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Do you remember the excitement of Christmas morning when you were little? Of course you do. Who can forget that? Waking your parents up at an ungodly hour, jumping up and down while they got themselves ready far too slowly, and then finally being allowed to run into the living room where all your presents were waiting. Most of us probably ran straight to the biggest one and ripped it open fast. After all, when you're a kid, bigger is better, right? Adulthood, though, means learning that the biggest isn't always the best, the flashiest isn't always the most fun, the loudest isn't always worth listening to, and sometimes the best gifts simply come in the smallest packages. And this lesson doesn't just apply to Christmas presents. Take, for example, where you live when you're young, you might be drawn to the hustle and bustle of the city and bright lights, late night dinners, and excitement on every corner. What could be better, right? But for a lot of us, the big city eventually loses its glossy appeal. After a certain point, you just want quiet streets and the comfort of a familiar routine. Of course, living in a small town doesn't mean that our lives are small. It just means that we value something else. Now, when most people talk about New York, they're usually talking about New York City. It's alive and energetic and full of the most interesting people in the world. But there's just as much beauty to be found in the smaller towns of upstate New York. Even though they don't have quite the same sprawl, they certainly have their own stories to tell, and for that matter, their own hauntings. I'm Aaron Manke, and this is Lore Legends. I'm hesitant to say that Palmyra, New York ever really had what one may call a heyday. In 1800, the town had a population of roughly 1000 people, and today it's just over 3000. In the grand scheme of things, there hasn't been a ton of growth. But if Palmyra did have a heyday, then it was in the 30 years between 1822 and 1853. They call these the Canal years, and they were exactly what they sounded like. The years that Palmyra was next to the Erie Canal. The influx of trade that came to the area seriously bolstered the town. At one point, it was even called the queen of canal towns. And it was during these booming canal years that the locals built the majority of Main Street. Money was flowing in, travelers were passing through, and it was the closest thing that a little town like this could have to a golden age. Just a hop, skip and a jump away from Palmyra's historic Main street was Market Street. And the money flowed over there, too. In 1826, a developer constructed a three story Federal style building, hoping to take advantage of Palmyra's mini economic boom. Fast forward a few decades and a young man by the name of William Phelps bought the entire Building in 1868. His family was growing, and he needed a place where they could flourish. A place that they could call their forever home. So he converted the building at 140 Market St. Into Phelps General Store. He and the family used the upstairs as their personal residence, but downstairs, it was all business. And not only was it business, it was a family business. The Phelps General Store was passed down from generation to generation over 100 years. Over the decades, the Phelps continued to operate the store through both the good times and the bad. The general store kept its doors open for the Palmyra community through World War I, the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. Things got hard and the family had to tighten their belts once more. But through it all, they persevered. Until 1940. At the time, the store was run by William's son Julius. And then one day in July, seemingly at random, Julius locked the front door, closed up shop, turned out the lights, and never reopened again. He didn't give any explanation for his decision. Maybe he felt that he was getting too old, or maybe he was tired of being a shopkeeper. He and his family continued to live upstairs, while downstairs, the general store stayed frozen in time, exactly as it was the day he closed his doors. Merchandise still lined the shelves, cracker barrels were still full, and even eggs were still lying there waiting to be plucked from the flock. As the years Passed by. Members of the Phelps family gradually died or moved away. Eventually, the building's only resident was Julius daughter Sybil. She lived at 140 Market street until her death in 1976 at the age of 81. And it might have been lonely living by herself with all those empty bedrooms. But I don't think that Sybil was ever truly lonesome. After all, she spent far too much time chatting with the ghosts. Sybil, you see, was a spiritualist. She had her own crystal ball, and she was known to hang mirrors facing each other so that she could create spirit portals. Those who knew her said that she was much happier in the company of ghosts than she was with living people. That policy also seemed to have extended to feline companions because she had a grand total of 15 cats. I think you will find it unsurprising that the neighborhood children fervently believed that Sybil was a witch. But as far as I know, she wasn't. She was just an eccentric woman who preferred the company of ghosts to people. And if I had to guess what they spent their time talking about together, I would say that Cybil was probably trying to convince her family to all move back home. Because today, the Phelps General Store is considered to be the most haunted building in the Finger Lakes district. And