Tales of Moderate Terror

Cameron: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Lost Threads, episode seven. My name is Cameron Ezell.

Cory: And I'm Cory Munson. Well, Cameron, Halloween is almost here and it's the perfect time to tell some ghost stories.

Cameron: Yeah, but most ghost stories are just the same made up nonsense. Like, uh, what you got the call coming from inside the house?

The hook on the rear view mirror,

Cory: the babysitter reaching under the table to let her dog lick her hand.

Cameron: Oh, I don't know that one actually, that you wanna tell that one.

Cory: Uh, there's a babysitter who has a dog under her table and she keeps hearing strange noises in the house and she keeps putting her hand under the table for the dog to lick her hand to comfort her.

And then she goes into the bathroom and the dog is dead. It's all butchered in the [00:01:00] bathtub and she realizes it wasn't the dog licking her hand the whole time it was the killer.

Cameron: Wow. Well, we'll see you next year folks. But yeah, so like it's kind of like the same stories

Cory: And even if we didn't want to tell those stories, most podcasts have already talked about all the famous true crime stories. So what's there left for us to talk about?

Cameron: Well, here at Lost Threads, we specialize in scouring the public domain for tales from yesteryear.

Cory: These stories that we're going to tell today are all taken from newspapers and are allegedly true.

Cameron: Right. So all of the accounts from these stories that we're gonna tell tonight are from eyewitnesses. They have elements of the supernatural and the unexplainable, but they are reported on, they're true. These aren't fiction.

Cory: Yeah. They come from newspapers, but we're not going to read them just as they appeared in the newspaper.

Cameron: [00:02:00] Right. We kind of, we dressed 'em up a bit. We made 'em prettier just to make 'em more of a fun story. But the information's the same.

Cory: All right, so submitted for approval by the Midnight Society, we've got three tales for you today. Do you want to kick us off with our first one, Cameron?

Cameron: Our first story is titled The Hell Hound of Calabria.

It was midnight one night in June of 1862, and the first battalion of the La Tour d’Auvergne regiment was stationed at Palmi in Calabria, Italy. They had just received urgent orders to march at once with all speed to Tropea, which was 40 miles away.

After a grueling day with hardly any breaks, the regiment reached Tropea at about 7:00 PM. [00:03:00] The men were exhausted, and after having a filling dinner they were ready to finally retire for the evening. Since this battalion was the last to arrive, they were assigned to the worst barracks for the night: an abandoned monastery. A local man who happened to be passing by saw the roughly 800 troops piling in and warned them that the monastery was haunted by a phantom dog.

Although this made a few of the men uncomfortable, it mostly garnered laughs.

"It would take a good size ghost dog to disturb me after such a day and night of marching."

The troops settled into the abandoned monastery, laying down on haystacks and cold stone, ready to get some rest after such an exhausting day. By 9:00 PM every soldier in the battalion was in a deep state of slumber. Right at midnight, however, the men began to awaken. One by one. [00:04:00] Every one screaming bloody murder in fear for their life.

They began to flood out of the monastery in a panic, running towards their commanding officers who were bunked in the town. Each man had the same story. They had been visited in their sleep by the phantom dog. Each man with the same description, as well. A great black shaggy beast with skull denuded of skin and flesh, and monstrous eyeballs of fire swimming in blood. In each of their dreams, the dog rushed in through the door of the monastery and leapt onto their chest, suffocating them. The hellhound lifted its enormous paw with razor sharp claws and slashed them across the neck.

The troops refused to reenter the monastery, fearing for their lives. Each man climbed down the stairs of the monastery to the beach where they would remain [00:05:00] until dawn.

Cory: Well, Cameron, that's a pretty spooky tale, but how much of that did you embellish? 'cause I know we both added a little bit of color to our stories.

Cameron: Surprisingly very little, actually. So I found this story in the St. Louis Republic and the whole account was recorded by a French physician named Dr. Lauren, who was part of that first battalion.

He was a surgeon with them, and he ended up writing this whole thing in the Journal of Psychological Medicine in 1862.

Cory: Other than that, it doesn't really pop up that much.

Cameron: No. Um, what they had written about in the Journal of Psychological Medicine was this being a strange case of a shared nightmare experience and that there's actually been other cases of this and there's not really an explanation as to how it [00:06:00] happens.

