September 2, 2025 • 18 mins
George Noory and author Jeff Belanger explore urban legends, ghost stories and haunting tales from around New England, including a man killed by a lightning strike inside a church, a grave with a window for a man terrified of being buried alive, an ancient Egyptian prince buried in Vermont, and the infamous Lizzie Borden axe murders.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeartRadio and.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to our Labor Day night program, George NOORI
with you, Jeff Bland, You're back with us. Author, podcaster,
great storyteller, adventurer and explorer of the unexplained. He's written
more than a dozen books that have been published in
six languages, and as an Emmy nominated host, writer and producer. Jeffery,
you hit a home run with Wicked Strange. Welcome back, Thanks, George,
(00:28):
so good to be back with you. How did you
get the idea to write this one about New England?
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Well, that's New England's home. And you know, long ago
when I started researching the paranormal ghosts and haunted places,
I think I fell into the trap of thinking all
the cool places are far away from me. And then
you realize wherever you live is far away from most
of the world. And so I started to kind of
look at my own backyard and just started uncovering so
(00:55):
many great stories. And when you're local, you know you
can just get in deeper because these are your name.
And so it started with a TV show on PBS
called New England Legends that turned into a podcast of
the same name, and what's great is, over time, George,
a whole community sort of evolved of people emailing me saying, Hey,
in my town, we've got this strange story, and what
(01:16):
about this strange story? And I've now collected hundreds and
hundreds of them, and from there it was just sort
of natural to put together a very weird book.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
The photography in the book absolutely stunning.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Yeah, that's Frank Grace. He is amazing. So Frank and
I started doing a Haunted New England calendar, an annual calendar,
thirteen years ago and we've done one thirteen years in
a row. And he tells a whole story with a
photograph and I'm so in awe of what he can do.
And when we first met, he said, oh, I love
your stories, and I said I love your photography, and
(01:50):
a relationship was born. So the calendar has now turned
into the book and it was just such a pleasure
to work on.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
New eng One consists of Connecticut, Massachusett, It's New Hampshire,
Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, a number of states.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Right, yep, all Sex, that's it.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Where were the Witches Salem? Right?
Speaker 1 (02:10):
No?
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Well, yes, of course, everyone knows Salem, believe it or not.
Though Connecticut had witch trials decades before Salem. They had
executed a dozen people over time from various towns. Unlike Salem,
where it was sort of a craze all at once
over the span of a few months, Connecticut, it was
happening in pockets and they sort of hit it better.
(02:34):
But there's witches in pretty much all the New England states.
We just know the most about Salem because it got
so much attention, But the stories are similar, you know,
where you've got people that were sort of outliers in
the community that were persecuted, and it really was more
about a power grab and a land grab as opposed
to fighting someone with magical powers.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Jeff Well andrew with us. His website is his name.
We're talking about his latest book called Wicked Strange, which
is available now. Jeff, isn't it George?
Speaker 3 (03:05):
The book came out twelve minutes.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Ago and Tim did it perfectly.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Yeah, this is it, so thank you, thank you for
letting me launch it here.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
The evolution of the book was based on the TV
show right.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Yeah, So, as you know, when TV shows are very
expensive to make and they take a lot of time
and between permits and everything else. And so when we
were working for PBS, we funded it ourselves, myself and
my producer partner, Tony Dunn. We were paying for it ourselves.
PBS really doesn't pay us anything. They would just air it.
(03:37):
And I said, man, I wish we could do more
of these stories, you know, without with all the time
and expense. And so that's how the podcast was born
and that became a weekly thing called the New England
Legends Podcast, and that's when the things that's when things
really took off because at that point you can just
be a lot more prolific. And the podcast it's short,
you know, they're like ten to fifteen minutes scripted stories.
