Every US National Park is Apparently Haunted

The United States National Parks system is a stunning system of over 85 million acres of natural wonders, attracting millions of visitors from across the world every single year. Within the parks, you can find a cavalcade of unique animals, plants and monuments. But there's a stranger side to all this wilderness: according to centuries worth of legends, the parks are also home to ghosts. Join Ben, Matt and Noel to learn more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel.

Speaker 3 (00:31):
They call me Ben.

Speaker 4 (00:33):
We're joined as always with our super producer Paul, Mission
Control decand most importantly, you are here. That makes this
the stuff they don't want you to know, coming to
you live from various places, emphasis on live, which will
be important later in the show. One of the most
amazing things about our imperfect country, the United States, is

(00:55):
no fooling, it's national parks. It's a huge, huge country,
and a lot of it is dedicated to wildlife. And
I think we've all had that experience when you talk
to someone who's not from the US and they're like, Hey,
we're gonna land in New York. What are you doing
this weekend? Oh, we thought we'd drive over to Chicago.

Speaker 3 (01:15):
All right.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Yeah, there's so many amazing national parks in the western
side of the contiguous United States. I've not done extensive
traveling over there, but man, it makes me want to
just exist on that side of the country for a
while just to see the parks.

Speaker 5 (01:32):
Well, I'll tell you who has done that to a
great degree is a friend of the show, Alex Williams,
who has posted up in many a national park in
that and other parts of the country.

Speaker 6 (01:42):
He is a bit of an outdoorsman.

Speaker 4 (01:44):
I love it, I love it and a huge fan
of maps as well. Check out his show Ephemeral, which
in my mind proves what podcast can be and can do.
You also, a spoiler, might hear some familiar voices in
those episodes. Now we have been fortunate to explore some,
but by no means all, of the US national parks

(02:05):
in person, and they're absolutely worth it. The US is
vast to a degree, it's still filled with wild country,
and it's home to so much amazing flora and fauna.
Yet depending upon whom you ask, these national parks may
also be home to something else ghost. Let's begin the tour.
Here are the facts. We won't spend too much time

(02:27):
on this, but it's important to know the history of
national parks.

Speaker 6 (02:31):
That's right.

Speaker 5 (02:31):
The story of the National parks system officially begins back
in March of eighteen hundred and seventy one, when Congress
created the Yellowstone National Park and the what was then
territories of Montana and Wyoming under the control of the
Secretary of the Interior. So I've always found to be
a bit of a perplexing concept, the interior of what

(02:54):
like everything within the United States.

Speaker 6 (02:56):
I don't know, it's a weird one, but what are
you gonna do?

Speaker 5 (03:00):
And this was as a benefit for the public, the
idea of you know, having green spaces where people can
hang out and maintaining them.

Speaker 4 (03:09):
Yeah, son, gone are the days of you know, the
European royal reserves. Right, Like back in Europe, under various monarchies,
the king or the crown would have their own hunting
lands and peasants could be executed for venturing onto these grounds.
So it's a big step to say, hey, we were
keeping this green space for everyone.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
Well except for the indigenous peoples prior to that, right,
and even some homeowners that you know, people who had
moved west especially and kind of staked their own land.
And then somebody came through and said, actually, this is
part of our thing now, so you've got to go, you.

Speaker 5 (03:51):
Guys, I was about to say, I recently kind of
started thinking about the idea of how much we take
for granted, the idea of land, you know, owning land,
who does the land belong to? Luckily, I guess through
a lot of convoluted legal practices and documents and things
like that, we've more or less sorted that out. People
can't just come and plant a flag in your yard,

(04:13):
but there was a time where that would come and
you would pay the blood price.

Speaker 4 (04:18):
And litigation continues today with various Native American communities who
are regaining control of land that was repeatedly stolen from them.
This is simply an historical fact, and I think it's
also very American for there to be these beautiful ideas
and writing and concept with ugly real world practices behind them.

(04:41):
I mean, what happened, as imperfect and at times evil
as it was, is that the creation of Yellowstone led
to a global movement to create, maintain, and if needed,
protect national parks. And that protection clause becomes ever more
important as industry starts coming in and saying things like, hey,

(05:04):
we'll sponsor this park, and all we want in exchange
is the mineral rights you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (05:12):
Well, yeah, or a little chunk of we want to
have access to a little chunk of land to do
our thing, and you can you all keep the rest.
We don't want that. We just need this one area
because there's lots of copper.

Speaker 4 (05:23):
Over here, so we'd all us Yeah, we'd also like
a right to renegotiate this based on what we find.

Speaker 3 (05:31):
You know, every two to five years.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
Well we still see stuff. We talked about it pretty
recently with when huge car manufacturers are trying to expand
or something, and that practice of just deciding, well, actually
we kind of need where we need the stuff that
you're occupying right now, Like that whole thing, we need that,
so we're going to use the laws to take it.

Speaker 3 (05:52):
Our domain is imminent. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
Yeah, And Ben, I don't think this. I really like
where you're going here with the positive side of national
parks because I think for me personally, national parks are
on the whole a majorly positive thing. I just I
think you're right to say that there's like this this
side to it, right that like everything is a little

(06:15):
darker than we we'd like to think about it.

Speaker 5 (06:17):
Well, look at what we've got, look at all this
natural splendor you know that exists under our purview.

Speaker 6 (06:23):
But let's not talk about the ugly way.

Speaker 3 (06:26):
We got it right right.

Speaker 4 (06:28):
People stumble into places like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon
or glaciers and they say this is amazing, and then
millennia old cultures say, yeah, we know we live here.

Speaker 6 (06:41):
We were there, so we were there, dude, we're there.

Speaker 4 (06:43):
The whole time. One more step in history we owe
to President Theodore Roosevelt, most famous of course for inspiring
the stuffed teddy bear he creates. He's like the famous
amateur wrestler Abraham Lincoln. He creates the National Parks movement,
the big one, because he's inspired by a naturalist and

(07:05):
very eccentric convenor named John Muir.

Speaker 5 (07:08):
Wasn't Roosevelt also like a big game hunter. He liked
the sale stuff.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
Yeah, conservationist meant a different thing back then.

Speaker 6 (07:14):
I guess it did.

Speaker 5 (07:15):
It's sort of like Darwin eating every example of a
species that he discovered.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
Yep, just so true story.

Speaker 4 (07:21):
And shout out to our pal Jack O'Brien who hits
us to that one a while back. So Mure stood
tall against the dominant sort of zeitgeist of America at
the time, which said, look, progress is what we're about.
We're manifesting destiny. That means the land is here to
be used, it's just resources to extract, and he would say, no,

(07:42):
we've got to protect this, and luckily his argument won
the day he pushed for the eighteen ninety Act that
created Yosemite National Park, and then he was also instrumental
in the creation of multiple other parks. That's why he's
called the father of the National Park System.

Speaker 5 (07:59):
Well, I mean, if there are no kind of base
level rules around what's like on the table to develop,
you know, to destroy and kind of like piece together
other stuff out of, then everything's on the table. So
it's very important that this was established when it was,
or else you wouldn't have any of that stuff.

Speaker 4 (08:18):
No, No, we pave the we would pave the world.
And now the National Park System covers four hundred different areas.

Speaker 6 (08:27):
We're talking about.

Speaker 4 (08:27):
More than eighty four million acres across all fifty US
states and then the territories and commonwealths including Saipan. Weirdly enough,
huge Marine Reserve. The service employees over twenty thousand people,
and that's a lot, but it's nowhere near enough to
have a single person monitoring every single acre of land.

(08:51):
The wildlife is dangerous at times. That means that if
you visit national parks, you are responsible for your interactions
with the wild adam. It also means that some unscrupulous
visitors can get away with breaking the rules, polluting, littering,
starting forest fires and you know, murdering folks well.

Speaker 5 (09:11):
And the people that maintain and you know, watch over
these parks do it out of passion.

Speaker 6 (09:17):
You know, they love it.

Speaker 5 (09:18):
They're not like highly paid, and oftentimes there's a skeleton.

Speaker 6 (09:21):
Crew kind of situation.

Speaker 5 (09:23):
If there's ever a government shut down or funding gets scarce,
park maintenance is kind of one of the first things
to go, as we saw with Joshua Tree and there
was like a government shutdown and so many people you know,
vandalized and destroyed a lot of the titular Joshua trees.

