Haunted Happenings at Work: Largo, Florida

My sister Reenie is a mammogram and x-ray technician in a facility in the Largo area of Florida.  Reenie has had her own personal experiences with the paranormal, so while she isn’t a gullible sort, she does keep an open mind.

One of her co-workers, Maddie, started complaining during the down time in their work day that she thought her adult son, from whom she is estranged, was breaking into her home and moving her things around to mess with her. My sister and the other technicians pooh-poohed this idea and told Maddie that she was probably moving the things herself and just not remembering where she put them.  Maddie was adamant, however.  She lived alone, without even any pets, and she was a  bit OCD about putting things back in their assigned places throughout her house.  For instance, her remote control went on a small end table that was between her sofa and her recliner. Her keys were kept on a hook in her kitchen. Maddie explained that her son, a former Special Forces member, knew how meticulous she was, and that she would notice the small changes that occurred whenever she left the house. Early in their estrangement, he had broken into her previous home just to prove to her that he could. It had been some time since those days, but apparently he was back to his old tricks, she said. Sometimes, she was only gone a half an hour to run to the store, but when she returned, something was typically out of place. Reenie just told her  it sounded like she had a ghost. Maddie was not amused. She vowed to catch her son in the act.

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What’s It Like Living in a Haunted House?

Edwin Gonzalez’s wife Lillian is the one who fell in love with the home.

“Since she was a little girl, she’s always wanted a Victorian,” he explained. It was Thanksgiving 2008 and Lillian’s sister sent her the Gardner, MA listing. Three days later, Edwin and Lillian went to see the home.

“The minute we walked in, we felt like we were going back in time,” Gonzalez said. “Lillian said, ‘This is mine!’ It was a dream home, really, it’s very charming. It calls you in.”

They bought the home and moved in about six months later. That’s when they started hearing rumors about the stately Victorian. Apparently, their dream home was haunted.

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Gettysburg, PA: The Devil’s Den

Devils Den, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (c1909) – Location of intensive fighting on Day 2 (July 2, 1863) of the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War.
Photo Courtesy of the Library of Congress Archives.

I’ve been to the Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania twice (so far) in my lifetime. Once in 1999 with my family and again in 2005 with my old, college roommates at my insistence. Both times, I’ve really enjoyed myself there. The historical significance of the Gettysburg Battlefield alone is really inspiring. And, of course, the ample graveyards and ghost stories really made me feel at home.

You have to spend at least a day in Gettysburg. The battlefield is so extensive it takes a whole day to do a self guided car tour– if you see everything from Iverson’s Pits, the Roundtops, the Devil’s Den, the Triangular Field, and Culp’s Hill (among other places). The visitor centers, cemeteries, and museums are really engaging too. Probably the most notable thing about this battlefield is the documentation of the battle and the National Park’s efforts to restore the battlefield to how it looked those three fateful days in 1863. In the years since I’ve been to Gettysburg, they’ve removed trees where there were none and planted trees and orchards where they once stood. Something about the atmosphere and the terrible amounts of men who met their untimely demise on the field of battle in Gettysburg calls to the dead– though the official park stance on the paranormal is that they have no stance on the paranormal.

The Anatomy of Ghosts by Andrew Taylor

They say Jerusalem College, Cambridge, is haunted by Mrs Whichcote’s ghost. In 1786, Frank Oldershaw claims he saw her in the garden, where she drowned. Now he’s under the care of a physician. Desperate to salvage her son’s reputation and restore him to health, Lady Anne Oldershaw employs her own agent – John Holdsworth, author of The Anatomy of Ghosts, a controversial attack on the existence of ghostly phenomena. But his arrival in Cambridge disrupts the uneasy status quo. He glimpses a world of privilege and abuse, where the sinister Holy Ghost Club governs life at Jerusalem more effectively than the Master, Dr Carbury, ever could. 

But Holdsworth’s powers of reason and his knowledge of natural philosophy have other challenges. He dreams of his dead wife, Maria, who roams the borders of death. Now there’s Elinor, the very-much-alive Master’s wife, to haunt him in life. And at the heart of it all is the mystery of what really happened to Sylvia Whichcote in the claustrophobic confines of Jerusalem. Why was Sylvia found lying dead in the Long Pond just before a February dawn? And how did she die? Indeed, why was she at Jerusalem, living or dead, in the first place?