(03:59):
And what I what I want to know is how
did we get here? Why do we talk about this
building being haunted? Why do we talk about those woods
having a strange creature or this spot being a hot
spot for UFOs? And to answer that, you have to
go back in time. You just you have to start
looking backwards what was here before today and before that
and before that, and you can start to piece together
(04:21):
a picture that's really that really paints a whole portrait
of your community of where you live, and you realize
we're all a byproduct of where we live. We're a
byproduct of everything that happened before us, and these these
strange events, these unexplained events, are kind of like the
crutons in the salad.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Jeffrey, how many of these stories came from your work
as opposed to people who wrote.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
You oh goodness, well zero, It was all people who
who I mean, I researched it, but someone would say like, hey,
did you hear about this weird grave in Bridgeport, Connecticut?
And then I would go and look into it. So
I looked into all of them. But you know, of course,
growing up where I have, I mean, I was born
in Massachusetts. I grew up in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and
(05:06):
you know, we had our legends that we heard about,
and that's where I started with the ones I heard
about since the time I was a kid. But from
there it just grows and grows, and as you know,
once you start going down the rabbit hole, there's no stopping.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
What are some of your favorite stories in the book?
Wicked Strange?
Speaker 1 (05:22):
So?
Speaker 3 (05:24):
I was raised Catholic in the interest of full disclosure,
and went to church every week and the whole thing,
and then sort of got away from it around, you know,
after becoming an adult. And you know, my mom would
get upset by that, and I'd joke, you know, Mom,
I don't want to go to church because I'm afraid
lightning would strike and I don't want anyone innocent to
get hurt. And that was a joke, and she didn't
find it very funny. Anyway. There's this cemetery in Bridgeport, Connecticut,
(05:48):
and there's a there's an old grave from seventeen seventy one,
and the epitaph reads, and I quote, here lies buried
the body of mister David Sherman, who was killed lightning
in the House of God at public worship on the
twenty eighth of July seventeen seventy one and the thirty
fifth year of his age. And I read that and
(06:08):
I went, are you kidding? He was killed by lightning
in church? And then I started to dig into it,
and it turns out two people were killed that day,
and another man had his shoe torn off by the
lightning strike. And I've discovered the secret to immortality. George,
you need to have a really crazy, memorable funny epitaph
(06:29):
on your headstone, and we will be talking about you
for centuries.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
I'll pass.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Fair enough.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
That is unbelievable.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Yeah, I know, right there and there it is, right
there in stone, killed by lightning in the House of God.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Right through the church, right through the church.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
It turns out the church had yet to put up
a lightning rod, and two people paid with their lives
and one guy lost a shoe.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Come, I've being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Yeah, pretty much, that's how it goes.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
You know.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
I always think that the outliers, right, that's that's where
we that's where we earn our living, you know, we
earn our living, and not the middle but the very
fringes of what happens, the kind of stuff that sometimes
defies explanation but also begs a lot of questions. And
that's what I love about this stuff. I love the
fringy stuff that makes us say, like, well, maybe there's
(07:23):
something more to it. And I think usually there is.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
How many stories Jeff did that make the book?
Speaker 3 (07:29):
So there's seventeen from each of the six states, so
one hundred and two to be exact.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
That made the book.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
That made the book.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Oh and the.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Podcast, how many did did not make it?
Speaker 3 (07:40):
So in our podcast we've already covered four hundred and twelve. Wow,
so and growing so. And then you know, there's the
stories you gather here and there. I do one every
week now, and it's it's at one point I was
worried I was going to run out, But I'm not
worried anymore, as this thing just sort of grows on itself.
And you know, I like everything weird, not just ghosts
(08:03):
and hauntings, but UFO sites, roadside oddities, when someone just
decides to put something up because they just want to
leave a mark somewhere. These kind of things just I
think make a community all the more interesting.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
At what point did you turn Frank Grace loose to
take pictures so?
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Well? It started back when we met. Frank and I
met at the haunted Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, Massachusetts,
and I had seen his work online. I knew he
was going to be there and I hadn't met him yet,
and I walked up and I just said, oh my gosh,
you're Frank Grace. It's so great to meet you. And
he was literally like hunched over taking a picture inside
the house. At the time, and I said, I just
(08:43):
think you're so talented. And he pointed to the shutter
button on his camera and he said, I just pushed
this button. The camera really does most of the work.
