Japan after World War two,
and in some stories, Haneko was playing or hiding in

(12:33):
the school and was killed in an air raid. In others,
she was murdered in the bathroom, or she took her
own life because she was being relentlessly bullied. In addition
to being a very well known and widely repeated story
in Japan, Hanako San has been the subject of a
number of films, anime and manga. One of them, titled

(12:53):
Toilet Bound Hanako Kun in English, is both a manga
series and an anime adaptation, and it presents Henacho as Mail. Yeah.
I don't know if I don't know enough about this
series to know if there's background on why that is,
but this reminds me a bit of here in the US,

(13:14):
the saying bloody Mary looking in the mirror. In terms
of like creepy ghost experiences, I like that it could
be in any school. We will take a quick sponsor
break and come back with some more ghosts. Our next

(13:43):
ghost story is the only one in today's episode that
is not from the audience mail bag. This one is
from my own upbringing in North Carolina. It is the
make a Light. This was an eerie light or maybe
lights in Brunswick County, North Carolina, west of Wilmington. As
the story goes, there was a brakeman named Joe Baldwin

(14:03):
who was working for the Wilmington and Manchester Railroad in
eighteen sixty seven when he was beheaded in an accident.
Since then, he's been on the tracks with a light
looking for his head. There's also another slightly different version
of this story, which is that Baldwin was alone in
the last car of a train when he realized that
car had come uncoupled, so he was wildly swinging a

(14:27):
light to try to warn another oncoming train that they
were about to collide. When they did, he was killed.
So he's like now in death, frantically swinging the light
to try to warn the other train. There is no
record of a train crash involving a Joe Baldwin in
eighteen sixty seven, but there was a real train crash

(14:48):
in the area on January fourth, eighteen fifty six, and
it has some similarities to this story. The engine of
a train had experienced mechanical problems near Mako, which at
the time was now as Farmer's Turnout. The engineer had
decoupled the last cars of the train, hoping the engine
could get to Wilmington for repairs if it didn't have

(15:09):
to pull the weight of those cars. But then when
the engine returned, it crashed into the cars that it
had left behind. A male car attendant E. L. Sherwood,
had minor injuries, but a conductor named Charles Baldwin, not Joe,
was thrown from the train and suffered a fatal head injury.
The coroner's jury found that the engineer was not responsible

(15:32):
for this crash because there was no light at the
front of the train, and that it had been the
duty of the conductor, Charles Baldwin, to have hung one there.
People started reporting seeing strange lights in this area in
the eighteen seventies. In eighteen ninety nine, President Grover Cleveland
was aboard a train that reportedly stopped at Farmer's turnout

(15:53):
for wood and water. Cleveland noticed that a brakeman was
carrying signal lanterns into few different colors, which was apparently
not typical, and asked what that was about, and was
told that it was to keep engineers from being confused
by quote. The ghostly weaving of the Joe Baldwin light
most people described as a light as amber or red

(16:16):
or occasionally yellow, hovering or swinging along the tracks. Some
of the mundane explanations to the lights include static electricity
discharges from the train tracks, reflections of lights from nearby
US Highway seventy four seventy six and marsh gas from
the surrounding swamps. The stretch of tracks associated with the

(16:37):
Makeo Light wasn't far from the highway, and starting in
the nineteen fifties, going to try to see the Maco
light was a popular nighttime activity for teenagers, or maybe
a pretense for teenagers to go out at night and
get into some mischief or pursue something romantic. The railroad
tracks were removed in nineteen seventy seven, at which some

(16:59):
point say the lights went away entirely. Uh, this was
definitely still something people were talking about a lot for
my whole childhood and adolescence. Though, So if the lights
went away in nineteen seventy seven when I was to
the lore around it sure did not. I wonder if
the was there more lighting along the tracks, and so

(17:20):
whatever was causing those lights may have been obscured. Oh yeah,
I don't know. Maybe maybe our next ghost story was
suggested by Roman, and that is Resurrection Mary, a ghost
from Chicago. There are some variations here as well, but
most accounts describe Mary as a young woman who died
sometime in the nineteen twenties or thirties, when she was

