October 25, 2025 • 27 mins
(Hosts: Christine, Lucy, Sam, and Kristin)
It's the spookiest time of the year and we are here with your annual dose of historical Halloween tales!
For further reading suggestions and more, please visit: https://www.footnotinghistory.com
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:22):
[Christine] Welcome, dear listeners! Christine here to kick off Footnoting History’s 12th-annual
History for Halloween episode…what?! I know. Every year I act surprised that we are still doing
Halloween episodes, but that isn’t the case…it’s more that I’m impressed that we have been doing
them for so long. Thank you, thank you, listeners for being here. Especially a big thank you to
(00:45):
our patrons who keep us going financially. If you’re considering being a patron, you can visit
FootnotingHistory.com/Donate to do so. Patrons not only get the clout of saying they help us,
but they get exclusive minisodes every few months and a quarterly newsletter that I was told should
be called a quarterly magazine because it contains so much–like games, pop culture recommendations,
(01:09):
hosts answering questions, and collections of content relevant to the time of the year.
Also, as we always like to note (01:14):
every regular episode is available for free
in captioned format. You can find the captioned versions primarily on FootnotingHistory.com and
YouTube.com/FootnotingHistory.Now, on to Halloween!
On March 6, 1878, The Daily Inter-Ocean, a newspaper out of Illinois, USA,
(01:35):
published an article of news from Boston that caught my attention all the way in 2025. Why?
Because it promised to be “The Remarkable Story of a Remarkable Penitentiary Convict”.
You know you would want to read it, too and learn what was going on…well I did that for
you and it turns out that what was going on was the filing of a petition, by friends,
(01:57):
to have a man named Michael O’Donnell pardoned.Some ten years prior, Michael O’Donnell was put
on trial for the murder of a young girl. Prior to the events that caused the trial,
Michael was “a well-to-do Irishman who…had a small piece of land. In his garden he raised
vegetables and was troubled by thefts.” Because of this, Michael was always on guard for thieves,
(02:19):
worried as he was about losing more of his garden’s productions. One night–yes,
a night in late October–he heard troubling sounds out in his garden. Suspecting thieves, he decided
to fire randomly into the impossibly dark night in order to scare them off. It was, as I mentioned,
so dark that he decided to just go back inside instead of checking to see what happened. Well,
(02:42):
the following morning it was discovered that his warning shots had not been warning shots
at all…they had been fatal for the interloper, who happened to be a fifteen-year-old girl.
The aftermath of this saw Michael tried and convicted to life in prison. According to
the article, the conviction caused him to completely change. Two separate pieces in
(03:02):
the article describe what happened to him. One says: “after his sentence for life he acted like
a man from whom every emotion of feeling had gone. The vacant expression came to his face,
his hair turned white, and for ten years his manner has been unchanged. He does the work
he is told to do like a machine, and obeys the prison regulations, but he never speaks except
(03:23):
to answer yes or no.” Another says that when Mr. Haynes of the Governor’s Council
went to visit Michael regarding the proposed pardon, “a tall man in prison dress walked in,
and his appearance and manner were so strange that none of us could speak for a few minutes. We sat
and looked at the man in amazement. His hair was perfectly white and soft, but there was a
(03:45):
fixed expression on his face that was terrible. He looked like a man struck [mute] with terror–like a
sleep-walker. There was absolutely no expression whatever on his face except that of fear.
He walked like an automaton.” Michael O’Donnell was clearly traumatized by what he’d done.
According to Haynes, in the original trial the prosecution argued that Michael saw the girl,
(04:07):
knew who she was, and intentionally shot her [note that she is never named in the article, which is
why I haven’t named her myself.] Later though, it was uncovered that Michael did not know the girl
at all…so why then was she in his garden at night when it was so dark that she could not be seen?
Well, it seems that it was Halloween and she was trying to prepare for one of the annual customs.
(04:30):
The article tells us that “there is a superstition that if a virgin places a cabbage over her door
upon that night, she will marry him who first passes under the threshold.” The girl then,
was seriously in want of a cabbage for this purpose, and went into O’Donnell’s garden
to take one so that she might find out who her future husband would be. Unfortunately,
(04:51):
everything went awry and we know how it ended. The article tells us that Mr. Haynes was certain
that the pardon would be given because what was one considered an act of malicious murder was
actually a horrible tragedy. It is a sad story, no matter how one spins it, and it serves as a
reminder to all…please be very careful.Stay safe out there, dear listeners,
(05:11):
and may you enjoy this and many more Halloweens.[Lucy] Happy Hallowe’en, dear listeners!
This year, I come to you with stories from 5th-century North Africa, where
two bishops debated what exactly happens to souls after death and how we can know.
(05:33):
We know about this from the exchange of letters among these men: Bishop Evodius of Uzalis,
in Tunisia; Bishop Augustine of Hippo, famous for writing one of the world’s first autobiographies;
and Bishop Paulinus of Nola, in Italy, who was also curious about what exactly the
(05:55):
relationship between the living and the dead is. As Evodius put it: “Going forth from the body,
and leaving behind every burden and nimble sin, who are we?” He was deeply disturbed by the
possibility that after death, souls might just... sleep, and not be aware of anything. After all,
(06:20):
as he wrote to Augustine, within Christianity, the soul should not be “like something dead.” Besides,
he writes (06:28):
“many people also say that the dead are seen at certain hours of the night, in the
places in which their bodies were buried, and especially in the basilicas, where they are known
to make noises and say prayers.” Also, he said, “if these things are nonsense, it is strange,
and I would like to know more about it, because the dead do seem to come and visit the living.”
