November 1, 2024 • 15 mins
Holly shares some of the theories about the Brown Lady photographers that characterizes them as charlatans. Tracy and Holly also share their experiences with possible ghosts.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I am Holly Fry
and I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson. Oh.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
I hate when Halloween season ends.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Yeah, but it's okay. That just means more new things ahead.
And because I ended up doing only three in this one,
that means I have a list for next year, so
we can probably certainly do this one again with new stories.
So there were a few things I wanted to talk
(00:40):
about for each of these.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
One. In talking about the men who took the picture
of the Brown Lady r Ravan and Shira, I couldn't
find hard substantiation. But there are some folks who have
suggested did that those two men were in fact hucksters
(01:03):
in their own right, and that they had approached Country
Life magazine claiming to be like professional photographers of a
very high level, when really they were also planning this thing.
One thing that I read suggested that Andrews Shira had
actually borrowed the name of his wife, who was a
(01:26):
fortune teller at this time. Name, But I and there
was an Indrew Shira that that was also working at
that time, But I couldn't find substantiation of a relationship
between these two people. So I don't know, but it
is interesting. I really liked the idea that the damning
piece of evidence is that the Brown Lady would have
been like four feet tall, which people can be, but
(01:48):
she was never reportedly that short, right, And so they're like,
this doesn't actually hold up or make sense.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
And then the resemblance to a statue that could have
been used to stage a picture.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Right, to do a double exposure situation, right, love all that,
love all of it. I also think it's funny that
I didn't. I didn't realize. You know, we mentioned we
had talked about this on our Spirit Photography episode, which
was really about Mumbler, and so this was like a
tertiary part of it, so we didn't I didn't dig
really deepen it. But I had not found until kind
(02:19):
of late in the game the fact that the owner
of the house had just published a book about ghosts, right, right, like, oh,
this is all little too coincidental. Like there are even
some assessments who think who kind of put it out there? That,
like the martian Ess was really irritated by all of
(02:40):
this and these men making like a ghost story out
of what was supposed to be her her spread, of
her beautiful renovation, and I'm like, oh.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
I think that's what was going on.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
I think she was down with it. The other thing
that I wanted to talk about from our first episode
this week is this scenario of a hotel being created
out of the old castle and a new construction being
added on to it, because I have stayed at one
(03:11):
such hotel in Ireland and it is quite cool. I
really really enjoy those. Yeah. I've stayed at a couple
of castle hotels in Ireland, one of which I could
have believed pretty easily was haunted. I'm not really especially
especially superstitious. I'm very skeptical, but Brian and I were
(03:32):
both like, yeah, if there is one, this is probably
the one. But I will stay in those all day,
every day. I love those. Yeah, I love that Bally
Galley just leans right into the whole thing and it's like,
would you like to see our ghosts? She's right up here,
like this is her house. That's fine. I think that's
super fun and now I want to go there. It's
one more place on my list. M Okay. I promised
(03:55):
we would talk about William Drury and some weirdness because
a lot there are two interesting things. There are many
more interesting things. There are two interesting things. I wanted
to mention.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
This one is that a lot of times when you
see information about William Drury and I mentioned we didn't
have much, there is a piece of supposition that happens
that becomes problematic in its own right where they use
the slur that is often used today to refer to
(04:32):
Romeny people or travelers, and it kind of buis into
that whole thing that those people cannot be trusted. Clearly,
it was a group of Romney who he was part of,
and they were all trying to do this thing because
they are inherently aggressive and cruel, and it's just like
(04:52):
it's all supposition. There is no backup on any of that, right,
and so that's an element to the story that you
can't really substantiate because one we don't know for sure
that that's the case.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Two people that are making those comments often aren't the
ones who were involved in it. So it's sort of
like an after the fact kind of racist take on
the whole scene. Yeah, which is just super weird. I mean,
it's common, it's not weird in terms of being an outlier.
We see it all the time, but it's just that
(05:27):
thing of I don't understand this thing. It must be
the work of these people I already don't trust. Okay,
well that's a leap of logic, but all right, right right,
and it's fundamentally harmful. So I wanted to mention it
in case any of our listeners, because I know sometimes
people like to go and look up stuff that we've
talked about and dig a little deeper on their own, like,
(05:48):
be prepared, you will see all of that. It's not
not cool. There were so many rumors that got started
in the immediate aftermath of the Mampison situation. One that
somebody started, and we don't know where it began, was
that Glanville had changed his mind and no longer believed
(06:11):
in the veracity of this being, you know, a demonic entity,
which was not the case. So it just kind of
to me as I got deeper and deeper into looking
stuff up on this and trying to, you know, peel
the layers of the onion. It's another one of those wonderful,
slash sad examples of history as seen through the modern eye.
