Genevieve Mannion (4:17)
As we now find ourselves monster mashing our way through Halloween season, I will have some extra spooky stuff for you all month long. Every episode this month is going to be covered in goosebumps. Today for you, dear listener, I will be talking about the disturbing history and hauntings of the Crescent Hotel. Built in Eureka Springs, Arkansas in 1886. This hotel is called the Most Haunted Hotel in America, or at least one of the most haunted hotels in America. I do not think that they trademarked that title like the Whaley House trademarked the most haunted house in America. They better get on that. They have some stiff competition. I also was delighted to receive a reading from Medium, Jennifer Page from the I Talk to Ghosts podcast. I'm going to include a bit of that reading in this episode, but you can hear the whole thing on her podcast I Talk to Ghosts, available anywhere you find your spooky podcasts. But first we will have our weekly segment With Their Own Eyes where I discuss the personal haunting accounts of petrified Victorians. Man, I found this little article and it opened up a bloody can of worms. This can was a creepy gift that just kept on giving when I started to dig into it. It comes to us from the spiritualist newspaper from December 3, 1869. The title is A Haunted Castle and it reads it would be strange if Leap Castle was not haunted. It would not be easy to imagine a more appropriate habitation for ghosts considering its antiquity, its traditions, the deeds of violence and blood of which it was the theater, the quaint and curious apartments in the prehistoric dwelling house attached to the castle now used for kitchen and servants apartments, the great trees dying of age and the weird aspect of the whole place. Accordingly, While partaking of Mr. Darby's genial hospitality and going through the building, the ladies told me of several most extraordinary and unaccountable apparitions and noises of which they were themselves personally the witnesses, and which would afford ample materials for a lot of sensational romances. But even these stories were scarcely more strange than the psychological fact that the children of the family are all ghost proof. Even the youngest will go to sleep alone, without light, in rooms where women in white have been seen, where loud laughter and awful shrieks have been heard, and the sounds of feet moving about and of hands cautiously lifting and drawing back bed curtains at the witching hour of night. Okay, I did a little digging into the history of this purported haunted castle. And goodness gracious, that man said a mouthful when he said that it would be strange if it weren't haunted. This was a bloody, bloody hell of a place. This Leap castle is in Rosscrae in County Offleigh, Ireland. It was built in about 1250 AD by the O' Bannon clan, and its history is rather awful. In 1513, the O' Carroll clan took over, and in 1532, a fierce rivalry for leadership of the clan ensued. Two brothers in the clan became sworn enemies. One was a priest, and in the middle of a mass, his brother stormed in and drove a sword right through the other's back. The butchered priest fell across the altar and died in front of the whole family. The chapel where this happened still stands, and it is called the Bloody Chapel by those in the know. In 1922, men working to restore the castle found a hidden dungeon behind the wall of the Bloody Chapel. Inside was found a deep hole full of skele. It was just a hole clearly used to throw prisoners into. 150 human remains were found. They also found a pocket watch that was dated to about 1850, 1860, just about when that article I just read was written. I wonder if the family we read about in that article with the ghost proof children were using that dungeon for their own purposes. The hole contained three thick wooden spikes so you would be impaled when thrown in. The O' Carroll family also hired 40 members of the MacMahon family to train them in new warring techniques in the 1500s. And when they were all done, they invited them to a big feast and poisoned all of them so that they wouldn't have to pay them. Lovely group of folks. Many say that the spirits of the MacMahans still roam the castle. The current owner, a man named Sean Ryan, says that the place is crawling with ghosts. When he moved in and began to restore it, he said that he Was thrown off a ladder twice and various other violent and creepy incidents happened to him. He decided to have a serious heartfelt talk with the spirits and assured them that he was only intending to restore the castle and that they could all stay. From that point on, he hasn't experienced any negative issues, but there are a few, few ghosts that he claims live there. They just don't cause him any harm. How nice. There's an old man ghost who sits in an armchair by the main hall's fireplace. Oh, that's exactly how I want to spend my afterlife. With like a lovely little cup of ghost hot chocolate in hand. There are two little girls known as Emily and Charlotte. One of the girls died by falling out of a window at age 11. It's unclear how the other died, but she suffered from a deformed leg in life. And this little ghost is seen limping. They are said to be seen with another spirit, a kindly woman referred to as the governess, who appears to stay by their side. It's believed that these particular ghosts all lived in the castle in the 16th century. There is also a woman, half naked that is frequently seen and this is terrifying. She will scream a blood curdling scream twice before she disappears. There is also a woman in red seen holding holding a dagger that she raises at people. A woman named Mildred Darby lived in the castle in 1909 and she claimed to see this woman in red. She also claimed in a magazine called the journal Occult Review, which I must find, that the castle has a non human demonic spirit called an elemental. She believed that this may have been a spirit called upon to either curse one of the families or was called upon far earlier in the 12th or 13th century to curse the land itself by the druids who the land was stolen from, either to curse or even perhaps protect their land. That woman, Mildred Darby, she described the elemental spirit in that magazine as such. Quote, I was in the gallery and looked at the floor when I suddenly felt a hand on my shoulder. The thing had the size of a sheep and it was thin and shadow, like the face was human, but it also was not. His decomposed eyes showed some kind of lust. At that point I smelled a horrible smell which made me ill. It was the smell of a decomposing body. Ooh, my God. I've been to Ireland. It was one of the most beautiful places I have ever, ever seen. And I stayed in a few castles when I was there and barely slept because I was afraid of this kind of thing happening. Not so much running into stinky Demons. But like any and all manner of slaughtered chieftains, like my family, the Manion clan had a castle that is nothing but like a few pebbles now as I understand it, it was sacked the daylights out of. At some point I'm afraid I may have a few spectral enemies, enemies that might recognize me around those parts. I went with my family a few years back. I've mentioned that my family began immigrating during the Great Hunger, otherwise known as the Potato famine in the 1800s and we visited a number of mass graves that have single stones commemorating the hundreds if not thousands of people beneath our feet, including my family. And my father brought with him his 30 year sober pin. They give you pins in AA to mark your days and years sober. He wanted to leave it there to show our family that despite the hardships that their sons and daughters who fled to the US endured and the alcoholism, many of them used to cope. Quite a number of my first generation Irish American ancestors were rather famous in the police blotters of the day. He wanted to bring his pin and show the family that we're okay now, that we're safe, we are well and we haven't forgotten where we came from. And my dad lost the pin on the way from the car to the stone. Damn it. We laughed and I said, dad, maybe they were just so proud that they took it right out of your pocket the moment you arrived. Who can say? I just know that I'm so proud of him. Okay, before we make our way to the creepy Eepy hotel, won't you follow me into the seance room where I usually discuss the goings on in the spiritualist society of the 1800s. But today I have a very exciting spiritualist experience to share. Not from the 1800s, but from my very own reading with medium Jennifer Page, hostess of the I Talk to Ghosts podcast. And I have to say, first of all, I love this gal and her show. We had so much fun with the reading, but we also ended up just talking witchy stuff for like two hours afterwards. It was delightful. She told me a number of weeks ago to think of someone that I wanted to speak with in the reading and not to tell her who it was. Instantly I knew that I wanted to talk to my grandma on my dad's side, but I didn't tell her like she asked as the reading began. I thought she was going to start by asking me who I wanted to speak with. And she didn't ask that, she just said okay, so your grandmother on your dad's side came forward and she picked up another notebook to show me all of the notes that she had taken over the previous week of messages that my grandma wanted to share. This was before we started recording. I got teary straight away. I pulled it together when we started recording those. So take a listen to this snippet of my I Talk to Ghosts Reading with Jennifer Page.
