December 15, 2025 • 17 mins
Guest Host Richard Syrett and Courtney McInvale discuss Courtney growing up in a haunted house, the regional differences in hauntings and ghost tours.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Historian Courtney macnveile is the author of Civil War Ghosts
of Georgia Volumes one and two, Civil War Ghosts of Connecticut,
Revolutionary War Ghosts of Connecticut, and Haunted Mystic. You come
by your interest in hauntings honestly, as I say, you
grew up in a haunted house that was investigated by
(00:25):
none other than Ed and Lorraine Warren tell me about that.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Yeah, that's very true.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
So I grew up in New England, and I think
if you ask anyone from New England were no stranger
to hauntings.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Every house sort of has a creaky floorboard.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Or flickering light, and our house was no different when
I was growing up, and my parents were, you know,
pretty honest about it. They just said old houses did
strange things. They didn't want my siblings and I growing
up scared.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
But as we.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
Got older, there was a whole lot of change of
events in our family life. And I think it's important
when you look at extreme hauntings to really understand that
some families can have an experience in one house.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
That other people don't.
Speaker 4 (01:10):
And there was a lot going on in my familial home,
and my father was working a second job called post
mortem cleanup, where he was cleaning up homicides and suicides,
and it was around that time that we started to
get this really sort of unexplained almost negative or malevolent
haunting activity. And being raised by an Irish Catholic mother.
She was calling priests and everything for house blessings and
(01:33):
they couldn't figure out what.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Was going on.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
So she ended up calling Eda Lorraine Warren, who she
found on the old dial up internet on AOL. They
said they helped people in haunted houses, and she gave
them a ring, and after interviewing her and our family,
they took the case.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Wow, and what did they discover.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
They told our family that we were residing in a
portal to the other side, and that had sort of
been a train station for spirits, and that there were
benign or okay ones, and that there were malevolent ones,
and that they had to conduct a cleansing, almost like
an exorcism of the home. And so my family had
to leave the home for a while while they conducted
(02:17):
this cleansing of the home, which was ultimately very helpful,
but I would say not you know, permanent. We ended
up still having more haunted activity, and a few years
later my mom did sell the house.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
And then later you worked with the FBI and Homeland Security.
I mean, how did that in investigative background help you
bring or what did it bring to your paranormal and
historical research.
Speaker 4 (02:49):
I think I think it's much more helpful than I
initially realized. So it's funny I growing up in a
haunted house and things. I almost at that age was
embarrassed by it.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
I didn't want anyone to know those things about me.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
Now people are a lot more open about the paranormal
and the occults and their beliefs and experiences, and it's
a lot more unifying. But it wasn't that way. So
I went to college and told no one and got
a job working for the government. And I worked for
a cold case homicide unit when I was in college
for NCIS, and then I was able to work for
(03:25):
the Bureau after that as an analyst, and by that
I was able to go through the FBI Academy, And
really what that did for me was help me to
learn how to corroborate information, how to validate facts, how
to put things together. In a timeline that makes sense
when you're telling a story, so that it is supported.
(03:48):
And I found that with the paranormal a lot of
times our emotions can sort of tell us what we
want to say. And so all of that work with
the FBI Academy and learning about corroboration and validation helped
me to add those facts in those layers to make
the stories that much more meaningful and have much more evidence.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
So I'm very grateful that I had that.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Are there regional differences in hauntings? So, for example, do
New England hauntings differ from Southern hauntings?
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (04:19):
Absolutely, on a micro scale they do, because of what
happened in these.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
Areas is vastly different.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
And if we're talking on a broad scope, hauntings and
communication with human spirits or through tragedy can happen anywhere.
So if you're up in New England, a lot of
people are going to be talking about the Salem witch Trials,
some of the early massacres against the Native Americans, some
seafaring tragedies and shipwrecks, Whereas down South we're going to
(04:50):
be talking a lot about the Civil War, the Trail
of Tears, there's a lot more when it comes to
cryptids when worthy American South. That sort of comes from
these rich Appalachian lores of a mix of Scots, Irish, German,
and African American cultures combining. So depending on what cultures
(05:11):
settled can also dictate your paranormal.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
New England has a lot more.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
English people, so they might have a little bit less
of the monstrous sort of stories that the Scots, Irish
and stuff are familiar with because they've always leaned into
the supernatural. And a lot of them settled down South,
so you see those differences come from the cultures and
where they settled.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
And does geography influence the type of activity reported.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
I think it does.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
I find that a lot of times locations by the
water seem to be sort of a natural conduit for activity.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
So I've often felt sort.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
Of that combining of the natural elements here on Earth,
of land and water can bring things together. However, being
working in Chickamauga and Gettysburg in places like that, you're
more in mountainous regions which have their own sort of mysteries.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
So I do.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
Feel that areas that really have something geographical that shapes them,
that sets them apart from somewhere else do tend to
gravitate toward more activity.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
A little earlier, you were mentioning time slips. What are
they to me?