(17:41):
either killed in a car crash or struck by a
hit and run driver. She is usually described as a
fashionable young woman, maybe in her late teens or twenties,
who had just been out for a night of dancing,
so she's dressed up in her dancing clothes. Sometimes this
is a ball gown, sometimes more of a flapper dress,

(18:01):
but either way the dress is usually white. Sometimes people
just say old fashioned. Resurrection Mary reportedly haunts a stretch
of Archer Avenue, which is outside the city limits southwest
of Chicago. Specifically, this stretch of road runs from Resurrection
Catholic cemetery and mausoleums through the village of Willow Springs

(18:24):
to the side of the o Henry Ballroom. That ballroom
later became the Willowbrook Ballroom, but it burned down in
twenty sixteen. So this is a stretch of road that's
allegedly running from where Mary danced her last dance to
where she was buried after she was killed. Most stories
about Resurrection Mary follow the pattern of the vanishing hitchhiker

(18:47):
urban legend. So she flags down a passing car and
gets inside, but when the car passes Resurrection Cemetery, she disappears.
A lot of the people who have said they've had
the six pere are cab drivers, and there are also
tales about her being seen dancing in dance halls and
clubs on the South Side of Chicago. According to an

(19:09):
episode of Unsolved Mysteries that came out in nineteen ninety four,
the first person to see Resurrection Mary was Jerry Paullis.
In nineteen thirty nine, Paulus spent an evening dancing with
a lovely young woman named Mary, not at the o
Henry Ballroom, but at Liberty Grove Hall and Ballroom. Then
at the end of the night, he offered to drive

(19:30):
this young woman home, and she accepted his offer, but
then changed her mind and asked him to drive her
to Resurrection Cemetery on Archer Avenue instead. This is kind
of a strange request. The cemetery wasn't really close to
where she had said that she lived, and then when
they got to the cemetery, Mary disappeared. The next day,

(19:51):
Paulus went to her address that she'd given him. The
woman who answered the door said that Mary was her
daughter who had been dead for five years. According to
that same episode of Unsolved Mysteries, Mary was Mary Brigovie,
who was killed in a car crash in nineteen thirty four,
shortly before her twenty first birthday, but the Chicago Tribune's

(20:12):
reporting on this crash gives her name as Marie, not Mary,
and her age is twenty one. According to the Tribune reports,
the crash happened at the intersection of Lake Street and
Whacker Drive when the driver, John Thole, ran into a
support for the L train. This intersection is inside the

(20:32):
Chicago Loop, not outside of the south side of town.
It's about sixteen miles away from the stretch of Archer
Avenue that is associated with Resurrection Mary. So Marie's parents,
Stephan and Joanna Brigovie are buried in Resurrection Cemetery, and
there are some reports that Marie was buried there as well,

(20:53):
alongside her parents. Stephan and Joanna died in nineteen fifty
one in nineteen forty five, respectively, and there her graves
are marked, so if Marie really is buried next to them,
it's not clear why she does not have a marker.
Another candidate for the real Resurrection Mary is Anna Norkis,

(21:13):
who took Maria or Mary as a middle name because
of its religious significance. She died in nineteen twenty seven
in a crash that killed one other person and injured
four more. This crash site was not far from Archer Avenue,
but Anna was only twelve, so not the young woman Resurrection.
Mary is usually described as reportedly her father had promised

(21:37):
to take her to the O Henry Ballroom for her
thirteenth birthday, and they were on the way back when
the driver had to take a detour and wound up
on a road that was not well marked. He missed
the end of the road and plunged into a ditch
and the vehicle overturned. According to funeral records, she was
buried at Saint Casimir's Cemetery in Chicago. There are some

(22:00):
vague reports that Marie or Anna, or maybe both of
them were temporarily buried at Resurrection Cemetery due to grave
digger strikes at the cemetery where they were really supposed
to be buried, and that for some reason they were
never exhumed and moved to their original planned burial site.
I really wasn't able to substantiate any of that. It

(22:23):
does seem like there were some grave digger strikes going
on when Marie Bragovi died is not clearly substantiated. And
so there are some things here that make it seem
like maybe they are things people are sort of trying
to line up with the resurrection Mary story. Yeah, we
will talk about two haunted places after a sponsor break.