And at that point I figured we were probably going
to be friends. And then we started talking about the
calendar and that's what started it. And now we've gone
on road trips together all over and he's always up
for a ghost hunt or whatever's going on. He brings
(09:05):
his camera. He tells his stories that way, and I
do it with words.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Did Lizzie Borden get acquitted?
Speaker 3 (09:11):
She did. The all male jury said there's no way
a woman could have committed a crime like that. And
that's one of those stories that I mean, think about
how weird. There's a nursery rhyme here in Massachusetts. You know,
the children sing it, Lizzie Borden took an axe and
gave her mother forty wax, and when she saw what
she had done, she gave her father forty one. They
(09:34):
would sing that during her trial, the little kids outside
dancing in a circle when you run out of ring
around the rosie we have. We can be just as
macabre with Lizzie's trial that was You have to remember
that was eighteen ninety two, which was not the Dark Ages.
That was fairly modern times, and it was well covered
by the papers and such a head scratcher. I've been
(09:57):
in that house so many times now when you stand
at the crime scene and you realize there was no
sign of forced entry, nothing was stolen, nothing was disturbed,
and literally the victims were killed, you know, without a struggle.
I mean, you don't have to be a CSI expert
to know they knew whoever killed them, that they knew
them like that, they knew their killer. And Lizzie was
(10:19):
really the most obvious, but it's also possible she might
have had some help. This case still haunts us because
two people were murdered and no one was ever punished
for that, and that's something that shakes us up. We
don't like it.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
What did Lizzie contend happen to them?
Speaker 3 (10:37):
She says, in the span of about fifteen minutes, she
went out back to pick some pears from their tree
and then go into their barn and get some weights
for a fishing trip she had coming up, and in
that time, someone mysteriously slipped into their house, murdered her
father Andrew while he was napping on the sofa in
the sitting room, and then what's that for no reason? Right, yeah,
(11:01):
and then went up with an axe violently over and over,
and then went upstairs and killed her stepmother right on
the floor. She was making the bed in the one
of their bedrooms, and so she came in, said she
found them, and then called for help. So in that
fifteen minute period, someone just did that brutally and left.
That's what that was her alibi. I was out back
(11:22):
getting pairs and fishing in some fishing weights.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Jeff, what do we know about Lizzie Board Who was she?
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Well, we know she never married. There's a lot of
speculation about her sexuality that maybe you know, that was
a time where you you couldn't really be out if
you were, you know. And so she she was acquitted.
She became sort of famous, well she was famous, but
also infamous, as these sort of characters go. She mingled
(11:48):
in a lot of different circles, and then she and
her sister eventually bought a much larger house about a
mile away from their former home in Fall River, and
and she pretty much spent the rest of her days
in infamy.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
I had a guest on last week who goes to
cemeteries for for lot. You've got a number of cemetery stories,
don't you.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Oh my goodness. I call it a cemetery safari when
we go to some of these various boneyards, because like
I said, there's there's First of all, every grave has
a story to tell. I think some some really command attention.
There's there's this one cemetery in a little town called
New Haven, Vermont, not to be confused with the one
(12:35):
in Connecticut. And in Evergreen Cemetery, there's this this mound
and it's a it's a pretty little cemetery, well taken
care of, but this one mound sticks out and there's
no marker on it except at the top there's a
square and when you look down, there's a window. And
the window looks down six feet to the h to
(12:56):
the crypt of doctor Timothy Clark Smith, who had a
horrible case of tafaphobia and tapaphobia is the fear of
being buried alive. And the extent that he went to
to make sure he would not be buried alive was
just epic. Not just the grave with the window, but
He had a casket with a glass glass top on it,
(13:18):
and he wanted a hammer and a chisel placed in
his hands should he wake up in that casket, need
to chisel his way out. And then, of course he
designed the grave with a window, which became a tourist attraction,
attracting sometimes twelve and fourteen people a year to this
little cemetery in the middle of Vermont.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
You heard the story of the guy who too, had
an obsession with being buried alive, convinced that if he died,
he really wasn't dead, and that he'd wake up in
his casket panicking. So he told his family, when I die,
put a cell phone in the coffin with me so
I can call for help. And they went, Dad, that's
(13:58):
a waste, He said, please insist. So one day he died,
They put him in a coffin, put the cell phone
in there. The family argued about it, but they did.