Speaker 4 (06:24):
A time slip is when you go to a place
and you are either hearing or sensing something that's.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Not of your time.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
Like so, if you're on a battlefield, you might hear
a cannon fire, or you might smell gunpowder in the air,
and you'll think, oh, that, you know, that's not around.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
That could be a slip in time.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
There are stories too, where it's much bigger, where people
actually look around them and they see people of a
different era and just for a second they feel like
they're almost like a fish out of and they're existing
in this other time.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
So it can be like.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
That where for a moment you're seeing something else. There
were two sisters in Versailles a couple hundred years ago
and they ended up, you know, having a time slip
where they saw you know, Marie Antoinette and all these
people walking around, and they were so confused and for
the rest of their lives they were trying to figure
it out how for a few minutes in Versailles they
(07:26):
were back in time and those things do happen on occasion,
and that's what I would call a time slip.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Have you ever accidentally stepped into the past.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
I've had like some of those sensory experiences. I think
only once did I have an experience where it felt
as if I was somewhat in the past. I had
like one foot in each I want to say. And
it wasn't Gettysburg. I was by the Eternal Flame, and
it's near an area called Iverson's Charge, where a Confederate
(07:59):
general he.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
Was a little bit drunk, he was grieving.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
He was not necessarily the nicest man at that time,
and he sent a bunch of his soldiers into a
terrible move where hundreds, if not thousands of them died
within moments. And people would always say that area was haunted.
And so I was walking around seeing what I could sense,
when all of a sudden I saw a man standing.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
There in uniform.
Speaker 4 (08:23):
And it was at night, back in the day you
could go on the battlefield at night. And he looked
at me as if he saw me, and was as
baffled by the side of me as I was by him.
And I actually had on an audio recorder at that time,
and you can hear me calling for my husband because
I got really nervous that this man was so close,
and I sort.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
Of skidaddled back to the car.
Speaker 4 (08:46):
My husband heard me, and he got in the car,
and as we were driving away, I could see the
man following the car, and I could see him looking
at me in the window, and the sort of motion
detector that tells you where something is was blinking on
my side where I saw.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
So I think for.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
A moment our time paths crossed or something like that,
and we confused each other.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
But I do think that's rare.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
Although when I'm out on the battlefield walking for a moment,
sometimes I think it would be really neat if I
just saw them walking by or marching and that sort
of thing, and sometimes you can feel it and you
just know it's right there.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Why does some spirits seem tied to specific objects or structures.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
I think a lot of that is actually us as
humans trying to figure that out. There's a long held
belief that ghosts or spirits are something that can't cross over,
or they're stuck in a place, and so we start
to associate that place or that object with them. I
(09:51):
think that's more of a human concept than a spiritual concept.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
I think spirits are very.
Speaker 4 (09:56):
Fluid and move around, and while there is residual energy,
I feel like they might go back to some of
these places, but they're not stuck there. What I more
think is attracting them is a familiarity. Right, So, if
you are a spirit and you are sort of on
this earthly plane of existence for any reason, even if
(10:16):
it's ensuring your memory, You're going to want to go
to things or around things that are familiar to you.
So I think things of certain eras and interests might
have spirits gravitate to them for that reason, not as
much as an attachment.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Though your ghost tours, you have two very successful ghost tours.
How do you handle skeptics on your tours?
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (10:41):
I love having skeptics on my tours because my goal
is not to change your mind or convert you or
make you believe anything. I'm going to tell you the
stories of the history as they were written by those
people and as I've experienced them. And so no matter what,
even if you're a skeptic, you can enjoy the stories,
(11:02):
but I want you to come with an open mind.
And so one of the things I always do. Especially
that I feel as helpful with skeptics is I bring
out news articles or writings that people had in the
eighteen hundreds where they documented what they saw as a ghost,
and I show them these documents saying, you don't have
to believe me, but here's what they said of their
(11:25):
own time and of their own beliefs.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
And sometimes when you see.