(06:53):
Augustine was more skeptical about this. Writing back to both Evodius and Paulinus,
he spoke about the circumstances in which the dead appear to the living in dreams, or visions—like
Marley to Scrooge, for instance. Augustine said that it should not be believed. “For,” he writes,
(07:15):
“the living often appear to the living while asleep, even though they are not themselves
aware of this. It is possible for someone to see me in their dreams, indicating to him something
that has happened, or indeed foretelling something that will happen in the future, while for my part,
I am completely ignorant of this, and do not care whatsoever, not only what he is dreaming about,
but also whether he is awake while I am sleeping, or whether he is asleep while I am awake,
(07:38):
or whether we are both awake or asleep at one and the same time, when he experiences
the dream in which I appear. Why then is it so strange that the dead, without their knowledge
and unable to perceive these things, are seen by the living in dreams and say something,
which the living know to be true when they wake up?” And he goes on to say that yes, he too has
(08:00):
heard reports of the living seeing the dead and maybe—maybe—these visions happen by divine agency.
But he doesn’t believe that you actually have to view these visions as reliable. “These visions,”
he writes, “have no basis in reality, but rather, they have been sketched in shadow,
(08:23):
on certain images of things that are real.”Evodius, however, believed that not only did
people appear to the living, but that this made sense, “because the soul in the body relishes
its own strength, and,” he writes, “when the body is put aside, like a cloud that has blown away,
(08:46):
the soul becomes completely bright in a state of tranquility without temptation,
seeing what it desires, embracing what it loves, remembering its friends, even recognizing those
whom it preceded in death, and those who followed after it. Perhaps this is true.”
(09:09):
[Samantha] Hello, and welcome to another frightening tale from the past. I’m Sam
and today I’m going to tell you the story of the Green Children. It’s a curious tale that has left
historians puzzled to this very day. The story was first recorded in the late 12th century and
is set a generation or two earlier in the county of Suffolk, England. Versions of the story can
(09:30):
be found in William of Newburgh’s Historia rerum Anglicarum and in Ralph Coggeshall’s
Chronicum Anglicanum. Both of these writers have other, let’s say, unusual tales included in their
works. They’re just packed with good, spooky stuff and I’m only telling you about one today.
William is the earlier writer of the two writers, so we’ll start with his version. The
(09:52):
Green Children appear in Chapter 27 of William’s work, right after the appointment of Hugh, bishop
of Durham and the restoration of William of York and right before other honorable mentions of some
extraordinary “prodigies,” it kind of reads like a grab bag of magical items and strange happenings.
William says that it wouldn’t “seem right to pass over” the Green Children and I must agree.
(10:13):
William sets the scene. We are in the reign of King Stephen, in East Anglia,
in a distant village, a few miles from the “noble monastery of the blessed king and martyr, Edmund”
and there are a few caves in this area that people called “Wolfpittes.” During the harvest season,
William tells us, people came across two children, a boy and a girl, who looked like
(10:34):
normal children except THEY WERE GREEN and their clothes were strange, strange color,
strange material, just strange. They seemed to be wandering around in a daze, and so the
field workers took them back to the village – the children were exhausted, and they were hungry but
they couldn’t (or perhaps wouldn’t?) eat any of the food the villagers tried to give them. Except
for some beans. The children got very excited when they saw the bean stalks, and they grabbed
(10:57):
them and “examined the stalk for the pulse” but couldn’t find one and they cried but then
some bystanders took the beans out of the pods and gave them to the children. For some reason,
they could eat those. And that’s what they ate for “many months” until they learned how to eat bread.
After they started eating, their color started changing. They gradually lost their green color
and looked more like the East Anglicans around them, and they started learning the local
(11:20):
language. Of course people had questions for them and they asked the children where they came from
– from “the land of St. Martin” the children said, St. Martin was very special to their home country.
They didn’t know how they ended up wandering in that field. Apparently they had been out feeding
their father’s flock when they heard a loud noise, they became entranced, and then, bam!, there they
were in the field. The land where they came from was always in twilight. They could see a luminous
(11:45):
country in the distance and a great river that divided them. The villagers then thought that they
should baptize the children – and the boy, who was probably the younger, survived the ritual but died
soon after. The girl survived and married someone in the town of Lynne and seemed like all the other
women. William of Newburg says he feels no regret about recording this story, thankyouverymuch.
Ralph of Coggeshall’s version is slightly later and just a little different. His story
(12:10):
sits between some stories about the reign of Henry II and Richard I which would place his
version set a bit later than William’s. He agrees with William’s version about some stuff – it’s in
Suffolk, near the Wolfpittes. But Ralph tells us that the person who took the children in was
a knight named Sir Richard de Caine and he took them to the village of Wykes. In Ralph’s version
(12:32):
the boy was perpetually depressed and Ralph says he died slightly after his arrival in the village.
The girl did okay. She was able to eat normal food after a while and lost her green hue – and she was
later baptized. She continued to live and work in the household for the knight, but Roger feels
it’s important you know that she was “loose and wanton in her conduct.” In this version,
(12:54):
people also asked the children about how they came to be in that field – and in Roger’s story,
the girl says they that heard delightful bells coming from a cavern and that they followed the
sound and went through the cave until they got to an opening which was the field. It was very sunny,
and they were confused, so they wanted to go back but they couldn’t find the
way. Ralph’s Green Girl says where she came from everything was green.
(13:17):
There’s a lot to unpack here, but it’s very difficult from our perspective, centuries later,
to fully understand what these authors were getting at in regaling us with these stories
of mysterious green children. The motif of caves being a transport zone between worlds is a thing
in medieval literature, especially in England and Wales. Both stories be sure to include the
importance of the Christian ritual of baptism. Anne Witte has suggested that the children were
(13:42):
associated with a kind of Underworld – because they talk about St. Martin and because St.