They think that, you know, there is something to do maybe with the exhaustion of the soldiers and the story kind of getting into their psyche about this ghost dog, that it was just kind of the perfect scenario for all of this to happen. So this maybe wasn't an actual ghost dog, it was a shared nightmare experience kind of thing.

But what you have is an actual maybe ghost story, right Cory?

Cory: Yes. I have a ghost story for you. Prepare. This one is called the Apparition at Antigonish.

Our story begins in 1922 in the windswept hills of Nova Scotia. On these frigid shores, farmers of proud Scottish heritage plod the land and toil in the same manner as their ancestors millennia before. [00:07:00] Most folks haven't wandered but a few miles from their birthplaces, and even 20 years into the new century, most have never seen a train or automobile. They work their fields during the day, then spend each night huddled around their hearths, where outside the endless Canadian forest looms. In a two story frame house, what the papers call a bleak desolate comfortless outpost at the best of times, lived the MacDonald family: Mr. MacDonald, Mrs. MacDonald, and their 15-year-old foster daughter, Mary Ellen.

The hauntings started in the first week of January, 1922. At first, they were slight. Almost trivial. Floorboards would creak; lights would flicker and go out. These were things that could be chalked up to an overactive imagination. As the unforgiving winter carried on into February, the visitations grew in frequency and moved beyond strange bumps in the night.

The MacDonald's [00:08:00] started finding strange bits of cotton wool lying around the house, something they had never purchased or owned. Then, Mrs. MacDonald told her husband and daughter that she'd been hearing strange noises when alone, something like a hollow thumping sound, followed by scraping.

One morning, Mr. MacDonald woke up to discover his cattle were missing from the barn. He found them a half mile away, half sunk in the snow. The specter had also gotten to the mares. Each night, the horses were inexplicably let out from their stable, escaping into the night only to reappear each dawn in a different pen. Stranger, yet, was what had been done to their tails. Each morning, the old farmer would find them braided.

Whatever it was that tormented the family, it soon became violent. One night, Mrs. MacDonald was sleeping when she felt a cold grasp on her ankle. She awoke with a start. [00:09:00] Then the icy hand yanked her from the bed, throwing her to the cold floor.

Then the fires started. For three nights, small flames began to manifest throughout the house. They appeared like jets shooting out from the walls and up from the floor. Mr. MacDonald reported seeing hellish fire imps skittering around corners moments before another kindling started. Each time, the fires were extinguished, but what was left behind was more of that strange white cloth.

The family decided they needed help. MacDonald rode the two miles over to his neighbor Leo to ask if he could come inspect the house. It didn't take Leo long to see what was terrifying the MacDonald family. When he arrived at the house, he saw an arm thrust out of the upstairs window waving a white cloth.[00:10:00]

Residents of the nearby village of Antigonish visited the home. They claimed that they saw fires leaping from the floorboards and out of the stove. Those traveling to and from the house saw strange figures dancing in the hills and perhaps even the form of the evil one lurking near the MacDonald Farm. One neighbor said that these signs portended the end of the world and that she wouldn't sleep out of fear of missing the call of Gabriel's horn.

The village rose to a frenzied panic, and children were kept from going out after dark. The terror rose to its climax on the night of February 3rd when dozens of small fire appeared throughout the house. The newspapers would later report that there were 38 in total. Although they were able to put out the fires and save the home, this was the breaking point for the MacDonald family. Though a blizzard raged [00:11:00] outside, they ran from the house in the dead of night and made it to a small cabin a mile and a half away. The family and the residents of Antigonish asked for help.

A reporter from Halifax named Harold Whidden and some associates of his were sent to the farm. They traveled through the winter gale with the intent to board themselves up in the abandoned MacDonald house to discover what lurked there. They would stay there for two nights. The MacDonald's would stop by to drop off meals, though they would never enter the house.

On the first night, Whidden reported hearing nothing but the wind roaring outside the home. But on the second they too experienced what the papers were calling The Ghost of Antigonish. Whidden said that he and his party were trying to get some sleep after another uneventful day. They were all piled in the main room as the winter storm wailed about them [00:12:00] when they were suddenly awoken by a pounding near the front of the house. The pounding turned into a scraping noise, which seemed to come from a boarded up room adjacent to the parlor.