Speaker 4 (09:39):
And perhaps most controversially, there is to date, as we record,
no official tallly of just how many people go missing
on public land in the United States, and there's there's
not a great way to fix that either. And we've
had episodes with experts in this such as Professor Brian
Colt who talked about the Zone of Death and yellow

(10:00):
Stone and David Politis from missing for one one, But
there's another conversation, one that sends a shiver up the
spine of true believers, and every year, to be honest,
delivers piles of cash to the park system. Guys, there
are so many stories of ghost in these public parks.
Let's gather around the campfire, maybe spins some spooky tales.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
And it's every one. It's every single one. By the way,
it's not just a couple of parks are haunted. Every
single one that we've looked at has at least one
ghost story, whether it's directly tied to, you know, one
of the most sought after places in the park or
one of the most sought after inns that is immediately

(10:47):
on the park, you know, property, or of right like
adjacent to it.

Speaker 6 (10:51):
Scooby and the gang really have their hands full.

Speaker 4 (10:53):
Everybody gets one Spider Man rules. Here's where it gets crazy.
We're not kidding conspiracy realist. Now, sure, some of the
more skeptical amongst us may automatically roll our eyes or
tentacles or algorithms, I guess at the thought, but you
still can't deny millions of visitors appear to at least
believe they encountered something in as you said, Matt, every

(11:17):
single National park covered by the Park Service. I mean
we can start with more notorious examples. The Grand Canyon, dude. Honestly,
people think the Grand Canyon is haunted. If you've ever
been there, it looks haunted. It lives up to the hype.
It is indeed grand.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
There's stuff in them cracks.

Speaker 4 (11:36):
It's probably ghosts or agent civilizations.

Speaker 2 (11:40):
Yeah, Ben, what do you what do you think is
accomplished by the tentacle rolling? Is it the same? Is
it the same kind of thing with it? It just
lets just lets people know.

Speaker 3 (11:52):
Yeah, have you I mean, have you ever bored an octopus?
It's very apparent.

Speaker 6 (11:57):
They do this.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
No, do they find me fascinating.

Speaker 5 (12:02):
When I hear roll tentacles? I'm picturing like it doing
sort of like a breakdancing move, you.

Speaker 4 (12:06):
Know, nice, nice and h And I also wonder this
is unrelated, but this is fascinating. We know the octopus dreams.
I wonder if the octopus encounters ghost or one it
thinks of the afterlife, that'd be cool story idea octagosts.

Speaker 5 (12:23):
Have you seen the vampire squid? I mean, that thing's
a demon from hell.

Speaker 4 (12:28):
There's some new pictures of I think it's the glass octopus,
which is so cool. It's been making the rounds on
the nature nerd stuff.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
But enough about octopus is let's get to Eldovar Hotel.

Speaker 4 (12:40):
Yes, known for its octopus ghost We're kidding, but it
is known for ghosts.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
It's uh exclamation marks.

Speaker 3 (12:47):
Oh gosh.

Speaker 4 (12:48):
Yeah, And a lot of the reporting met you and
I were talking about this off air, and we made
a little joke about it in the notes because a
lot of places would copy and paste for lack of
better work some of the stories and things that come
directly from the Grand Canyon's official website. And you can

(13:09):
tell because a lot of them.

Speaker 3 (13:11):
And how'd you put it that? I like the way
you put it.

Speaker 2 (13:14):
Well, it's ending a sentence as though like all of
this was happening at the or or you may think
that was spooky, but what wait until you hear about
the Eldovar Hotel.

Speaker 4 (13:26):
And it's almost as if the narrator is turning around
dramatically as soon as they say elov our hotel.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
But yeah, the writing about this hotel, as well as
a lot of the other stories we're going to be
talking about today. Do seem to be stories that would
be easily retold by like a guide, let's say, or
a bus driver or somebody working at a hotel that's
going to tell you about the stories that are occurring

(13:53):
within this specific hotel or this national park.

Speaker 3 (13:57):
Ring ring. Hello, it's me folklore. Yes, because I'm also
doing the telephone game.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
That's what it feels like, and maybe that's why it's
a little frustrating as we're you know, researching this topic
in general. But it's also it does send tingles up
your spine if any of us to believe. So, I
guess that's what we're on that journey today.

Speaker 4 (14:19):
Yeah, and if you don't have, I mean to exercise empathy,
right and understand the perspective. A lot of these people
who hear these stories and maybe take them at face value,
they've never heard them before, they don't know how often
they've been retold. They're hearing them from one person and
that is key, right.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
And they're just rolling through for a couple of nights, probably.

Speaker 4 (14:40):
Right, exactly exactly they want an experience, right.

Speaker 6 (14:43):
So expectations a hell of a drug.

Speaker 4 (14:47):
Right, Yes, Actually you nailed it. This place, the Eltovar
hotel is located in a very dramatic spot. It's like
about twenty feet from the south d of the Grand Canyon.
It opened in nineteen oh five, so before the Grand
Canyon National Park was really a thing. And when it opened,

(15:07):
it was seen as the absolute peak of luxury pun
very much intended. And I didn't know this, but it
was part of a chain, a hospitality chain of restaurants
and lodgings owned by a guy named Fred Harvey. It
was one of the most famous Harvey hotels of the day.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
Yeah, and I didn't know what that meant. I had
no idea what that meant. The Harvey Company's mister Fred Harvey.
But this guy was apparently one of the most what
would you call, I don't know, Like I imagine someone
who owns a hotel that's really excited that you're at
his hotel, And that is what I see when I

(15:46):
imagine Fred Harvey.

Speaker 4 (15:47):
Yeah, and he came up along with the age of
rail you know, and so he would purposely build stuff
to service passengers on various important railway intersections or passages
or stops. And yeah, he was an absolute nut about
it because he was very good at promoting tourism in

(16:10):
the American Southwest.

Speaker 5 (16:11):
Looks to have also made a stand in Vegas with
things like the Nevada Lake Tahoe Harvey's Resort, hotel and casino,
which comes up if you're googling, like crazy Neon signs nice.

Speaker 4 (16:23):
He also got a One of the other things he'll
be remembered for is being one of the forces that
kind of tamed the wild West, which was a very
short period of American history. But he's the one who
was like, let's bring some sit down restaurants where you know,
Harvey hotel restaurants, you can eat here without being shot.

Speaker 5 (16:44):
Well sort of the almost like fantasy of the wild
West that was more sanitized. Like that's a big part
of what Vegas was was giving people some way to
feel like they were participating in that kind of like legacy,
but it was all very you know, kind of buttoned
up in like disneylandish.

Speaker 4 (17:03):
And this all leads us to El Tovar because obviously.

Speaker 6 (17:08):
He's sounds so cool and sinister.

Speaker 4 (17:11):
Because you have to say it like you've just turned
around to announce it to the camera exactly, we should
do a commercial for Altovar. So if it's if you're
listening Fred from the Afterlife. So okay, this thing's been
around for more than a century. As the ghost stories start,

(17:31):
and over time it gets this reputation for bizarre experiences.

Speaker 3 (17:36):
The things you'll read.

Speaker 4 (17:37):
Most often in sort of the copypasta tour guide notes
are a ghostly figure wandering through the front entrance, a
painting whose subject appears to like track you wherever you move,
and so much more.

Speaker 3 (17:53):
We'll get to it, but like.

Speaker 4 (17:56):
First, not to be too much of a MythBuster, but
we all know what's up with a painting whose eyes
seem to follow you wherever you go, because we've all
seen that, Uncle Sam, I want you for the US
Army picture. It's just perspective that you can paint that
does not imply a ghost, That implies a pretty talented
artist at best. But it doesn't answer the questions about

(18:19):
the You guys saw the thing about the gravestone, right right, So.

Speaker 5 (18:23):
A lot of these stories around, some of these alleged
hauntings at the hotel hinge on this mysterious gravestone hidden
and mixed the foliage. The foliage to the left across
the drive from the front entrance. It's humble small and
flat on the ground, bearing the very humble, small and

(18:45):
flat inscription Pearl A Ward eighteen seventy eight nineteen thirty four.

Speaker 3 (18:51):
P I rl Right, I've never seen that spelling before. Pearl.

Speaker 4 (18:56):
Yeah, and a shout out to anybody who just heard
the ghostly squelches there as we're talking. That is indeed
my stomach, My stomach is now haunted.

Speaker 6 (19:08):
We'll keep it in.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
Get a meat pie, some fish and chips.

Speaker 6 (19:17):
Is somebody guess where Ben is?

Speaker 5 (19:19):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (19:19):
Gosh uh so in in in the red lodge apparently,
so this is this is weird to me because you
can we can paint such backstories off such small things.

Speaker 3 (19:33):
Is Pearl p I r L?

Speaker 4 (19:37):
Were Pearl's parents perhaps not very literate, and wanted to
name their kid after something precious? You know it always yeah,
breaks your heart. But we won't know because no one
is exactly sure who Ward Pearl Ward is or was well?

