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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match Limited by state law not available in all states Just yesterday I was talking to a friend about how much I loved the IT movies, the most recent ones, and how genuinely terrified I was, especially of the first one. And that's not easy with me anymore. I don't get scared of horror movies easily, but I loved every single goosebump I got from those films. And so I am so, so excited to announce HBO Max's original series welcome to Derry, a whole series that explores the origins of Pennywise, set in the 60s, 27 years before the Losers Club was formed. I love no nothing more than a chilling backstory to my favorite horror characters. So I've been waiting on bated breath for this series to come out and they have a companion podcast with hosts Mark Bernardin and Princess Weeks. Mark is a TV and comic book writer, podcaster, professional nerd, his words, not mine, and journalist. Princess is a pop culture critic and horror movie lover. Like me, I'm over the moon. I get to watch the series, then listen to cool spooky people unpack every single detail detail on every episode. You will hear from the creators themselves, Andy and Barbara Muschietti, as well as cast members. This is exactly what I want for Halloween. New episodes drop every week. After every episode airs on HBO Max, stream new episodes of HBO's It welcome to Derry Sundays on HBO Max and listen to the it welcome to Derry official podcast. Wherever you get your spooky podcasts. Hello and welcome to My Victorian Nightmare. I'm your host, Genevieve Manion, and I'm here to talk about mysterious deaths, morbid fascinations, disturbing stories, and otherwise spooky events from the Victorian era. Because to me, there's just something especially intriguing, creepy, and oddly comforting about horror and mayhem from the 19th century. So listener discretion is advised. Hello friends, and welcome to this, my 68th episode. My that was sure a fabulous out with the old, in with the new new Taurus Supermoon episode. I'm still riding the high of our mayoral election here in New York. So proud of my city as always. I love this place. I do regret, however, that I was still a little hungover from my cocktail party last Sunday, so I didn't go out into the streets to celebrate like I wanted to. I poured one glass of red wine and I spilled it when they officially called the race. I am so uncool. I was like on my floor singing Alicia Keys, Empire State of Mind, picking up shards of glass, mopping Toby shaking his little head and rolling his eyes in my general direction. I get it, Toby. I get it. Okay, let's race through Haunted Housekeeping because I have such a fabulous episode full of spooky stuff, Victorian cemetery, facts, time slips, ghost clubs. It is going to be an emotional rollercoaster. Thank you as always for rating my show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If you haven't already, please do. It means the world to me. Thank you for your lovely comments. Please say hi, let me know what you think of the show. And thank you most of all to those of you who have joined the fan coven. Those who receive the show ad free a day early, who receive witchy content as well as bloody or awful Victorian true crime extras every single week. Just go to myvictorianightmare.com to join this lovely community. I created a very relaxing full moon meditation this week for the coven that actually started turning me into like a wet noodle while I was QCing the recording. I hope you guys enjoyed that as well. Oh, and before I forget, won't you follow me through this lovely autumn cemetery to the Crypt of Corrections? It's been a while since we popped into here. I have a very important correction to make. Two weeks ago, I said something that was not true, that was incorrect. I mentioned that the reason the spookiest room in Stephen King's the Shining was changed from 2:17 as it was written in the book to 237 in the movie was because the Stanley Hotel was afraid folks wouldn't want to stay in room 217 if they showed it in the movie. Which made no sense to me. Like, surely folks would equally not want to stay in room 237. But I got a very important detail incorrect. It wasn't the management of the Stanley Hotel that were concerned about folks not wanting to stay in room 217. It was the management of the Timberline Lodge, the place where the film was shot, that were concerned. They don't have a room 237, but they do have a 217. So that's why they wanted a room that didn't actually exist to be the spookiest one in the film. They just made like a fake number for the door in the movie. That's why I didn't understand myself what I was talking about. Thank you to the Fan coven listener who brought that to my attention. I think I'm gonna take a quick spin around this sparkly autumn cemetery before we get started. Be back in a minute. Okay. For you today, dear Listener, I've got something special. You guys often request topics that are awesome but don't have enough juice to make like a full episode out of. So today I decided to cover three fascinating listener requested topics that again, can't quite fill out an entire