(22:56):
We will close out this installment of six Impossible epites
with a couple of haunted buildings. The first is Rotherwood Mansion,
suggested by Mary Grace. This is a private residence today,
so you can get a view of the exterior of
it from the green Belt in Kingsport, Tennessee, but it
is not generally open to the public. I have the

(23:17):
impression that the current owner finds the number of people
who try to come get a closer look to be
a little frustrating, So please don't do that. Yeah, this
is the downside of having a cool haunted house. This
mansion was built in phases starting in eighteen eighteen and
named after the home of Cedric the Saxon in Sir

(23:39):
Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. Its original owner was the Reverend Frederick A. Ross,
a Presbyterian clergyman from Virginia, whose family was very wealthy.
Ross inherited the land where Rotherwood was built after the
death of his father. Ross was apparently a big fan
of Ivanhoe. One of its main characters is a princess

(24:00):
named Rowena, and that was also the name of Ross's daughter.
The workforce at Rotherwood initially included both enslaved and indentured workers,
and Ross was also an advocate for the institution of slavery.
In eighteen fifty seven, he published a book called Slavery
Ordained of God, which compiled all of his pro slavery

(24:21):
letters and speeches into one work that argued that quote,
slavery is of God, and to continue for the good
of the slave, the good of the master, the good
of the whole American family, until another and better destiny
may be unfolded. So as a side note, so many
relatively recent articles about Ross and Rotherwood frame him as

(24:44):
someone who treated his enslaved workforce with benevolence and point
out that he manumitted some of them during his lifetime. Okay,
even if that's true, it does not offset his advocacy
of slavery or his participation in it, and some of
that is really cherry picked. Like when Ross's father died,
Ross did free about thirty people, mostly people who he

(25:08):
described as old and infirm, along with some that he
freed to avoid separating families. But he also sold about
five hundred people who had been enslaved at his father's
Oxford ironworks as a way to deal with his late
father's debts. It plays into that hole. We would like
to not think the worst of this person, So we're

(25:28):
going to talk about how kind he was. Right, Slavery
is never kind. Roll stop. So. One of the ghosts
most associated with Rotherwood is said to be of Ross's
daughter Rowena. According to the lore, she was engaged to
be married and her fiance drowned in the Holston River,
either on her wedding day or just before it. That

(25:50):
river runs right by the mansion, and in this story,
Rowena saw the whole thing happen. Some sources say her
fiance's body was never recovered, others say that it was
pulled out of the river at the hour that their
wedding was supposed to take place. Then, in eighteen fifty
Rowena married Edward S. Temple, but he died of yellow

(26:12):
fever in October of eighteen fifty two, when their only child, Theodosia,
was about six months old. Rowena married again, this time
to Wescombe Hudgens, and one widely repeated story is that
not long after their marriage, the couple came to Rotherwood
for a visit, and while they were there, Rowena became
deeply depressed. Eventually, she put on the dress that she

(26:35):
was supposed to wear for her first wedding and drowned
herself in the river. Rowena did die on April fifth,
eighteen fifty seven, at the age of thirty two, and
according to a brief autobiography written by her father, she
did take her own life, but this all happened in Huntsville, Alabama,
not at Rotherwood. By the time Rowena died, her father

(26:57):
didn't even own Rotherwood anymore. Tried to start a cotton factory,
which failed and he lost most of his wealth and
had to sell the mansion. So, in spite of those
sort of factual discrepancies, Rotherwood is reportedly haunted by a
lady in white who walks the grounds in the river,
and sometimes there are also ghostly wet footprints from the

(27:19):
river up to the back door. When Ross sold the mansion,
it was to Joshua Phipps, who was described as Ross's overseer.
A lot of sources paint Phipps as Ross's opposite in
terms of how the enslaved workforce was treated, like Ross
was supposedly kind while Phipps was a monster. This sort
of sidesteps the fact that if Phipps worked as Ross's overseer,