 

I discovered this gem of a book on our library’s website while looking for books to listen to while walking at night. While it is listed on Good Reads as a paranormal/ghost story, the existence – or non-existence – of ghosts in this story is simply the backdrop for a good old fashioned mystery. John Holdsworth spends his time in search of the more reasonable explanation for what Frank Oldershaw witnessed in the garden and does so in the end. Although there are a few threads of the plot which are left unresolved, they are but minor bits to the over-all mystery which is solved very reasonably.

 

Haunted Ireland: Dublin’s Haunted History Tour

Dublin Street at Night

I am happy to report that I visited Ireland for the first time in November 2012.  I took a very short, action packed trip to Dublin, and of course, I had to hit up the local ghost tour.  Hidden Dublin Walks is the company that I patronized for my tour.  Their company offers a smorgasborg of historical and paranormal tours.  I was hoping to get two under my belt while I was there, but sadly only got to enjoy one.  Let me tell you a little about a couple of the tours that I missed before I highlight the tour that I did take, the Haunted History Tour.

Hidden Dublin is the only tour group that takes tour groups to the site of Dublin’s Hellfire Club annex.  In the 1700’s the Hellfire Club used to meet in a hunting lodge located a short jaunt out of Dublin in the Dublin Mountains.  (As mountains go, I don’t think they actually qualify, but they are still lovely.) As is common in the Hellfire Clubs that were once located throughout the UK, this branch is said to have participated in orgies, rapes, animal sacrifice and satanic rituals to name but a few of their “entertainments”. The building was mysteriously destroyed by fire whist the Hellfire Club still leased it.  Since then there have been all manners of disturbing paranormal occurrences that have taken place there.  I would tell you about them, but alas, the tour seems only to be offered on Thursdays and I was not in Ireland on a Thursday.  Otherwise I would have been “in like Flynn”, because of all the tours that Hidden Dublin offers, THIS one was the one I wanted to go on the most!

The Northside Ghost Walk takes you on a tour north of the River Liffey in the oldest part of Dublin, which was built on the site of the former Viking settlement. This tour seems to be pretty incredible. It tells you the tale of St. Michan’s church and its crypts filled with mummified corpses…now on display for the macabre-minded tourists.  (Funny side note here…when I was in Dublin, I was heading to the Jameson Distillery and St. Michan’s is a literal stone’s throw away from the Distillery.  I was very excited to get the chance to tour the famous crypts, but sadly the site was closed when we arrived. The mysteriously vague sign posted on the gate said “Closed due to unforeseen circumstances”…which of course had me envisioning the mummified corpses all rising up from their coffins to protest their post-mortem careers as tourist fodder.) During the Northside tour you also visit Croppie’s acre, the site of a mass grave filled with the bodies of hundreds of rebels who were put to death after trying unsuccessfully to fight for Irish independence during the 1798 Rebellion. Hanging judges, haunted hospitals, tales of murders and murderers all round out this walking tour, which is said to be the scariest tour in Dublin.  I still plan on taking this tour (and the Hellfire tour) when I go back to Dublin again!

The tour that I did take was the Haunted History tour, and it began just around the corner from Dublin Castle, which was the seat of English rule in Ireland for almost eight hundred years.  As Americans, we recognize the name ‘Lord Cornwallis’ as the English General who surrendered to our General Washington in Yorktown, VA.  But some time after the American Revolution he was made Viceroy of Ireland, where he was King George’s regent during the aforementioned 1798 Rebellion.  Cornwallis had no sympathies with the rebels and oversaw the execution of so many of them, it is reported that the first floor windows of Dublin Castle had the light blocked out of them by the piles of corpses in the Castle’s courtyard. The amount of history in Dublin Castle is phenomenal…it was built upon the even older site of a Viking fortification, the remains of which can still be viewed in the lower regions of the Castle.  The Presidency of the Council of the European Union is held by Ireland at the moment, as of January 2013 and Dublin Castle continues to be used for official state affairs, adding to its already extensive historical dossier.

The tour guide wove us through the winding streets and alleys of Dublin, sharing tales of the Hellfire Club (which used to meet in town before they got wise and moved to the privacy of their mountainside hunting lodge), Jonathan Swift who, in addition to being a famous author, was the dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the infamous fish monger Molly Malone who sold seafood by day…and perhaps something else by night.