episode. They won't make an entire entree, but they do make very tasty appetizers. I will be discussing Victorian gravestone symbolism, the Moberly Jordan incident, a tale of time slipping, potentially residually haunted, deeply respected academics in 1901, and ghost clubs of the 19th century, the paranormal Society, whose members included the likes of Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and W.B. yeats. These influential gentlemen apparently enjoyed getting spooky together. It seems positive masculinity. At least that's one of the ways I define positive masculinity. Men getting vulnerable and creeped out together. We love to see it. But first, let us make our way to our first segment with their own eyes, where I share with you the personal haunting accounts of petrified Victorians. This article is a continuation of a haunting story about the family of John Wesley. If you recall, in episode 62, we were introduced to the paranormal shenanigans the Wesley family had to endure in the 1700s. Although the very long diary of hauntings was published in a number of 1869 volumes of the Spiritualist newspaper, these poor people were dealing with phantom bottle smashings, spectral roosters, and it sounds like the phantom roosters have more feelings to express in this December 17, 1869 volume. The article is called Spirit Wrapping in John Wesley's Family. And it reads, while John Brown, my father's servant, was sitting with one of the maids a little before 10 at night, in the dining room which opened to the garden, they both heard one knocking at the door. Robert rose and opened it, but could see nobody. Quickly it knocked again and groaned. He opened the door again, twice or thrice, the knocking being twice or thrice repeated, but still seeing nothing and being a little startled, they rose and went up to bed. When he was in bed, he heard heard the gobbling of a turkey cock close to the bedside and one stumbling over his shoes and boots. But there were none there and he had left them below. The next evening, between 5 and 6 o', clock, my sister Molly, then about 20 years of age, sitting in the dining room reading, heard as if it were the door that led into the hall open and a person walking in that seemed to have on a silk nightgown rustling and trailing along. It seemed to walk round her, then to the door, then round again. But she could see nothing. She thought it signifies nothing to run away, for whatever it is, it can run faster than me. So she rose, put her book under her arm and walked slowly away. End quote. To me, the creepiest thing about this installment of the Wesley Paranormal Torments is the experience of hearing a silk nightgown rustling and trailing around you. That makes like my knees goose pimply especially for some reason. Is it just me? I can't explain why specifically the knees bumps, but I think think it creeps me out so hard because if a living person were to walk slowly in a circle around me and saying nothing, that would be very threatening. A ghost is spooky enough. It's even spookier to imagine like a ghost acting out an interrogation technique in a spooky old silky nightgown. I'd say, okay, crinkly ghostly silk nightgowns aside, won't you now follow me in to the seance room where we discuss the goings on in the Spiritualist society of the 1800s. This article, I think, perfectly touches on something that I said last week about how spiritualism, in many ways was a form of survival for folks contending with unimaginable amounts of grief. As a society, death was a very significant part of life for the Victorians, and this article comes to us from the Spiritualist 1869 volume, and it reads, Mr. T. Shorter said that Spiritualism has no class sympathies or prejudices, and is adapted to meet the wants of humanity at large. It is a boon to sorrowing struggling humanity. Sore and severe are the trials of the laboring classes, but spiritualism strengthens them in their times of weakness and makes life more cheerful, more happy, and more noble, for, among other things, it takes away all doubt and distress of mind about the nature of the future life. It is a noble movement, and though some of the manifestations may seem to be trivial, it should be remembered that Franklin, simply by flying a kite with a key tied to the end of a wet string, learnt much about electricity and what, while watching the movements of the lid of a kettle, conceived the idea of a steam engine. Great things, therefore, may spring from small motions, even though the articles moved, may be tables. Spiritualism teaches men to realize more than they ever did before, and they are preparing for a higher and better life hereafter. It teaches that our former friends, whose bodies are laid away in the grave still really and actually are with us, and that their love still surrounds us. Death is not the grim monster and the grisly image which he has been pictured for although he strips us of our robes of clay, he is a beneficent angel who opens to us the flower encircled door of the summer land and Introduction introduces us once more to those we love. End quote Ah, the flower encircled door of this summer land. How beautiful. This was actually very much what my friends