(27:43):
then Ross was employing a man who was cruel toward
the same people that Ross was supposedly kind to. So
there are also a lot of ghostly stories about Rotherwood
that surround Joshua Phipps, like his daughter Priscilla reportedly fell
in love with a man that Phipps didn't approve of,
and Phipps arranged for someone to kill that man in

(28:04):
battle during the Civil War. So that's awful. And then
on top of that, he gloated to Priscilla about having
orchestrated his death. She either took her own life or
died of grief, and now some people say you can
see her ghost at one of the front windows waiting
for her beloved to come home. According to the lore,

(28:25):
Phipps became ill in eighteen sixty one and died in
a swarm of flies that appeared out of nowhere. People
said this was evidence of a curse that was placed
on him by the mansions enslaved workforce. A storm blew
in during his funeral and the horses that were pulling
the cart carrying his coffin started straining as though it

(28:45):
was getting heavier and heavier. Lightning struck a nearby tree,
causing it to fall across the road, so the pallbearers
had to carry the casket the rest of the way
to the gravesite, and a giant black dog described as
a hound of hell, burst out of the coffin as
it was about to be buried. So there are lots
of stories about nightmarish incidents at the mansion attributed to

(29:09):
the ghost of Phipps and this devil dog. After Phipps's death,
Rotherwood passed through a series of owners and at some
points it was vacant. It fell into deep disrepair before
being purchased in the nineteen eighties and then restored over
a period of years. In a televised interview with WJHL,
the current owner was described as something of a ghost skeptic,

(29:33):
but she did say that on her first night in
the house, she very loudly announced that if there were
any ghosts they could stay as long as they left
her alone. I'm trying to imagine what I would do
in that scenario, and it's slightly different. And lastly, we
have Larnick Castle, suggested by Becky. This is billed as

(29:54):
New Zealand's only castle and it was built in eighteen
seventy one by William Larnick, something that took two hundred
workers in more than three years to complete. William Larnick
had been born in New South Wales, Australia in eighteen
thirty three and was of Scottish descent. He became wealthy
through his work as a banker, thanks in part to

(30:15):
being pretty much at the right place at the right
time for gold rushes in both Australia and New Zealand.
He went on to become a merchant, a speculator and
a politician. He held a series of roles in the
New Zealand government, including being a member of Parliament and
holding multiple cabinet positions. He built Larnick Castle as his

(30:36):
dream home for himself and his family, choosing a site
near Dunedin that had beautiful views of the harbor and
the ocean, but it was on ground that had to
be leveled extensively before construction could even begin. In addition
to the three years it took to build the structure,
it took another twelve for craftspeople and designers to finish

(30:56):
the interior, and it was all very extravage However, by
the end of the nineteenth century, the family had been
struck with tragedy and scandal. William's first wife, Eliza, died
in eighteen eighty at the age of thirty eight, when
their youngest child was still a baby. He married her
half sister, Mary, who died in eighteen eighty seven, also

(31:18):
at the age of thirty eight. William's favorite daughter was Kate,
and he added a massive ballroom to the castle as
a birthday gift for her when she turned twenty one,
but she died in eighteen ninety one at the age
of about twenty eight. The same year that Kate died,
William married again to a woman named Constance, who was
more than twenty years younger than he was. There were

(31:42):
rumors that Constance had an affair with Douglas Larnock, who
was William's son with his first wife Eliza. William was
also facing serious financial problems. He had lost money as
a speculator. Banks he had been in charge of collapsed,
and businesses he had started had just failed. He suspected
and sometimes accused of mismanagement and malfeasance. In eighteen ninety eight,

(32:06):
Larnick was serving as a member of Parliament and he
took his own life in the Parliament offices on October
twelfth of that year. By that point he was financially insolvent,
and he died intestate, leaving his surviving family members to
just fight over what was left of the property. They
sold the castle in nineteen oh six, and it became
increasingly run down as it passed through a series of owners.

