HOME |
RSS | 
A talking weasel on the Isle of Man was an international media sensation back in the 1930s. It was known as “the Dalby Spook” locally, but the weasel called itself Gef. The weasel -or possibly a mongoose- lived on the farm of James and Margaret Irving.
The strange events began in autumn 1931, when the Irvings noticed an unusual animal in their farmyard, being, as Price’s correspondent described: “similar in appearance to a weasel, with small body, long bushy tail, flat nose, and yellow in colour”.[3] Oddly, this animal did not appear to alarm the chickens. Later, it was seen inside the house, as James Irving described: “This eerie weasel, as I thought he might be, then began to keep us awake at night by blowing, spitting and growling behind the matchboard partition of the lower rooms…”[4]
The entity quickly progressed to something more sophisticated. Having learned to mimic various animal noises, it then began to repeat nursery rhymes, and within a short while – having built up a sufficiently wide vocabulary – it could converse with the family. Its voice is said to have been loud, clear, and one or two octaves higher than a human’s. Other witnesses describe it as a “very high, screechy sort”.[5]
Initial news reports spoke of the ‘man-weasel’ farm,[6] and indeed, the entity itself, when asked who or what he was, would frequently reply: “I am the ghost of a weasel, and I will haunt you with weird noises and clanking chains.”[7] It was only later on that he described himself as “just a little extra, extra clever mongoose”.[8]
Newspapers printed stories about Gef, although when reporters visited the farm, he tended to disappear. Some considered him a poltergeist or a shape-shifter. It was later thought that the Irving’s teenage daughter, Voirrey, provided the voice of Gef, but she never admitted to a hoax. Link
Atlas Obscura is running a series called the 31 Days of Halloween on their blog. One post tells how made-up ghost stories can lead to frightening real stories of graveyard shenanigans, as happened at London’s fashionable Highgate Cemetery in the 1970s.
Though the details are a bit murky, it began with reports of a “creature” in the graveyard. The story was likely generated by one of the two main players in the incident magicians / exorcists / full-on maniacs Seán Manchester and David Farrant. Eventually the story became that it was a vampire (a Transylvanian prince brought to the cemetery in the 1800s) and Manchester and Farrant both vowed to hunt down and kill the beast. (They also pronounced each other charlatans.)
As described in the (not to be fully trusted) book Beyond the Grave, “many claimed to see a particular creature hovering over the graves. Scores of ‘vampire hunters’ regularly converged on the graveyard in the dead of night. Tombs were broken open and bodies were mutilated with wooden stakes driven into their chests. These stolen corpses, turning up in strange places, continuously startled local residents. One horrified neighbor to the cemetery discovered a headless body propped behind the steering wheel of his car one morning!”
Read the whole story at Atlas Obscura. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Leo Reynolds)
Comments Off
I know a lot of people don’t believe in ghosts, but for those who do believe (or are undecided about their existence), this great Oddee article features 10 ghost pictures and recordings that are certain to be accepted by the believers and debated by the skeptics. What do you guys think? Are ghosts fact or fiction?
This French video shows an interview with a clairvoyant. The word clairvoyant comes from the French words for “see clearly”. -via Arbroath
There have been about 200 reported cases of spontaneous human combustion reported in history, in which a person was killed by a fire that could not be explained otherwise. What happened? And is there a scientific explanation for these cases?
The earliest case of SHC that we know of today comes from a Danish anatomist named Thomas Bartholin who in 1663 described an occurrence in Paris where a woman was burnt completely to ashes in her sleep while the straw mattress upon which she was laying remained unmarred by the flames that had consumed her. Since the reporting of this case of spontaneous human combustion to the whole of the European community, many others have been recorded in history. Yet, they tend to have a similar pattern in the resulting accounts. The victim is generally found almost completely consumed by a then died out fire in his or her home or place of residence.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
A radio at the Montrose Air Station Heritage Center in Scotland has been picking up radio broadcasts from the WWII era.
The vintage radio set is kept in a recreation of a 1940s room. Several people have heard Second World War era broadcasts including the big band sound of the Glenn Miller orchestra and speeches by Winston Churchill. The broadcasts come on at random and can last for up to half an hour…
“It plays Glenn Miller, and that’s what everyone has heard. It is very faint and you have to put your ear to it, but that’s what it’s playing.
“It’s not just one of us who’s heard it – most of us here have. We are talking about highly educated, reliable people.
“My wife Aileen was with me when we heard the Glenn Miller Orchestra last weekend. She’s a physicist and not predisposed to believing in things like this but no-one has an explanation.
The fact that the radio is not plugged in will cause some people to be skeptical, and assume that an audio device has been hidden inside the radio case. However…
Technicians who examined it removed the back, but found “nothing but cobwebs and spiders”.