Speaker 5 (19:54):
And is the hidden nature of the stone more a
product of if things were built around it, or was
it like obscured for a reason, you know, like the
questions do come up.

Speaker 3 (20:07):
That is a great question.

Speaker 4 (20:08):
Yeah, can can the altovar somehow not afford landscaping. I mean,
is that just not in their budget? Do they want
it to seem like it's in disrepair. In some stories,
Pearl Ward is a cowboy who dies sort of drifting
through the area and no one knew their name, this

(20:29):
person's name when they buried him, and other stories, Pearl
is a she Pearls a female who is one of
the hostesses from the Harvey Hotel. They were called Harvey
Girls at the time, and according to that legend, she lived, worked,
and died.

Speaker 3 (20:46):
Under unknown circumstances on the property those tours, Ben, it'd
be great.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
Well, I just you should, Ben, But come on, Usually,
if this is someone who worked at the hotel, there's
no record of their passing in the nineteen thirties.

Speaker 4 (21:02):
Right exactly at that point, they would have had to
have something because it becomes increasingly suspicious, right, especially if
you're living on the property, you're working with tons of
other people in this big operation.

Speaker 5 (21:18):
Oh yeah, I mean, you know, entrepreneurs of that scale
in that era.

Speaker 6 (21:22):
I would have wanted to cover their butts.

Speaker 2 (21:24):
Okay, there's one scenario where I see it working. Hit
The gravestone was created by somebody who knew the truth
about what happened to Pearl ward this person that's not
actually where Pearl is buried. That has nothing to do
with that. It's to remind whoever did it, who works
and or owns the hotel, that of what they did.

Speaker 6 (21:46):
Do we know what you did last summer and.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
Every time you leave the property, you got to see
your gravestone.

Speaker 4 (21:52):
We could also I mean maybe maybe that birth and
death date. Maybe it's some sort of code. Oh at
webs we weave?

Speaker 5 (22:00):
And did they plant the hedge around it? Why didn't
they just dig it up?

Speaker 3 (22:04):
You know what I mean? Like just no one's exhumed
it exactly.

Speaker 4 (22:07):
So is it all smoke and mirrors or we should
say stone and dirt.

Speaker 2 (22:12):
Let don't have some shovels.

Speaker 3 (22:14):
Boys, let's do it.

Speaker 4 (22:16):
And you know what, when we're digging, what we need
to do is have two of us dig a one
of us be on the look I call look out. Okay,
the for the caped figure that is often reported to
exit the hotel's front stairs and entrance rocket a black
cape by the way, and then go over two pearls grave,

(22:36):
hang out there as if in contemplation for a minute,
and then wander off behind a nearby building called the
Hope House before disappearing.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
Oh yeah, and this is my favorite part about Eltovar Hotel.
There is an elderly gentleman that has been seen walking around.
He appears sometimes when there's a big party going on,
sometimes when there's no hardy at.

Speaker 6 (23:00):
All, walking the grounds, you say.

Speaker 2 (23:02):
Walking the grounds and or the house itself, the hotel,
and he's often giving you a little like if you
walk up to him as a guest or walk past him,
he's just kind of there for a moment. He's like, hey,
oh hey, make sure you head up to the ballroom.
We got the big gathering to get together. It's gonna
be a swell time. Head on up there. And guess
who people think that is?

Speaker 3 (23:24):
Is it Fred Harvey?

Speaker 2 (23:26):
Old Fred Harvey? But there is it is. It does
get a little weirder because the people see him all
over the place, right or somebody that they attribute to
Fred Harvey, but the timeline maybe doesn't match up so good.

Speaker 4 (23:41):
Yeah, the profiling is a little weird too, because old
Man is not you know, the most specific thing, and
you know, the spooky, dooky part is when they show
up at this party, there's no record of them being invited.
They're like, this old man told me, and they're like,
what old.

Speaker 5 (23:58):
Man, you've always been the caretakers exact, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
There, or there's no party at all. The hotel staff
is like, what are you talking about?

Speaker 3 (24:08):
You know, we don't have a holiday party for Arbor Day,
my friends.

Speaker 5 (24:12):
I've always thought it was so interesting that Stanley Kubrick,
being such a snob, glombed onto the Shining, because it
is a bit of a broad you know, Stephen King
is a bit of a broad rider. But the Shining
there's something about it that does capitalize on all of
this stuff we're talking about, the idea of haunted places,
the idea of like what is the history the tortured

(24:34):
kind of legacy of a place or whatever it might be.
And a hotel is the perfect kind of like location
for stuff like that.

Speaker 3 (24:42):
Yeah, it's e liminal space exactly.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
Think about how difficult it would have been to create
a giant hotel at the edge of the Grand Canyon
in the early nineteen hundreds, right late eighteen hundreds to
the like brand new nineteen hundreds. You're having that stuff
built and people are probably getting maimed and injured. Really

(25:06):
badly because you're so far from civilization, right there's you
can't can't send them on over to the local doctor
because there's no local doctor, you know, for a couple
hundred miles or whatever, right Like, that's insane, first of all.
And also I think this is for me the reasoning

(25:27):
behind the Fred Harvey sightings. If you were able to
achieve that feat of creating a giant building out in
the wilderness like that, you would be massively proud of it,
right or you, I think likely you'd be massively proud
of it, and it would be not only an achievement
of human ingenuity, but placing it where it is to

(25:49):
be able to look from from within that place you
built looking out upon the Grand Canyon must be I
don't know, very close to religious.

Speaker 4 (26:00):
It's ozmendious look upon my works, he mighty. And there's
one catch though, As as much as I agree with
you there, Matt on that on that excellent observation, Fred
never got to see this particular feat because he himself
passed away in nineteen oh one, four years before the

(26:20):
completion of.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
That's why he's there, Ben. He never got to see
it in real life. So now he's got to hang
out there for just give people, like be their personal
concierge and.

Speaker 3 (26:32):
Lie at them about when the party's going.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
In his timeline, there as a party and he's super
excited about it, and he liked.

Speaker 6 (26:43):
Yeah, exactly. It's like a superimposed reality.

Speaker 3 (26:47):
And I love it.

Speaker 4 (26:48):
I'm a huge propos I actually kind of believe in
some of that stuff, but our beliefs or our own.
This is one of the most famous stories, but there
are two other incidents. You can find them reported in
the local newspapers usually around Halloween. To be honest with you,
there's a couple from New Jersey and in the story

(27:11):
no timeline attributed. This is the Griffiths couple and they
they woke up in the night. The wife woke up
because an unseen presence was quote pulling on her clothing
in the middle of the night. I don't know about
you guys, but when I first read that, I immediately

(27:31):
thought there was a ghost who was like, get dressed, lady,
and started like throwing her dress on her slacks or whatever.
But no, it was just like tugging at her PJS.

Speaker 5 (27:42):
I saw this meme the other day where it was
like every HP Lovecraft story. It's like I saw a
monsters what was it like?

Speaker 4 (27:49):
Yeah, I can't describe it, but let me spend four
pages doing just that.

Speaker 3 (27:54):
Shout out Lovecraft. I like Lovecraft, but yeah I.

Speaker 6 (27:59):
Had some problematic views. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:02):
But as for the clothes pulling, that's that's weird. I
would not enjoy that. But you know, maybe your maybe
your clothes got stuck, or maybe I would enjoy it.

Speaker 6 (28:12):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
I don't know situation. I guess it depends you guys.

Speaker 4 (28:18):
Seeing that that film from back in the day called
High Spirits starring Liam Neeson, it's.

Speaker 5 (28:24):
Not when he was in his rom com era kind of.

Speaker 4 (28:26):
It's a nineteen eighty eight fantasy comedy about uh oh
wait it's is it Liam Neeson? Yeah, it is Liam Neeson.
It's about a haunted castle that is being turned into
a tourist destination and the ghosts have you know, lovable
high jinks, Beetlejuice esque with the with a visiting couple

(28:49):
played by Daryl Hannah and Steve Gutenberg.

Speaker 6 (28:51):
Oh, Daryl Hannah was such a babe.

Speaker 4 (28:53):
There's a close pulling scene in there that may not
have aged well.

Speaker 5 (28:57):
Steve, I cannot believe Steve Gutenberg was ever like a
leading man.

Speaker 6 (29:01):
He is.

Speaker 5 (29:01):
Late Daryl Hannah is so above Steve Gutenberg's pay grade
it's not even funny.

Speaker 3 (29:06):
Well, you know Hollywood magic, right.