every single ghost seems to be a member of the Phelps family. You see, Sybil wasn't the only Phelps who died at 140 Market St. Before her, there were at least four other deaths in the house. And not only did they stick around after they passed away, but they appear to have convinced their other relatives to visit as well. This isn't a haunting so much as it is a ghostly family reunion. Today, the Phelps General Store is operated by the Palmyra Historical Society as a museum, which has given employees and visitors alike ample opportunity for paranormal experiences. Visitors frequently report hearing footsteps, slamming doors and disembodied voices. They almost always say that there are multiple distinct voices, too, not just one. This claim has even been backed up with EVP recordings in which a chorus of ghostly voices welcomes people into the Phelps family home. People have also seen several children running about. The most famous is a girl called Holly. It's believed that little Holly died in 1836 when she was only 8 years old. Museum employees say that she and a few of the other ghost children frequently hide together under a table. If visitors ever sit in one of the chairs next to that table, Holly will reach out and grab their hand. It's unknown if she's trying to make friends by doing this or if she's trying to scare everyone away. Either way, the latter is usually what happens. Other identifiable ghosts include multiple cats assumedly owned by Cybil, as well as Cybil's father, Julius Phelps. He's known as a cantankerous spirit who's frequently seen pacing around his bedroom and asking who all these bothersome museum visitors are. Of course, the ghost who is most frequently sighted around the house is the spiritualist herself, Sybil. Unlike many of the other ghosts, she doesn't stay in one spot. Instead, she wanders around the entire house, hanging out in the kitchen or playing her piano. Cybil has even been known to speak to the living. There's an EVP recording of her asking, can you tell me who else has died? And during one notable encounter, she appeared before a museum employee and told him, don't touch my stuff. After that, the poor man refused to go to the third floor alone again. Her ghost has even crashed her own party. Every October, the museum throws a birthday party for Cybil, and on multiple occasions, she's actually made an appearance. I think it's easy for us to see death as something scary, but if you take anything away from Cybil's story, it should be that dying doesn't have to be this dark, terrible thing. And if you play your cards right, there might even be some cats. Less than 30 miles south of Buffalo is the little village of Angola, New York. With a population of just over 2,000 people, Angola doesn't really have a lot going on. There are a couple of wineries outside the village borders and a haunted house attraction that seems to be in operation throughout the calendar year. Other than that, there just isn't much around. But if you do find yourself in Angola and you're looking for a real thrill, then the locals just might direct you to Holland Road, or, as it's colloquially known, Pigman Road, which is where you'll find, as the name suggests, the Angola Pigman. The Pigman is said to be a grotesque entity. That shocker resembles a pig. Some say that he has an actual pig head, while others say that he's wearing a pig mask. Either way, he has a snout, and according to some accounts, he even snorts and squeals, just like a real swine. Most sightings happen on a stretch of road between two different railroad bridges. There he lurks in the shadows, although he has also been known to occasionally run across the road, shrieking like his namesake animal. And the local wildlife all seems to know that they should steer clear. You can rarely hear any birds singing while you're between those two bridges and no one can remember the last time they saw a deer there. It's possible that the Pigman likes it that way. After all, he's sent some very clear messages about not wanting to share his home with anyone else. For example, whenever anyone tries to build a house or a building between the two bridges, it burns down every single time. Paranormal investigators seem to disagree on whether or not the Pigman is a malevolent spirit. Arsene is a pretty intense ghostly power after all. And it would be fair to say that our fire wielding friend could get violent when provoked. But some investigators disagree, claiming that he's just an angry spirit who wants to be left alone. He's never hurt anyone, and as far as investigators can tell, he doesn't intend to. Now, if you were to tell me that there was a deformed pig like man running around, my first instinct would be to say that he's some kind of monster or cryptid. But the local legends are adamant he's absolutely a ghost. And if you're wondering how someone could have died and turned into a ghost that resembles Porky the Pig, then your guess is good as anyone else's. There are a lot of theories floating around out there about his origin story. According to one version of the legend, a butcher once lived on Holland Road. Some people say that he was a butcher and a pig farmer, but let's not split hairs there. The point is that he had access to pigs. The legend claims that he lined his property with hog heads impaled on spikes. Apparently he was trying to scare people away, which would be a strange thing for a butcher to do if he wanted paying customers. But he didn't seem super keen on being open to business advice anyway. For some reason, this hog head impaling hobby