and I were celebrating last weekend at my Samhain party, the opportunity to altogether invite spirits of our loved ones to the party. I think, although it is not mentioned in that article, a large part of the comfort taken from spiritualism was the fellowship, the community, the getting together with the living to attempt to reach out to the dead. I imagine that was likely where most of the comfort came. I think it's so important to do this in our own time, but with others. Losing people we love is deeply traumatic and we can help each other heal by coming together and remembering. Even though we may cry, we may feel overwhelmed, it's the feeling those things and having friends there to hold your hand, where I believe we truly heal when we're remembering together. Or even better, when we're celebrating those on the other side of the veil. Okay, let's talk a whole bunch of spooky and fascinating subjects. Our first subject, Victorian grave Symbolism, comes with visual aids. I put them on Instagram. Blue sky only allows you to post for images at a time and I have a whole bunch, so these will only be on Instagram. You'll find the link to the post in the show Notes. The next time you visit a Victorian era cemetery, you will find that the graves are speaking to you, telling you about what the deceased valued in life, what they wanted to be their lasting messages through the ages to those who came to visit them, or that their families wanted to be the lasting messages about their late family members. And I am not particularly speaking about the passionate, somber, hopeful, poetic, sometimes intensely macabre epitaphs that Victorians loved to display on their graves. But the stone wreaths, the obelisks, the broken anchor chains all tell stories. At the start of the Victorian era, much of the population of Europe and the United States couldn't read. It wasn't until 1880 that school was made compulsory in England. And even even in that time, many Victorians, especially the poor, could not read. So the symbols on graves were as much for beauty as for communication. To all who would walk by the stones, a Hidden language that most people, no matter their background, understood. Incidentally, speaking of epitaphs, I found the epitaph of a gravedigger that exists at Darlington, a man named Richard Preston. I need to share this with you before we get to the symbols, because it's incredible. It says, under this marble are deposed poor Preston's sad remains. Alas, too true for light robbed jest to sing in playful strains. Ye dread possessors of the grave who feed on others woe abstain from Richard's small remains and grateful pity show for many a weighty corpse he gave to you with liberal hand, Then sure his little body may some small respect command. Isn't that wonderful? So just in case you weren't lucky enough to be able to read that chilling bit of poetry, you could look at the symbols on the stone and maybe gather a degree of understanding what final messages poor Richard Preston the gravedigger, intended to impart. So I will share a few grave symbols so the next time you find yourself strolling through a Victorian cemetery, you will be able to speak the silent language of the dead. You may find draped urns. In ancient times, urns were used to hold ashes or bones of the dead after cremation. But the Victorians didn't do cremation. In many places, it was actually illegal. But the symbol of the urn remained as an expression of the death of the body, but not the soul. The drapery represents the veil between the worlds world of the living and the dead. In the Victorian era, it was common to drape mirrors, photographs, paintings of loved ones, clocks, closing the drapes of the home after a family member died for numerous reasons. The mirrors, paintings and photographs, for example, were to prevent the spirit of the deceased from seeing themselves or faces of family and making them connect too deeply to the living, which was believed to potentially cause them to stick around and not move on to heaven, but remain as ghosts. But interestingly, closing the drapes was to keep them inside just long enough for the funeral. They didn't open windows, as is actually a common custom even nowadays, to allow the spirit to fly free. They wanted them to stay just long enough for the funeral so that all proper prayers and rites could be performed to ensure the spirit of their loved ones made their way safely to the Lord. And it were so drapery itself was actually a symbol of death. You may also find obelisks, an Egyptian symbol, in Victorian cemeteries. Many Victorian Christians saw the cross as too Catholic a symbol for graves, so many folks chose Egyptian symbolism instead. Folks who were Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist, Anglicans, etc. Especially those who had an affinity for spiritualism. There was an Egyptian obsession, especially among spiritualists, in the 19th century. I've spoken about mummy unwrapping parties and the belief that many spiritualists held that Egyptian corpses and amulets enabled them to secure a more powerful connection to their own dead loved ones. So despite the fact that most spiritualists were Christian, they adopted Egyptian symbolism