Martin’s day is November 11 and that’s close enough to All Saints’ Day and All
Souls’ Day – October 31 and November 1. Witte also talks about broad beans,
the only thing the children can eat at first, which were associated with death and corruption,
but then also with rebirth and fertility. Beans were often eaten during the season Lent, which had
(14:07):
a lot of dietary restrictions. Physicians were also cautious about beans, though. They could
be digestively difficult and could cause symptoms like dizziness and blurry vision. But we are also
left to wonder why the children are green. It’s possible that green was symbolic of spring and
nature, but it could mean love – or it could mean death. The devil was often described as
(14:28):
sometimes wearing green; the famous knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is kind of ruthless.
And of course there might be another way that medieval people viewed the color green that
modern historians are now missing. So, yeah. It could mean just about anything. There’s some kind
of symbolism there with the color of the children, but what it is … is really open to interpretation.
(14:50):
People have been wondering about these Green Children for a long time. In 1586,
William of Camden wrote that he thought the whole thing was a hoax. Now, if you’re thinking, dudes,
these are green children who are talking about being from the land of St. Martin and immediately
thought, “yeah, of course, THEY’RE MARTIANS, THEY’RE ALIENS, PEOPLE,” you’re not the first
(15:11):
one to think that. Robert Burton beat you to the punch in 1621. In Anatomy of Melancholy,
he wrote that the Green Children had fallen from the moon and Francis Godwin, who was bishop of
Hereford, wrote about them in his book Man in the Moone in 1626 but that one might be more of a
science fiction sort of work than an expression of genuine belief in green children falling from the
(15:31):
moon. But like, these kids continued to intrigue, especially after the story was first published in
English (rather than the Latin of the originals) for the first time in 1850 in Fairy Mythology – a
work by a folklorist who treated the story as folklore and the children as fairies,
not moon people. There are also scholarly theories that the children got lost in the
woods and were suffering from malnutrition, or a type of anemia known as “the green sickness,” or
(15:55):
that they were actually Flemish children who were orphaned in the Battle of Fornham St.
Martin in 1173. Those theories are problematic for a variety of reasons and definitely not as fun as:
medieval green Martian children who speak a strange language and wear strange clothing.
If SETI had been around in the 12th century, they’d probably have been pretty interested
in “Leading the search for life beyond Earth, two green children at a time.”
(16:20):
Happy Halloween!
[Kristin] Hello Footnoting History friends,
it’s Kristin, here to wrap up this year’s Halloween episode with a story about what
may be the most haunted house in United States … the Peyton Randolph house. This
is one that I have been mulling for years – and friends, I mean years – and I’m not
(16:44):
quite sure what to think about it all except that this house is legit creepy, can confirm.
So, the Peyton Randolph house is located in Colonial Williamsburg Virginia, also known as
Kristin’s Mother Ship. Colonial Williamsburg was a project originally financed by John D.
Rockefeller, and it is considered a living-history museum. It’s your 1-Stop-Immersive-Shop for all
(17:10):
things Colonial Virginia – and I swear I don’t work for them, but I seriously love this place
and they’ve done a lot of good work grappling with some very difficult portions of history,
and I can’t believe it’s taken me this many years to do an episode featuring it,
but here we are. Williamsburg certainly keeps the ghosts alive, figuratively,
(17:31):
performatively and maybe even … really.
To begin, the Peyton Randolph house is considered one of the oldest, extent structures in the
restored area and was one of the first buildings to be restored – and partially reconstructed – by
the Colonial Williamsburg foundation in the 1930s. It’s considered super old. I’m
(17:53):
a medievalist who lives in New England, so if you tell me something is super old and it’s from 1715,
I’m generally not that impressed, but for Colonial Williamsburg, this is kind of it. Peyton Randolph,
who lived from 1721-1775, gets top billing as far as owners of the house go – he’s part of
(18:13):
the American Revolution story the foundation is committed to telling – but he wasn’t the first,
nor was he the last, owner of the house. The original owner was William Robertson,
and he started building in 1715. In 1715, Williamsburg Virginia was just getting into
its stride – the settlement was originally called Middle Plantation and that was established in 1632
(18:37):
(Jamestown was too swampy and just not great and Middle Plantation was a fortified settlement that
sat between the James and York rivers) – and they renamed Middle Plantation Williamsburg
in 1699 – and Williamsburg became the capital of the colony of Virginia and it’s where the
House of Burgesses met and where courts were periodically in session and there was also the
(19:00):
College of William and Mary, founded in 1693, and Williamsburg was hoppin’ until 1780 when Thomas
Jefferson moved the capital to Richmond. Then, not so much and there was a strong economic decline,
and also the American Civil War did no favors to the area. But Peyton Randolph,
who inherited the house from his father Sir John Randolph who bought it from in 1724, lived at a
(19:23):
time when Williamsburg was in its heyday. Peyton Randolph is considered an American Founding Father
(even if he didn’t live to see how the American Revolution turned out). He was the president of
the First Continental Congress and so that’s why he’s the main namesake of the house today.
You can google this house to see what it looks like – and I strongly encourage you to do
(19:46):
that – but I’ll try to describe it the best I can. The Randolphs built onto the original 1715 house
over time, and it ended up being this L-shaped structure – and there are also outbuildings,
like the kitchen and the laundry etc. behind the main living space – and some of those accessory
buildings served to house the many enslaved people that the Randolphs kept. The house is a dark,
(20:10):
rusty red color, it’s two stories and has two chimneys when you’re facing the front of the
house, there’s a very Georgian-style gable over the front door and steps leading up.
Some of the original structure was in pretty bad shape when the Colonial Williamsburg foundation
started working on it in 1939, so not all of what stands today is original,
but certainly a chunk of it is – and a lot of that interior is original too. It has quite the aura,
(20:36):
and in person, it feels a little heavy. That may be the color, the small rooms, the glass
in the windows that’s gone a little wavy over time, or you know, it might be something else.