Then the noises stopped and the reporter sat in silence. Just when it appeared that it was best to go back to sleep, they heard footsteps climbing down the stairs. Then the footsteps entered the main parlor. And Whidden suddenly felt a slap.

In his report of the encounter, Whidden says that he doesn't believe what he witnessed was the work of human hands. The story of the Antigonish ghost began to appear in papers around the world, and everyone had their theory for what was actually happening. While the brightest minds couldn't agree on what was happening, the general consensus was that only science could solve this mystery.

At an urgent summon, Dr. Walter [00:13:00] F. Prince was sent to Nova Scotia to investigate the haunting. Dr. Prince was no stranger to the public. As a leader of the American Society for Psychical Research, he had often appeared in the paper as an investigator of the paranormal, which earned him the nickname Ghostbuster.

When Dr. Prince arrived at the MacDonald Farm, he requested that the family return home. As he put it, the conditions must be exactly as they were for this to be a thorough investigation. Dr. Prince began surveying the home and conducted interviews with the family. He invited journalists and photographers who crowded in the small kitchen, passing long nights at the kitchen table, playing pinochle, and waiting to catch the spirit.

Unfortunately, after a few nights, the ghost had not made itself known. Dr. Prince finished his investigation, then returned to New York to write his report. On March 16th, the report's findings made front page news and papers [00:14:00] all around North America. His conclusion? Mary Ellen, the daughter, was the ghost.

Prince said that she set the fires. She drove the cattle out. And she braided the horse's tails. Dr. Prince did conclude that Mary Ellen may not have done all these acts willingly. In his report, he writes "she is not morally culpable", and that Mary Ellen was in an "altered state of consciousness wherein she didn't know what she was doing", and that this behavior was brought about by some kind of "discarnate intelligence".

Mr. And Mrs. MacDonald, along with Mary Ellen, denied these accusations and refused to accept this explanation. Later that month, the MacDonald family talked to the press. Mary Ellen spoke to reporters with her father and mother standing behind her. "It's a lie! It's all lies!" Mary Ellen said. "I never set any fires or did any of the things printed [00:15:00] in the papers."

Mary Ellen's mother said that she was a good little girl and she had never done anything of this kind. The family says that they would never have let Dr. Prince conduct his research if they knew he would slander their daughter. Seven months later after the world had moved on from the ghost of Antigonish, a small article appears in the Washington Herald:

October 13th, 1922. This afternoon, Ms. MacDonald, the Mary Ellen of the Antigonish Ghost Stories last February, entered the Nova Scotia Hospital for the Insane.

With their daughter locked away in a hospital. Mr. And Mrs. MacDonald returned to the farm. Their first night back, they went upstairs to retire for the evening. Looking forward to their first quiet night.

That's when they looked down at the floor and noticed the smoke billowing in [00:16:00] from under the bedroom door.

Okay, I made up that last paragraph because I felt like the story didn't have a good ending.

Cameron: So what actually happened at the end there?

Cory: That's it. She goes to the hospital. That's the last thing that appears in the papers. It was all over everything in 1922. Bunch of papers reported on it. It even, it was front page news in the New York Times.

Um, but after this, it totally goes away. So what do you think, Cameron? Who was the real ghost? Is this like a Scooby-Doo case?

Cameron: Uh, if Scooby-Doo went after 15-year-old girls, then uh, yes.

Cory: Honestly have not seen that much Scooby Doo, but there are like some things that were unexplained. Like for example, the journalist feeling this light slap on [00:17:00] his elbow and the townspeople seeing a bunch of things around the house. Like, that certainly wasn't the girl's doing unless she's a very, very elaborate prankster.

Also, I want to point out that the townspeople thought that everything that the scientists were doing was just baloney. Like there was no way that they were going to be able to catch a ghost with science. So they were fully on the side of the family who still thought that there was a ghost.

Cameron: I, I can believe maybe in some kind of combination, because if we went off the description of the neighbors of the fire just kind of rising up from the floors and the way it was dancing around, the way it was described like that, there's no way this young girl could have done all of that.

I think that sounds more like I, I don't know, like a natural gas leak or something. Um, but, uh, braiding [00:18:00] ponies hairs, that sounds like 15-year-old girls.

Cory: Maybe this was just a case of mass carbon monoxide poisoning yet again. You did a little more research on this after I sent the story to you, and you were the one that saw that there was actually a little bit after Mary Ellen was committed.

