(Hauntings) Chris Woodyard ”Haunted Ohio & The ABCs of Victorian Death” pt. 1

[00:00:00] From the darkest reaches of space, to the deepest corners of your mind, welcome to From The Void.

[00:00:18] When I was younger, I was captivated by the book series Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

[00:00:23] You know, the one they recently made a movie about and also has the terrifyingly creepy illustrations

[00:00:29] that I may or may not have tattooed on my arm.

[00:00:32] My daughter refers to it as my scary spooky church tattoo.

[00:00:37] Anyway, having lived a large portion of my life in the Midwestern state of Ohio,

[00:00:41] I later discovered another series, The Haunted Ohio Series by Chris Woodard.

[00:00:46] This was a collection of true stories from around the state and my favorite part was that it was organized by city and location.

[00:00:54] I would sit there and comb through the books for any stories that came from my town or anywhere in close proximity.

[00:01:00] And this was long before the rise and popularity of all the ghost-hunting shows and all the different paranormal shows that would follow.

[00:01:07] You were lucky if you could catch an episode back in those days of In Search Of or sightings.

[00:01:12] I credit The Haunted Ohio Series for feeding my curiosity of the unknown.

[00:01:17] I still have those books sitting on my bookshelf and read a story to my daughter from time to time.

[00:01:22] So as you can imagine, I was thrilled to have Chris Woodard herself on the show to talk about that series in her more recent books on Victoria-era hauntings.

[00:01:31] And of course, her latest book, A is for Arsenic and ABC of Victorian Death.

[00:01:36] A is for Arsenic is a guide to the basics of Victoria morning with whimsical poems, death-anitions,

[00:01:43] and stories resurrected from 19th century newspapers brought back to life through the evocative art of land display.

[00:01:50] Chris Woodard, author of the Victorian Book of the Dead, answers your dead serious questions including,

[00:01:56] How long should you mourn for someone who left you money in their will?

[00:02:00] Why did body snatchers strip a body before carrying it away?

[00:02:04] What was a coffin torpedo? Were morning clothes poisonous?

[00:02:08] What is inheritance powder? Who killed off Keening? And what is dead water?

[00:02:14] So get ready for an absolutely fascinating conversation with the legendary Chris Woodard on this week's episode part one of Haunted Ohio and the ABCs of Victorian Death on From the Void.

[00:02:37] Alright, welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to have my guest on this week. Chris Woodard,

[00:02:42] thank you so much for spending some of your day with me.

[00:02:45] Oh, thank you for having me.

[00:02:47] Absolutely. So I grew up on some of your books. You wrote a series of collections of ghost stories around Ohio, Haunted Ohio books that I definitely have many copies of

[00:03:00] and that I pull out every once in a while to read. So I was very excited to have you on.

[00:03:05] But you've since then written more extensively outside of Ohio, but we will certainly get into that.

[00:03:12] But before we do, talk a little bit about yourself and what got you interested in this topic to begin with?

[00:03:18] It runs in our family to see and sense ghosts. So I come by it honestly, I guess.

[00:03:24] My grandfather could always know he always knew when people were going to die,

[00:03:29] which is kind of an unsettling gift to have. His father also could see ghosts and it was quite interesting because I grew up in the 50s when ghosts were not fashionable.

[00:03:41] You didn't talk about them. It was superstition, it was stupid.

[00:03:46] So my family didn't quite get what was going on. My father was a scientist and I think everything was just sort of...

[00:03:56] He basically cut off his family from talking about this stuff around us.

[00:04:02] Turns out my cousins knew all about it. They lived in the same town as my grandfather and he'd tell them all about the ghost stories.

[00:04:09] And it wasn't until I was in college and I'd had all kinds of weird experiences but didn't really know what to call them.

[00:04:16] I was in college and my cousin had just died and he was at a family reunion with me and he turned to me and he said,

[00:04:23] yeah, your cousin and my dead brother came into our room the other night and my jaw just dropped and I said, you see them too.

[00:04:32] And it was such a revelation because I didn't realize that we had this family...

[00:04:37] I hesitate to call it a gift because it's really quite shocking sometimes.

[00:04:42] But that was the first time I realized that this was kind of a family thing. It skipped my dad but my daughter has the ability also.

[00:04:51] I used to take her sometimes to haunted places and see what she would experience.

[00:04:58] Wow, that's incredible.

[00:04:59] That's how I got my start and as far as the books, I had done a guidebook to the Dayton area.