meant that when his spirit returned to the mortal world, he got to have a pig head of his very own. Sometimes the butcher story is much darker, though. Some people claim that the Butcher of Holland Road killed five schoolboys who trespassed on his property. Instead of pigs heads, it was their bodies that he staked and displayed around his yard. And in another version of the story, he shot a man and hung him from a meat hook in his shop. And if you go by these bloody versions of the story, then his posthumous pig head was meant to be a punishment for his considerable crimes. But another story claims that the Pigman wasn't a butcher at all. He was just a farmer with a deformed face, his nose stuck up like a snout, and his cleft palate made it difficult for him to speak. When local schoolchildren made fun of him, he murdered them and impaled their heads on spikes. All of these explanations are frankly nonsense, but there's one that's even more nonsensical than the rest. Another popular version of the Pigman's backstory is that he died during the Angola train wreck. You see, on December 18th of 1876, a six car express train from Cleveland en route to Buffalo derailed, with the last two cars tumbling down an embankment and bursting into flames. Eyewitnesses were only able to save a few people from the burning cars. According to one contemporary newspaper, the shrieks for aid were heard for a full 15 minutes while the fire, communicated by the overturned stove, was consuming their vitals. It was a terrible tragedy and one that the Angola community has kept alive in their memory. According to locals, the ghosts from the train wreck still haunt Holland Road to this day. The Pigman is simply the one who stands out the most. There's no real explanation as to why he is the only train ghost who looks like a pig. Maybe he was deformed like the farmer in the previous story. Or maybe he caused the train to crash and the pig face is his eternal punishment. Now look, stories like this can be fun to tell, but it's still important that we separate fact from fiction. My team's research discovered that the train actually didn't crash anywhere near Holland Road. In fact, it went off the rails a full 1.2 miles away. So if anyone tells you that you can still hear the screams of the dying railway passengers out on Holland Road, then you may want to tell them to search for a screech owl instead of a ghost. As for the other Pigman legends, they aren't terribly plausible either. There actually was an Angola butcher, but he was the one who was murdered rather than the other way around. It happened in 1931 when two men shot and killed a butcher named Steve Solecki. There were no records of any other butchers killing his customers or hanging them from meat hooks. There was only one innocent man who was murdered in cold blood. For a town with such a small population, they seem to have their fair share of tragedy. Their backstories for the Pigman may not add up, but that's the thing, they don't really have to. It's possible that the Angola Pigman was a way for everyone to make sense of the violence and trauma that they had all experienced. A sort of snout nosed coping mechanism. If they can blame every terrible event in history on one man and make sure that he gets his comeuppance, in this case, a pig head. Then there's justice in a chaotic world. And the legend has lived on because, honestly, teenagers really love driving out to a dark country road and searching for weird cryptids. The Angola pigman may not be real, but regardless, he holds a lot of collective trauma in his hands. And in such a small community, every helping hand counts. Even if those helping hands have hooves. On March 20th of 1920, the Tonawanda News made a surprising announcement. An angel had been spotted outside the local cemetery. The witness was a man named Edward. He told the newspaper that he had been driving from Buffalo to his home in North Towanda. As he neared the North Towanda cemetery, a woman emerged from the orchard on the other side of the road. He claimed that she had wings, long flowing hair and a white dress. Naturally, Edward hit the brakes, and while he gaped at the apparition in front of him, she drifted across the road and then disappeared. Local North Towanda readers may have thought that the story was a joke, or perhaps that Edward hadn't been in his right mind. But they found it harder to write this whole thing off when four days later, another angel sighting was was reported. According to the same newspaper, a trolley driver was pulling the late shift when it happened. Around 11:30 that night, he saw a long haired woman in a white dress waiting by the tracks as if she were about to board. Assuming that she was a passenger, he stopped the trolley and opened the door. But nobody got in. Not only that, but where the woman had once been standing was now empty. It was as if nobody had ever been there at all. After this encounter, people stopped calling the apparition an angel and started calling it a ghost. It's unclear why the change happened, but it may have something to do with the fact that the trolley driver didn't report seeing any wings on her back. On April 6th of that year, local newspapers once again reported on a ghost sighting. This time it was at a boarding house. Sometime between 1am and 2am the boarding house's manager, a man named Anthony Ross, was startled awake by a huge gust of wind that swept his bed coverings off his body. When he opened his eyes, there was a woman floating through the room. And then, just as quickly, she vanished. That was enough