Speaker 4 (11:30):
It coming from a historic source, it really opens up
your mind to think, huh, would these people be making
this up for us two hundred years later to read.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Probably not.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
They really believed in something more too, and they had
something compelling happen.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
So I always try to show people some.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Of these clips of evidence that I believe is evidence
of what people have documented over the centuries.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
As a skeptical or change his mind is or her
mind as a result.
Speaker 4 (11:58):
Oh yes, yes, I love getting those reviews too. Sometimes
I'll usually see them in a review they're like, I
went in a skeptic and I left a believer. It's
either because of something that I had shown them or
because they had just such an experience on the tour
where they felt something that.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
It changed their mind.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
And I always love when that happens because I think
as humans we try to understand everything and think we're
so knowledgeable, and just having that openness to saying, hey,
maybe I don't know all the facts is very rewarding.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Do you think a memory itself is a kind of haunting?
Speaker 4 (12:37):
Oh? Yeah, yes, And I love that you say that,
because when I talk about spirits, and especially Civil war spirits,
what I oftentimes find is that they didn't fear dying,
they feared being forgotten. So there were different things that
were done to ensure the perpetuity of their mine memory,
(13:01):
and so flowers were sent to funerals, face masks were made,
clocks were stopped, certain journal things were written, there were
lavish funerals. All of these were things to ensure memory.
So for us, memory is our way of connecting with
the past and those who we have lost or will
(13:24):
have been lost over time. Any way that we can
carry that memory is in a sense carrying their spirit
and as I mentioned, signaling that familiarity to the spirit
to come through.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Do you think ignoring history is a way of creating
more ghosts.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
I think it's a way of making ghosts angry. I
think it's, you know, our.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Service to our fellow human being. Whether they're alive or not.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
To try and understand them and treat them with dignity
and respect, and so to learn of their time and
what happened to them is the best thing you can
do to connect with spirit. Otherwise it's just as rude
as you walking into someone's home that you don't know
or care about and demanding they answer you.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
You know, I think that.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
Spirits have to be treated with respect to their history
and who they were for you to really understand them.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Tell me a little bit about Mystic, Connecticut.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Sure.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
So. Mystic is set in far southeastern Connecticut, not far
from the Rhode Island border, and it is one of
the oldest seafaring towns. It's a halfway point between Boston
and New York, right near the city of New London.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
And Mystic was the site of one of the.
Speaker 4 (14:47):
First massacres on what would become us soil, and it
was called the Mystic mascar of sixteen thirty seven, where
several hundred Pequa indigenous people were murdered by fire for
some the British settlers. After that, Mystic became a settlement
where all of these shipbuilders came. But by way of that,
(15:09):
a lot of ship tragedies would also follow of sinkings
or missing ships, and so a lot of that history
is there, as well as American revolutionary history. There were
a lot of Revolutionary War soldiers from that area.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
And have you experienced anything something that scared you in
Mystic Connecticut?
Speaker 4 (15:34):
Yes, yes, it was on my very own graveyard tour.
And I feel bad saying it because I actually do
love this spirit's story, but it very much scared me
at the time. So when I was giving a tour,
I was talking about an attack that Benedict Arnold had
had on our area, and I was standing by the
(15:55):
grave of a gentleman who was killed in that attack.
And when I was standing there by the grave, I
noticed that a lot of people started having these sort
of outpouring of emotions and they were feeling really strange,
and so I had sort of talked them down. I
continued with my story. I was looking at all of
my guests to make sure they were all right, and
then all of a sudden, I looked at this one
(16:16):
man and he looked at me very sternly, like he
was fact checking everything I said. And then I went
to the next person in the line and It suddenly
hit me, like an epiphany, that the man I had
just been looking at wasn't someone who had been on
my tour prior to that moment. It wasn't someone I
had checked in, it wasn't someone dressed of the correct era.
(16:40):
And I thought, oh my gosh, this is him making
sure I told his story correctly. And all my guests
told me where I saw him is where they had
felt a person standing and had gotten all those strange emotions.