[00:05:07] We had moved from Indianapolis to here although I'm originally from Ohio.

[00:05:11] And the librarians were really helpful and after it was done they said, what are you going to do next?

[00:05:18] And I said, what do you need? We need a book of Ohio ghost stories.

[00:05:22] I said, I can do that because I lived in a haunted house over by OSU.

[00:05:28] I had a vintage clothing store and some people said we brought the ghost in with the clothes but there was also an old man that lived there.

[00:05:37] And it was odd because he would steal things.

[00:05:41] He stole pieces of my pantyhose and was hanging up to dry in the bathroom.

[00:05:47] And I'm like, hmm, kinky ghost.

[00:05:50] He taught the budgie to say naughty words so that was interesting.

[00:05:56] He also tried to push one of my clerks down the stairs and the first time she told me this I was very skeptical.

[00:06:04] I said, no, you just caught your heel or something like that.

[00:06:07] And she says, no, I felt hands shoving me in the middle of my back.

[00:06:11] Well, I did a little research.

[00:06:13] I wasn't too keen to find out exactly what was going on but the man who rented the place said, yeah, this used to be a doctor's office and he lived upstairs.

[00:06:23] And he died in this one back room where none of us like to go.

[00:06:29] In fact, I sent a friend of mine up there just to see what she would feel because I just couldn't cope with the room.

[00:06:36] And she came running back downstairs and out the door and didn't talk to me about it.

[00:06:41] And later I found out she saw this man standing in the closet.

[00:06:45] And I didn't realize but she's sensitive to ghosts also.

[00:06:50] And I don't think she's forgiven me for sending her up there without warning.

[00:06:54] So I had some experiences of my own and I started researching and, you know, there's 88 counties and I thought I can knock this out in a year.

[00:07:03] No problem. It took me 10 years to get stories from every single county.

[00:07:09] There were a lot of dead zones.

[00:07:11] Wow.

[00:07:13] Yeah, it's in one of the things I always enjoyed about those books is that you organize them in a way that it's by believe you did it by county.

[00:07:22] So you could kind of narrow down if you were from a particular county like Franklin County per se, you know, you could you could kind of narrow down here are the ghost stories that were collected around my area.

[00:07:31] Right. Yes.

[00:07:32] Yeah. So I thought that was really cool the way that you kind of put that together.

[00:07:37] Good. Well, I wanted people to be able to tell what was what was haunted in their areas because that's what people really want to know is is what about that spooky house out on that that road.

[00:07:48] When we first moved to Dayton area, people kept saying, Oh, this road out here. This is really, really haunted.

[00:07:57] Like, great. Tell me what's the haunting? And there are like 60 different versions.

[00:08:02] Oh, well, someone has seen hanging on the tree at the curve in the road.

[00:08:06] Oh, there's an old lady in the window up there and there's a farmer on a ghost tractor. It was just endless.

[00:08:14] Yeah. So I mean, that must be like one of the major complications in cobbling together a collection of stories is trying to figure out decipher, you know, fact from legend and determining which version of the story to publish.

[00:08:28] How do you how do you go about doing that?

[00:08:30] That's a good question. And things have changed since we've got so many wonderful digital resources now.

[00:08:38] And as an example, there's this great story of the headless motorcyclist of Elmore.

[00:08:44] And he supposedly came back from the First World War and went to see his girlfriend found that she'd married somebody else and he roars off down the road under a barbed wire fence and his head's cut off.

[00:08:55] And ever since then if you go out there and you honk your horn three times and you blink your lights three times, you'll see the light going up the road and it vanishes in the middle of the bridge.

[00:09:05] Great story. Wonderful story. You hear other stories. I think there's one near the Oxford near Miami University, the Oxford Roadlight.

[00:09:15] But this one was my particular favorite. And then I went into the newspapers from the 1920s, 1910s to see if I could find anything about this.

[00:09:26] There's a whole different story. It's about a man who was a recluse, a hermit and lived in this old shack and that's where he he's hung himself.

[00:09:37] And there was a light that went down the same road and disappeared.

[00:09:43] And this was reported and people said we tried to catch the light and it knocked us into a ditch.

[00:09:49] There are stories about the motorcyclists knocking people into a ditch.

[00:09:54] So it was sort of like, oh my goodness, I've told the wrong version of this story. The original, the origin story is something very different.

[00:10:02] But it still has the spook light coming down the road which I find intriguing.

[00:10:08] But in the books I tried to do, be very specific about if something was a legend.