So there.
Link. RAF Heritage Center website.
Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire, England {wiki} was home to Cistercian monks from the year 1204 to 1538. But there are many who say the monks are still there! And why not? After all, it’s a beautiful place.
Michael Sedgwick, who was research director of the Montagu Motor Museum at Beaulieu Abbey, England, had been working into the small hours one night before Christmas in 1959. His office was thick with tobacco smoke. Throwing open a window to clear the air; he heard the chanting of a Catholic mass!
“It came in uneven waves, as if from a faulty wireless,” he said. “It was so beautiful that I tried to find it on my own wireless…and I couldn’t.”
(image credit: Flickr user Pgd)
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
One family mourned the death of a daughter. Another family welcomed a new daughter. A few years later, Mary Lurancy Vennum "became" the deceased Mary Roth! Was it a case of multiple personality, reincarnation, a haunting, or just wishful thinking?
Mary Roff had died in July 1865 at the age of 18, having suffered from fits throughout her life. It now seemed to Roff that his daughter had returned from the grave and taken over Lurancy’s body. Indeed, Lurancy was giving every sign of being Mary Roff and was constantly pleading to be allowed to go home to her parents.
On February 11 “Mary Roff” moved to the Roff household. For three months she behave exactly as if she were the dead daughter of the Roffs’ immediately recognizing friends, relatives, clothes, and belongings. She also remembered scores of events from her past, many of which had occurred up to 25 years before. When the Vennums visited, “Mary Roff” behaved as if Lurancy reemerged.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by MrGhaz.
One of the most eerie historical mysteries of all time is that of the strange disappearance of the three ligthouse keepers of Eilean Mor. Some even think they might have been abducted by a giant bird or squid… and, of course, by aliens. Others say they have gone mad and murdered each other. And then there is of course the theory of a very local tsunami on the west coast of Scotland…
The Flannan Islands had been marked by superstition from the time they were named for the obscure Saint Flan. It was said that the “Phantoms of the Seven Hunters” so resented the intrusion of the lighthouse that they lured the men over the cliff to their death…
As a matter of fact, Ducat did not want to be stationed at Eilean Mor. He seemed to have had some sort of a premonition and said it was “not the most suitable place for a man with a young family”.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Your Favorite Ghostwriter.
Check out this award winning short film (it’s only 3 minutes long). It’s a nice shoutout to the gothic horror films of the 20s and 30s. Simple but effective.
Plot Synopsis:
A leasing agent prepares an apartment with a mysterious past for an
afternoon viewing. While awaiting the arrival of the prospective client
the leasing agent learns that she’s not alone in the apartment.
– via fightingowlfilms
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Gukbe2000.
Avid I Met a Possum readers (Hi mom and Jennifer!) already know that a few friends and I took it upon ourselves to investigate the Lizzie Borden house in Fall River, Mass., last weekend. We had such a blast that we’ve decided to return to the area in the fall (preferably October) to do a whole Haunted New England kind of thing. So I was doing a little research on what is in the area and found a handy little list of paranormal locations in the States. I was pretty surprised to see how many hospitals made the list. I guess I shouldn’t be – it’s very House on Haunted Hill (the 1999 version with Geoffrey Rush, not the 1959 Vincent Price film). Obviously some terrible things were done to patients before modern medicine intervened, so it’s not too off-base to think that some tortured spirits are still lurking about.
Below are a few of the (allegedly) haunted hospitals I found most intriguing – hopefully you will too.
Fairfield State Hospital (AKA Fairfield Hills)
photo from fairfieldstatehospital.com
Despite their best efforts, the city of Newtown, Connecticut has been unable to squelch Fairfield State Hospital’s eerie reputation. Then again, they have allowed it to be used for several decidedly spooky shoots, including Sleepers and MTV’s Fear.
The asylum has been in Newtown since 1931, but most of its buildings have been standing empty for the past 13 years. At its peak period of operations, it housed almost 4,000 patients.
Fueling the scary stories is the fact that its numerous buildings are all connected by underground tunnels. Were these simply for transporting patients during bad weather, or was it an easier way to dispose of dead bodies?
Glenn Dale Hospital
photo from The Glenn Dale Hospital Mission
Glenn Dale opened in the same era as Fairfield State – the 1930s was a popular time for mental institutes, apparently. Well, actually, Glenn Dale wasn’t originally used for that purpose – it was a tuberculosis hospital with one building for adults and one for children. Eventually the tuberculosis problem died down and Glenn Dale was repurposed. It closed in 1982 due to asbestos and structural problems, but before it closed it was (supposedly) home to the criminally insane. As with Fairfield State, the buildings are connected via underground passageways, which people have been exploring since the day Glenn Dale officially closed its doors.