And ever since then we have captured voices there in
pages of a man there, as if he continues to
(17:03):
make sure we're doing his story justice.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern, and go to Coast to cooastam dot
com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Historian Courtney macnveile is the author of Civil War Ghosts
of Georgia Volumes one and two, Civil War Ghosts of Connecticut,
Revolutionary War Ghosts of Connecticut, and Haunted Mystic. You come
by your interest in hauntings honestly, as I say, you
grew up in a haunted house that was investigated by
(00:25):
none other than Ed and Lorraine Warren tell me about that.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Yeah, that's very true.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
So I grew up in New England, and I think
if you ask anyone from New England were no stranger
to hauntings.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Every house sort of has a creaky floorboard.
Speaker 4 (00:41):
Or flickering light, and our house was no different when
I was growing up, and my parents were, you know,
pretty honest about it. They just said old houses did
strange things. They didn't want my siblings and I growing
up scared.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
But as we.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
Got older, there was a whole lot of change of
events in our family life. And I think it's important
when you look at extreme hauntings to really understand that
some families can have an experience in one house.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
That other people don't.
Speaker 4 (01:10):
And there was a lot going on in my familial home,
and my father was working a second job called post
mortem cleanup, where he was cleaning up homicides and suicides,
and it was around that time that we started to
get this really sort of unexplained almost negative or malevolent
haunting activity. And being raised by an Irish Catholic mother.
She was calling priests and everything for house blessings and
(01:33):
they couldn't figure out what.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Was going on.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
So she ended up calling Eda Lorraine Warren, who she
found on the old dial up internet on AOL. They
said they helped people in haunted houses, and she gave
them a ring, and after interviewing her and our family,
they took the case.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
Wow, and what did they discover.
Speaker 4 (01:55):
They told our family that we were residing in a
portal to the other side, and that had sort of
been a train station for spirits, and that there were
benign or okay ones, and that there were malevolent ones,
and that they had to conduct a cleansing, almost like
an exorcism of the home. And so my family had
to leave the home for a while while they conducted
(02:17):
this cleansing of the home, which was ultimately very helpful,
but I would say not you know, permanent. We ended
up still having more haunted activity, and a few years
later my mom did sell the house.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
And then later you worked with the FBI and Homeland Security.
I mean, how did that in investigative background help you
bring or what did it bring to your paranormal and
historical research.
Speaker 4 (02:49):
I think I think it's much more helpful than I
initially realized. So it's funny I growing up in a
haunted house and things. I almost at that age was
embarrassed by it.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
I didn't want anyone to know those things about me.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
Now people are a lot more open about the paranormal
and the occults and their beliefs and experiences, and it's
a lot more unifying. But it wasn't that way. So
I went to college and told no one and got
a job working for the government. And I worked for
a cold case homicide unit when I was in college
for NCIS, and then I was able to work for
(03:25):
the Bureau after that as an analyst, and by that
I was able to go through the FBI Academy, And
really what that did for me was help me to
learn how to corroborate information, how to validate facts, how
to put things together. In a timeline that makes sense
when you're telling a story, so that it is supported.
(03:48):
And I found that with the paranormal a lot of
times our emotions can sort of tell us what we
want to say. And so all of that work with
the FBI Academy and learning about corroboration and validation helped
me to add those facts in those layers to make
the stories that much more meaningful and have much more evidence.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
So I'm very grateful that I had that.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Are there regional differences in hauntings? So, for example, do
New England hauntings differ from Southern hauntings?
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (04:19):
Absolutely, on a micro scale they do, because of what
happened in these.
Speaker 3 (04:26):
Areas is vastly different.
Speaker 4 (04:28):
And if we're talking on a broad scope, hauntings and
communication with human spirits or through tragedy can happen anywhere.
So if you're up in New England, a lot of
people are going to be talking about the Salem witch Trials,
some of the early massacres against the Native Americans, some
seafaring tragedies and shipwrecks, Whereas down South we're going to
(04:50):
be talking a lot about the Civil War, the Trail
of Tears, there's a lot more when it comes to
cryptids when worthy American South. That sort of comes from
these rich Appalachian lores of a mix of Scots, Irish, German,
and African American cultures combining. So depending on what cultures
(05:11):
settled can also dictate your paranormal.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
New England has a lot more.
Speaker 4 (05:15):
English people, so they might have a little bit less
of the monstrous sort of stories that the Scots, Irish
and stuff are familiar with because they've always leaned into
the supernatural. And a lot of them settled down South,
so you see those differences come from the cultures and
where they settled.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
And does geography influence the type of activity reported.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
I think it does.