[00:10:14] Because the books have legends. They have stories about historical figures that perhaps were written in somebody's biography.

[00:10:23] And they have stories where I went out to the place and interviewed people or I just interviewed people when the happenings had actually stopped.

[00:10:33] They didn't live in the house anymore, but they wanted to tell me about their experiences.

[00:10:38] And again I would go out to some houses and actually investigate. I don't do that anymore. I'm retired from that.

[00:10:44] It's really, really tiring. But there's generally those kinds of categories.

[00:10:51] So I tried to be very clear about this is an urban legend or this is a legend that was reported.

[00:10:58] I sort of write it in a different style.

[00:11:01] Yeah, so tell me about some of your favorite stories perhaps that were coupled with when you were still sort of going out investigating.

[00:11:11] Tell me about some of your favorite stories where maybe you had your own experiences that sort of corroborated what the witnesses had been telling you.

[00:11:19] It's always fascinating to me to go into a place because my rule was you are not to tell me anything about the place before I go in.

[00:11:27] And that helps if I've just got a person house.

[00:11:32] It helps if I've just got a house.

[00:11:35] You know, historical site people could say well you just looked this stuff up on the internet or read about it.

[00:11:41] But I really wanted to be completely in the dark as it were when I went through places.

[00:11:48] And one of my favorite examples was in Dayton at the Masonic Temple.

[00:11:54] It's this amazing building up on the hill, very historic building.

[00:11:58] And they called me in.

[00:12:00] They said we'd like you to just walk through and tell us what you feel.

[00:12:05] So fine I had no information on the place other than it's a Masonic Temple.

[00:12:11] So I started walking through and usually what I do is I take notes and I'm writing this stuff down.

[00:12:18] And as I'm writing what I'm feeling all of a sudden these doors fly open.

[00:12:23] These, you know, the metal doors you have in institutional places but they didn't really open.

[00:12:29] But there was a guy there and he's just like kind of high.

[00:12:33] You can call me George.

[00:12:35] Very friendly.

[00:12:36] It's like I'll be your guide for today.

[00:12:39] So he followed me around the whole place and he had a very distinctive egg shaped head.

[00:12:45] He was balding, older gentleman kind of portly.

[00:12:49] Very friendly.

[00:12:50] I didn't feel threatened by him or anything like that as I sometimes do.

[00:12:55] We'll talk about some of those in a minute.

[00:12:57] But we walked around and we got to a room where they have photographs of all the graduating classes if you will.

[00:13:07] That's not really what they call it but there's like a class of masons for one year.

[00:13:14] And he, I walked up and they're in holders on the wall like poster holders where you sort of flip through them.

[00:13:21] They're metal frames.

[00:13:23] And he said, and I'm trying to remember the year.

[00:13:27] I'm gonna say, I'm improvising here so don't quote me.

[00:13:31] 1969.

[00:13:33] So I flipped through to 1969 and there he is in the picture.

[00:13:38] So I'm like what?

[00:13:40] Wow.

[00:13:41] All right cool.

[00:13:42] I said it doesn't do you justice.

[00:13:44] So at one point I sat down in what is their card room, their game room because I was just completely drained.

[00:13:52] He grabbed me by the elbow, scoops me out of my chair and says come on, girlie.

[00:13:57] Like hey we got more to see.

[00:13:59] So you know I went back and I'm sitting there with all the officials of the Masonic Order that hit some of the things that they had also experienced

[00:14:09] and then in comes this other gentleman.

[00:14:12] And he just reminded me of some hard boiled detective in a film noir tough guy.

[00:14:19] Well he was the security officer and they're like oh she saw the ghost, she saw the ghost and he's like well

[00:14:25] and they said she's got a picture, she's got a picture.

[00:14:28] He's like well okay let's go look at this picture.

[00:14:31] So I flipped through the fixtures and I point him out and I swear the guy turned pale.

[00:14:37] He says that's the guy I see around here all the time.

[00:14:41] So we tried to find out who he was because they have the roster on the back, printed on the back.

[00:14:47] There wasn't a roster on this photo.

[00:14:50] There are all the other ones but we think we know who he is and I'm not going to name him

[00:14:54] because the family might get upset or something.

[00:14:57] But I think we know who he was.

[00:15:00] And he was just a card.

[00:15:02] He was just a guy that loved hanging around the Masonic Temple

[00:15:06] and he's happy to continue hanging around the Masonic Temple.

[00:15:10] But I thought it was really interesting that here he is, I knew nothing about him

[00:15:15] and he's the same guy that this man and other people have seen.

