I am with Alyson Horrocks of The Strange and Unusual Podcast. It’s the evening of August 20th, 2017. We are in Danvers, MA which was previously known as Salem Village. We are visiting the Samuel Parris archeological site. Surrounded by a rail fence there are two stone lined cellars marking the location of the house that once stood here. Next to this location is a grassy path that leads to the back of a house with a wolves head door knocker.
A wolf can be a monster of many faces and a bad omen. This is one of the hidden places of American history. A place where the horrors of yesterday have cast a long shadow. The bright memory of a day spent walking the sunny streets of Salem have suddenly grown dim. Even though the sun has not yet set, we are surrounded by darkness.
Resources:
The Strange and Unusual Podcast
A Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials
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Alyson Horrocks from the Strange and Unusual Podcast took me on a tour of a historical site with a dark past. The site sits in a town called Danvers, but it was once Salem Village. This site was the culmination of a strange mix of religion, superstition, folklore, slavery, patriarchy, truth, and lies.
A place where people’s imagination or secret motives ran wild and story or lie or desperate attempt at redemption led to the basis for one of the darkest times in colonial American History. What started as a search for freedom to pursue religion and all things good, and ended in a nondescript historical site and archaeological dig, has a sinister history with a story that is hard to tell and even harder to understand.
Resources:
The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege
The Strange and Unusual Podcast
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The history of the Navajo goes back in time to the Four Corners region in Arizona. Where the spider grandmother spun a giant web and threw it into the night sky to create the stars. This area known as Canyon de Chelly is also known as the Canyon of the Dead after a misguided weaver’s warning resulted in a cruel cave massacre.
Like the art and designs of the Navajo weaver’s blanket, the Navajo legends are intertwined with a ranch purchased by a Utah couple. The Sherman ranch seemed like an idyllic place to raise premium cattle, but strange things started happening almost immediately upon the family's arrival. This ranch is now known as the Skinwalker Ranch and the legends continue.
Episode Highlights:
Resources:
Kit Carson’s Campaign Against the Indians
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On November 20th, 1850 night watchman George Pollard Jr. makes his nightly rounds on the foggy Island of Nantucket, MA. An island once inhabited by proud tribes of Native Americans before the addition of the colonists. An island that was the whaling capital of the world for over a century.
The inhabitants and the whalers themselves were haunted with superstition and legends about the dark underworld of the sea and the evil that lied beneath the depths. The dangers were all too real, yet it wasn’t a sea monster or a devil ascended from Davy Jones’ Locker that posed the threat. It was an invisible threat that lurked in the hearts of men like the night watchman.
Resources:
How Nantucket Came to Be the Whaling Capital of the World
George Pollard Jr.
The True-Life Horror That Inspired Moby-Dick
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Count Dracula’s story is one of many pieces; a story of a man and the secrets that are hidden inside his castle. Bram Stoker, the story’s author, is also a man of many secrets who constructed his own castle and built a fortress around his heart. The puzzle of Count Dracula is not complete until the intertwining pieces are put together.
When put together what do the pieces reveal about the story and the man behind it?
Episode Highlights:
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Chicago’s West 63rd Street Post Office was built in 1938 over the site of what its creator referred to as “The Castle”, and in 1902 an Ohio Daily News article called it Chicago’s Ghost Castle. Whatever you want to call it, this site was once or possibly still is the home to a notorious killer.
A figure who built a home that included a 2nd floor full of secret passages, trap doors, and hidden staircases. The basement so notorious that a crowd would lay on the sidewalk and try to peer through the cracks as it was excavated.
The creator of “The Castle” claimed to be under an evil influence. An influence that seemed to continue to claim victims after his death. An influence that is still felt today
Resources:
Herman Webster Mudgett or H. H. Holmes
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The Heriot House in Georgetown, South Carolina was built in 1765. It is now the Harbor House Inn and there are many stories by visitors and Georgetown residents alike of seeing an image of a woman that looks like she doesn’t belong there. Is this woman the ghost of a forlorn lover or does she represent something more sinister?
Something that ties in with the four circles of Dante’s Inferno and stretches all the way from the old Heriot House to a Greenwich Village neighborhood located on Jane Street. A story that crosses the founding of America and the early days of New York, featuring such notable founders as Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and even George Washington.
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In Austin, Texas in 1884 a female servant was killed in a gruesome ax murder. Feeble attempts were made to find the murderer, but to no avail. Soon a series of gruesome ax murders and attacks followed. Each one more horrific than the other, and the murders spread beyond the black servant population to the white community.
What originally was considered a black problem in the South twenty years after the Civil War became society's problem. This was a birth. The birth of legions of Demons cast out by Jesus. The birth referred to in the occult addicted mind of William Butler Yeats in his poem The Second Coming. The birth of something much more sinister.
Episode Highlights:
Resources:
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
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In Native American folklore, there was a dark creature that possessed the mind and body of men, instilling within them a great hunger for human flesh. The Wendigo was feared by tribes throughout what is now North America and Canada as stories of bloodshed and terror spread across the continent. Picture it: Your best friend, your husband, your sister -- crouched down and feasting upon the flesh of someone you love.
It’s been many, many years since a Wendigo was rumoured to be wreaking havoc, but are they truly gone for good?