in their own gravestones. The obelisk in Egypt would be found at the entrances of temples and represented the sun God Ra. It was seen as pointing to God. It also, by design, stands tall among all of the other stones in the cemetery. It sticks out. It's easy to find. So that's a little about the obelisks that you often see. You will often see stone wreaths of flowers on grapes stones. The wreath symbolized victory, specifically victory over death, as it is presumed by the addition of this wreath that they went to heaven. Interestingly, the wreath in death symbolism was originally a pagan symbol that the Victorians co opted. The ancient Greeks would present a wreath to Olympic athletes. Generals who won wars and battles would be awarded a wreath in Roman times that would be made of laurel and oak. You will see wreaths worn on the heads of angel statues, mourning women held in the hands of statues, or round obelisks, again to signify victory over death. The flowers that were chosen for wreaths held symbolism in themselves. Flowers in general, throughout Victorian society, held so much hidden meaning. The flowers chosen for wedding invitations, details on dresses, the flowers you kept in your home or wouldn't dare plant, all had significant meanings. This art of language through flower symbolism is called floriography. Roses and wreaths on graves were to symbolize love, but the state of the rose would give further meaning. An open rose symbolized a married woman, but a closed rose represented a child or unmarried woman. Lilies, which have come to symbolize death and funeral decor in the modern era, have been used in funeral traditions for thousands of years. The lilies strong smell was used to mask the smell of death in earlier years. But when you see them on a stone cross in a Victorian cemetery, they are meant to symbolize either Jesus or Mary. One of my favorite Victorian grave symbols often seen are hands. They could be praying, shaking other hands, holding objects. When you see two hands holding one another, this was often to symbolize a husband and wife meeting on the other side in heaven, or the greeting of a family member by other family members in heaven. If it is a husband and wife, the cuffs of the hands will be a dress, perhaps lace and A man's shirt cuff represented the everlasting bond between husband and wife. A few more symbols that you will often see anchors. This was an early Christian symbol of hope and at times you may see an anchor with a broken chain. This is a tragic loss of a family member on Quaker graves at this time. And perhaps still you will see no symbolism at all. They are flat, designless, simple. This in and of itself is actually a symbol. This is to signify that everyone is the same in death. No one gets a special stone. We are all the same in God's eyes. And I thought this was an interesting thing to note. They don't even use the words for months, only numbers on the stones, as the roots of the names of months are pagan in origin or the names of the of Roman rulers. August is named after Augustus Caesar. January is named after Janus, the two faced Roman God of beginnings. March, named after Mars, the God of war, etc. So those words are left off their stones. Ferns. Victorians loved ferns. They became so popular in the era that laws had to be passed in some localities because the obsessive collecting and picking of ferns was causing important species to ecosystems to go extinct. The phenomenon of what was called fern fever or pteridomania began with the invention of the Wardian case. This was a sealed glass container created in 1829 that made it possible to grow delicate plants indoors, even in smoky industrial areas that had little greenery anywhere. Ferns grew especially easily in these cases. And people who lived in areas like upper class or wealthy parts of London, which were entirely paved in the early to mid-1800s, were desperate for some green. The obsession crossed genders and class, but became a status symbol. They were marketed as a hobby. For intelligent, refined people. Collecting ferns was seen as a cultured hobby. And when it came to gravestones, it was a mark of intelligence, but also sincerity and a connection to the natural world. I was just thinking the other day about the movie Dorian Gray from 2009. And in the beginning of the film, Dorian returns to his childhood home in a well to do part of London. And there isn't a tree, a bush, a leaf in sight. It feels so cold and sad. It makes sense why some folks were desperate to see some green in their lives in this area. So that's just a little bit about grave symbolism. There are obviously many more symbols, but those really stand out to me as particularly interesting. And again, I put photos of those grave symbols on the Instagram. You can find the link in the show notes. Okay, now won't you Follow me through this simply delicious rose garden. Oh, the roses in Versailles smell like they're made of sugar in August, don't they? Just like candy. The year is 1901, just on the razor's edge of the Victorian era on a bright, sunny summer day. And we are going to be sneaking sneakily behind those two ladies. Ladies right there. Here. Follow me through the