[00:15:20] So to me that's exciting.

[00:15:23] Yeah that's incredible.

[00:15:25] I recently interviewed another local author from the state of Ohio.

[00:15:29] He's written some books about different occurrences around the state,

[00:15:33] author by the name of James Willis.

[00:15:35] And Jim talks about in the beginning of one of his books about how to know how.

[00:15:40] He believes that ghosts exist in order to keep history alive

[00:15:44] and that's sort of in essence what he's kind of doing.

[00:15:47] He's keeping his memory alive by serving as sort of your spiritual tour guide.

[00:15:51] Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.

[00:15:53] That's very cool.

[00:15:55] And I'm just going to go through the fact that some of the encounters you've had

[00:15:59] have not been so positive.

[00:16:01] Not terribly pleasant.

[00:16:03] I mean, when anybody would call me up and say, I have a demon,

[00:16:07] it's like thank you for calling.

[00:16:09] I don't do demons.

[00:16:11] No thank you.

[00:16:13] It's well above my pay grade.

[00:16:15] I don't have the expertise to deal with this.

[00:16:18] So I would try to suggest other ideas

[00:16:22] that would never deliberately take a case where somebody said they had a demon.

[00:16:27] Yeah.

[00:16:28] But I was at a house near Springfield

[00:16:32] and they had called me in just to see what I would see

[00:16:35] and I walked up to the door

[00:16:37] and a little dog, a little fluffy dog,

[00:16:40] started walking in with me.

[00:16:43] And cute little dog turns out it was a ghost.

[00:16:48] So that was interesting.

[00:16:50] And I walked upstairs and felt a lot of hostility.

[00:16:56] This was a very angry ghost and it was male.

[00:17:00] I got the idea he was a farmhand,

[00:17:02] he had lived in the attic

[00:17:05] and he was just like really furious

[00:17:07] because he had been a very religious man,

[00:17:09] it sounded like, if I'm dead, why am I stuck here?

[00:17:13] Why am I not in heaven?

[00:17:15] And he was just livid.

[00:17:17] Well, I looked at everything I could in the upper floor

[00:17:21] and then I reluctantly opened the attic door

[00:17:25] and he popped out and he smacked me on the chin.

[00:17:29] Now this isn't, you know, it's not like a human smacking you

[00:17:33] but it snapped my head back

[00:17:35] and it certainly rattled me

[00:17:37] and I didn't quite know what to think of it

[00:17:39] but I slammed the door and just sort of panted for a while.

[00:17:43] And they said that they have trouble going in the attic.

[00:17:47] The husband in particular said,

[00:17:49] I go into the attic and I just become immediately furiously angry.

[00:17:53] And he was a very, very gentle laid back man.

[00:17:57] The ghost was obviously influencing him

[00:18:00] or making him feel what he was feeling.

[00:18:03] So you know, I was trying to suggest ways

[00:18:05] they could get rid of this ghost

[00:18:07] or tell him to move along, go to the light or whatever.

[00:18:09] I don't personally do that sort of thing

[00:18:11] but if the householder wants to do it, that's good.

[00:18:15] But that was startling.

[00:18:18] Another time I was at a house where there was a lady doctoress.

[00:18:24] She had, unusually for the 19th century, early 20th century

[00:18:28] she was a female physician.

[00:18:31] There was a dead man lying in one of the beds

[00:18:34] and I said that to the household owner

[00:18:37] and she says, is it a real, you know, a recent dead person?

[00:18:40] I said, no, this is a historic dead person,

[00:18:42] probably one of the doctor's patients.

[00:18:45] But I was upstairs standing by the window looking out

[00:18:47] and somebody started stroking my hair.

[00:18:51] And that was also a little unsettling.

[00:18:56] I don't like any physical contact from these things.

[00:19:00] Just prefer not, you know.

[00:19:02] Let's set some boundaries.

[00:19:04] Right, you can hear my personal space.

[00:19:06] Yeah.

[00:19:08] I'm trying to think of some other places

[00:19:10] out Collingwood Arts Center in Toledo.

[00:19:14] This used to be the mother house of the Ursuline nuns.

[00:19:18] There's teaching order.

[00:19:20] And it's just amazingly gothic building.

[00:19:24] It's now used as residence and studios for artists

[00:19:27] and they have performances and things there.

[00:19:30] It was vacant for a while

[00:19:32] and supposedly Satanists performed ceremonies,

[00:19:36] occult ceremonies in the basement.