They buried him. Well, he wakes up, Jeff in the coffin, panicking,
reaches around, feels the cell phone, turns it on. It
(14:21):
says no service.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
That's a joke, of course, how would you know, How
would you know? Use that would tell the tale I
love it. Yeah, I know, we all have strange, strange
fears of But you know, also Timothy Clark Smith was
a medical doctor, and this was about the time when
embalming started to get to be all the rage. So
(14:47):
there was a whole slew of patented devices to keep
you from being buried alive, like a rope that would
be attached to your hand that would lift a flag
if you pulled it from underground, or a bell where
you could ring the bell to call for help if
you were buried alive. But once embalming became all the fashion,
even regular folks like us started to figure out like, well,
(15:08):
if you've replaced all my blood with, you know, a
cocktail of chemicals. If I wasn't dead before, I probably am.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Now what would you say? Is one of the most
bizarre stories in the book.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
Okay, so there is an Egyptian prince buried in Vermont.
This prince happened. Yeah, that's that's a that's a great story.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Right.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
So, so the Egyptian prince died in the year eighteen
eighty six BC and his name was amanhir Kpaeschev. And
what happened is in the late eighteen hundreds. The world
had Egypt fever. As these the pyramids were being unearthed,
and they were unearthing crips, and everybody wanted a mummy.
(15:57):
Mummies were starting to be pulled from the ground and
sent all all over the world. Young emon her Kopachev
was just two years old, and his little carcass was
removed from Egypt and it was put on a boat
and it was sent eventually over to New York, where
then it made its way up to Middlebury, Vermont, to
a guy named Henry Sheldon who had a Vermont history museum.
(16:19):
He wanted a mummy. The thing is, when they were
buried in Egypt, the air is so arid, the ground
is dry. It preserves the mummies. But as soon as
they leave that environment and they get into the moist
air of like an ocean going vessel and so on,
you know, decomposition picks up right where it left off.
And so by the time it got to Middlebury, Vermont,
(16:41):
it was sort of a mess, and Henry Sheldon put
it in the attic and everybody forgot about it for years,
and then he died, and so it was decades later
when the museum curator, George Meade discovered this in the attic,
and it didn't sit right with him. He said, this
is a human being. This is not just some artifact
or something to gauk at. This was a human being.
(17:03):
And so he gave up some of his family plot
space and they agreed, and they buried the remains of
this Egyptian mummy with a headstone with with you know,
some hieroglyphs on it and everything. And so you've got
this ancient Egyptian mummy buried in this sea of cemetery
right in the middle of Vermont.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
How many stories do you have in there?
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Are one hundred and two?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Fantastic love Yeah, oh.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Gosh, you know, yes, and for so many different reasons.
Like I said, this is this is the weird stuff.
We're living in a time when our towns get to
look a lot alike, you know, the box stores and
the chain restaurants and the strip malls and so on.
But these legends are what still make our communities unique,
and we only share them with people we trust. You know,
if someone comes to your town and says, oh, you know,
(17:51):
what's weird around here, you might look at them a
little slant, you know, just cock eyed and say, yeah,
I'm not talking about that, but if someone you know
approaches and you connect in some way, maybe you would
share it because these are the things that we know.