gates. We are going to hang back a little bit. I don't want them to know that we are following them. They are Eleanor Jourdan and Charlotte Ann Moberly, and they're about to have an adventure. We are following them to the grounds of Versailles, where things are about to get a little strange. Look up at the trees. They're desaturating. The smell of roses, which I could smell until now, have entirely faded. It's as if light and shade have gone entirely flat. The breeze has stopped. Oh, this is feeling weirder than I thought it would. Not just weird, but oppressive, wouldn't you say? Like my heart hurts. Okay, let's speed up a bit. We don't want to lose those gals who appear to be just as concerned as we are that it appears all of the people who surrounded us before are gone, except for those two officers in grayish green coats and three cornered hats waving them on. They also have wigs as if it's the 1700s. Okay, let's pop a crouch over here. Sorry, those were my knees. Why am I always putting us in positions where we have to pop crouches? Never mind. I'm gonna stand comfortably by this manicured bush if you care to join me. We now appear to be the only people anywhere except for the two ladies just yonder. And I don't want them to see us when they realize they're just about alone except for one other person. Look, just over there in the grass. The two ladies have stopped in front of another lady wearing a light summer dress, shady white hat and a wig. Her dress is just the same error as the guards we saw. 1780s ish. That lady, so Ms. Moberly will come to believe, is Marie Antoinette. Here, let's walk back toward the gardens and hopefully out of this time slip or mass residual haunting that we and the two ladies have just experienced. Man, that reminded me of the further in the insidious movies. What we have just experienced was the Moberly Jordan incident, a rather bizarre situation where two very well respected and accomplished women came to visit Versailles as tourists and ended up back in time or in the spirit realm or something else. Charlotte Moberly was the first principal of a hall of residence for young women at St. Hughes College in Oxford. Eleanor Jourdan was a successful author of textbooks and ran a school of her own and then became vice principal of St. Hughes College. Before Eleanor began her post. She and Charlotte thought they should get to know each other better as they would be working together closely. Eleanor owned an apartment in Paris, so Charlotte came to stay with her for a bit so they could tour Paris and Versailles together. Sounds like a lovely way to get to know someone. After visiting the palace of Versailles, they decided to go for a little stroll around the grounds and noticed something strange. They took with them a traveling guidebook and as they turned a corner, they noticed what was there wasn't in the guidebook. It was a lane where it didn't belong, at least not according to the book. So they tried to find their way around and they started seeing more things that were not in the guidebook. A deserted farmhouse, a cottage, people in clothing from 130 years earlier. Here and there they saw a woman shaking a white cloth out of a window. A strange man in a cloak and shady hat with his face pockmarked with smallpox. Charlotte described this man as odious, repulsive, he had an evil expression. They saw another with large dark eyes, crisp curling hair under a large sombrero, ha. Who walked up to them and guided them in another direction. They described those guards that I mentioned as well and the woman in the grass. As they continued on, they noticed no other people at all, even though the streets were filled with people touring the grounds. Not long before, after they saw who they believed to potentially be Marie Antoinette, they decided to make their way back to the palace. And as they did they, the saturation came back into the trees, the light became more defined and they came upon other visitors in the palace that looked like them in present day clothes. They had tea at a hotel and made their way back to Eleanor's apartment. Creeped the hell out. So creeped out that they didn't even discuss what happened for a full week. The experience felt almost like a dream dream to them. And as they began to recount the details about their stroll, Eleanor proposed that they separately write down what they experienced and they would later compare notes to see if they had the same experience. They both believed that Versailles was haunted and that they saw the ghosts of Marie Antoinette and others. They began to research extensively the area, the people, the clothing of Marie Antoinette's time. They came to the conclusion that they were seeing and feeling events that took place on August 10, 1792. Six weeks before the French Revolution kicked off and the monarchy and Swiss guards were massacred. They went back to retrace their steps, but found things that they saw were not there when they returned. Bridges, the old farmhouse, the kiosk where the creepy pockmarked dude was sitting. They were all gone. They researched if there were any private events, any dress up balls, anything that could explain what happened to them. And they discovered