(06:40):
Because we I have mentioned this many times before. We
always think we are living through the most and the worst,
and like, can you believe we've gotten to this point
where people are purposely using disinformation campaigns to manipulate the
truth and what people believe in. Well, this was the
sixteen sixties. It was happening then, So like, this is
(07:02):
not a new thing to the modern world. It's reassuring
to know that we haven't, you know, necessarily reached Uh,
this isn't the result of like the apex of humans
being progressively more horrible that we are doing such things.
But it's also sad because we've never learned from our
mistakes anyway. That just stuck out to me. Uh, yeah,
(07:33):
I'm not I'm a ghosty person. Yeah, not really. I
say that I was raised in a house where one
of my parents was enough into these things that there's
part of me. It's like, ah, I don't know. Maybe, Yeah,
I'm not adamant about anything, frankly, because it's one of
(07:53):
those one of those things, you know. I hope there
are ghosts because I want to be one. Yeah. Yeah,
I think I want to find a cute bar and
be its ghosts hang out.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Yeah, there was a cabin that I stayed in I
might have told this story on the show before. I
was in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and a couple of
very kind neighbors allowed me to stay in it for
an extraordinarily small amount of money while I was in
massage school.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Nice and it.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Was like very old had been built by people who
were like farming this little bit of land in western
North Carolina, and then like a Sears Kit mother in
law cottage had been built onto it in like the
nineteen eighties, and like I stayed in the Sears Kit
house and the original log cabin structure had all of
(08:49):
this stuff that had belonged to the parents of the
person the people who owned the cabin now like from
places they travel.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
It was really cool.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
And I I went in there after dark one night
to put away a hammock so that it wouldn't get
wet and mildewy from being out in the dew right.
And I walked into the cabin and it was like
all the hairs on the back of my neck stood up,
and I was like, nope, And I put the hammock
(09:19):
on the nearest location and left and shut the door
behind me and locked it and went over into the
mother in law suite that had been added on, and like,
I don't know what was up with that, but I
did not want to look into the windows of that
cabin after dark for the rest of the time that
I stayed there, because I was very sure I might
(09:42):
see something looking back at me. I don't know if
that cabin is there anymore.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
In my head, it was like a raccoon, who's like,
what is this lady doing here?
Speaker 2 (09:53):
I later did have an experience where there was a weird,
repetitive thumping noise happening in the night that I was like,
what the go is coming for me now? And when
I got up in the morning, I realized it was
apples falling out of the apple tree. But I don't
know if that cabin is standing. It's in an area
that was like really really hard hit by Helene, Like
(10:13):
all the roads around it are still closed, and I
honestly I don't know if that was still there at
some time before this, because this was twenty something years ago,
and the people that I've rented it from were in
their elder years when I did that, so who knows.