Episode Highlights:
Resources:
Dangerous Spirits: The Wendigo in Myth and History by Shawn Smallman
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The Salisbury Plain is the name for the 300 miles of grasslands located in Wiltshire, England. Home to Stonehenge, a rich history, and a wide variety of plants and animals, the Salisbury Plain is one of the most famous locations in England. For the residents of Wiltshire, however, the area is notorious for more than its archaeological features and mystical energy. The great grassy plains of Salisbury border the mansions of Wiltshire, whose walls are painted in blood and sorrow. In these great houses, the dead refuse to rest.
Episode Highlights:
Resources:
Haunted Wiltshire by Sonia Smith
If you are looking for podcasts that are similar to Pleasing Terrors, check out:
The Strange and Unusual Podcast
Quid Pro Quo Podcast, episode 10 “Double Trouble”
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The White House: In all it’s glory, from the immaculately-kept gardens to the walls hung with priceless art, is an icon of American history and power. Home to every President since 1800, the White House is seen as a safe haven for the President and their family.
Not even the heavy iron fence that borders the grounds of the White House can keep dark magic from harming its inhabitants. A curse muttered on a bloodied battlefield in 1812 has left over a hundred years of President’s scared for their lives, but has the debt finally been paid?
Episode Highlights:
Resources:
The History Goes Bump Podcast, Episode 162: The White House
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Deep within the heart of New Jersey lies an untamed swath of trees and brush, long believed to be the home of the Jersey Devil itself. A horrifying creature with the head of a goat and the wings of a bat, the legend of the Jersey Devil has haunted the Pine Barrens for generations.
Yet the Jersey Devil might not be the only degenerate creature lurking within the shadows of the Pines. What dark secrets does the Devil guard?
Episode Highlights:
Resources:
Dogma and Ritual of High Magic by Eliphas Levi
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Who can forget the classic tale of the mad scientist who creates a gorgeously gruesome Creature, only to become frightened and disgusted by his own creation? Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is one of the most widely taught examples of Gothic literature, yet most readers don’t know the true story behind Shelley’s most famous work. Was Frankenstein really the product of a writing competition between friends while on summer vacation, as most people believe it to be, or was the story of the scientist and his Monster born out of a much darker mindset?
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Fairy tales often teach an important moral lesson, hidden within the entertaining twists and turns of the story. The tale of Bluebeard, the rich man who keeps the bodies of his murdered wives locked behind the forbidden doors of the dungeon in his castle, doomed to have his wrongdoing exposed by his newest wife, serves as a reminder to young women that curiosity can sometimes be your downfall -- or your savior. In real life there are rarely happy endings to tragedies and moral lessons must be learned the hard way.
For Zona Shue, choked to death in her own home, life was certainly no fairytale. Yet the strange events that led to a murder conviction were as fantastical as any tale written up in a storybook. The moral lesson in her twisted fairy tale?
Mothers are always right.
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Resources:
The Man Who Wanted Seven Wives by Katie Letcher Lyle, Quarrier Press 1999
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The time between three and four in the morning is said to be the hour when evil is at the height of it’s power -- the time when the Devil ascends from Hell and ghosts haunt the land of the living. In part two of my experience of the Devil’s hour inside Charleston’s Old City Jail, I receive a message from Hell itself, and discover the truth about one of the jail’s most famous prisoners -- Lavinia Fisher herself.
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Resources:
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Nestled inside Charleston, South Carolina lives a menacing stone monstrosity, often called the most haunted building in America -- The Old City Jail. The square upon which the Jail sits has been home to untold amounts of suffering and torture, making it the perfect breeding ground for the supernatural to take hold.
As part of my training and experience as a storyteller and tour guide, I have been visiting haunted locations for the past 19 years. There have been many times that I’ve been in the presence of people having a paranormal encounter, but I had never felt anything myself until the night I decided to enter the Old City Jail. This is part one of my experience, the story of a night that shook me to my very core.
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The railroad tracks over the Tsavo river are flanked on either side with lush grasses. A picturesque river runs below, providing a calming base for the trains that rush from Uganda to Kenya and back again. During it’s construction, men from all over India and far parts of Africa gathered at the Tsavo river, working for months on end. At first, the men were oblivious to the twin pairs of golden eyes stalking them from the grasses… until half-devoured bodies and screams in the night became commonplace.
From a distance, from a viewpoint high above the clouds, the Kenya-Uganda Railway snakes its way across deserts and through forests of thorns, trailing bloodshed and pain in its wake.
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Throughout history, disasters of astronomical proportions have taken place on one auspicious day -- Friday the Thirteenth. Shipwrecks, tsunamis, raging forest fires, brutal murderers, and horrifying accidents have all claimed victims on a day that many believe has been cursed since the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The same serpent who tested the pair has become the dark figurehead of Friday the Thirteenth, feared by ancient cultures for centuries.
The fear of 13 seems like old suspicions that were born and died in ancient times, but as an asteroid headed straight for the Earth threatens to destroy civilization as we know it, the due date of Friday the Thirteenth might be more relevant than ever.
Episode Highlights:
Resources:
Friday the Thirteenth by Thomas William Lawson
“The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe
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