Speaker 5 (29:08):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (29:09):
Speaking of Hollywood magic, there's a couple from Los Angeles
who said the following At the Alto var they walked
past their television and stopped because when they looked at
the screen there was the face of a bearded old
man peering back at them. And I was trying to
figure out more about this tale, which gets just tossed

(29:29):
around so often. It doesn't seem that any investigator asked them, Well,
was the television on? I feel like that might explain it.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
Yeah, it was the duck was a duck show with
all the big bearded guys, duck hunters.

Speaker 6 (29:45):
Duck show. Wow, I got there? Or you know?

Speaker 2 (29:54):
Or could it? Was it a reflection in the black mirror?

Speaker 6 (29:58):
Right?

Speaker 2 (29:58):
Was the person actually in the room.

Speaker 5 (30:00):
Perhaps the guy just needed a shave and didn't realize
how how much he'd let himself go.

Speaker 4 (30:04):
Maybe it was a window and they didn't understand televisions.
I don't know, dude, Maybe they were just I'm gonna
say it, maybe they were high.

Speaker 5 (30:13):
High spirits. Indeed, by the way, I was just watching
a trailer for that movie. I've never seen hide nor
hear of this, and it looks like a delight.

Speaker 3 (30:20):
It's fine. I loved it. Yeah, it's it's a fun romp.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
Es.

Speaker 3 (30:26):
Yes, yeah, that it's of that era. It's of that era,
but not of that caliber.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
So there are a couple other things in Grand Canyon.
Really quickly. I just want to throw out here if
anybody ends up going there, because I've not been and
I want to go now. Of course, there's a place
called the Phantom Ranch that exists there that allegedly there's
this this thing called Phantom Ranch. There's a it's the property,

(30:54):
I guess, that's called the Phantom Ranch. There's a place
called Phantom Creek within the park that is in immediately
adjacent to it. And according to the stories, the folklore,
there's this guy named John Wesley Powell who set that
thing up. All right, this is in the eighteen sixties
eighteen seventies when all of this is happening, and he's

(31:16):
this one armed person who was in the Civil War.
He's considered a hero. He did not die there. According
to the folklore. But again kind of like how we
were joking around about mister Harvey. It's thought that this
guy was proud of this achievement or he it was
in some way impactful in his life. So his spirit

(31:36):
haunts this Phantom Ranch, which is aptly named, I must say, but.

Speaker 6 (31:41):
It does and very Scooby Doo.

Speaker 5 (31:43):
Sorry, the Phantom Ranch, Scooby Doo, and the Phantom Ranch
it does.

Speaker 2 (31:49):
But there's this the little twist thing to it, and
that a lot of the folklore in the Grand Canyon,
I feel like, has this kind of thing. There's another
place within the Grand Canyon call Bright Angel Creek and
there are there were huge stones from that creek bed
in that area that were used to build a lot
of the structures in Phantom Ranch. So you've got angels

(32:11):
worked in there, right, and phantoms just in the names,
which feels like a great way to sell sell people are.

Speaker 4 (32:17):
Going, and rumors of giants back in the days. There
was also, of course, we're not joking about the ancient
civilization thing. Check out our earlier episode on that. That
was a weird comment on reporting of the time as well.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
Yes, yes, and one other thing, guys, this story of
we've we've heard so many tales like this when we've
covered ghost stories. A crying woman right out in the
woods somewhere that you can't really see this person, but
you hear the whiling. Yeah, exactly that. But it's it's
again a twist on that. Right, you can look up

(32:55):
a place called Transsept Trail t R A N s
e Pt Trail where I think it was again, I
think it was the nineteen thirties. There's a place called
the Grand Canyon Lodge that burned up and after that fire,
it's thought that some spirit involved in some way haunts
that area.

Speaker 4 (33:17):
To this day, in this very day, and here we
can already see those common traits of folklore stories told repeatedly.
Small changes over time give it a twist to make
your lier on a different and then there's always a
lack of certain specificity. It adds to the overall mystery
and at the same time it makes it increasingly difficult

(33:39):
to nail down some concrete facts. We'll see this in
other ghost stories as well. What do you guys think,
should we take a break and go to some more examples. Absolutely,
and we have returned. Now we're traveling to Yellowstone And

(34:01):
you know, we talked about this a little bit off air.
You can find the history of Yellowstone Park, the history
of all these parks. Really, we're not gonna spend too
much time on them. We wanted to get to some
of the juicy ghost stories speaking of haunted female figures,
haunted women. Here's when Matt Nole we I think all
read about this one, the Headless Bride of the Old

(34:23):
Faithful in yet again another in with an interesting, unique
experience of the paranormal.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
Yeah, it's an inn, but it's not in love. You
know what I'm saying. Don't force others to marry people
they don't want to marry. That's the story of the
Old Faithful Inn.

Speaker 4 (34:43):
Just don't do it, even when you know it's not
gonna work out, don't do it, you know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (34:51):
You gotta let people do what they want.

Speaker 4 (34:52):
And you can find this story of the Headless Bride
all over the place, including the official website Yellowstone Park
dot com.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
It goes like this.

Speaker 4 (35:01):
Back in nineteen fifteen, there's this guy in New York
and he's sort of a blue blood. He's the one
percenter of his day. He owns a shipping company country here.
He owns a shipping company, and he's got a rebellious
teenage daughter just full of hijinks, and he has arranged
a marriage for her with a young guy from an

(35:23):
equally wealthy New York family. But she says, no, you
can't control me, old man. I'm in love with an
unnamed household servant.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
Right.

Speaker 3 (35:37):
Right.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
So Dad's like, ah, this guy's got bad intentions, unnamed person.
But you know, despite the father's let's say issues with
the person that his daughter's going to marry, she went
in and did it. She got hitched.

Speaker 3 (35:54):
She did.

Speaker 4 (35:55):
Indeed, she said, unnamed older household servant, I am in
love with you. And the dad was bad about this,
but she would brook no argument. He tried to talk
her out of it, and he said, look, this is
not just me being a stodgy, bossy old man. I
am genuinely concerned that this dude's intentions for you are

(36:18):
not romantic. I think he has an evil, sinister plan.
And you know, in the modern day parlance, he thinks
that this guy's a gold digger. And she says, I'm
not going to hear it. She goes ahead, she gets married.
The father tries to make a poison pill, as we
would call it in corporate mergers and acquisitions. He says, Okay,

(36:41):
if you guys want to get married, I will give
you an extravagant dowry as your wedding gift. And as
a condition of this dowry, you have to agree you
as a couple, have to agree that you are getting
no more additional support from our family. Ever, you're not
getting an inherent and so you're not getting a share
of the business fleetwood Max style, go your own way.

(37:05):
As a matter of fact, you need to leave New
York forever. According to the story, this was a bluff
on the father's part. He thought this would force these
people to call off the wedding because it would remove
the servant's access to the larger fortune.

Speaker 3 (37:23):
His gamble was a failure. The couple said, okay, yeah,
we agree. Because we're so much.

Speaker 4 (37:28):
In love, we're going to go have a baller honeymoon
at Yellowstone and we're going to stay at the hottest
inn for We're going to stay at the hottest in
for honeymoons, the old faithful in. And there's a little
specificity here because they were staying at Room one twenty seven.
That doesn't always happen in these ghost stories. We know,

(37:50):
the Old Faithful In was pretty new at the time.
It was still less than ten years old. It was
the scene and be seen place for family vacations. But
as we heard from various versions of the legend, things
went wrong for the couple very quickly.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
Yeah, why is it important that they were in room
one twenty seven. Well, that's because there was a huge
argument in that room that other people heard on let's say,
The Faithful Night. And why were they arguing This is
a happy new couple, they're on their honeymoon. Well, according
to the story, it's because the new husband basically did

(38:27):
kind of what the father was warning the daughter he
was going to do, or what he was about. Allegedly,
according to the stories, he was gambling a ton, and
not just while hanging out somewhere at the Old Faithful Inn,
while they were making their way to the end, right
and hanging out in tavern, spending a ton of money
on drinks and all that kind of stuff. And they

(38:48):
were arguing because basically the guy blew through all the
money they had and they couldn't even afford to pay
the bill at the old, faithful.

Speaker 4 (38:57):
Right, which makes the staff a lot less helpful. And
about a month into the honeymoon, you.

Speaker 2 (39:04):
Know there, squiches a long honeymoon.

Speaker 4 (39:07):
I was thinking that too, you know what I mean, Like,
I get that they're wealthy, but I I read that
with no small amount of envy. The idea, it's up
there with the idea of people in this in that
day and age saying oh, well, we're abroad to Europe
for the summer. I do love the continent, not too

(39:28):
long a stay, merely a third month or so. And
it was just a different, different world, right, because it
would it would take it would take a significant it
would take a significant amount of work for us, any
of us to figure out a way to not be

(39:48):
at work for a month.