[00:19:38] And ever since then, some dark figure has been seen

[00:19:41] in the basement, just sort of a hoodless,

[00:19:44] a faceless hooded thing

[00:19:47] and seen by a number of people.

[00:19:51] There's also a number of ghostly nuns.

[00:19:54] I was up in the balcony in the auditorium

[00:19:58] and there was one sitting down below

[00:20:01] in the main theater

[00:20:03] and she looked up at me and she was just radiating hatred.

[00:20:06] Just evil, evil, evil, nasty woman.

[00:20:10] And then I went into the basement.

[00:20:13] I was with a friend who said she's psychically deaf

[00:20:17] so she's not sensitive at all.

[00:20:20] And they wanted me to go into this one room.

[00:20:22] This is where we saw the faceless hooded figure

[00:20:25] come over here and look at it

[00:20:27] and I'm like backing away.

[00:20:29] No thanks.

[00:20:31] She's like holding me by the wrist and saying,

[00:20:33] breathe, keep breathing.

[00:20:35] Because it was just so terrifying.

[00:20:38] And it's hard to explain what it's the atmosphere

[00:20:42] that is so terrifying

[00:20:44] because I'm not really seeing anything.

[00:20:46] I didn't see the hooded figure.

[00:20:48] I did see the nun.

[00:20:50] But it's very difficult to explain why it's so terrifying.

[00:20:53] And I don't know whether there...

[00:20:55] I'm sure there's some physical reason

[00:20:57] that it sets your adrenaline off.

[00:21:01] The ghosts usually are not dangerous.

[00:21:06] They normally can't hurt you.

[00:21:09] I know that logically.

[00:21:12] But there's just some lizard brain part

[00:21:16] that says run away, run away.

[00:21:19] And I know why am I doing this?

[00:21:22] What scares me so much.

[00:21:24] I guess you could call it aversion therapy

[00:21:26] or something or...

[00:21:28] therapy. What do you call it when you try to desensitization?

[00:21:31] That's it.

[00:21:33] Because I've been scared of them since I was a small child

[00:21:36] because I didn't know what I was seeing.

[00:21:38] And my parents were like,

[00:21:40] nah, nah, nah, nah, it doesn't exist.

[00:21:42] You're a liar, you're a good storyteller.

[00:21:44] Thank you very much. It's not real.

[00:21:47] But when I see them, they're solid.

[00:21:49] They're real looking.

[00:21:51] Nothing in a bloody mummy suit.

[00:21:53] Nothing in a sheet.

[00:21:55] Just very solid real people.

[00:21:58] Also sort of a time warp.

[00:22:01] I've had experiences where I've seen buildings

[00:22:04] where they're not... they don't look that way anymore.

[00:22:08] This was a house in Dayton.

[00:22:11] And the lady asked me to come in and see what I could see.

[00:22:14] And I drove up and behind the house

[00:22:18] at an angle was a barn.

[00:22:20] It was like a tumbled down barn with vines growing all over it.

[00:22:24] I just noted it in passing.

[00:22:26] Went in, did my little walk through

[00:22:30] and it turned out it was her dad was still living

[00:22:33] or hanging around the house.

[00:22:36] We'd had a babysitting problem so my daughter was with us

[00:22:40] and she was like eight years old.

[00:22:42] And it felt kind of bad but she was cool with it

[00:22:45] and at the end we were discussing what I felt

[00:22:48] and where I felt it.

[00:22:50] She started asking the lady questions

[00:22:52] was your dad kind of bald and had a mustache?

[00:22:56] She said yeah.

[00:22:58] And there weren't any pictures of him in the house that I had seen.

[00:23:00] Did he walk with a cane?

[00:23:02] And she said yeah, he had bad arthritis

[00:23:04] and I nearly buried him with the cane.

[00:23:07] Well was this his favorite chair I'm sitting in?

[00:23:10] And she said yeah, it was.

[00:23:12] And I said where are you getting this?

[00:23:15] She says oh he's standing over there in the hall telling me.

[00:23:18] Oh wow.

[00:23:19] Oh my.

[00:23:21] I was excited.

[00:23:23] So we went outside and I said

[00:23:26] originally when we drove up I thought the house next door

[00:23:29] was the one we were visiting because it was kind of grubby

[00:23:32] and spooky looking

[00:23:34] and her house was just immaculate

[00:23:36] in lots of light and flowers and things.

[00:23:39] And I said you know ha ha we thought this was the haunted house

[00:23:42] and it's even got that old barn out back.