for Anthony. He packed up his belongings and he ushered his family and the other boarders out of the building. One man didn't believe that Anthony had actually seen a ghost, and he elected to stay. The very next night, he too fled the house. Strangely, the Day after the story about the boarding house was published, Anthony Ross went to the police and recanted his testimony. He said that a man dressed in black had broken into the home, but that no women, whether they were ghosts or angels, had come to call. A few days later, the owner of the boarding house, a guy named August Kuhn, complained to the Niagara Gazette that ever since Anthony had gone public with the ghost story, nobody wanted to rent a room from him. Even though Anthony had walked it all back, nobody seemed to care. They didn't want to risk sleeping with a spook. Later, August flew to the idea that this ghost nonsense was actually just a conspiracy to get him to sell his house below market rate. No one actually wanted to buy his old boarding house, though. But plenty of people did want to see the ghost. North Towanda was suddenly flooded with tourists and amateur ghost hunters. Local newspapers were making money hand over fist as companies all clamored to advertise with them. Everyone in the area was talking about the North Towanda ghost, and they weren't going to stop anytime soon. On June 11, the Tawanda News reported that a large number of people had seen the spirit float down Falconer Street. It was described as, and I quote, about 7ft in height, dressed in flowing, creamy white robes, and had the appearance of having its wings clipped off. It even woke up a few people as it passed by their bedroom windows. Now, this next part might get a bit confusing, so stay with me here. North Towanda actually has a sister city called simply Towanda. It was rare for the Twin Cities to get much attention in the news, so it's only natural that after a while, Tawanda residents got jealous of North Towanda hogging the Spotlight. So on June 13, the Buffalo Times reported. The mystery deepens. Towanda, too, has a ghost. Apparently, their ghost looked just like the one in North Tawanda. Maybe it had traveled, or maybe there had never been a ghost, et al. On June 15th of 1920, the Buffalo Courier Express blew the lid off this whole ghost debacle. Remember how I said that Tawanda and North Towanda were sister cities? While their respective governments must have really been tired of everyone getting their two towns mixed up, because for years they had been in talks about merging into one town. Unfortunately for these local governments, none of their residents actually wanted to merge. They had already voted to strike down a merger in 1919, and now in 1920, the matter was simply up to a vote again. Except this time, the Chamber of Commerce had a plan. An incredibly ridiculous, incredibly stupid plan. They decided to create a ghost. Members of the Chamber of Commerce would call in sightings and the newspapers would report on it. Even the police chief was in on the scam. At the end of this months long elaborate political stunt, the North Towanda government was going to run an article in local newspapers saying if Towanda would give up the ghost for North Towanda in the merger project, North Towanda would give up the ghost for its sister city. That's it. That was the plan. And that pun to give up the ghost was supposed to make everyone feel warm and fuzzy about the merger and maybe everyone would laugh about this whole crazy ghost hoax and sing Kumbaya together at the polls. Unfortunately for the government, none of those things ever happened. Instead, people felt duped. They felt foolish. Here they had been believing in a ghost, when in reality, politicians had been pulling the strings the entire time. I think the Buffalo Times put it best when they said never again will any resident of the Tiwandas believe in ghost stories. They are all cured after realizing the manner in which they were taken in. And the best part? After all the theatrics, the North Towanda ghost hoax had absolutely no bearing on the merger at all. In fact, it might have even made it more unpopular than it had ever been before the merger was struck down at the poles of later that year. To this day, North Towanda and Tawanda remain separate cities and neither of them have reported any mysterious ghost sightings ever since. Every small town has a few legends. For the folks who live there, they serve a lot of purposes. They explain things that are tough to wrestle with. They illustrate the flaws of human nature. They entertain. And hopefully our tour through some of upstate New York's weirdest legends has offered you a bit of each. But we're not done just yet. We might have talked about ghosts with wings or specters with snouts, but what about a ghost with four legs? Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. We've all done it before, turning to our barista, hairdresser, or a random stranger at the gym for some life advice. As fun as they are to talk with about everyday topics. Though, when you're looking for help about relationships, anxiety, depression or other clinical issues, they may not have all the right answers. Instead, get guidance from a credentialed therapist online with BetterHelp. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their industry leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. BetterHelp has been helping people find their match for over 10 years and has a 4.9 star rating out of 1.7 million client session reviews. 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