But yeah, that whole part of North Carolina is very
(10:35):
close to my heart, and so I don't know if
anyone else is listening to the show who's from that
part of the state in the southeast, Like that's all
still really difficult times happening out there.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Oh for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
I have had a couple of weird incidents. The one
that I always tell people and I know I've told you,
and I feel like I've told it in a live
show was the ghost cat.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Oh yeah, where when we were in our old apartment,
there was a period of time where Brian and I
both independently had been seeing a cat out of the
corner of our eyes and couning and realizing there was
no cat there.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Yeah, And we had two cats at the time, but
it was always like we thought it would be one
of them, and we would turn and be like that
is neither gg nor zisu, Like what's going on, It's
just the stairs. And then there was an incident where
we both independently heard very clearly my deceased mother's voice
and we were like, what the hell was that? And like,
(11:40):
I had a not always awesome relationship with my mom, right,
but it would be very much in line with her
personality for her as a way to like try to
build a bridge to show up with an animal, okay. Yeah,
And so it was like the day after we heard
about that, some friends contacted us and we're like, we
(12:02):
found and the cat we had both seen was a
solid gray cat. And our friend was like, I found
these gray kittens, right, you take kittens. And we were like, jam,
did you bring us a cat? Like that's how we
got Veers and Ozzl. Hey to you know, Veers is
no longer with us and Ozl is gonna turn twenty
(12:22):
in the Yeah, so it's been a while, but we
have always joked that they were brought by my deceased mom. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
The day that we moved into this house, you know,
with the movers moving all of our furniture and everything,
we had gotten sheets on the bed. We were going
to bed for our first night in this house that
we live in now, and I felt the sensation of
a cat jumping up onto the bed and like, we
don't have We did not have any cats at that time, right,
(12:50):
But that was my only experience with ghost cat in
the house.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
I did have one other weird one that happened in
San Francisco when we were staying at a hotel there
that is rumored to be haunted. And there was one
night there were two things. One thing we solved on
our own, and we laughed at ourselves, and then I
was relaxed. And then something else happened, which is in
(13:15):
one night we were in bed and we heard like
a jingling noise and it just was persistent. Then it
sounded like it was coming from the closet, and we
eventually like it wouldn't stop, and we got up and
we turned on the lights and we went and we
realized that there was a little a little like hole
in the wall through which some plumbing passed and the fitting,
(13:40):
like a fitting that would normally close that whole, like
seal it off, had come loose, and that was what
was jingling. We were like, ha ha ha, we've been
taken in. And then the next day Brian was taking
a shower and I was like, I'm gonna lie down
and get a nap while you take a shower. And
I felt just what felt like someone scratching their fingernails
gently on my back, and I just said, no, thank you.
(14:04):
What's the end of it. But for all I know,
it was like a bug that I never found. I
don't know what it was. It did scare, the scare
the who sits out of me For a moment, I
was just like, ah, all right, no thank you. That's
literally how I would talk to a ghost. No thank you, Yeah,
ski dadd all. If they were a ghost, I hope
(14:25):
they were not offended. But I mean not wanting to chat. Yeah,
But I hope to be a ghost one day. Because
I have plants. That's outside of the Hauna mansion. I
have plants. There will be hauntings. I hope since we
are now, as you're listening to this just past Halloween season,
(14:48):
I hope that you had a wonderful Halloween, if that
is a holiday that you celebrate. If you don't like Halloween,
I hope that you can live in the relief that
it's all over, unless you come to my house where
it never ends. We are going to be back here
tomorrow with a classic, and then on Monday we will
have a new episode.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I am Holly Fry
and I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson. Oh.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
I hate when Halloween season ends.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Yeah, but it's okay. That just means more new things ahead.
And because I ended up doing only three in this one,
that means I have a list for next year, so
we can probably certainly do this one again with new stories.
So there were a few things I wanted to talk
(00:40):
about for each of these.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
One. In talking about the men who took the picture
of the Brown Lady r Ravan and Shira, I couldn't
find hard substantiation. But there are some folks who have
suggested did that those two men were in fact hucksters
(01:03):
in their own right, and that they had approached Country
Life magazine claiming to be like professional photographers of a
very high level, when really they were also planning this thing.
One thing that I read suggested that Andrews Shira had
actually borrowed the name of his wife, who was a
(01:26):
fortune teller at this time. Name, But I and there
was an Indrew Shira that that was also working at
that time, But I couldn't find substantiation of a relationship
between these two people. So I don't know, but it
is interesting. I really liked the idea that the damning
piece of evidence is that the Brown Lady would have
been like four feet tall, which people can be, but
(01:48):
she was never reportedly that short, right, And so they're like,
this doesn't actually hold up or make sense.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
And then the resemblance to a statue that could have
been used to stage a picture.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Right, to do a double exposure situation, right, love all that,
love all of it. I also think it's funny that