There is no shortage of ghost stories about the Peyton Randolph house, but I’ll tell you
some of the more famous ones here and you can do your own internet deep dive to hear some more,
(20:56):
if you’re so inclined and you will be. I have not run across many stories about Peyton Randolph
himself but there is something related to his wife, Elizabeth, and her enslaved maid,
Eve that regularly makes the rounds. Elizabeth, fondly called Betty, was the daughter of a rich
Virginia planter and her maternal grandfather was Robert “King” Carter who had a large planation on
(21:18):
the James River and she married Peyton in 1746. In 1775, the colonial Virginia royal governor,
Lord Dunmore, issued a decree that any enslaved person who escaped from their revolutionary
owners and then joined the British army would be freed. It was an offer that many could not refuse,
including Eve, who escaped the Randolph household with her son George along with several other
(21:40):
enslaved persons held by the Randolphs. One way or the other, however, Eve and George returned,
and Eve was severely physically punished. Things got so bad that she ran away again but, again,
she unfortunately returned. Peyton had died in 1775 – of a stroke, apparently, while at a dinner
party with Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia – but Betty died in 1782, and she inherited the estate
(22:04):
and then later wrote up her own will. And Betty wrote up a special section in her will just for
Eve (and you can read a scan of the original at the Museum of the American Revolution website).
The original will which was written in 1780 said that Eve and her son, George, were to be inherited
by her niece, Ann Couplande. However, Betty put in a codicil later to the will, in 1782,
(22:26):
that said that because of Eve’s “bad behavior,” Eve would be sold to someone else, and the money
was to be used to buy two other enslaved people, one for her niece and one for her nephew. This was
really bad but what made it even worse was that it meant Eve would never see her son, George,
again. I am not sure what happened to George. His status was not updated in Betty’s will. Maybe that
(22:47):
was because he didn’t run away a second time, like his mother. Maybe it was because he didn’t serve
Betty in the way that Eve had, and so things were more personal with Eve. Maybe just no one thought
it was worth writing down. It’s hard to say, and we just don’t know the fates of most enslaved
people. The person who bought Eve allegedly had to drag her away and some stories talk about
her being tied over the back of a horse. I could not verify that last part, I only read the will,
(23:12):
but that story unfortunately is not hard to imagine. There are a few ghost photos online
that claim to show the face of a Black woman, glaring from a mirror, in what used to be Mrs.
Randolph’s bedroom, along with other reported supernatural encounters that seem menacing or
malicious. Is this Eve? I dunno, but if it is Eve haunting the Randolph house, I say, bravo,
(23:34):
Eve. I’d come back to haunt the hell out of the house where that happened to me, too, if I could.
Most of the stories about the Peyton Randolph house, though, are associated with the Peachy
family, who owned the house at the turn of the 19th century, after the Randolphs.
Thomas Peachy was another big deal planter and wealthy and well-connected Virginian, and uh,
he’s still there. Somewhere. According to the family bible, a few of the Peachys probably
(23:59):
are. When Thomas Peachy died in 1810, they buried him in the family graveyard,
which was in the back garden of the house. Except no one knows exactly where that is
anymore. (I say this like it’s unusual for wealthy families at this time to have their
own private graveyards on their property, but it’s Halloween, lean into it. And also,
come on, admit it. It is a little unsettling to not know where this one is exactly.)
(24:22):
When Mary Munro Peachy, who married Thomas Peachy’s son, William Samuel, was widowed in 1802,
she moved into her father-in-law’s house with her small children. The Colonial Williamsburg
report says that there were five children living in the Peachy house at that time: Elizabeth,
Sally, Thomas Griffin, John, and Mary, but Thomas Griffin is the only one we know something about
in terms of his adult life and when he died (and he died in 1864 in Richmond) – which
(24:47):
leaves me to assume that the other children, sadly, did not make it long in this world, and
thus probably died in the Peyton Randolph house and probably were also buried there somewhere.
That’s a lot of tragedy already for one house, but there are also reports that the home was
used as a hospital during the Civil War Battle of Williamsburg in 1862 – which
(25:09):
was pretty brutal and had a high casualty rate. During the American Revolution, Betty allowed
the home to be used as a place where ill and wounded soldiers could be treated (but mostly
it seems that it was a military headquarters and Rochambeau used it during the Yorktown Campaign
in 1781). I’ve read several things that claim that violence and untimely death happened in
(25:30):
the home over the years the Peachy family owned it, but all those claims are very non-specific.
However, one person was a little more specific about his experiences in the house and that
was the Marquis de Lafayette who visited Williamsburg in 1824, and he stayed at the
Peyton Randolph house, during the time the Peachy family owned it. In a letter to a friend he wrote,
(25:52):
“I considered myself fortunate to lodge in the home of a great man … I remembered it to be a
fine and elegantly decorated building … Upon my arrival, as I entered through the foyer,
I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned quickly but found no one there. The
nights were not restful as the sounds of voices kept me awake for most of my stay.”
(26:12):
I recently took a trip to Williamsburg with my parents, and we got a private tour of the
Randolph house. (It’s just how things worked out with the timed tours, we were not that special,
just happened to get lucky. And boy, did we.) At the end, the guide asked if we had any questions,
and you will not be surprised to hear that I asked about the ghosts. I always do and the guides never
(26:34):
tell me anything. But this person actually had a few things to say, like hearing their name called
when the house was empty or that the house “let [them] know” when they got something wrong on
the tour; or how another guide saw a staircase disappear right in front of them. I don’t think
they were trying to scare me or just telling me what I wanted to hear. I mean, maybe they were. I
usually get shut down pretty fast with these kinds of questions though. I do think they believed it,
(26:58):
and in that moment, I could easily believe it too. And in this moment, I still kinda do. Either way,
excellent tour, Colonial Williamsburg guide. 10/10 would recommend planning a visit.
Happy Halloween, Footnoting History friends. Thank you for sharing another collaborative episode of
spooky tales from the past. If you’d like more hair-raising stories, you can find an archive of
(27:21):
previous Halloween episodes as well as episodes on other creepy topics like true crime and witchcraft
on our website, FootnotingHistory.com, or on our YouTube channel. Stay spooky, my history nerds,
stay curious about the past, and remember the best stories are in the footnotes.