Some people laugh at us for talking about a haunted
building or a cursed grave or something like that, but
(18:11):
we also know there's something to it, and there's something
to it because these stories endure, they stick around, and
no matter what logic may tell you, we still talk
about it. I think because someone's still experiencing something.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Listen to more at Coast to Coast AM every weeknight
at one am Eastern, and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeartRadio and.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to our Labor Day night program, George NOORI
with you, Jeff Bland, You're back with us. Author, podcaster,
great storyteller, adventurer and explorer of the unexplained. He's written
more than a dozen books that have been published in
six languages, and as an Emmy nominated host, writer and producer. Jeffery,
you hit a home run with Wicked Strange. Welcome back, Thanks, George,
(00:28):
so good to be back with you. How did you
get the idea to write this one about New England?
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Well, that's New England's home. And you know, long ago
when I started researching the paranormal ghosts and haunted places,
I think I fell into the trap of thinking all
the cool places are far away from me. And then
you realize wherever you live is far away from most
of the world. And so I started to kind of
look at my own backyard and just started uncovering so
(00:55):
many great stories. And when you're local, you know you
can just get in deeper because these are your name.
And so it started with a TV show on PBS
called New England Legends that turned into a podcast of
the same name, and what's great is, over time, George,
a whole community sort of evolved of people emailing me saying, Hey,
in my town, we've got this strange story, and what
(01:16):
about this strange story? And I've now collected hundreds and
hundreds of them, and from there it was just sort
of natural to put together a very weird book.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
The photography in the book absolutely stunning.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Yeah, that's Frank Grace. He is amazing. So Frank and
I started doing a Haunted New England calendar, an annual calendar,
thirteen years ago and we've done one thirteen years in
a row. And he tells a whole story with a
photograph and I'm so in awe of what he can do.
And when we first met, he said, oh, I love
your stories, and I said I love your photography, and
(01:50):
a relationship was born. So the calendar has now turned
into the book and it was just such a pleasure
to work on.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
New eng One consists of Connecticut, Massachusett, It's New Hampshire,
Rhode Island, Vermont, Maine, a number of states.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
Right, yep, all Sex, that's it.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Where were the Witches Salem? Right?
Speaker 1 (02:10):
No?
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Well, yes, of course, everyone knows Salem, believe it or not.
Though Connecticut had witch trials decades before Salem. They had
executed a dozen people over time from various towns. Unlike Salem,
where it was sort of a craze all at once
over the span of a few months, Connecticut, it was
happening in pockets and they sort of hit it better.
(02:34):
But there's witches in pretty much all the New England states.
We just know the most about Salem because it got
so much attention, But the stories are similar, you know,
where you've got people that were sort of outliers in
the community that were persecuted, and it really was more
about a power grab and a land grab as opposed
to fighting someone with magical powers.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Jeff Well andrew with us. His website is his name.
We're talking about his latest book called Wicked Strange, which
is available now. Jeff, isn't it George?
Speaker 3 (03:05):
The book came out twelve minutes.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
Ago and Tim did it perfectly.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Yeah, this is it, so thank you, thank you for
letting me launch it here.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
The evolution of the book was based on the TV
show right.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Yeah, So, as you know, when TV shows are very
expensive to make and they take a lot of time
and between permits and everything else. And so when we
were working for PBS, we funded it ourselves, myself and
my producer partner, Tony Dunn. We were paying for it ourselves.
PBS really doesn't pay us anything. They would just air it.
(03:37):
And I said, man, I wish we could do more
of these stories, you know, without with all the time
and expense. And so that's how the podcast was born
and that became a weekly thing called the New England
Legends Podcast, and that's when the things that's when things
really took off because at that point you can just
be a lot more prolific. And the podcast it's short,
you know, they're like ten to fifteen minutes scripted stories.
(03:59):
And what I what I want to know is how
did we get here? Why do we talk about this
building being haunted? Why do we talk about those woods
having a strange creature or this spot being a hot
spot for UFOs? And to answer that, you have to
go back in time. You just you have to start
looking backwards what was here before today and before that
and before that, and you can start to piece together
(04:21):
a picture that's really that really paints a whole portrait
of your community of where you live, and you realize
we're all a byproduct of where we live. We're a
byproduct of everything that happened before us, and these these
strange events, these unexplained events, are kind of like the
crutons in the salad.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Jeffrey, how many of these stories came from your work
as opposed to people who wrote.