Speaker 3 (39:50):
But uh, but there we have it.

Speaker 4 (39:53):
And it turns out that kind of privilege doesn't necessarily
make people happy, Like you said, Matt, It goes to
this one night the couple had already been arguing on
a regular basis. It was the scandal of the hotel,
and the daughter had called her father for help and
he refused, kind of cold, but he set those terms

(40:14):
and during this very violent, louder than usual shouting match.
On this evening, the husband storms out, never to be
seen again.

Speaker 3 (40:23):
The hotel staff gives the bride her privacy for a while,
after about two days. It's a weird number. But after
about two days they go to room one twenty seven
to check on her. She's not going to be like,
where is our money? Right?

Speaker 4 (40:39):
And also sorry about your loss. Also you owe us
for this plus these other two days.

Speaker 3 (40:46):
Call your dad.

Speaker 4 (40:47):
And the maid who is looking around because you know
how hotels are laid out. When you walk in, there
might be a foyer or a hallway and you'll see
like a maybe a living room, suite or a bedroom.
First you have to walk in into the restroom. It's
not clearly visible. So she walks into the restroom or
the bathroom, and she screams because the bride's corpse is

(41:08):
filling the bathtub. It's riddled with blood. It's a dexter
level or animal level crime scene. It's got all the
ingredients of true crime except one thing's missing.

Speaker 3 (41:20):
Her head.

Speaker 2 (41:21):
Yeah, yeah, head's missing. Bodies in there, lots of blood.
Not great, not great for the bathtub. For you know,
the reputation of the hotel, especially for the new bride,
probably not great for her, and they basically looked for
the head. They didn't notice the husband carrying you know,

(41:43):
a human head when he stormed out, which you know,
obviously he is the suspect, right, the last person to
be seen with this person. They were arguing a whole lot.
What I think the tales say they searched the property
for like a week or maybe even longer.

Speaker 4 (42:02):
Yeah, yeah, they searched up and down across the hotel
property for yeah, at least a week. The amount of
time they's been searching varies depending on the version of
the tail you hear, but it was definitely more than
just like a one afternoon search. We know this because
they did eventually find the head. They found it due

(42:27):
to the smell emanating from an elevated area, the highest
interior point of the hotel called the Crow's Nest, where
the band would play and just to pause there. That's
a really cool idea to have the band playing from
that elevated area. But somebody, somebody got a bad width

(42:47):
figured out something was rotten in the Crow's Nest and
they went up there, and you guessed it, that's where
they found the head rotting away. And ever since then,
guests have reported seeing a ghostly woman walking down the
stairs of the Crow's Nest in her white dress, carrying
her head under her arm. This is brought to you
by under Armour.

Speaker 3 (43:11):
Yeah, I'm sorry, no.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
Stally fine, but you know, this is one of those
stories where it's on the official website.

Speaker 4 (43:20):
It very much is. It's on the official website. It's
on numerous blogs about the area. You can find it
published as fact in multiple like collection of paranormal Things
paperbacks you know which we grew up loving. And you
have to ask yourself, is this true? Is this false?
Is this embellished?

Speaker 2 (43:40):
Well, it's got to be helping the hotel in some
way to even be to have a place on their website,
right exactly. If it hurt, you would just leave it off,
and you could, you know, anyone who was interested could
go to any other blog that's out there that writes
about these things. But if you went to the official
Yellowstone website, not there, leaving everybody who is you know,

(44:03):
thinking about going, oh well maybe that's just a tall tale.
When you put it on the website like that, I
feel like it gives it such credence or it lends
so much more credibility. Yeah, I guess it is credibility
legitimacy here. It's just weird to do that unless unless
gonna make some profit.

Speaker 3 (44:25):
Exactly.

Speaker 4 (44:25):
It's what we kind of were setting up at the
at the top and through all this, we can tell
you the truth about this story for sure. It's this
Ghosts are only real when someone was decapitate it. It's
the only time scientifically proven that's a real headless horseman
is a thing. Yeah, it's proven French Revolution. That's why
they still have ghost or or we're funning with you,

(44:51):
just like the assistant manager of the Old Faithful In
George Borman, who made the whole thing up. He's got
a nineteen ninety one interview with Desert News and he says, Okay,
here's what happened. I was in the hotel one time
when it was deserted overlook style, and I heard some
footsteps down the hallway, and I walked out and looked

(45:15):
because there was nobody there but me and one or
two other employees, and I couldn't find anybody who could
have run down that hallway at that time outside of
my room. And so I went and looked again, and
I saw nobody. He says, he went and looked three times,
and he said later this got him thinking, huh, what

(45:35):
if there was a ghost story for the Old Faithful
in that would be interesting, that would add a hint
of mystery to the inns vibes. And so he says
he made the whole thing up in nineteen eighty three,
and then ever since that moment, because he was still
working there for a while, he says, people would come
to him and repeat the fictitious story to him, and

(45:59):
like even to the point of like man explaining his
own story to him.

Speaker 2 (46:04):
Nice. Nice, There's more, there's more telephone details, sir, to
this story. That's that's fascinating. It checks out to me.

Speaker 4 (46:16):
However, not all of the ghostly activities or alleged paranormal
experiences of these different parts have such simple explanations. And
you know, I think it's really important for us to
point out as well that it goes into this expectation
idea that Noel mentioned earlier, the idea that we have

(46:40):
to the idea that people came into Old Faithful having
heard that story, perhaps accepted it as fact, and we're
therefore on some level primed to see or experience something. However,
we we have other cases where the answer is not
so clear cut. We got to go to a cool

(47:03):
place next a place called Mammoth Cave. And you know
we're talking about this off air Mammoth Cave. When you
say we want to go to it, we don't just
mean go to it in this conversation. We want to
go as a crew.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
Yeah, well, let's just go ahead and mention it at
the top. We want to do this thing called the
Violet City Lantern Tour. Yeah, where because this is okay,
So Mammoth Cave. It's the longest known cave system in
the world. It's got four hundred and twenty six miles
worth of cave that you can kind of check out.
Some of the areas you can't check out, and there

(47:39):
are new areas being discovered still, which is my going.

Speaker 3 (47:43):
To the extent.

Speaker 4 (47:44):
Also, I love I love the worth of cave. Like,
how many miles worth of cave is this before I
pave for the tour?

Speaker 2 (47:52):
Four twenty six miles? And what they do with this,
I was going to say, velvet With this Violet City
Lantern Tour, they shut down all the lights because there's
a ton of human made light that exists in the
cave system so that when people go on tours they
can see right, nobody gets hurt. There's illumination via electricity

(48:14):
throughout the cave system. But in these tours they turn
off those lights and they've got lanterns and they take
you through the cave by a lantern light. I want
to do that because it appears that there's more than
just bats down in them caves. Oh there's coughing. Wait

(48:35):
a second, I know this story. Bed.

Speaker 4 (48:40):
Also, we should mention this story scares our colleague Gnols
so much that he has left the episode for today. Actually,
we're kidding, is a little bit under the weather with
the bit of a cough, and will be rejoining us soon,
But for now, he gives us his blessing and wishes
us to continue the subterranean exploration.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
Oh yes, So let's put our minds in the place
of being inside a system that consists of four hundred
twenty six miles of cave worth of cave worth of cave.
Imagine being there, deep beneath within the earth, let's say,

(49:22):
and just what your mind, the tricks your mind would
play on you, and the other worldly things you might
imagine could be down there.

Speaker 4 (49:33):
Oh sure, yeah, I mean it's true because subterranean flora
and fauna are still being discovered. We don't know how
far these cave systems go. We don't know what's living
in there. There's some cave systems that are for all
intents and purposes sealed off. They've become their own ecosystems,

(49:54):
unreliant upon sunlight and all those things surface dwellers love.
We can also we can also say that for most
people who have never been in absolute darkness, and being
an absolute darkness will lead you to hallucinate.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
Yes, Now, let's bring in the history of this cave system,
or at least the the like American version, I guess,
the the Anglo centric existence of this cave and the
history of that, because it is, it gets dark pretty quickly.

(50:33):
The wasn't it purchased for some I mean, I guess
it was a fairly large sum back then, but like
ten thousand dollars US.

Speaker 4 (50:41):
Yes, ten thousand dollars in eighteen thirty nine, and we
can borrow a bit from our handy inflation calculator, ten
thousand dollars in eighteen thirty nine is the equivalent of
three hundred and twenty nine eight hundred and thirty four
dollars today, so very expensive. But still that's a lot

(51:03):
cheaper than I thought a cave system would cost.