[Christine] Welcome, dear listeners! Christine here to kick off Footnoting History’s 12th-annual
History for Halloween episode…what?! I know. Every year I act surprised that we are still doing
Halloween episodes, but that isn’t the case…it’s more that I’m impressed that we have been doing
them for so long. Thank you, thank you, listeners for being here. Especially a big thank you to
(00:45):
our patrons who keep us going financially. If you’re considering being a patron, you can visit
FootnotingHistory.com/Donate to do so. Patrons not only get the clout of saying they help us,
but they get exclusive minisodes every few months and a quarterly newsletter that I was told should
be called a quarterly magazine because it contains so much–like games, pop culture recommendations,
(01:09):
hosts answering questions, and collections of content relevant to the time of the year.
Also, as we always like to note (01:14):
every regular episode is available for free
in captioned format. You can find the captioned versions primarily on FootnotingHistory.com and
YouTube.com/FootnotingHistory.Now, on to Halloween!
On March 6, 1878, The Daily Inter-Ocean, a newspaper out of Illinois, USA,
(01:35):
published an article of news from Boston that caught my attention all the way in 2025. Why?
Because it promised to be “The Remarkable Story of a Remarkable Penitentiary Convict”.
You know you would want to read it, too and learn what was going on…well I did that for
you and it turns out that what was going on was the filing of a petition, by friends,
(01:57):
to have a man named Michael O’Donnell pardoned.Some ten years prior, Michael O’Donnell was put
on trial for the murder of a young girl. Prior to the events that caused the trial,
Michael was “a well-to-do Irishman who…had a small piece of land. In his garden he raised
vegetables and was troubled by thefts.” Because of this, Michael was always on guard for thieves,
(02:19):
worried as he was about losing more of his garden’s productions. One night–yes,
a night in late October–he heard troubling sounds out in his garden. Suspecting thieves, he decided
to fire randomly into the impossibly dark night in order to scare them off. It was, as I mentioned,
so dark that he decided to just go back inside instead of checking to see what happened. Well,
(02:42):
the following morning it was discovered that his warning shots had not been warning shots
at all…they had been fatal for the interloper, who happened to be a fifteen-year-old girl.
The aftermath of this saw Michael tried and convicted to life in prison. According to
the article, the conviction caused him to completely change. Two separate pieces in
(03:02):
the article describe what happened to him. One says: “after his sentence for life he acted like
a man from whom every emotion of feeling had gone. The vacant expression came to his face,
his hair turned white, and for ten years his manner has been unchanged. He does the work
he is told to do like a machine, and obeys the prison regulations, but he never speaks except
(03:23):
to answer yes or no.” Another says that when Mr. Haynes of the Governor’s Council
went to visit Michael regarding the proposed pardon, “a tall man in prison dress walked in,
and his appearance and manner were so strange that none of us could speak for a few minutes. We sat
and looked at the man in amazement. His hair was perfectly white and soft, but there was a
(03:45):
fixed expression on his face that was terrible. He looked like a man struck [mute] with terror–like a
sleep-walker. There was absolutely no expression whatever on his face except that of fear.
He walked like an automaton.” Michael O’Donnell was clearly traumatized by what he’d done.
According to Haynes, in the original trial the prosecution argued that Michael saw the girl,
(04:07):
knew who she was, and intentionally shot her [note that she is never named in the article, which is
why I haven’t named her myself.] Later though, it was uncovered that Michael did not know the girl
at all…so why then was she in his garden at night when it was so dark that she could not be seen?
Well, it seems that it was Halloween and she was trying to prepare for one of the annual customs.
(04:30):
The article tells us that “there is a superstition that if a virgin places a cabbage over her door
upon that night, she will marry him who first passes under the threshold.” The girl then,
was seriously in want of a cabbage for this purpose, and went into O’Donnell’s garden
to take one so that she might find out who her future husband would be. Unfortunately,
(04:51):
everything went awry and we know how it ended. The article tells us that Mr. Haynes was certain
that the pardon would be given because what was one considered an act of malicious murder was
actually a horrible tragedy. It is a sad story, no matter how one spins it, and it serves as a
reminder to all…please be very careful.Stay safe out there, dear listeners,
(05:11):
and may you enjoy this and many more Halloweens.[Lucy] Happy Hallowe’en, dear listeners!
This year, I come to you with stories from 5th-century North Africa, where
two bishops debated what exactly happens to souls after death and how we can know.
(05:33):
We know about this from the exchange of letters among these men: Bishop Evodius of Uzalis,
in Tunisia; Bishop Augustine of Hippo, famous for writing one of the world’s first autobiographies;
and Bishop Paulinus of Nola, in Italy, who was also curious about what exactly the
(05:55):
relationship between the living and the dead is. As Evodius put it: “Going forth from the body,
and leaving behind every burden and nimble sin, who are we?” He was deeply disturbed by the
possibility that after death, souls might just... sleep, and not be aware of anything. After all,
(06:20):
as he wrote to Augustine, within Christianity, the soul should not be “like something dead.” Besides,
he writes (06:28):
“many people also say that the dead are seen at certain hours of the night, in the
places in which their bodies were buried, and especially in the basilicas, where they are known
to make noises and say prayers.” Also, he said, “if these things are nonsense, it is strange,
and I would like to know more about it, because the dead do seem to come and visit the living.”