I didn't. I didn't realize. You know, we mentioned we
had talked about this on our Spirit Photography episode, which
was really about Mumbler, and so this was like a
tertiary part of it, so we didn't I didn't dig
really deepen it. But I had not found until kind
(02:19):
of late in the game the fact that the owner
of the house had just published a book about ghosts, right, right, like, oh,
this is all little too coincidental. Like there are even
some assessments who think who kind of put it out there? That,
like the martian Ess was really irritated by all of
(02:40):
this and these men making like a ghost story out
of what was supposed to be her her spread, of
her beautiful renovation, and I'm like, oh.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
I think that's what was going on.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
I think she was down with it. The other thing
that I wanted to talk about from our first episode
this week is this scenario of a hotel being created
out of the old castle and a new construction being
added on to it, because I have stayed at one
(03:11):
such hotel in Ireland and it is quite cool. I
really really enjoy those. Yeah. I've stayed at a couple
of castle hotels in Ireland, one of which I could
have believed pretty easily was haunted. I'm not really especially
especially superstitious. I'm very skeptical, but Brian and I were
(03:32):
both like, yeah, if there is one, this is probably
the one. But I will stay in those all day,
every day. I love those. Yeah, I love that Bally
Galley just leans right into the whole thing and it's like,
would you like to see our ghosts? She's right up here,
like this is her house. That's fine. I think that's
super fun and now I want to go there. It's
one more place on my list. M Okay. I promised
(03:55):
we would talk about William Drury and some weirdness because
a lot there are two interesting things. There are many
more interesting things. There are two interesting things. I wanted
to mention.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
This one is that a lot of times when you
see information about William Drury and I mentioned we didn't
have much, there is a piece of supposition that happens
that becomes problematic in its own right where they use
the slur that is often used today to refer to
(04:32):
Romeny people or travelers, and it kind of buis into
that whole thing that those people cannot be trusted. Clearly,
it was a group of Romney who he was part of,
and they were all trying to do this thing because
they are inherently aggressive and cruel, and it's just like
(04:52):
it's all supposition. There is no backup on any of that, right,
and so that's an element to the story that you
can't really substantiate because one we don't know for sure
that that's the case.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
Two people that are making those comments often aren't the
ones who were involved in it. So it's sort of
like an after the fact kind of racist take on
the whole scene. Yeah, which is just super weird. I mean,
it's common, it's not weird in terms of being an outlier.
We see it all the time, but it's just that
(05:27):
thing of I don't understand this thing. It must be
the work of these people I already don't trust. Okay,
well that's a leap of logic, but all right, right right,
and it's fundamentally harmful. So I wanted to mention it
in case any of our listeners, because I know sometimes
people like to go and look up stuff that we've
talked about and dig a little deeper on their own, like,
(05:48):
be prepared, you will see all of that. It's not
not cool. There were so many rumors that got started
in the immediate aftermath of the Mampison situation. One that
somebody started, and we don't know where it began, was
that Glanville had changed his mind and no longer believed
(06:11):
in the veracity of this being, you know, a demonic entity,
which was not the case. So it just kind of
to me as I got deeper and deeper into looking
stuff up on this and trying to, you know, peel
the layers of the onion. It's another one of those wonderful,
slash sad examples of history as seen through the modern eye.
(06:40):
Because we I have mentioned this many times before. We
always think we are living through the most and the worst,
and like, can you believe we've gotten to this point
where people are purposely using disinformation campaigns to manipulate the
truth and what people believe in. Well, this was the
sixteen sixties. It was happening then, So like, this is
(07:02):
not a new thing to the modern world. It's reassuring
to know that we haven't, you know, necessarily reached Uh,
this isn't the result of like the apex of humans
being progressively more horrible that we are doing such things.
But it's also sad because we've never learned from our
mistakes anyway. That just stuck out to me. Uh, yeah,
(07:33):
I'm not I'm a ghosty person. Yeah, not really. I
say that I was raised in a house where one
of my parents was enough into these things that there's
part of me. It's like, ah, I don't know. Maybe, Yeah,
I'm not adamant about anything, frankly, because it's one of
(07:53):
those one of those things, you know. I hope there
are ghosts because I want to be one. Yeah. Yeah,
I think I want to find a cute bar and
be its ghosts hang out.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Yeah, there was a cabin that I stayed in I
might have told this story on the show before. I
was in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and a couple of
very kind neighbors allowed me to stay in it for
an extraordinarily small amount of money while I was in
massage school.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
Nice and it.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Was like very old had been built by people who
were like farming this little bit of land in western
North Carolina, and then like a Sears Kit mother in
law cottage had been built onto it in like the
nineteen eighties, and like I stayed in the Sears Kit
house and the original log cabin structure had all of
(08:49):
this stuff that had belonged to the parents of the
person the people who owned the cabin now like from
places they travel.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
It was really cool.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
And I I went in there after dark one night
to put away a hammock so that it wouldn't get
wet and mildewy from being out in the dew right.