Speaker 2 (51:06):
Yeah, a huge cave system that was not again like
it not its super early stages of mapping, but early. Right,
A lot has been discovered since then. But he didn't
just buy the cave system itself. In the property above
the caves, he also bought humans.

Speaker 3 (51:24):
He did.

Speaker 4 (51:26):
The deal included you know, adjacent property, and they defined
adjacent property as also enslaved human beings because again this
was eighteen thirty nine, and one of the enslaved people
that he took ownership of as part of this deal
was a cave guide named Stefan Bishop. And at this point,

(51:49):
Bishop probably knew the caverns better than any other person alive.
And I really appreciate that you point out we're starting
the story from the kind of Anglo central view, because
native populations again knew about this cave for thousands, thousands
and thousands of years.

Speaker 2 (52:07):
Bishops has a celebrated important places for those cultures. It's
not yeah, it's not just a cave.

Speaker 4 (52:14):
It has immense cultural and spiritual significance. Doctor Krogan does
not care about that. He doesn't give a damn about it.
He immediately starts tours. And so Stephan Bishop is giving
people these amazing tours. He's showing them Echo River where

(52:35):
blind albino fish have evolved, miles of all these unique
twisting passageways. Meanwhile, on the surface, doctor Krogan is busying
himself brainstorming new ways to monetize this natural wonder, to
turn it into a cash cow, to make his ten
thousand back as soon as possible, and then just make

(52:55):
more and more money. And you and I were talking
off air about is more his strange idea, one of
the strangest that he put into place. It was the
idea that he could build a special camp inside the
cave for people suffering from tuberculosis or consumption as it

(53:17):
was called in the day.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
I don't know. I think it's a good idea for
something to try.

Speaker 3 (53:22):
It's not trying, I agree, you know.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
Well, because a lot was there wasn't a lot known
about what could actually like, what are the conditions that
would help someone get over tuberculosis?

Speaker 6 (53:34):
Right?

Speaker 2 (53:35):
And the thought came up, well, what if this the
low relatively low temperatures of the cave system compared to
the outside world at the time. What if those temperatures
would be conducive to reducing the effects of tuberculosis on
the human body. Maybe again worth a shot. So they
actually built a fairly large area included. There are several

(54:01):
they call them huts, but they're these like they look
almost like it does look like a hut, I guess,
but it's a mini little stone and wooden structure.

Speaker 3 (54:09):
Yeah, they call the hut, call it a cabin somewhere
in between.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
Yeah, they're tiny, but it's enough for a human being
to be in and not to live comfortably, but to survive, right,
I think I don't know how many they built, but
they built a bunch of them, and there are two
that remain to this day that you can go visit.

Speaker 6 (54:28):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (54:28):
Yeah, I think most of the reporting I read said
that you originally had eleven huts built in there, and
the idea was that you would get fifteen patients, which
means some of the patients were couples, because that's you know,
or maybe parent and child or siblings. But they say

(54:51):
fifteen patients arrived, and honestly, folks, we don't know whether
these patients genuinely believe this treatment would work. But we
can only imagine, given what you described met at this time,
that they were desperate enough to try anything.

Speaker 6 (55:08):
You know.

Speaker 4 (55:08):
That's kind of it's like when we look at cancer
cure conspiracies and the con artist involved in sort of
bilking desperate people. As far as we can tell, doctor
Krogan is not himself a con artist. He is actually
trying to see whether this will assist people who are

(55:30):
suffering from consumption. However, as history reprove, this treatment did
not work, two patients died that same year. All fifteen
of the patients got worse. Doctor Crogan himself would go
on to die from tuberculosis in eighteen forty nine.

Speaker 2 (55:46):
Yeah, ten years after you buy the cave system. He
does of tuberculosis too, So you might imagine, oh, there's
been some death in this cave that we know of,
and we can tribute tuberculosis to those deaths. That that
disease comes with a lot of coughing. It would make

(56:07):
sense right to hear coughing in the distance somewhere within
the cave system, right as you're touring through it, especially
by lantern.

Speaker 3 (56:16):
Light, especially by lantern.

Speaker 4 (56:18):
Yeah, if you elect to take the Violet City tour
of the cave, the tour guides will take you to
that blackout like you described, Matt, where you actually go
down into the dark that most people have not experienced.
And then they'll give you the tour with the oil
lamp and they'll tell you the stories and you can
actually see remnants of this tuberculosis camp experiment. That is

(56:43):
a real thing, that's not a legend. And some rangers
will tell you that they have experienced strange things down there,
that they have seen shoves from unseen forces, They've heard
inexplicable footsteps, or coughing in the distance, or even being

(57:04):
grabbed or touched when they knew there were no other
people around. I have a question for you, man, because
you know I go to you for audio advice often.
Is it possible with the acoustics of a cavern that
you could frank someone with ghost coughing? Like could you
be far enough away around a bend or something and

(57:24):
cough and have the cough reflect off the stone to
reach the person observing the camp.

Speaker 2 (57:31):
I don't know the science behind that, Ben. What I
would do is get a really long tube that is
highly flexible. I got set it up at one end
of it higher up in the cave system, and then
I would have it go all the way down to
lower in the cave system, and I would do a
little cough into the tube, okay, at one side or

(57:53):
the other, and make everybody think the cough's coming from
way up there or way down.

Speaker 4 (57:58):
There ever, Okay, because I was thinking, you might say,
set up like a time delay motion sensor with w
with a speaker, so that it doesn't start coughing right
when you trip the wire, but or trip the light,
but it starts coughing, you know, four minutes after.

Speaker 2 (58:17):
So I think, love it. I love the way you think.
In his high tech I'm going to say the tube
system is the way I'm going imagine the sound of
dragging the tube back to your location after you've used it.

Speaker 3 (58:28):
How long is this tube? Wait? It's huge? Crazy, it awkward?
You know what, Let's do both.

Speaker 2 (58:36):
Let's do both.

Speaker 3 (58:37):
Uh how much will they sell the caves for this? Is?

Speaker 4 (58:43):
We do have specific folks like one guide, Larry Purcell,
had another story.

Speaker 3 (58:50):
He went on.

Speaker 4 (58:50):
Record and he said that he experienced something unrelated to
the tuberculosis camp that terrified him.

Speaker 3 (58:58):
He said, he was.

Speaker 4 (58:59):
Giving in tour and during some part of this tour,
it was the Violet City tour, he noticed an African
American family standing behind the rest of the group and
he was surprised to see them because he hadn't noticed
any African American tourist in this particular group. And he said, huh,
it's crazy. The father is wearing a white panama hat

(59:20):
and he's watching with rapt attention as we're giving the
oil lamp tour, right. And then when he reached the
part where they turn off the oil lamp and turn
the electric lights back on, he looks for this family
and he can't find anybody. There were just extra people
there when the oil lamp was on.

Speaker 2 (59:40):
Yeah, no, thanks, extra people while the oil lamp was on.
Don't like that phrase. Don't like any of them.

Speaker 4 (59:47):
Yeah, it reminds me when we went on our brief
excursion to the Hoover Dam. I think that's a close
recent comparison for US. Hoover Dam very much man made cavern.
But what we saw is that the tour guides at regular,
frequent intervals, we're counting the number of people in the group.

Speaker 2 (01:00:08):
That's why sometimes there are extra families.

Speaker 4 (01:00:16):
Oh man, I love that idea. Okay, so do octopus
believe in ghosts? And then the extra extra tour guide members. Okay, gold, Jerry,
we're making gold here, Rebel Stiltskin style, all right. Apparently
the room where the rangers saw this family is called

(01:00:36):
the Methodist Church because miners used to have religious services
there when they were exploring resources in the cave, and
during those days, because of the rampant racism, if an
African American guide or his family attended the services, they
would have to stand back at a distance. Wow, I

(01:00:58):
know it's a bummer. And those two things aren't necessarily related.
They're the kind of things that have just enough commonality
for people to put some red string together, turn down
the lights and tell you it's scary.

Speaker 2 (01:01:13):
Yeah, you know what, Why don't we Why don't we
pause here? We've got a few more parks to visit
before we're done today. But we need to hear a
word from our sponsor, so we'll be right back.

Speaker 3 (01:01:31):
And we have returned.

Speaker 4 (01:01:34):
Let's visit we don't if we don't do anything else,
let's at least visit the Devil's Dead.

Speaker 3 (01:01:38):
We've got other places to go.

Speaker 4 (01:01:40):
Like you said, Matt, every single national park has some
kind of ghost story, and we will tell you why
by the way at the end. But the Devil's Dead
is in Gettysburg National Military Park, Matt. Have you visited Gettysburg.

Speaker 2 (01:01:56):
I feel like I did as a kid, but I
have no recollection of actually going through there. Yeah, because
it's getting muddled with other Civil War parts I've been to.