Speaker 3 (04:45):
You oh goodness, well zero, It was all people who
who I mean, I researched it, but someone would say like, hey,
did you hear about this weird grave in Bridgeport, Connecticut?
And then I would go and look into it. So
I looked into all of them. But you know, of course,
growing up where I have, I mean, I was born
in Massachusetts. I grew up in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and
(05:06):
you know, we had our legends that we heard about,
and that's where I started with the ones I heard
about since the time I was a kid. But from
there it just grows and grows, and as you know,
once you start going down the rabbit hole, there's no stopping.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
What are some of your favorite stories in the book?
Wicked Strange?
Speaker 1 (05:22):
So?
Speaker 3 (05:24):
I was raised Catholic in the interest of full disclosure,
and went to church every week and the whole thing,
and then sort of got away from it around, you know,
after becoming an adult. And you know, my mom would
get upset by that, and I'd joke, you know, Mom,
I don't want to go to church because I'm afraid
lightning would strike and I don't want anyone innocent to
get hurt. And that was a joke, and she didn't
find it very funny. Anyway. There's this cemetery in Bridgeport, Connecticut,
(05:48):
and there's a there's an old grave from seventeen seventy one,
and the epitaph reads, and I quote, here lies buried
the body of mister David Sherman, who was killed lightning
in the House of God at public worship on the
twenty eighth of July seventeen seventy one and the thirty
fifth year of his age. And I read that and
(06:08):
I went, are you kidding? He was killed by lightning
in church? And then I started to dig into it,
and it turns out two people were killed that day,
and another man had his shoe torn off by the
lightning strike. And I've discovered the secret to immortality. George,
you need to have a really crazy, memorable funny epitaph
(06:29):
on your headstone, and we will be talking about you
for centuries.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
I'll pass.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Fair enough.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
That is unbelievable.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Yeah, I know, right there and there it is, right
there in stone, killed by lightning in the House of God.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Right through the church, right through the church.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
It turns out the church had yet to put up
a lightning rod, and two people paid with their lives
and one guy lost a shoe.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Come, I've being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Yeah, pretty much, that's how it goes.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
You know.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
I always think that the outliers, right, that's that's where
we that's where we earn our living, you know, we
earn our living, and not the middle but the very
fringes of what happens, the kind of stuff that sometimes
defies explanation but also begs a lot of questions. And
that's what I love about this stuff. I love the
fringy stuff that makes us say, like, well, maybe there's
(07:23):
something more to it. And I think usually there is.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
How many stories Jeff did that make the book?
Speaker 3 (07:29):
So there's seventeen from each of the six states, so
one hundred and two to be exact.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
That made the book.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
That made the book.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Oh and the.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Podcast, how many did did not make it?
Speaker 3 (07:40):
So in our podcast we've already covered four hundred and twelve. Wow,
so and growing so. And then you know, there's the
stories you gather here and there. I do one every
week now, and it's it's at one point I was
worried I was going to run out, But I'm not
worried anymore, as this thing just sort of grows on itself.
And you know, I like everything weird, not just ghosts
(08:03):
and hauntings, but UFO sites, roadside oddities, when someone just
decides to put something up because they just want to
leave a mark somewhere. These kind of things just I
think make a community all the more interesting.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
At what point did you turn Frank Grace loose to
take pictures so?
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Well? It started back when we met. Frank and I
met at the haunted Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, Massachusetts,
and I had seen his work online. I knew he
was going to be there and I hadn't met him yet,
and I walked up and I just said, oh my gosh,
you're Frank Grace. It's so great to meet you. And
he was literally like hunched over taking a picture inside
the house. At the time, and I said, I just
(08:43):
think you're so talented. And he pointed to the shutter
button on his camera and he said, I just pushed
this button. The camera really does most of the work.