Her parents didn't commit her, right?

Cameron: No. It was the police, and I guess it was not the local police either. It was the Canadian Mounties? I don't, I don't really know. It's kind of hard to get a lot of good, solid information on this. It's a lot of what you found in the papers and then it's a lot of local legend.

So how did you discover this? 'cause this isn't something I'd ever heard of.

Cory: No, I was in, uh, the Library of Congress newspaper archives, and I was just trying to find anything that hasn't been done, or it wasn't just a tiny little blurb and for my keywords, I chose the very original "ghost story" [00:19:00] and I, I just randomly clicked on a page and it led me to a tiny little article that was talking about Guglielmo Marconi, who was the inventor of the radio. And in this tiny little article, he was rebuking the scientist who said that it was because the house was between two radio towers that was what was causing the fire. And that was just Marconi saying, no, that's not how radio towers work. So from there I was able to, to click my way into this story.

Cameron: Yeah, I mean that's kind of how I end up going down these paths too, is just like I find this interesting little blurb and I just like, it's so out of context. It's like, how did we get here? Like you just have to trace it back and figure out how this ended up with Guglielmo Marconi talking about a ghost causing fires.

Cory: That's all I have from Antigonish, Cam, what do you got?

Cameron: So this next story takes place in eastern [00:20:00] Oregon.

Cory: Ooh,

Cameron: Right. So Eastern Oregon. Very scary. Um, but this story actually has some murder involved, unlike the other stories that we've, uh, heard tonight.

Cory: Let's turn it up a little bit. These have been pretty tame so far.

Cameron: Yeah. We're gonna crank it up here. Yeah. This one's gonna get real.

Cory: This one's rated PG 13.

Cameron: Get excited because this one is called The Banks of the Owyhee River.

Cory: The Banks of the Owyhee River? You're not gonna do like a murder pun or anything?

Cameron: I don't know. I, that was just like the first name I put down. What's a good, what would be a good title?

Cory: Um, something about the car like Ride or Die.

Cameron: Is there some kind of pun we could do with Grand Theft Auto? Grand Theft Slaughto.

Cory: How about Ghost Theft Auto? Do that. I wanna, I wanna play with that really quick.

Cameron: Ghost Theft Auto? How are you gonna play with [00:21:00] that one?

Cory: Just say it.

Cameron: Okay. This next story is called Ghost Theft Auto.

Cory: Cameron, that sucks. That doesn't even make sense.

Cameron: You know, like grant theft auto?

Cory: Just read the story.

Cameron: You set me up, you bastard.

In 1906, a young tailor by the name of George Sweeney packed up his belongings in Emmett, Idaho and decided to start fresh in the small town of Vale, Oregon, which sits 12 miles west of the Idaho border. Over the next decade or so, Mr. Sweeney remained a bachelor, but did good work as a tailor and made a name for himself within the community.

His success even led to him buying a new car. A new car that would become the envy of a young man by the name of George [00:22:00] Howard. George Howard was 23 years old, a former sailor and a native of Eastern Oregon.

On September 13th, 1920, George Howard approached Mr. Sweeney and expressed his interest in buying the car. Mr. Sweeney was open to offers and began showing George Howard some of the many features of his car before loading the two of them in the front seats and heading out for a test drive.

Once Mr. Sweeney had driven a couple miles outside of town, George Howard signaled for him to pull over so he could take a closer look at something on the car.

While Mr. Sweeney was distracted showing some of the details of his car, George Howard struck him on the back of the head with a monkey wrench killing him instantly. With blood beginning to pool in the dirt, George grabbed a blanket from the car and wrapped the body tightly before loading it into the backseat.

George drove the car back into Vale with [00:23:00] Mr. Sweeney's corpse in the back of the car, and bought a steamer trunk at a general store. A few miles outside of town, George stuffed the body into the steamer trunk and drove 65 miles to his father's home in Watson on the Owyhee River, where he spent the night at his father's house while Mr. Sweeney's corpse decayed in the trunk outside.

The next morning, September 14th, George Howard woke up to breakfast with his family and wanted to show off his new car to all of them. The steamer trunk with Mr. Sweeney's body was still taking up the back seat, so his family suggested helping him take it out so they could all go for a ride at once. But George refused, saying it was too heavy, filled with phonographs and records, so it would need to stay.