(32:30):
Afterward and the years after the family sold it, it
was used as an asylum and as housing for soldiers,
and at some points it was just vacant. Larnick Castle
was purchased by Barry and Margaret Barker in nineteen sixty seven,
and at that point it was almost in ruins. The
Barkers and their family undertook a massive restoration project involving

(32:51):
the structure and the grounds. Today it's a historical site
and a tourist attraction, and the gardens have been named
a Garden of inter National Significance by New Zealand Gardens Trust.
There are also accommodations on the grounds, but not in
the castle itself. This is why this is not going
to the list of haunted hotels. That may be an

(33:13):
episode later. D's Castle is reportedly very haunted. A New
Zealand TV series called ghost Hunt ran for one season
and covered Larnak Castle as its very first episode. So
in this episode, paranormal investigators visited the castle. A tour
guide told them about being pushed down the stairs by

(33:36):
an unseen force while joking about ghosts. This episode is
full of strange noises, inexplicably stuck doors, strange handprints on
the outside of a window, eerie looking photos, and some
jump scares as the investigators startled themselves in the dark
in various ways. Visitors have described feeling like they're being

(33:59):
why doors opening and closing by themselves, strange noises, and
just a sense of ominous foreboding. In nineteen ninety four,
a play about the Larnick family called Castle of Lies
was staged in the Grand ballroom, and an enormous storm
blew in. Just as the play started. The wind blew

(34:20):
down the chimneys, sending soot and ash everywhere, and just
at the moment in the play that Larnick was about
to take his own life, lightning sparked through the room.
One room, where Constance's wedding dress is on display, is
purportedly haunted by a malevolent spirit. People say this is
either Constance, who's angry that there are so many visitors

(34:42):
coming through the house all the time, or Eliza, who
is angry about Constance's presence in her home. There's also
the ghost of William himself, with visitors reporting a male
figure roaming around the castle. Some attribute his restlessness to
the fact that his tomb has fallen into disrepair and

(35:02):
been repeatedly vandalized over the years, including at one point
in the nineteen seventies when his bones were removed from
their resting place and his skull was taken. They were
all eventually replaced. Becky, who sent us this request, described
staying there on the grounds at the age of thirteen
and being truly terrified by all the potential ghost sightings.

(35:27):
So those are our six ghost stories. For this October episode,
since we talked about how we're going to go to Barcelona.
At the top of this I picked a listener mail
that's from a couple months ago, but is on that theme.
It is from Alicia, who says, Hello, Holly and Tracy.
I am writing exclusively to give you a tip that

(35:47):
is so unique to the curious minded like us. I
went to Barcelona at the end of twenty twenty one
and made a silly choice that paid dividends that I
encourage you to try. I, like a huge dork, brought
my mom's high end pocket binoculars to the Sigratto Familia.
Best choice ever. Seriously, I highly encourage everyone to take

(36:08):
binoculars for trips to see tall buildings from now on.
For Goudy's work in particular, you can imagine the benefit.
I'll pop a photo of how excited, excellently dorky I
was on site too. There are so many far away
details you get a chance to see that would have
been missed. It was amazing. I know you'll have so
much fun on the trip this sere thanks for the

(36:29):
excellent podcast. Pet photo Scruffy small dog is reny It.
It's the nickname that a great antie named Irene used,
and the chunky shepherd is Charlie. So number one. That
is a great tip about the binoculars I often bring.

(36:50):
It's been a while since I have gone to the theater,
but I pretty much always bring binoculars a little opera
glasses because I am often sitting like farther toward the back,
and it lets me sees things on the stage so
much better. I had not really thought about it in
terms of like sight seeing tours. I even have a
little tiny pair of pocket binoculars like in the pack

(37:13):
that I take with me, like my daypack when I
go hiking. I don't know why I never thought of
it in terms of like I'm going on a trip
somewhere now I will, And boy, these are some very cute,
very cute animals. So thank you so much for the
tip and the photos. If you would like to send
us a note about this or any other podcast or

(37:33):
a history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, you can find
our podcast on the iHeartRadio app wherever else you like
to hit your podcasts. You can also, at least theoretically
find us on some social media like Facebook, Twitter. That's
not a thing anymore. It's called x now, I guess,
Pinterest and Instagram, and that's missed in History is the name.

(37:54):
You'll find us under all those places. Stuff you Missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Six Impossible Episodes: Ghost Stories