[00:23:45] She says oh we had the barn torn down

[00:23:47] because it was too dangerous for the kids.

[00:23:50] And I'm like what 15 minutes ago

[00:23:53] and I walked over to where I could see the barn.

[00:23:55] The barn wasn't there anymore.

[00:23:57] Wow.

[00:23:58] It's like they don't have souls.

[00:24:01] What is this?

[00:24:03] So that was also interesting.

[00:24:06] Like a porthole to another time.

[00:24:09] Yeah, yeah.

[00:24:10] Now it does sound like to some degree you know

[00:24:13] at least in some cases you have some sort of

[00:24:15] direct interaction with the spirit.

[00:24:17] Have you gathered any sense as to why certain spirits linger

[00:24:22] and certain spirits pass along?

[00:24:25] Like you know you've heard the kind of theory over the years

[00:24:27] that well they have unfinished business or

[00:24:29] Right.

[00:24:30] You know what's your sense?

[00:24:32] There seem to be different types.

[00:24:34] There are the ones with unfinished business

[00:24:37] and sometimes that unfinished business is so trivial

[00:24:40] you have to wonder.

[00:24:41] A lady said yeah my husband came back

[00:24:44] and I was so happy to see him

[00:24:46] and he told me to make sure we got the storm windows

[00:24:49] that we had talked about before he died

[00:24:52] and then he never came back after that.

[00:24:55] It's like that's it?

[00:24:57] That's what you came back to say?

[00:25:00] Yeah.

[00:25:01] So I thought that hmm

[00:25:04] so there are ghosts with a purpose you know

[00:25:07] and traditionally in ghost stories

[00:25:09] they want to tell you where they've buried a treasure.

[00:25:12] I never get any of those darn it.

[00:25:15] Yeah, no kidding.

[00:25:17] We uh

[00:25:19] they also maybe want to see justice done

[00:25:23] reveal a murderer and that doesn't happen very often.

[00:25:26] I've never had that happen.

[00:25:29] Although there's a famous case in West Virginia

[00:25:32] Zona Shueh whose husband murdered her

[00:25:35] and she came to her mother

[00:25:37] and said he strangled me

[00:25:40] and they got a conviction

[00:25:42] on the basis of the ghost testimony.

[00:25:44] Interesting.

[00:25:46] But okay so they

[00:25:48] they have a reason to come back.

[00:25:50] Sometimes they just want to look in

[00:25:53] on a child or a grandchild.

[00:25:56] One woman said

[00:25:58] I looked up one night

[00:26:00] the baby was in the crib

[00:26:02] and there are my parents standing by

[00:26:04] the dead parents standing by the baby's crib

[00:26:07] and she made a noise

[00:26:09] and they turned around and said

[00:26:11] oops we woke her.

[00:26:13] We just wanted to see the baby

[00:26:15] and walked away and disappeared you know.

[00:26:17] So yeah they check in on people

[00:26:19] I've had other people say

[00:26:21] whenever I'm in trouble my grandfather

[00:26:23] comes back and pats me on the shoulder

[00:26:25] it's very comforting.

[00:26:27] That's beautiful, yeah.

[00:26:29] We lost my mom this time last year

[00:26:31] and my daughter often

[00:26:33] you know wonders you know

[00:26:35] what if grandma is you know

[00:26:37] she calls it ghost grandma.

[00:26:39] What if ghost grandma was around you know

[00:26:41] it's very sweet and I often wonder

[00:26:43] we haven't seen anything or heard anything

[00:26:45] to suggest that that's the case

[00:26:47] but I find that comforting.

[00:26:49] Yes it is comforting

[00:26:51] and sometimes they come back in dreams

[00:26:53] you know we think oh that's not them

[00:26:55] it's not a ghost

[00:26:57] but that's maybe the only way they can get through.

[00:26:59] I know

[00:27:01] my father-in-law passed away

[00:27:03] he would come and talk to me

[00:27:05] and he would sometimes have things

[00:27:07] he wanted my husband to hear

[00:27:09] and I'd say go tell him, go tell him yourself

[00:27:11] he'd say very sadly he can't hear me.

[00:27:13] Oh

[00:27:15] So

[00:27:17] I guess they have to find somebody

[00:27:19] that can hear them.