So, he ended up taking each family member one at a time, along with the corpse of George Sweeney, on a drive through the lonely reeds along the Owyhee [00:24:00] River.

Later that night, once his family had gone to sleep, George Howard hopped in his car and drove further up the river. He removed Sweeney's, decaying body from the trunk, attached some weights and sunk Sweeney's body in the black depths of the Owyhee River.

When George got back to the house that night, he climbed into bed and within a few minutes was awoken by whispering. He turned over and there in his room was the ghost of Sweeney. His body was bloated and his hair was dripping wet.

"You know that us bodies float, George. Come see for yourself."

Panicked, having never seen a ghost or disposed of a body, George jumped up from his bed and surprisingly enough, the [00:25:00] ghost did not disappear.

He rubbed his eyes and there it was in front of him, beckoning him to the banks of the Owyhee River. Fearing the body could have floated downstream, George walked along the river bank the whole two miles, following the ghost of Mr. Sweeney back to the dumping location in the middle of the night. When he approached the area where the body had been sunk, the ghost disappeared into the shadows of the willow trees.

There was nothing there. It was all his imagination. George Howard walked back the two miles to his parents' house and climbed into bed again, falling asleep.

The next day, by all accounts was very ordinary. George awoke, helped his family around the property, had supper, and then it was time for bed. But just like the night before, as George was falling asleep, he was awoken by Mr. Sweeney's ghost. [00:26:00] His image was even more unsightly than the night before, with decaying flesh hanging from his cheeks and his eyes, a cloudy white.

"It's only a matter of time before I rise to the surface. We both know it."

George tried to ignore it this time, but the ghost persisted.

"Maybe I'll just say hi to your mother while she's doing laundry in the river tomorrow."

George relented and followed Mr. Sweeney's ghost out of the house and along the riverbank, just as he did the night before.

And once again, as he approached the location where the body had been dumped, the ghost disappeared into the shadows of the willow trees. This same house visit occurred every night through September, through October, through November. Every single night, George Howard would follow the ghost along the river, panicked that the body may have risen.[00:27:00]

Finally, on December 12th, 1920, George Howard could take no more of this hell. He finally confessed to the sheriff of Malheur County what he had done to George Sweeney. By January the following year, George Howard was found guilty of first degree murder by a jury of his peers, and sentenced to death by hanging.

After some failed appeals, George Howard finally walked up the 13 steps of the gallows on September 8th, 1922, where papers reported that the executioner adjusted the black hood and shut the light from the sight of this doomed man. But it's my belief that in his final moments beneath that black hood, there would come one last vision.

The same figure that had haunted him in the months leading up to his confession. As Howard stepped toward the rope for his final moment on earth, George Sweeney was rising from the inky [00:28:00] depths of the Owyhee River, beckoning Howard forward just one more step.

Cory: So what did you make up for this story? Like, obviously the thing at the end where he saw the ghost. But most of this was in the paper?

Cameron: Uh, so I made up, you know, the, the image of Sweeney's ghost. There was no description of what he looked like. The things he told George Howard, I made that up. But otherwise it was all true.

Those dates, the details about the murder, going to the dumping location every single night following the ghost. Uh, that was all true.

Cory: So George was executed for the murder, but was the body ever found?

Cameron: No. The sheriff got some [00:29:00] men and they swept through the river where George Howard had said he had dumped it.

They couldn't find the body, but they were able to corroborate everything he said by looking at the trunk. They found the monkey wrench. His hair and blood was in the bottom of the trunk, so they had enough evidence to go off of.

Cory: Sounds like the ghost was kind of a liar.

Cameron: Yeah. I think just trying to torment this man into confession, and it worked. After the sheriff's office found all this and they went through the court case, he was sentenced to death by hanging. And throughout the entire court case, apparently, George Howard kind of had like this tough demeanor. He didn't really say anything, just stone cold face. But the moment the judge said that he would be sentenced to death by hanging, he just broke down crying like a little baby in the courtroom.

Cory: Well, I'll tell you what, Cameron, I'm gonna go turn on every light in my house right now because I'm just plain spooked by all the stories we just told.

Cameron: Yeah, I [00:30:00] mean, honestly, truth is scarier than fiction.

Cory: And remember everybody, please make sure to check your carbon monoxide detectors. That stuff's pretty serious

Cameron: And have a happy Halloween.