(06:53):
Augustine was more skeptical about this. Writing back to both Evodius and Paulinus,
he spoke about the circumstances in which the dead appear to the living in dreams, or visions—like
Marley to Scrooge, for instance. Augustine said that it should not be believed. “For,” he writes,
(07:15):
“the living often appear to the living while asleep, even though they are not themselves
aware of this. It is possible for someone to see me in their dreams, indicating to him something
that has happened, or indeed foretelling something that will happen in the future, while for my part,
I am completely ignorant of this, and do not care whatsoever, not only what he is dreaming about,
but also whether he is awake while I am sleeping, or whether he is asleep while I am awake,
(07:38):
or whether we are both awake or asleep at one and the same time, when he experiences
the dream in which I appear. Why then is it so strange that the dead, without their knowledge
and unable to perceive these things, are seen by the living in dreams and say something,
which the living know to be true when they wake up?” And he goes on to say that yes, he too has
(08:00):
heard reports of the living seeing the dead and maybe—maybe—these visions happen by divine agency.
But he doesn’t believe that you actually have to view these visions as reliable. “These visions,”
he writes, “have no basis in reality, but rather, they have been sketched in shadow,
(08:23):
on certain images of things that are real.”Evodius, however, believed that not only did
people appear to the living, but that this made sense, “because the soul in the body relishes
its own strength, and,” he writes, “when the body is put aside, like a cloud that has blown away,
(08:46):
the soul becomes completely bright in a state of tranquility without temptation,
seeing what it desires, embracing what it loves, remembering its friends, even recognizing those
whom it preceded in death, and those who followed after it. Perhaps this is true.”
(09:09):
[Samantha] Hello, and welcome to another frightening tale from the past. I’m Sam
and today I’m going to tell you the story of the Green Children. It’s a curious tale that has left
historians puzzled to this very day. The story was first recorded in the late 12th century and
is set a generation or two earlier in the county of Suffolk, England. Versions of the story can
(09:30):
be found in William of Newburgh’s Historia rerum Anglicarum and in Ralph Coggeshall’s
Chronicum Anglicanum. Both of these writers have other, let’s say, unusual tales included in their
works. They’re just packed with good, spooky stuff and I’m only telling you about one today.
William is the earlier writer of the two writers, so we’ll start with his version. The
(09:52):
Green Children appear in Chapter 27 of William’s work, right after the appointment of Hugh, bishop
of Durham and the restoration of William of York and right before other honorable mentions of some
extraordinary “prodigies,” it kind of reads like a grab bag of magical items and strange happenings.
William says that it wouldn’t “seem right to pass over” the Green Children and I must agree.
(10:13):
William sets the scene. We are in the reign of King Stephen, in East Anglia,
in a distant village, a few miles from the “noble monastery of the blessed king and martyr, Edmund”
and there are a few caves in this area that people called “Wolfpittes.” During the harvest season,
William tells us, people came across two children, a boy and a girl, who looked like
(10:34):
normal children except THEY WERE GREEN and their clothes were strange, strange color,
strange material, just strange. They seemed to be wandering around in a daze, and so the
field workers took them back to the village – the children were exhausted, and they were hungry but
they couldn’t (or perhaps wouldn’t?) eat any of the food the villagers tried to give them. Except
for some beans. The children got very excited when they saw the bean stalks, and they grabbed
(10:57):
them and “examined the stalk for the pulse” but couldn’t find one and they cried but then
some bystanders took the beans out of the pods and gave them to the children. For some reason,
they could eat those. And that’s what they ate for “many months” until they learned how to eat bread.
After they started eating, their color started changing. They gradually lost their green color
and looked more like the East Anglicans around them, and they started learning the local
(11:20):
language. Of course people had questions for them and they asked the children where they came from
– from “the land of St. Martin” the children said, St. Martin was very special to their home country.
They didn’t know how they ended up wandering in that field. Apparently they had been out feeding
their father’s flock when they heard a loud noise, they became entranced, and then, bam!, there they
were in the field. The land where they came from was always in twilight. They could see a luminous
(11:45):
country in the distance and a great river that divided them. The villagers then thought that they
should baptize the children – and the boy, who was probably the younger, survived the ritual but died
soon after. The girl survived and married someone in the town of Lynne and seemed like all the other
women. William of Newburg says he feels no regret about recording this story, thankyouverymuch.
Ralph of Coggeshall’s version is slightly later and just a little different. His story
(12:10):
sits between some stories about the reign of Henry II and Richard I which would place his
version set a bit later than William’s. He agrees with William’s version about some stuff – it’s in
Suffolk, near the Wolfpittes. But Ralph tells us that the person who took the children in was
a knight named Sir Richard de Caine and he took them to the village of Wykes. In Ralph’s version
(12:32):
the boy was perpetually depressed and Ralph says he died slightly after his arrival in the village.
The girl did okay. She was able to eat normal food after a while and lost her green hue – and she was
later baptized. She continued to live and work in the household for the knight, but Roger feels
it’s important you know that she was “loose and wanton in her conduct.” In this version,
(12:54):
people also asked the children about how they came to be in that field – and in Roger’s story,
the girl says they that heard delightful bells coming from a cavern and that they followed the
sound and went through the cave until they got to an opening which was the field. It was very sunny,
and they were confused, so they wanted to go back but they couldn’t find the
way. Ralph’s Green Girl says where she came from everything was green.
(13:17):
There’s a lot to unpack here, but it’s very difficult from our perspective, centuries later,
to fully understand what these authors were getting at in regaling us with these stories
of mysterious green children. The motif of caves being a transport zone between worlds is a thing
in medieval literature, especially in England and Wales. Both stories be sure to include the
importance of the Christian ritual of baptism. Anne Witte has suggested that the children were
(13:42):
associated with a kind of Underworld – because they talk about St. Martin and because St.
Martin’s day is November 11 and that’s close enough to All Saints’ Day and All
Souls’ Day – October 31 and November 1. Witte also talks about broad beans,
the only thing the children can eat at first, which were associated with death and corruption,
but then also with rebirth and fertility. Beans were often eaten during the season Lent, which had
(14:07):
a lot of dietary restrictions. Physicians were also cautious about beans, though. They could
be digestively difficult and could cause symptoms like dizziness and blurry vision. But we are also
left to wonder why the children are green. It’s possible that green was symbolic of spring and
nature, but it could mean love – or it could mean death. The devil was often described as
(14:28):
sometimes wearing green; the famous knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is kind of ruthless.