And at that point I figured we were probably going
to be friends. And then we started talking about the
calendar and that's what started it. And now we've gone
on road trips together all over and he's always up
for a ghost hunt or whatever's going on. He brings
(09:05):
his camera. He tells his stories that way, and I
do it with words.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Did Lizzie Borden get acquitted?
Speaker 3 (09:11):
She did. The all male jury said there's no way
a woman could have committed a crime like that. And
that's one of those stories that I mean, think about
how weird. There's a nursery rhyme here in Massachusetts. You know,
the children sing it, Lizzie Borden took an axe and
gave her mother forty wax, and when she saw what
she had done, she gave her father forty one. They
(09:34):
would sing that during her trial, the little kids outside
dancing in a circle when you run out of ring
around the rosie we have. We can be just as
macabre with Lizzie's trial that was You have to remember
that was eighteen ninety two, which was not the Dark Ages.
That was fairly modern times, and it was well covered
by the papers and such a head scratcher. I've been
(09:57):
in that house so many times now when you stand
at the crime scene and you realize there was no
sign of forced entry, nothing was stolen, nothing was disturbed,
and literally the victims were killed, you know, without a struggle.
I mean, you don't have to be a CSI expert
to know they knew whoever killed them, that they knew
them like that, they knew their killer. And Lizzie was
(10:19):
really the most obvious, but it's also possible she might
have had some help. This case still haunts us because
two people were murdered and no one was ever punished
for that, and that's something that shakes us up. We
don't like it.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
What did Lizzie contend happen to them?
Speaker 3 (10:37):
She says, in the span of about fifteen minutes, she
went out back to pick some pears from their tree
and then go into their barn and get some weights
for a fishing trip she had coming up, and in
that time, someone mysteriously slipped into their house, murdered her
father Andrew while he was napping on the sofa in
the sitting room, and then what's that for no reason? Right, yeah,
(11:01):
and then went up with an axe violently over and over,
and then went upstairs and killed her stepmother right on
the floor. She was making the bed in the one
of their bedrooms, and so she came in, said she
found them, and then called for help. So in that
fifteen minute period, someone just did that brutally and left.
That's what that was her alibi. I was out back
(11:22):
getting pairs and fishing in some fishing weights.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Jeff, what do we know about Lizzie Board Who was she?
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Well, we know she never married. There's a lot of
speculation about her sexuality that maybe you know, that was
a time where you you couldn't really be out if
you were, you know. And so she she was acquitted.
She became sort of famous, well she was famous, but
also infamous, as these sort of characters go. She mingled
(11:48):
in a lot of different circles, and then she and
her sister eventually bought a much larger house about a
mile away from their former home in Fall River, and
and she pretty much spent the rest of her days
in infamy.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
I had a guest on last week who goes to
cemeteries for for lot. You've got a number of cemetery stories,
don't you.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Oh my goodness. I call it a cemetery safari when
we go to some of these various boneyards, because like
I said, there's there's First of all, every grave has
a story to tell. I think some some really command attention.
There's there's this one cemetery in a little town called
New Haven, Vermont, not to be confused with the one
(12:35):
in Connecticut. And in Evergreen Cemetery, there's this this mound
and it's a it's a pretty little cemetery, well taken
care of, but this one mound sticks out and there's
no marker on it except at the top there's a
square and when you look down, there's a window. And
the window looks down six feet to the h to
(12:56):
the crypt of doctor Timothy Clark Smith, who had a
horrible case of tafaphobia and tapaphobia is the fear of
being buried alive. And the extent that he went to
to make sure he would not be buried alive was
just epic. Not just the grave with the window, but
He had a casket with a glass glass top on it,
(13:18):
and he wanted a hammer and a chisel placed in
his hands should he wake up in that casket, need
to chisel his way out. And then, of course he
designed the grave with a window, which became a tourist attraction,
attracting sometimes twelve and fourteen people a year to this
little cemetery in the middle of Vermont.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
You heard the story of the guy who too, had
an obsession with being buried alive, convinced that if he died,
he really wasn't dead, and that he'd wake up in
his casket panicking. So he told his family, when I die,
put a cell phone in the coffin with me so
I can call for help. And they went, Dad, that's
(13:58):
a waste, He said, please insist. So one day he died,
They put him in a coffin, put the cell phone
in there. The family argued about it, but they did.