And I walked into the cabin and it was like
all the hairs on the back of my neck stood up,
and I was like, nope, And I put the hammock
(09:19):
on the nearest location and left and shut the door
behind me and locked it and went over into the
mother in law suite that had been added on, and like,
I don't know what was up with that, but I
did not want to look into the windows of that
cabin after dark for the rest of the time that
I stayed there, because I was very sure I might
(09:42):
see something looking back at me. I don't know if
that cabin is there anymore.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
In my head, it was like a raccoon, who's like,
what is this lady doing here?
Speaker 2 (09:53):
I later did have an experience where there was a weird,
repetitive thumping noise happening in the night that I was like,
what the go is coming for me now? And when
I got up in the morning, I realized it was
apples falling out of the apple tree. But I don't
know if that cabin is standing. It's in an area
that was like really really hard hit by Helene, Like
(10:13):
all the roads around it are still closed, and I
honestly I don't know if that was still there at
some time before this, because this was twenty something years ago,
and the people that I've rented it from were in
their elder years when I did that, so who knows.
But yeah, that whole part of North Carolina is very
(10:35):
close to my heart, and so I don't know if
anyone else is listening to the show who's from that
part of the state in the southeast, Like that's all
still really difficult times happening out there.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Oh for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
I have had a couple of weird incidents. The one
that I always tell people and I know I've told you,
and I feel like I've told it in a live
show was the ghost cat.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Oh yeah, where when we were in our old apartment,
there was a period of time where Brian and I
both independently had been seeing a cat out of the
corner of our eyes and couning and realizing there was
no cat there.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Yeah, And we had two cats at the time, but
it was always like we thought it would be one
of them, and we would turn and be like that
is neither gg nor zisu, Like what's going on, It's
just the stairs. And then there was an incident where
we both independently heard very clearly my deceased mother's voice
and we were like, what the hell was that? And like,
(11:40):
I had a not always awesome relationship with my mom, right,
but it would be very much in line with her
personality for her as a way to like try to
build a bridge to show up with an animal, okay. Yeah,
And so it was like the day after we heard
about that, some friends contacted us and we're like, we
(12:02):
found and the cat we had both seen was a
solid gray cat. And our friend was like, I found
these gray kittens, right, you take kittens. And we were like, jam,
did you bring us a cat? Like that's how we
got Veers and Ozzl. Hey to you know, Veers is
no longer with us and Ozl is gonna turn twenty
(12:22):
in the Yeah, so it's been a while, but we
have always joked that they were brought by my deceased mom. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
The day that we moved into this house, you know,
with the movers moving all of our furniture and everything,
we had gotten sheets on the bed. We were going
to bed for our first night in this house that
we live in now, and I felt the sensation of
a cat jumping up onto the bed and like, we
don't have We did not have any cats at that time, right,
(12:50):
But that was my only experience with ghost cat in
the house.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
I did have one other weird one that happened in
San Francisco when we were staying at a hotel there
that is rumored to be haunted. And there was one
night there were two things. One thing we solved on
our own, and we laughed at ourselves, and then I
was relaxed. And then something else happened, which is in
(13:15):
one night we were in bed and we heard like
a jingling noise and it just was persistent. Then it
sounded like it was coming from the closet, and we
eventually like it wouldn't stop, and we got up and
we turned on the lights and we went and we
realized that there was a little a little like hole
in the wall through which some plumbing passed and the fitting,
(13:40):
like a fitting that would normally close that whole, like
seal it off, had come loose, and that was what
was jingling. We were like, ha ha ha, we've been
taken in. And then the next day Brian was taking
a shower and I was like, I'm gonna lie down
and get a nap while you take a shower. And
I felt just what felt like someone scratching their fingernails
gently on my back, and I just said, no, thank you.
(14:04):
What's the end of it. But for all I know,
it was like a bug that I never found. I
don't know what it was. It did scare, the scare
the who sits out of me For a moment, I
was just like, ah, all right, no thank you. That's
literally how I would talk to a ghost. No thank you, Yeah,
ski dadd all. If they were a ghost, I hope
(14:25):
they were not offended. But I mean not wanting to chat. Yeah,
But I hope to be a ghost one day. Because
I have plants. That's outside of the Hauna mansion. I
have plants. There will be hauntings. I hope since we
are now, as you're listening to this just past Halloween season,
(14:48):
I hope that you had a wonderful Halloween, if that
is a holiday that you celebrate. If you don't like Halloween,
I hope that you can live in the relief that
it's all over, unless you come to my house where
it never ends. We are going to be back here
tomorrow with a classic, and then on Monday we will
have a new episode.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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Tracy V. Wilson
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