[00:27:21] Then you also have the videotape ghost

[00:27:23] the ones that just do the same thing

[00:27:25] over and over it's kind of like a tape loop

[00:27:27] there was

[00:27:29] the headless

[00:27:31] motorcyclist was like that

[00:27:33] you know you would honk your horn

[00:27:35] and it would race up the road

[00:27:37] and race up the road and race up the road so

[00:27:41] those are I don't really know what

[00:27:43] to think about that there's a

[00:27:45] theory called the stone tape where things are

[00:27:47] supposedly recorded in stone

[00:27:49] I can't imagine what the mechanism is

[00:27:51] other people say

[00:27:53] oh the iron and old nails

[00:27:55] somehow records things in old houses

[00:27:57] but I don't have

[00:27:59] the technical expertise to really say anything about that.

[00:28:02] I've heard of these things as well

[00:28:04] sort of like imprint in time

[00:28:07] sort of like the ones that are

[00:28:09] almost on a schedule

[00:28:11] like you can predict same time every day

[00:28:13] the figure of this woman walks

[00:28:15] the staircase or whatever

[00:28:17] but yeah it does seem that there is

[00:28:19] a difference between

[00:28:21] that phenomenon and then

[00:28:23] sort of the more intelligent hauntings

[00:28:25] where there are

[00:28:27] as you said figures who are interacting

[00:28:29] with the living.

[00:28:31] Right it's definitely a different

[00:28:33] type of spirit apparently

[00:28:35] because sometimes you'll just see

[00:28:37] things and they're just going

[00:28:39] through their own lives

[00:28:41] and they don't see you, they don't hear you

[00:28:43] they don't sense you in any way.