Speaker 4 (01:02:05):
Right, because we've seen a lot of Civil War parks
in our time. Yeah, this is a site commemorating one
of the most historically significant and a very bloody battle
of the US Civil War. There is a site in
the park called the Devil's Den. It's world famous amid
paranormal investigators, ghost hunters, psychics, you name it. And it's

(01:02:29):
really interesting to look at pictures because it's like, imagine
if you are if you are a Union or Confederate
soldier and you are in the midst of you know,
unreliable ammunition. You're probably not feeling great because you've been malnourished,
you're probably suffering from some disease, and you're being forced

(01:02:49):
to fight Napoleonic style, which means you're told to line
up and then just sort of march at each other
and hope you don't get shot. It's a really shy
way to wage war, honestly. So if you're in that situation,
you need to make friends with geography. So a place
with a bunch of boulders is great. You can break

(01:03:11):
up your death march line. You can hide behind rocks
long enough to reload without getting shot. This also the
same advantage carries on to the enemy forces. So it's
no surprise that the Devil's Den became a bloodbath.

Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
Yeah, I did. I kind of want to describe it
a little bit more. You found a great description from
someone named Mark Nesbitt, and I guess we should just
the quote is awesome, Ben, do you want to just
do it?

Speaker 3 (01:03:44):
You should do it, You should do it?

Speaker 6 (01:03:46):
All right?

Speaker 2 (01:03:46):
Well, okay, this is what it looks like, according to
Mark Nesbitt, who was a paranormal investigator and a former
park ranger, which that is very important. Here's how he
describes it quote, the Devil's Den looks like some giant
just dropped these huge boulders the size of houses down
onto this one spot on the battlefield. On a sunny day.

(01:04:09):
It's not too bad on a cloudy day. It's kind
of ominous at night. It's just ridiculous. Yeah, exactly. I
love as in it's creepy, right, that's that's what he's implying.

Speaker 7 (01:04:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:04:25):
Yeah, And I like to point out he is a
former park ranger. He's also the owner of the Ghost
of Gettysburg tours. Uh, he's coming there with experience, but
also it's good for him if you go on a
ghost tour.

Speaker 3 (01:04:40):
Yeah, that's the way. He said.

Speaker 4 (01:04:43):
He would often get the willies when he was just
walking around the area at night doing security checks. And
he spoke in depth with our pals at how stuff works,
about this are alma matter, how SFT works. And he
wrote a book or he wrote a book series I
should say, called Go of Gettysburg, wherein he chronicles a
lot of unexplained experiences at Devil's Den. And they have

(01:05:07):
all the you know, all the usual stripes of folklore,
right often unnamed people. The timeline is a little vague,
but the experience itself is sobering. One lady said she
was climbing around the boulders with a friend. She felt
a hand grab her ankle. Could it be her friend?

(01:05:27):
She looks down she sees a ghostly soldier grabbing for her.
She screams for help. She looks up, Oh, and there's
her friend. Her Friend's not touching her at all. She
looks back down. The man's gone.

Speaker 3 (01:05:39):
Whoa stranger danger.

Speaker 2 (01:05:43):
Gotta love a good ankle grab.

Speaker 3 (01:05:45):
M let's take full Can we cut that? Keep it
out of context. I'll never forget.

Speaker 4 (01:05:55):
Well, my good friend Matt told me all those years ago,
you gotta love a good ankle grab.

Speaker 2 (01:06:00):
I don't know how that would be in a weird way,
but that's that's to me. Just uh, that's one of
the creepiest things that I remember having to me as
a kid. My sister like, be under the bed and
grab my ankle.

Speaker 3 (01:06:13):
Just frightening.

Speaker 4 (01:06:14):
Right, It's a very vulnerable part of your body. And
then additionally, since you're laying down you're trying to go
to sleep, that's terrifying. That's terrified to the point where
even if you know how it happened, Yeah, like you
see your sister, I would still be furious.

Speaker 2 (01:06:31):
Well, yeah, it feels fun though. I think that's why
I like horror movies. Now, I'm not sure.

Speaker 4 (01:06:37):
We enjoy the things that scarred us, right, I'm in
a similar situation. Well there's there's the other one that's
a little bit less weird, which is did you see
this the helpful hippie story?

Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
Yeah, this one's This one's great. This one is like, oh, man,
I'm lost, where do I go? I don't know what
to do? And then an apparition appears out of nowhere
and says, it's over.

Speaker 3 (01:07:03):
There, man, exactly that way.

Speaker 2 (01:07:06):
Look where you're looking for is over there.

Speaker 7 (01:07:09):
And then you look in that direction and then you
look back and he's gone, wow, and he's like flower child,
weird hat all like picture the hippie.

Speaker 4 (01:07:19):
It's the hippie stereotype. He's got a shoulder length hair,
bare feet, you know. And Nesbit says this, we'll give
you what Nesbit says. First, he says, I can't believe
she's describing exactly what a Texan looked like at the
Battle of Gettysburg. She would not have known that as
a tourist. However, with great respect, mister Nesbit, we have

(01:07:44):
a proposition for you here. A lot of people do
live off the grid in national parks, you know, and
there are people who wander from park to park or
live in nomadic existence, like the people who follow rain
bow gatherings things like that. You know what are oh gosh,

(01:08:05):
what are they called? Rubber tramps? You know, train hoppers.
People are living outside of the system. I think it's
completely possible. A lot of those people, by the way,
are very very cool. I think it's completely possible that
there could just be a guy living out around that
area who shows up and helps people.

Speaker 3 (01:08:24):
Amongst the stones, amongst the stones, stones, stones.

Speaker 2 (01:08:29):
I love it. By wait, speaking of stones, just before
this is an interjection everyone, Ben, I was looking at
Death Valley, and I know we looked at that one too,
because there's a national park called the Death Valley National Park,
and they've got this phenomenon that I think we've mentioned
before but we haven't looked into it in detail. But
it's these stones that are heavy and stone, and somehow,

(01:08:55):
without any intervention by human hands or seenly animal hands,
they move.

Speaker 3 (01:09:03):
Yeah, they sort of slide along.

Speaker 2 (01:09:06):
It's a dry lake bed where these stones are, and
they move and you can see the trails of these
stones having moved over time. No footprints, no any just
explanation outside of oh, those stones move, I guess.

Speaker 3 (01:09:23):
Right.

Speaker 4 (01:09:24):
And also when you see that you're already in death Valley,
so your primary concern is, Man, I hope I get
water before I die.

Speaker 6 (01:09:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:32):
Yeah, these But it's just really cool because there is
there are like pretty good scientific concepts ideas about what
could make those stones do that. It has a lot
to do with ice forming when it gets super cold,
but like small amounts of ice forming amidst all the

(01:09:53):
particles already imagine of sand and dust and all that
other stuff that's out there. Somehow, when there's enough lubric
lubrication right at the front facing part of that stone,
and then there's a strong enough wind and then all
these other factors could potentially make it happen.

Speaker 4 (01:10:09):
It removes the friction maybe, Yeah, I mean that's the idea. Also,
because that area is so it is so dry, so arid. Uh,
there's the idea that like the flash floods that occasionally
or the rain that occasionally encurage plays apart. I think
there is a scientific explanation. I'm with you though, as

(01:10:30):
to my knowledge, and this may be incorrect, there is
no documented like video footage of them moving.

Speaker 3 (01:10:38):
It's just point A and then point B.

Speaker 4 (01:10:40):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:10:40):
Not to cut you off, Ben, I'm not kidding, not
hidting anyone out there that's listening right now. I'm sitting
in my house. My son and my mother are downstairs
hanging out. My dogs are both asleep behind me, well
behind me. Yeah, as you were talking, Ben, I felt
something touch my leg and then my shoulder and that

(01:11:06):
was it. And there's nobody around me. I'm not kidding.

Speaker 4 (01:11:10):
I can confirm by the way that we saw. We
saw Matt look down first at his left leg.

Speaker 3 (01:11:16):
And then it is right, and then look behind him.

Speaker 4 (01:11:19):
And because he was so crazy polite, you were like, hey,
not to cut you off, but.

Speaker 2 (01:11:25):
I'm just kind of sitting with the feeling in this moment.
But okay, Harvey.

Speaker 7 (01:11:31):
Hovey, Hovey, you heard you were talking Sack about ELTIV.