that there were no special events or parties planned in the area that day that they knew of. Convinced that they somehow slipped into the further the spirit realm, they decided to write a book about their experience and they called it an Adventure. But they didn't include their real names. They used pseudonyms, Elizabeth Morrison and Frances Lamont. They also came up with different theories apart from the spirit realm theory. They thought perhaps they experienced a time slip, somehow discovering a wrinkle in time, while the other thought perhaps they slipped into Marie Antoinette's memories. The book caused a sensation and it was pored over by critics, lovers of the paranormal and folks who desperately wanted to seek for their own explanations to the event. Another a number of theories were put forth, some of course simply just dismissing the event altogether as nonsense. But the Society for Psychical Research, we've heard of them on other episodes, did a thorough investigation. And although they came to the conclusion that the incident was not paranormal in nature, they discovered an old map of Versailles that had the gardens and bridge that were not presently still there. Fascinatingly, this, this map was different than a number of other maps. So it was not likely that these two ladies had ever seen this particular map of Versailles. The identities of the ladies weren't revealed until after Eleanor's death in 1924. They were revealed in 1930. Charlotte died seven years later in 1937 and claimed to have seen a number of other ghosts. She claimed to have seen the Emperor Constantine standing with a gold crown and toga in the loop. Eleanor became paranoid and autocratic in her principal role at the college and after mass resignations and a huge scandal, she suddenly died. So a bit of a sad ending there for the ladies. There were even more theories about what may have happened in this incident. The most plausible one is not supernatural or time traveling related. At the same time the lady ladies went on their stroll. The decadent French poet Robert de Montesquieu lived nearby and was known for throwing lavish gay parties where he and his friends dressed in elegant period costumes. He and his friends dressed in drag as 1700s aristocratic ladies and went out to the grounds of Versailles to enjoy themselves. Montesquieu himself had a pock marked face, and it perhaps was him that the ladies saw. The original accounts that the ladies wrote when they separately decided to describe what they saw have been analyzed and compared to the book, and quite a bit had been aggrandized. The desaturating of trees, the dreary oppressive atmosphere was greatly embellished and exaggerated. Later, it's believed that the more the ladies researched the history of the late 1700s, the more creative details came to light. It has been theorized by psychologists that the ladies were perhaps sharing a hallucinatory experience that became more and more embellished over time. However, despite the fact that a lot of inconsistencies can be found in their story, it is believed that at least these ladies thought they experienced something very, very strange. It isn't believed that they made the entire thing up like out of nowhere. So perhaps it was a time slip, a trip into the further a shared hallucination. Or maybe it was just some fabulous gay poets traipsing around Versailles in fancy dresses for fun. We will never know for sure. Now let's discuss the Ghost Clubs of the Victorian era. The Ghost Club was a group of male intellectuals in 1862 who set out to investigate supposed supernatural encounters for the specific purpose of weeding out frost. These folks weren't necessarily believers in the supernatural and believed most paranormal phenomena could be explained by logical explanations. And they set out to prove it. That being said, some of them still subscribed to a number of isms that spiritualists of the day also dabbled in, that being mesmerism and magnetism. Mesmerism being what we now know to be hypnosis, and magnetism being the notion that there is an invisible, energetic force that connects all beings, humans, animals and even plants. Charles Dickens is believed to be the founding member of the Ghost Club in England in 1862, and he was very much not a believer in ghosts. He was very interested in mesmerism. However, apart from writing the most famous Christmas ghost tale of all time, A Christmas Carol, he dabbled in hypnosis and believed that it could cure people of a range of issues that appeared supernatural but were in fact not. For example, he claimed that he hypnotized a friend of his who saw specters apparitions, and after a hypnosis session, she never saw those floating phantoms again. What he did was, according to him, use hypnosis to help her with a nervous condition that wasn't paranormal in any way. Although he didn't believe in ghosts, he was still fascinated with them and kept an open mind. The purpose for him of the Ghost Club wasn't just to root out frauds in the spiritualist industry, but potentially to find evidence of the paranormal. However, he claimed to have never done so with his club. One of the club's first investigations was that of the Davenport