They buried him. Well, he wakes up, Jeff in the coffin, panicking,
reaches around, feels the cell phone, turns it on. It
(14:21):
says no service.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
That's a joke, of course, how would you know, How
would you know? Use that would tell the tale I
love it. Yeah, I know, we all have strange, strange
fears of But you know, also Timothy Clark Smith was
a medical doctor, and this was about the time when
embalming started to get to be all the rage. So
(14:47):
there was a whole slew of patented devices to keep
you from being buried alive, like a rope that would
be attached to your hand that would lift a flag
if you pulled it from underground, or a bell where
you could ring the bell to call for help if
you were buried alive. But once embalming became all the fashion,
even regular folks like us started to figure out like, well,
(15:08):
if you've replaced all my blood with, you know, a
cocktail of chemicals. If I wasn't dead before, I probably am.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Now what would you say? Is one of the most
bizarre stories in the book.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
Okay, so there is an Egyptian prince buried in Vermont.
This prince happened. Yeah, that's that's a that's a great story.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Right.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
So, so the Egyptian prince died in the year eighteen
eighty six BC and his name was amanhir Kpaeschev. And
what happened is in the late eighteen hundreds. The world
had Egypt fever. As these the pyramids were being unearthed,
and they were unearthing crips, and everybody wanted a mummy.
(15:57):
Mummies were starting to be pulled from the ground and
sent all all over the world. Young emon her Kopachev
was just two years old, and his little carcass was
removed from Egypt and it was put on a boat
and it was sent eventually over to New York, where
then it made its way up to Middlebury, Vermont, to
a guy named Henry Sheldon who had a Vermont history museum.
(16:19):
He wanted a mummy. The thing is, when they were
buried in Egypt, the air is so arid, the ground
is dry. It preserves the mummies. But as soon as
they leave that environment and they get into the moist
air of like an ocean going vessel and so on,
you know, decomposition picks up right where it left off.
And so by the time it got to Middlebury, Vermont,
(16:41):
it was sort of a mess, and Henry Sheldon put
it in the attic and everybody forgot about it for years,
and then he died, and so it was decades later
when the museum curator, George Meade discovered this in the attic,
and it didn't sit right with him. He said, this
is a human being. This is not just some artifact
or something to gauk at. This was a human being.
(17:03):
And so he gave up some of his family plot
space and they agreed, and they buried the remains of
this Egyptian mummy with a headstone with with you know,
some hieroglyphs on it and everything. And so you've got
this ancient Egyptian mummy buried in this sea of cemetery
right in the middle of Vermont.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
How many stories do you have in there?
Speaker 3 (17:24):
Are one hundred and two?
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Fantastic love Yeah, oh.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Gosh, you know, yes, and for so many different reasons.
Like I said, this is this is the weird stuff.
We're living in a time when our towns get to
look a lot alike, you know, the box stores and
the chain restaurants and the strip malls and so on.
But these legends are what still make our communities unique,
and we only share them with people we trust. You know,
if someone comes to your town and says, oh, you know,
(17:51):
what's weird around here, you might look at them a
little slant, you know, just cock eyed and say, yeah,
I'm not talking about that, but if someone you know
approaches and you connect in some way, maybe you would
share it because these are the things that we know.
Some people laugh at us for talking about a haunted
building or a cursed grave or something like that, but
(18:11):
we also know there's something to it, and there's something
to it because these stories endure, they stick around, and
no matter what logic may tell you, we still talk
about it. I think because someone's still experiencing something.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Listen to more at Coast to Coast AM every weeknight
at one am Eastern, and go to Coast to coastam
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