Speaker 4 (05:42):
I find that a lot of times locations by the
water seem to be sort of a natural conduit for activity.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
So I've often felt sort.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
Of that combining of the natural elements here on Earth,
of land and water can bring things together. However, being
working in Chickamauga and Gettysburg in places like that, you're
more in mountainous regions which have their own sort of mysteries.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
So I do.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
Feel that areas that really have something geographical that shapes them,
that sets them apart from somewhere else do tend to
gravitate toward more activity.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
A little earlier, you were mentioning time slips. What are
they to me?
Speaker 4 (06:24):
A time slip is when you go to a place
and you are either hearing or sensing something that's.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Not of your time.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
Like so, if you're on a battlefield, you might hear
a cannon fire, or you might smell gunpowder in the air,
and you'll think, oh, that, you know, that's not around.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
That could be a slip in time.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
There are stories too, where it's much bigger, where people
actually look around them and they see people of a
different era and just for a second they feel like
they're almost like a fish out of and they're existing
in this other time.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
So it can be like.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
That where for a moment you're seeing something else. There
were two sisters in Versailles a couple hundred years ago
and they ended up, you know, having a time slip
where they saw you know, Marie Antoinette and all these
people walking around, and they were so confused and for
the rest of their lives they were trying to figure
it out how for a few minutes in Versailles they
(07:26):
were back in time and those things do happen on occasion,
and that's what I would call a time slip.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Have you ever accidentally stepped into the past.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
I've had like some of those sensory experiences. I think
only once did I have an experience where it felt
as if I was somewhat in the past. I had
like one foot in each I want to say. And
it wasn't Gettysburg. I was by the Eternal Flame, and
it's near an area called Iverson's Charge, where a Confederate
(07:59):
general he.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
Was a little bit drunk, he was grieving.
Speaker 4 (08:03):
He was not necessarily the nicest man at that time,
and he sent a bunch of his soldiers into a
terrible move where hundreds, if not thousands of them died
within moments. And people would always say that area was haunted.
And so I was walking around seeing what I could sense,
when all of a sudden I saw a man standing.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
There in uniform.
Speaker 4 (08:23):
And it was at night, back in the day you
could go on the battlefield at night. And he looked
at me as if he saw me, and was as
baffled by the side of me as I was by him.
And I actually had on an audio recorder at that time,
and you can hear me calling for my husband because
I got really nervous that this man was so close,
and I sort.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
Of skidaddled back to the car.
Speaker 4 (08:46):
My husband heard me, and he got in the car,
and as we were driving away, I could see the
man following the car, and I could see him looking
at me in the window, and the sort of motion
detector that tells you where something is was blinking on
my side where I saw.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
So I think for.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
A moment our time paths crossed or something like that,
and we confused each other.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
But I do think that's rare.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
Although when I'm out on the battlefield walking for a moment,
sometimes I think it would be really neat if I
just saw them walking by or marching and that sort
of thing, and sometimes you can feel it and you
just know it's right there.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Why does some spirits seem tied to specific objects or structures.
Speaker 4 (09:31):
I think a lot of that is actually us as
humans trying to figure that out. There's a long held
belief that ghosts or spirits are something that can't cross over,
or they're stuck in a place, and so we start
to associate that place or that object with them. I
(09:51):
think that's more of a human concept than a spiritual concept.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
I think spirits are very.
Speaker 4 (09:56):
Fluid and move around, and while there is residual energy,
I feel like they might go back to some of
these places, but they're not stuck there. What I more
think is attracting them is a familiarity. Right, So, if
you are a spirit and you are sort of on
this earthly plane of existence for any reason, even if
(10:16):
it's ensuring your memory, You're going to want to go
to things or around things that are familiar to you.
So I think things of certain eras and interests might
have spirits gravitate to them for that reason, not as
much as an attachment.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Though your ghost tours, you have two very successful ghost tours.
How do you handle skeptics on your tours?
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (10:41):
I love having skeptics on my tours because my goal
is not to change your mind or convert you or
make you believe anything. I'm going to tell you the
stories of the history as they were written by those
people and as I've experienced them. And so no matter what,
even if you're a skeptic, you can enjoy the stories,
(11:02):
but I want you to come with an open mind.