brothers. I've mentioned them before. They would allow members of an audience to tie them up and then they would go into a big spirit cabinet full of instruments. The instruments would be on the outside of the cabinet too. The doors would be closed and all of the instruments would begin to play. These guys were just very talented escape artists. They would quickly untie themselves and use magic tricks to make the instruments on the outside play. And they would just play the ones on the inside as well. They were unmasked a number of times for being frauds. Dickens iteration of the Ghost Club, a ghost fraud hunting club, lasted about a decade until his death in 1870. It was reinvigorated, though in the 1880s with a totally new approach that Dickens would surely not have approved of. It became a a deeply spiritualist gentleman's club. They would meet at fashionable restaurants such as Pagani's on Great Portland street, and the meetings would always begin with a roll call that included the names of all those present that were living, as well as those that were dead, otherwise referred to as those incarnate and those passed on. They created a motto for themselves in Latin, but the translation was Be born work, die be born. This club became more of a secret society where they would discuss many of the things that I read to you from the spiritualist newspaper, their own personal experiences with connecting with the dead, other stories they had heard. They would share the minutes of spiritualist meetings that they would attend and discuss seances. Sounds like a fun little boys club. I love this for them. This iteration of the club also included prominent authors and poets. Yates was a rambunctious member of the group. He attended first as a guest, fell in love and became a full fledged member. It is believed that the discussions held in the Ghost Club would influence his writing inasmuch as it inspired and fed his mystical and paranormal interests. His philosophical work, called A Vision, included spiritual lessons that he gleamed from his own automatic writing with the Ghost Club. He believed that he was a medium and the dead could speak through his pen. Some of the finest ghost authors of the Victorian era, there was Algernon Blackwood and Siegfried Sassoon were also members. The Ghost Club still exists today and they say that their members are lecturers, barristers, librarians, doctors, members of the poor police force, public figures etc. And they still continue with some traditions of the days of Yates. They do a roll call of both the living and the dead on Halloween every year and they have combined their incarnation with Dickens vision as well with investigation of current paranormal goings on. And you will be pleased to know that since Ghost hunter Harry Price re established the club in 191937 it is no longer just for boys. His club was the first to admit women. It remains a non profit social club run by elected volunteers and includes open minded curious individuals looking to explore and investigate unexplained phenomena as they describe on their website. That looks a little like it was made with geocities in the 90s, but I'll forgive them. I'm just happy they still exist. Now before we go, I would like if I may to read you a little poem by 19th century poet Walt Whitman as an ode to my city. This poem is called Mannahatta and it reads I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city, whereupon lo up sprang the aboriginal name. Now I see what there is in a name, a word liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self sufficient. I see that the word of my city is that word from of old, because I see that word nested in nests of water bays, superb rich hemmed things, thick all around with sailships and steamships. An island 16 miles long, solid founded, numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender strong light splendidly uprising toward clear skies, tides swift and ample, well loved by me. Toward sundown the flowing sea currents, the little islands, larger adjoining islands, the heights, the villas, the countless masts, the white shore steamers, the lighters, the ferry boats, the black sea steamers well molded. The downtown streets, the jobbers, houses of business, the houses of business of the ship merchants and money brokers, the river streets, immigrants arriving 15 or 20,000 in a week, the carts hauling goods, the manly race of drivers of horses, the brown faced sailors, the summer air, the bright sun shining and the sailing clouds aloft, the wind, winter snows, the sleigh bells, the broken ice in the river passing along up or down with the flood tide or ebb tide. The mechanics of the city, the masters well formed, beautiful faced, looking you straight in the eyes. Trottiers thronged vehicles, Broadway the women, the shops and shows, a million people, manners free and superb, open voices, hospitality, the most courageous and friendly young men. City of hurried and sparkling waters, city of spires and masts, City nested in bays, my City. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please rate the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 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