And of course there might be another way that medieval people viewed the color green that
modern historians are now missing. So, yeah. It could mean just about anything. There’s some kind
of symbolism there with the color of the children, but what it is … is really open to interpretation.
(14:50):
People have been wondering about these Green Children for a long time. In 1586,
William of Camden wrote that he thought the whole thing was a hoax. Now, if you’re thinking, dudes,
these are green children who are talking about being from the land of St. Martin and immediately
thought, “yeah, of course, THEY’RE MARTIANS, THEY’RE ALIENS, PEOPLE,” you’re not the first
(15:11):
one to think that. Robert Burton beat you to the punch in 1621. In Anatomy of Melancholy,
he wrote that the Green Children had fallen from the moon and Francis Godwin, who was bishop of
Hereford, wrote about them in his book Man in the Moone in 1626 but that one might be more of a
science fiction sort of work than an expression of genuine belief in green children falling from the
(15:31):
moon. But like, these kids continued to intrigue, especially after the story was first published in
English (rather than the Latin of the originals) for the first time in 1850 in Fairy Mythology – a
work by a folklorist who treated the story as folklore and the children as fairies,
not moon people. There are also scholarly theories that the children got lost in the
woods and were suffering from malnutrition, or a type of anemia known as “the green sickness,” or
(15:55):
that they were actually Flemish children who were orphaned in the Battle of Fornham St.
Martin in 1173. Those theories are problematic for a variety of reasons and definitely not as fun as:
medieval green Martian children who speak a strange language and wear strange clothing.
If SETI had been around in the 12th century, they’d probably have been pretty interested
in “Leading the search for life beyond Earth, two green children at a time.”
(16:20):
Happy Halloween!
[Kristin] Hello Footnoting History friends,
it’s Kristin, here to wrap up this year’s Halloween episode with a story about what
may be the most haunted house in United States … the Peyton Randolph house. This
is one that I have been mulling for years – and friends, I mean years – and I’m not
(16:44):
quite sure what to think about it all except that this house is legit creepy, can confirm.
So, the Peyton Randolph house is located in Colonial Williamsburg Virginia, also known as
Kristin’s Mother Ship. Colonial Williamsburg was a project originally financed by John D.
Rockefeller, and it is considered a living-history museum. It’s your 1-Stop-Immersive-Shop for all
(17:10):
things Colonial Virginia – and I swear I don’t work for them, but I seriously love this place
and they’ve done a lot of good work grappling with some very difficult portions of history,
and I can’t believe it’s taken me this many years to do an episode featuring it,
but here we are. Williamsburg certainly keeps the ghosts alive, figuratively,
(17:31):
performatively and maybe even … really.
To begin, the Peyton Randolph house is considered one of the oldest, extent structures in the
restored area and was one of the first buildings to be restored – and partially reconstructed – by
the Colonial Williamsburg foundation in the 1930s. It’s considered super old. I’m
(17:53):
a medievalist who lives in New England, so if you tell me something is super old and it’s from 1715,
I’m generally not that impressed, but for Colonial Williamsburg, this is kind of it. Peyton Randolph,
who lived from 1721-1775, gets top billing as far as owners of the house go – he’s part of
(18:13):
the American Revolution story the foundation is committed to telling – but he wasn’t the first,
nor was he the last, owner of the house. The original owner was William Robertson,
and he started building in 1715. In 1715, Williamsburg Virginia was just getting into
its stride – the settlement was originally called Middle Plantation and that was established in 1632
(18:37):
(Jamestown was too swampy and just not great and Middle Plantation was a fortified settlement that
sat between the James and York rivers) – and they renamed Middle Plantation Williamsburg
in 1699 – and Williamsburg became the capital of the colony of Virginia and it’s where the
House of Burgesses met and where courts were periodically in session and there was also the
(19:00):
College of William and Mary, founded in 1693, and Williamsburg was hoppin’ until 1780 when Thomas
Jefferson moved the capital to Richmond. Then, not so much and there was a strong economic decline,
and also the American Civil War did no favors to the area. But Peyton Randolph,
who inherited the house from his father Sir John Randolph who bought it from in 1724, lived at a
(19:23):
time when Williamsburg was in its heyday. Peyton Randolph is considered an American Founding Father
(even if he didn’t live to see how the American Revolution turned out). He was the president of
the First Continental Congress and so that’s why he’s the main namesake of the house today.
You can google this house to see what it looks like – and I strongly encourage you to do
(19:46):
that – but I’ll try to describe it the best I can. The Randolphs built onto the original 1715 house
over time, and it ended up being this L-shaped structure – and there are also outbuildings,
like the kitchen and the laundry etc. behind the main living space – and some of those accessory
buildings served to house the many enslaved people that the Randolphs kept. The house is a dark,
(20:10):
rusty red color, it’s two stories and has two chimneys when you’re facing the front of the
house, there’s a very Georgian-style gable over the front door and steps leading up.
Some of the original structure was in pretty bad shape when the Colonial Williamsburg foundation
started working on it in 1939, so not all of what stands today is original,
but certainly a chunk of it is – and a lot of that interior is original too. It has quite the aura,
(20:36):
and in person, it feels a little heavy. That may be the color, the small rooms, the glass
in the windows that’s gone a little wavy over time, or you know, it might be something else.