And so one of the things I always do. Especially
that I feel as helpful with skeptics is I bring
out news articles or writings that people had in the
eighteen hundreds where they documented what they saw as a ghost,
and I show them these documents saying, you don't have
to believe me, but here's what they said of their
(11:25):
own time and of their own beliefs.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
And sometimes when you see.
Speaker 4 (11:30):
It coming from a historic source, it really opens up
your mind to think, huh, would these people be making
this up for us two hundred years later to read.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Probably not.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
They really believed in something more too, and they had
something compelling happen.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
So I always try to show people some.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Of these clips of evidence that I believe is evidence
of what people have documented over the centuries.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
As a skeptical or change his mind is or her
mind as a result.
Speaker 4 (11:58):
Oh yes, yes, I love getting those reviews too. Sometimes
I'll usually see them in a review they're like, I
went in a skeptic and I left a believer. It's
either because of something that I had shown them or
because they had just such an experience on the tour
where they felt something that.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
It changed their mind.
Speaker 4 (12:17):
And I always love when that happens because I think
as humans we try to understand everything and think we're
so knowledgeable, and just having that openness to saying, hey,
maybe I don't know all the facts is very rewarding.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Do you think a memory itself is a kind of haunting?
Speaker 4 (12:37):
Oh? Yeah, yes, And I love that you say that,
because when I talk about spirits, and especially Civil war spirits,
what I oftentimes find is that they didn't fear dying,
they feared being forgotten. So there were different things that
were done to ensure the perpetuity of their mine memory,
(13:01):
and so flowers were sent to funerals, face masks were made,
clocks were stopped, certain journal things were written, there were
lavish funerals. All of these were things to ensure memory.
So for us, memory is our way of connecting with
the past and those who we have lost or will
(13:24):
have been lost over time. Any way that we can
carry that memory is in a sense carrying their spirit
and as I mentioned, signaling that familiarity to the spirit
to come through.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Do you think ignoring history is a way of creating
more ghosts.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
I think it's a way of making ghosts angry. I
think it's, you know, our.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
Service to our fellow human being. Whether they're alive or not.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
To try and understand them and treat them with dignity
and respect, and so to learn of their time and
what happened to them is the best thing you can
do to connect with spirit. Otherwise it's just as rude
as you walking into someone's home that you don't know
or care about and demanding they answer you.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
You know, I think that.
Speaker 4 (14:18):
Spirits have to be treated with respect to their history
and who they were for you to really understand them.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
Tell me a little bit about Mystic, Connecticut.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Sure.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
So. Mystic is set in far southeastern Connecticut, not far
from the Rhode Island border, and it is one of
the oldest seafaring towns. It's a halfway point between Boston
and New York, right near the city of New London.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
And Mystic was the site of one of the.
Speaker 4 (14:47):
First massacres on what would become us soil, and it
was called the Mystic mascar of sixteen thirty seven, where
several hundred Pequa indigenous people were murdered by fire for
some the British settlers. After that, Mystic became a settlement
where all of these shipbuilders came. But by way of that,
(15:09):
a lot of ship tragedies would also follow of sinkings
or missing ships, and so a lot of that history
is there, as well as American revolutionary history. There were
a lot of Revolutionary War soldiers from that area.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
And have you experienced anything something that scared you in
Mystic Connecticut?
Speaker 4 (15:34):
Yes, yes, it was on my very own graveyard tour.
And I feel bad saying it because I actually do
love this spirit's story, but it very much scared me
at the time. So when I was giving a tour,
I was talking about an attack that Benedict Arnold had
had on our area, and I was standing by the
(15:55):
grave of a gentleman who was killed in that attack.
And when I was standing there by the grave, I
noticed that a lot of people started having these sort
of outpouring of emotions and they were feeling really strange,
and so I had sort of talked them down. I
continued with my story. I was looking at all of
my guests to make sure they were all right, and
then all of a sudden, I looked at this one
(16:16):
man and he looked at me very sternly, like he
was fact checking everything I said. And then I went
to the next person in the line and It suddenly
hit me, like an epiphany, that the man I had
just been looking at wasn't someone who had been on
my tour prior to that moment. It wasn't someone I
had checked in, it wasn't someone dressed of the correct era.
(16:40):
And I thought, oh my gosh, this is him making
sure I told his story correctly. And all my guests
told me where I saw him is where they had
felt a person standing and had gotten all those strange emotions.
And ever since then we have captured voices there in
pages of a man there, as if he continues to
(17:03):
make sure we're doing his story justice.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
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