Speaker 2 (01:11:37):
There's so much more to learn about all of these parts. Again,
we mentioned there's not a single park I think that
you can look up that doesn't have something haunted. Look
up the twice hanged man. Also in Death Valley, story
of a guy who allegedly killed a banker, got convicted,
got hanged, then he was cut down, then he was

(01:11:58):
put back up hanged again for like a press opportunity.
This is in nineteen oh eight in a place called Skidoo.
Really it's called skid Do ski Doo. You can see
remnants of the town that are still out there in
Death Valley. There's so much to that story. But allegedly they,

(01:12:19):
I guess the medical practitioners at the time cut his
head off to see if he had syphilis or some
other brain disease that would cause the his erratic behavior
because he was like a I guess, he was a
pretty well known businessman at the time. He was well
known in the town, and he killed a beloved, allegedly
beloved banker, and so they're like, what the heck caused

(01:12:40):
him to do this? So they supposedly cut his head off,
and now even now you can see basically this headless
ghost that's walking around trying to find his head.

Speaker 4 (01:12:53):
Wild Again, like we said, it's scientifically proven that the
only real ghost are people have been decapitated. They you know,
don't get mad at us, folks, that's just science. And
also don't fact check us on that one. But yeah,
we might even return with more ghosts from national parks, because,
like you said, Matt, there are so very many out there.

(01:13:15):
If we did one for every national park, we'd be
looking at over four hundred.

Speaker 2 (01:13:20):
Yeah, well over dude, the Indiana Dunes and look up
Diana of the Dunes. That's a thing, Diana of the Dunes.
It's a fascinating, great, actually wholesome ghost story. If you
want to check that one out.

Speaker 4 (01:13:32):
Look up also all the myths surrounding mounds burial mounds
which were around, you know, well before the idea of
the United States, and indeed they were actively suppressed by
the United States, in some cases destroyed. And also if
you happen to live near any take the time to

(01:13:54):
go visit them. It's a fascinating peak into the hidden
history of this continent.

Speaker 3 (01:14:00):
Oh. Last one, ben, Yeah, last one.

Speaker 2 (01:14:01):
Last, if you have ever gone through it's the Smoky Mountains.
What's that one called Great Smoky Mountain National Park, I
think is the name of it. There's an area, Oh,
let me see if I can find it. It's called
the Thomas Divide Ridge where you can find Oh, you
could find the Thomas Divide overlook that is on one

(01:14:22):
of the one of the main roads there. If you
look out at night at this Thomas Divide Ridge, allegedly
you can see lights that flicker and shine in this
area that is not populated. They call it ghost lights,
smoky mountain ghost lights. I have seen video of these things,
but I've never heard anyone give a better explanation. I

(01:14:45):
guess for what possibly could be.

Speaker 3 (01:14:48):
Because it can't be swamp gas.

Speaker 2 (01:14:50):
I don't fit miss mountain gas.

Speaker 3 (01:14:51):
Maybe Mountain I've had Moore may too.

Speaker 4 (01:14:56):
Oh boy, Yes, we're talking about this off air, and
we could. I think that one could be an entire
episode because we can take what we learned from previous
ghost light conversations and will of the Wisp things and
kind of case test, right.

Speaker 2 (01:15:12):
Yeah, I just want to go. I want to go
spend a couple of nights out there in the wilderness
on the ridge that you can view from the from
the street there. Yeah, because I I you can get
footage of it from a certain angle. I want to
know if the angle of observation has anything to do
with the way the light looks. Right.

Speaker 4 (01:15:32):
Yeah, yeah, you were saying, you were saying, we need
to find the specific spot, right, And it could be
a multi person operation too, where we find the specific
spot and we have one person stay there and maintain that,
and then we have somebody else try to move toward
it and see what they can.

Speaker 6 (01:15:52):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:15:52):
We could triangulate, we could do some interesting things, especially
in the age of GPS.

Speaker 2 (01:15:57):
Dude, it's not that far from us. It's Tennessee, right,
that's like me, it's ours. But we can make it.

Speaker 3 (01:16:08):
Yeah, we can make it happen.

Speaker 4 (01:16:11):
We can also, you know what, let's tell the bosses
this is valuable research. And then we don't have time
to explain why we can't be in the meetings.

Speaker 2 (01:16:20):
Yeah, guys, we are exploring the wilderness.

Speaker 3 (01:16:24):
Let's just call into the meeting from there.

Speaker 6 (01:16:26):
Where are you would go?

Speaker 2 (01:16:28):
Great? They make satellite phones, still right.

Speaker 3 (01:16:31):
They do? They do?

Speaker 4 (01:16:34):
Okay, so we'll get with accounting first to get the
sat phone, and then we will okay, Yeah, wheels are spinning.

Speaker 3 (01:16:41):
I think we got this.

Speaker 6 (01:16:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:16:43):
X thirty seven B still up there is gonna be
there for a while. We'll be able to make contact.

Speaker 4 (01:16:47):
Yeah, well, who knows what. We'll ring out there into
the ink and we might get X thirty seven B.
We might get the Chinese one. You know, we know
how to say hello and all those languages. It'll work out.

Speaker 2 (01:16:59):
So why I'm sticking with you, buddy.

Speaker 4 (01:17:03):
Well, see that's why I'm sticking with you. That's why
we hope you are sticking with us. We'd like to
answer this question, folks, why would national parks in particular
garner so many tales of ghostly activity. Well, without saying
whether or not ghost or real, we can tell you
expectation plays a big role. You were talking about this
a little bit too, Matt. When people enter a place

(01:17:25):
being told, perhaps numerous times that paranormal activity might be present,
on some level of consciousness, even if you're a skeptic
saying I'll disprove this, you are going to be more
primed to look for unusual things. Some stuff that you
might ignore otherwise become you know, takes on other implications,

(01:17:46):
right like if you're if you're in a grocery store
or in a crowded part of your city or town,
there are a lot of things you ignore just to
get by. You know other people are around, you know
there's going to be other stimuli hitting hitting your wonderful
sensory network. But if you're in a new environment where
people have already told you look out for that headless person,

(01:18:07):
then you have a higher likelihood of feeling like a
visual movement you can't track in the distance, or something
comes from somewhere beyond the mundane realm, and I think
that's something we have to remember. Plus it makes for
a heck of a story. And we did reach out

(01:18:28):
to the National Park System. We went to the top
of this one, folks, and what we found is that
there's so many allegations of ghost in individual parks that
the best way to learn more is to contact the
parks directly and they'll answer you because they are awesome,
tireless people. The rangers and other officials who maintain these

(01:18:50):
resources are, in our opinion, heroes. And I don't know, man,
something you said earlier, which I think is such a
good point. We have to apply the willingness of the
park system to say play along, or maybe, let's say,
encourage interest in naturally human history. They've got a sense
of humor as well as respect, and they're kind of

(01:19:12):
leveraging the interest in the paranormal as a way of
encouraging interest in the stunning, very real beauty of the
world around us.

Speaker 6 (01:19:21):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (01:19:23):
Yes, so if it's a conspiracy, it's like a good conspiracy.

Speaker 2 (01:19:26):
It's a wholesome conspiracy. Again, it makes you want to do,
like what I probably wouldn't want to travel to Chickamungo,
which is another place in Tennessee. It's like it's an
historic National Landmark, I guess kind of, and it's got
a forest connected with a natural area. It's another Civil

(01:19:47):
War related thing, and I would ever go there. But
there's a thing there called Old Green Eyes that's allegedly
this thing at night that you can see. Want to
go see Old green Eyes way more than I want
to see the Civil War history. The Civil War history
then becomes a little cherry on top that I get

(01:20:07):
for my green Eyes exploration.

Speaker 4 (01:20:09):
Mmm, like how they give you candy at the dentist.
Also think about that one. Oh man, Yeah, I think
that's a great point.

Speaker 2 (01:20:22):
That was. The timing was just so good.

Speaker 4 (01:20:26):
So folks, we know we went long on this. Thank
you and apologies and condolences to our super producer Paul
Mission Control decand for sticking with us.

Speaker 6 (01:20:37):
As we.

Speaker 3 (01:20:39):
And I'm in a weird place too, man.

Speaker 4 (01:20:41):
Probably we probably want to call it a day. We'll
have no Old joining us for future adventure very soon.
And for everyone who's hearing this, we would love to
hear stories from the ghost in your neck of the
Global Woods, your.

Speaker 3 (01:20:57):
Local national park.

Speaker 4 (01:20:58):
Even if you don't think there's a ghost story there,
go check it out and help us learn more about
it as well. As you're a fellow conspiracy realist. You
can find us on Instagram, you can find us on Facebook,
and can find us on x You check out our
weird avant garde social media videos that we're doing, and
if you don't want to do any of that, if

(01:21:20):
you don't sip those social meds, then why not just
give us a telephone call.

Speaker 2 (01:21:25):
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Speaker 4 (01:21:41):
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