There is no shortage of ghost stories about the Peyton Randolph house, but I’ll tell you
some of the more famous ones here and you can do your own internet deep dive to hear some more,
(20:56):
if you’re so inclined and you will be. I have not run across many stories about Peyton Randolph
himself but there is something related to his wife, Elizabeth, and her enslaved maid,
Eve that regularly makes the rounds. Elizabeth, fondly called Betty, was the daughter of a rich
Virginia planter and her maternal grandfather was Robert “King” Carter who had a large planation on
(21:18):
the James River and she married Peyton in 1746. In 1775, the colonial Virginia royal governor,
Lord Dunmore, issued a decree that any enslaved person who escaped from their revolutionary
owners and then joined the British army would be freed. It was an offer that many could not refuse,
including Eve, who escaped the Randolph household with her son George along with several other
(21:40):
enslaved persons held by the Randolphs. One way or the other, however, Eve and George returned,
and Eve was severely physically punished. Things got so bad that she ran away again but, again,
she unfortunately returned. Peyton had died in 1775 – of a stroke, apparently, while at a dinner
party with Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia – but Betty died in 1782, and she inherited the estate
(22:04):
and then later wrote up her own will. And Betty wrote up a special section in her will just for
Eve (and you can read a scan of the original at the Museum of the American Revolution website).
The original will which was written in 1780 said that Eve and her son, George, were to be inherited
by her niece, Ann Couplande. However, Betty put in a codicil later to the will, in 1782,
(22:26):
that said that because of Eve’s “bad behavior,” Eve would be sold to someone else, and the money
was to be used to buy two other enslaved people, one for her niece and one for her nephew. This was
really bad but what made it even worse was that it meant Eve would never see her son, George,
again. I am not sure what happened to George. His status was not updated in Betty’s will. Maybe that
(22:47):
was because he didn’t run away a second time, like his mother. Maybe it was because he didn’t serve
Betty in the way that Eve had, and so things were more personal with Eve. Maybe just no one thought
it was worth writing down. It’s hard to say, and we just don’t know the fates of most enslaved
people. The person who bought Eve allegedly had to drag her away and some stories talk about
her being tied over the back of a horse. I could not verify that last part, I only read the will,
(23:12):
but that story unfortunately is not hard to imagine. There are a few ghost photos online
that claim to show the face of a Black woman, glaring from a mirror, in what used to be Mrs.
Randolph’s bedroom, along with other reported supernatural encounters that seem menacing or
malicious. Is this Eve? I dunno, but if it is Eve haunting the Randolph house, I say, bravo,
(23:34):
Eve. I’d come back to haunt the hell out of the house where that happened to me, too, if I could.
Most of the stories about the Peyton Randolph house, though, are associated with the Peachy
family, who owned the house at the turn of the 19th century, after the Randolphs.
Thomas Peachy was another big deal planter and wealthy and well-connected Virginian, and uh,
he’s still there. Somewhere. According to the family bible, a few of the Peachys probably
(23:59):
are. When Thomas Peachy died in 1810, they buried him in the family graveyard,
which was in the back garden of the house. Except no one knows exactly where that is
anymore. (I say this like it’s unusual for wealthy families at this time to have their
own private graveyards on their property, but it’s Halloween, lean into it. And also,
come on, admit it. It is a little unsettling to not know where this one is exactly.)
(24:22):
When Mary Munro Peachy, who married Thomas Peachy’s son, William Samuel, was widowed in 1802,
she moved into her father-in-law’s house with her small children. The Colonial Williamsburg
report says that there were five children living in the Peachy house at that time: Elizabeth,
Sally, Thomas Griffin, John, and Mary, but Thomas Griffin is the only one we know something about
in terms of his adult life and when he died (and he died in 1864 in Richmond) – which
(24:47):
leaves me to assume that the other children, sadly, did not make it long in this world, and
thus probably died in the Peyton Randolph house and probably were also buried there somewhere.
That’s a lot of tragedy already for one house, but there are also reports that the home was
used as a hospital during the Civil War Battle of Williamsburg in 1862 – which
(25:09):
was pretty brutal and had a high casualty rate. During the American Revolution, Betty allowed
the home to be used as a place where ill and wounded soldiers could be treated (but mostly
it seems that it was a military headquarters and Rochambeau used it during the Yorktown Campaign
in 1781). I’ve read several things that claim that violence and untimely death happened in
(25:30):
the home over the years the Peachy family owned it, but all those claims are very non-specific.
However, one person was a little more specific about his experiences in the house and that
was the Marquis de Lafayette who visited Williamsburg in 1824, and he stayed at the
Peyton Randolph house, during the time the Peachy family owned it. In a letter to a friend he wrote,
(25:52):
“I considered myself fortunate to lodge in the home of a great man … I remembered it to be a
fine and elegantly decorated building … Upon my arrival, as I entered through the foyer,
I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned quickly but found no one there. The
nights were not restful as the sounds of voices kept me awake for most of my stay.”
(26:12):
I recently took a trip to Williamsburg with my parents, and we got a private tour of the
Randolph house. (It’s just how things worked out with the timed tours, we were not that special,
just happened to get lucky. And boy, did we.) At the end, the guide asked if we had any questions,
and you will not be surprised to hear that I asked about the ghosts. I always do and the guides never
(26:34):
tell me anything. But this person actually had a few things to say, like hearing their name called
when the house was empty or that the house “let [them] know” when they got something wrong on
the tour; or how another guide saw a staircase disappear right in front of them. I don’t think
they were trying to scare me or just telling me what I wanted to hear. I mean, maybe they were. I
usually get shut down pretty fast with these kinds of questions though. I do think they believed it,
(26:58):
and in that moment, I could easily believe it too. And in this moment, I still kinda do. Either way,
excellent tour, Colonial Williamsburg guide. 10/10 would recommend planning a visit.
Happy Halloween, Footnoting History friends. Thank you for sharing another collaborative episode of
spooky tales from the past. If you’d like more hair-raising stories, you can find an archive of
(27:21):
previous Halloween episodes as well as episodes on other creepy topics like true crime and witchcraft
on our website, FootnotingHistory.com, or on our YouTube channel. Stay spooky, my history nerds,
stay curious about the past, and remember the best stories are in the footnotes.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!