[00:28:47] Yeah it is very interesting

[00:28:49] and speaking of interesting

[00:28:51] since

[00:28:53] writing about some of these hauntings

[00:28:55] specifically in Ohio

[00:28:57] and the surrounding area

[00:28:59] you've kind of moved down a little bit more broadly to

[00:29:01] one of my favorite historical eras

[00:29:03] you've written a bit on

[00:29:05] the Victorian era which I find

[00:29:07] to be a very interesting

[00:29:09] period of time because it's sort of right before

[00:29:11] the big wave of technology

[00:29:13] hits at the turn of the century

[00:29:15] and yet there are still

[00:29:17] society is still sort of

[00:29:19] more modernized but yet

[00:29:21] they still believe in things like spiritualism

[00:29:23] and there's still a sense

[00:29:25] of sort of magic in society

[00:29:27] so I've always been kind of fascinated

[00:29:29] with it and the other fascinating thing

[00:29:31] is as you talk about in your

[00:29:33] newer books the fact that

[00:29:35] in those days it was not uncommon

[00:29:37] for someone to report to like their local

[00:29:39] newspaper hey I've experienced

[00:29:41] a strange paranormal thing and then

[00:29:43] they print it in the newspaper so we have

[00:29:45] this treasure trove

[00:29:47] of historical information

[00:29:49] and you've collected a lot of that

[00:29:51] in a couple of these books here

[00:29:53] Yes I love

[00:29:55] getting historic newspaper

[00:29:57] ghost stories because there's

[00:29:59] so many interesting

[00:30:01] details about society

[00:30:03] or about crime

[00:30:05] or about just local interactions

[00:30:09] in some cases you'll find

[00:30:11] that there are rivalries

[00:30:13] between cities

[00:30:15] and they're always talking trash

[00:30:17] about each other's ghosts

[00:30:19] or being skeptical about

[00:30:21] oh yeah you've got the gum shoe man

[00:30:23] well we've got

[00:30:25] so and so

[00:30:27] it really is interesting to

[00:30:29] find these

[00:30:31] it's very ephemeral stuff

[00:30:33] it's things that

[00:30:35] exist nowhere else unless

[00:30:37] you happen to run across the family

[00:30:39] or the descendants of the people

[00:30:41] in the story who you could

[00:30:43] ask did your grandmother

[00:30:45] really experience this

[00:30:47] and that would be quite

[00:30:49] a feat to be able to track those folks

[00:30:51] down but

[00:30:53] yeah you find patterns

[00:30:55] like the women in black

[00:30:57] that's one of my favorite characters

[00:30:59] in the 19th century Victorian

[00:31:01] ghost world

[00:31:03] and we have a lot of them in Ohio

[00:31:05] but they also clustered around

[00:31:07] the coal mining regions in Pennsylvania

[00:31:09] these were

[00:31:11] women dressed in widows

[00:31:13] clothing with a veil usually

[00:31:15] over their face

[00:31:17] they were often described as

[00:31:19] unnaturally tall

[00:31:21] and they would leap at people

[00:31:23] or they would attack people

[00:31:25] or they would just flip through the dark

[00:31:27] and scare people and you could never catch them

[00:31:29] and

[00:31:31] people would go out with posseys

[00:31:33] and guns trying to hunt

[00:31:35] down whatever this creature

[00:31:37] was that was

[00:31:39] was flipping through the dark

[00:31:41] and they never seemed to catch them

[00:31:43] I think well is this somebody just playing a prank

[00:31:45] because there were people who liked

[00:31:47] going out hoaxing

[00:31:49] ghosts causing a ghost panic

[00:31:51] but

[00:31:53] if you knew you were going to be shot in the dark

[00:31:55] or shot at you know I think

[00:31:57] you'd maybe cool it for a while

[00:31:59] but

[00:32:01] it's quite

[00:32:03] a pattern that you

[00:32:05] find and one

[00:32:07] of them I remember from the New York

[00:32:09] an insane

[00:32:11] asylum this woman was

[00:32:13] one of the matrons was walking through

[00:32:15] a tunnel

[00:32:17] to her next place

[00:32:19] of where she was going to work

[00:32:21] and she hears a noise behind her of rustling

[00:32:23] cloth and she turns around

[00:32:25] and there's this

[00:32:27] hideously white faced

[00:32:29] woman dressed all in black with her

[00:32:31] veil thrown back and she's just

[00:32:33] so menacing

[00:32:35] and she came out of nowhere

[00:32:37] and then she disappears into

[00:32:39] nowhere so

[00:32:41] they're just one of my favorites

[00:32:43] I'd love to write just a book about them

[00:32:45] except there's so many

[00:32:47] similar stories

[00:32:49] there's another one that hisses

[00:32:51] at people another one

[00:32:53] in New Orleans where the man

[00:32:55] heard a noise in the corner

[00:32:57] of his room and struck a match

[00:32:59] and she's crouched in the corner

[00:33:01] yeah

[00:33:03] no thank you

[00:33:05] no thank you

[00:33:07] if that's in your house that's okay

[00:33:09] just not in my house

[00:33:11] I make a point of not living in a haunted house

[00:33:13] yes

[00:33:15] oh goodness

[00:33:17] yeah one of the interesting things too

[00:33:19] that I think about that time period is that

[00:33:21] the individuals who are

[00:33:23] writing in and submitting these stories to newspapers

[00:33:25] are sort of average citizens

[00:33:27] and a lot of them as you point out

[00:33:29] in the book start out by saying listen

[00:33:31] I'm not crazy this is what I experienced

[00:33:33] so you have doctors

[00:33:35] in sorts of manner of individuals

[00:33:37] writing in and submitting these

[00:33:39] and they always say I'm not superstitious

[00:33:41] but

[00:33:43] this happened to me because

[00:33:45] to be superstitious was to be

[00:33:47] ignorant or uneducated

[00:33:49] and they like to say that other

[00:33:51] people were that

[00:33:53] but they knew the truth

[00:33:55] and this really happened yeah wonderful

[00:33:57] stories

[00:33:59] there were also ghost story

[00:34:01] contests where

[00:34:03] people would write in and they would award

[00:34:05] a prize that we had one in Dayton

[00:34:07] in 1914

[00:34:09] over 800 entries

[00:34:11] now some of them were just

[00:34:13] standard

[00:34:15] like the Hitchhiker story

[00:34:17] that they told as if it happened to them

[00:34:19] and I was really disappointed

[00:34:21] that one of those urban legend type

[00:34:23] stories actually won the prize

[00:34:25] it's like oh that's cheating

[00:34:27] so many other stories were really

[00:34:29] really good ones but

[00:34:31] what can you do

[00:35:01] to get your support

[00:35:03] we'll be back next week

[00:35:05] with part 2 to wrap up the conversation

[00:35:07] that I had with legendary

[00:35:09] author Chris Woodyard

[00:35:11] and that will do it for this season

[00:35:13] but we are working on

[00:35:15] all new episodes and all new topics

[00:35:17] and we will be back before too long with season 5

[00:35:19] so fear not

[00:35:21] if you have any particular

[00:35:23] guests or topics you'd like us to cover

[00:35:25] feel free to reach out to us on social media

[00:35:27] and

[00:35:29] we'll be happy to try to make that happen

[00:35:31] so thanks so much for all your support

[00:35:33] we'll be back next week and until then

[00:35:35] you've been listening to From

[00:35:37] The Void

[00:36:29] you