I can’t retell all of the stories here, but I will light on two of my favorites. The first one had to do with a cryptkeeper of Christchurch Cathedral who was not so enamored of his job; he felt he didn’t make enough of a salary. During that time, Dublin had strict drinking laws, the pubs had to close around midnight and apparently there were a fair amount of Dubliners who wanted to keep carousing after the Witching Hour had passed. So the cryptkeeper got the ingenious idea to open a drinking club in the crypt. It worked great all summer….the authorities never suspected a thing and the subterranean club stayed nice and cool.  The inhabitants of the crypt didn’t complain about the after hours visitors and everyone was happy.  When the weather got colder though, the crypt wasn’t an enjoyable place to throw back a brew or two, and business was dead (pun intended).  The next year, the cryptkeeper got smart; he operated the afterhours bar all summer and closed up shop once the autumn started turning towards winter.  The last night of operations for the year he locked everything up nice and tight and left the crypt until the following spring (not a very attentive cryptkeeper, but as I said, he didn’t like his job very much). Come the spring, he opened the crypt to get place spruced back up for business and he was horrified to find a skeleton lying against the door.  Around the skeleton were the smaller skeletons of dozens of rats. The remains of a soldier’s uniform, lay chewed into bits among the man’s bones.  Apparently, the man had been a soldier at nearby Dublin Castle and had abandoned his post the last night of the bar’s operations the previous autumn to go tie one on amongst the coffins. He must have gotten dead drunk and passed out in the recesses of the crypt and didn’t hear the last call, or the bar being emptied for the season.  When he came to, he was in the pitch black, locked in with no way out.  His regiment at the Castle put out a warrant for his arrest, as he was considered AWOL, but he never turned up…until the next spring.  He had died during the winter either due to exposure or starvation and his corpse had been consumed by the hungry rats, thus leaving only the skeleton to greet the cryptkeeper at his return. The rats had in turn died from cold or starvation. To this day, there are reports of passerbys hearing desperate pounding and muffled calls coming from the crypt’s entrance in the wee hours of the morning. Poor man…in a roundabout way, he drank himself to death.

My second favorite story is not my favorite because of the tale.  Indeed, the tale is pretty gruesome and lacking the element of dark humor present in the cryptkeeper’s tale.  The story is about “Darky Kelly”, a beautiful prostitute turned madam who ran a highly successful bordello just a block or two up from the river.  The madam, who was after all the boss, didn’t need to turn tricks anymore, but she did have one regular client who was the sheriff, or at least some type of respected official.  She became pregnant with his child and he began to fear what would happen to his reputation and his career if it was discovered that he had a lovechild with a common prostitute.  So he started a rumor that Kelly was a witch, and that was how she was getting the good men of Dublin to leave their wives and patronize her scandalous bordello.  The rumor was spread with such virulence and hatred that it ultimately inflamed a group of church going women to raid the bordello, grab Kelly by her hair and drag her down the street to St. Audoen’s where they had an impromptu trial there in the churchyard.   Unsurprisingly, they found her guilty and burned her alive right there and then.  This is really a very tragic story and is only one of my favorites because as the guide was telling us the tale, I took a photograph from up on the churchyard steps, looking down towards the entrance gate through which they had dragged Darky Kelly.  There was an orb in the right corner next to the gate.  Not being a big believer in orbs, I disregarded it for the moment.  Very shortly after I took the picture, the tour guide went on to say that the apparition of Kelly was often spotted just inside the gate. One of the other participants of the tour remarked to the tour guide that he kept looking towards the corner on the right side of the gate, expecting to see someone there and the tour guide revealed that it was that specific corner to which the apparition was often seen retreating. Sooo, the orb picture has a little more meaning for me now.  I’m not saying that the orb I caught was poor Darky Kelly…but it sure is one of the coolest souvenirs I brought back from Ireland.

Ireland is a land that is dripping with the paranormal.  My ancestry is there, so I love the country no matter what…but with all of its banshees, little people, faeries, elementals, ghosts and other spirit beings, I would love the country even if there wasn’t a drop of green blood running through my veins.  If you’re ever planning a trip to Dublin, check out the Hidden Dublin website and choose the tour that would most interest you!