Exploration might not be the best idea, though, and not just because of the asbestos (although that should be an obvious deterrent). One rumor says that when the hospital closed, the remaining patients were just turned loose. Having nowhere else to go, many of them simply broke back into the abandoned buildings and lurk there even today.
Another story goes that a police officer went to check out the buildings himself after getting a call that the buildings were being vandalized by a bunch of kids. After he went in, someone in the vicinity heard gun shots and called the police. When the police arrived, they found the first officer standing in one of the rooms, staring straight ahead at nothing. He had emptied his gun firing at something that no one ever found.
Norwich State hospital
photo from creepyconnecticut.net
Connecticut is a popular spot for haunted hospitals, I guess, because Norwich State Hospital can be found in Preston and Norwich, Conn. Oh, and guess what else? More underground tunnels. The mental hospital was built in 1904 and had 151 patients the very day it opened. By the 1960s, the hospital reached a record high of 3,186 patients.
Perhaps piggybacking off of the success of MTV’s Fear, VH1 sent contestants of the Celebrity Paranormal Project here but didn’t quite represent the place accurately: they fixed old, coverless couch cushions to the walls in a small room and told the celebrities that it was an old padded cell for the truly disturbed patients when in reality such a room never existed.
Waverly Hills Sanatorium
photo from ConspiracyofHappiness on Flickr
Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky, has been called the most haunted place in the U.S. Some reports put the number of deaths that occurred at this tuberculosis hospital at more than 60,000. While I had some problems digging up ghost stories from some of these allegedly haunted sites, stories from the Waverly Hills Sanatorium are plentiful.
When WHS opened in 1926, it was considered the most advanced TB hospital in the world. Still, at the time, not much was known about the disease and how to treat it, so a lot of the treatments were extremely experimental – these patients were more or less guinea pigs. Lots of them exited the hospital via the “body chute”, a tunnel that led from the hospital to railroad tracks that allowed for discreet corpse disposal.
In addition to the dying tuberculosis patients, at least two nurses committed suicide at Waverly. In 1928, the 29-year-old head nurse, pregnant and unwed, hanged herself in the nurses’ station. In 1932, another nurse who worked in the same room leapt off of the balcony to her death several stories down.
Creepy stories include a chef who still walks the kitchens (you can tell he’s present when you smell freshly baked bread), apparitions of a woman with chains around her arms and legs and blood dripping from her wrists, ghostly children wandering about and eerie red glows.
Troy Taylor, a paranormal author, visited Waverly Hills with Louisville Ghost Hunter founder Keith Age and experienced plenty of paranormal activity. In Troy’s own words,
“Keith was standing in the corner, looking at the changes on the meter scale, when an empty plastic soda bottle came seemingly out of nowhere and struck him in the back. As he turned to see what had happened, an overhead fluorescent light fixture suddenly came loose from the ceiling with a loud crack. With one end of it still anchored to the ceiling, the other end swung loose and hit Keith in the side of the head. The long burned-out bulb that remained in the fixture shattered when it collided with Keith and showered him with glass. Before he even had time to react, he heard the sound of a brick scrape across the concrete floor. The noise came from the opposite corner of the room and when he looked over, he saw the brick moving across the floor towards him. With a lurch, it shot directly at him and as he scrambled to get out of the line of fire, it hit him in the small of the back. Needless to say, he quickly retreated from the room. The other investigators had not seen where the brick or the soda bottle had come from, but they had clearly heard the brick move and had seen both objects strike Keith.”
You can read more about Keith and Troy’s experiences at PrairieGhosts.com.
Athens Lunatic Asylum
Giving Waverly a run for the “Most Haunted Abandoned Hospital in the United States” title is the Athens Lunatic Asylum in Athens, Ohio. After opening its doors in 1874, many of its first patients were Civil War veterans suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.
What has proved to be one of the most enduring stories from the Asylum occurred more than 100 years after its grand opening, however: on December 1, 1978, a patient named Margaret Schilling disappeared from one of the active wards. They found her body more than a month later in the top floor of ward N. 20, which had been abandoned for years.
The official cause of death was heart failure–probably due to her exposure to the December cold in an unheated section of the hospital. Her death isn’t the weird part, though – what’s weird is that her body left a stain that you can still see today.
photo from forgottenoh.com
One of the reasons ALA makes the Most Haunted Places in the U.S. list is because of its strange location. If you draw a line from each of the five cemeteries around Athens, the shape ends up being a pentagram with Ohio University being right in the middle, which is where ALA is located. I couldn’t actually find a map that backed this theory up, though – does anyone have one?
Like I said, there are a surprisingly large number of abandoned hospitals and asylums scattered across the country. Are there any in your town? Let’s hear your stories!
