Chasing Ghosts, page 15
Eastern State Penitentiary prisoners were strapped to “mad chairs” for several days until their circulation was cut off, occasionally resulting in amputations and madness.
The penitentiary’s gruesome history and decaying corridors lined with rusting metal and flaking plaster make it the stuff of nightmares. Visitors who believe in ghosts are primed to attribute anything out of the ordinary here to spirits. Shadowy forms on the walls and echoes of women’s laughter in the dirt-filled cells have been frequently reported. A prison locksmith, though, allegedly experienced the most powerful paranormal activity during restoration work in Cell Block 4 in the mid-nineties. While trying to remove a 140-year-old padlock, he sensed an evil presence and eerie energy in the cell, as if he’d been caught in a swirl of souls that froze him in his tracks. Hundreds of tormented faces appeared on the walls and a mysterious fog seemed to draw him in, almost like he was suddenly having an out-of-body experience. The locksmith never got the padlock off, but ghosts of the prison’s macabre past, it seemed, had been freed.
Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum
The inmates at Eastern State Penitentiary led rough lives within the prison’s walls, but their lingering spirits might feel better if they could swap stories with the ghosts of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia. Spanning nine acres of long, staggered wings and four floors, it’s believed to host many ghosts. The psychiatric hospital opened in 1864 and, like the penitentiary, owns a rather repulsive history. The insanity of its patients was matched only by the insanity of the conditions and treatments administered during their stay.
Let’s start with syphilis. Before the invention of penicillin, patients dealing with the disease were treated with malaria. Introducing this second illness to a patient would trigger a fever high enough to kill off the syphilis bacteria. Other patients were treated with hydrotherapy, wrapped tightly in their bedsheets and submerged in hot or cold water. Some were strapped in a chair and spun around to increase the “good” blood flow to the brain. Bloodletting and electroshock therapy were common, as were orgasms for women patients administered by the asylum’s own brand of vibrators. And then there were the lobotomies. Too many lobotomies.
Walter Freeman, the father of the lobotomy, had a field day at the asylum—and at many others across the country, in fact. In 1954 he toured West Virginia’s institutions and by the end of the year ensured the state could boast more lobotomized patients per capita than any other in the country. With his trusty ice pick in hand and a little electricity to knock patients out, it only took him a few minutes to go in through the eye socket, give the handle a firm tap with a hammer, and pluck out a chunk of brain. Sometimes he tapped too hard and the transorbital lobotomy left patients forgetting how to speak or use the bathroom.
Among these poor souls were the types you might expect to fill an asylum: schizophrenics, epileptics, and the criminally insane, to name a few. But it seemed most anyone could be discarded from society and dumped into the asylum’s many wards. A list showing the “Reasons for Admission” from 1864 to 1889 included such maladies as “seduction & disappointment,” “marriage of son,” “over study of religion,” and “parents were cousins.”
No matter their supposed disorder, they all shared the struggle of wretched living conditions. In 1938, for example, there were 1,641 patients being treated by just five physicians, six assistants, and nine nurses. For much of the asylum’s existence the patients had little heat, no air-conditioning, and insufficient clothing, lighting, and furniture. Even a condemned building continued housing male patients for five years. Needless to say, thousands of patients died there, surely with little to no sanity left.
The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Viriginia, was the scene of many horrors, including bloodletting, electroshock therapy, and lobotomies.
Like at Eastern State Penitentiary, both staff and patients experienced the paranormal within the asylum’s walls, whether it was strange lights or shadows, or just spooky energy permeating the wards. Some patients enjoyed stringing up a bedsheet across a hallway and watching for shadow forms to appear. Others refused to sleep, believing they were being haunted. The asylum closed its doors in 1994, but was purchased and reopened for historical purposes in 2007. People visit to learn about the asylum, but many come for the ghosts that remain active.
Night event manager Valarie Myers has experienced a lot of them. But the encounter that was “all of the above as far as a terrifying, confusing, mind-blowing, holy-shit-what-was-that sort of situation” happened on consecutive nights in 2017. It started with Myers suddenly feeling dizzy while observing a group of ghost hunters on the fourth floor. She assumed it was nothing but then she felt a burning sensation on her lower back to the right of her spine. It grew so intense she finally had a coworker inspect the area. Myers discovered that she had an abrasion or burn about four inches long and nearly an inch wide. The next night during a tour in the same part of the building, her right arm started burning.
“I shifted my flashlight onto my right arm and both my assistant manager and myself watched three welts develop down my arm,” Myers recalls.
She’s hardly alone in experiencing strange phenomena. Spirits have been both seen and heard by many. Numerous guests on the second floor, for example, have caught the name “Jane” on recordings and perceived it whispered in their ears. Records showed that a Jane Harvey was a patient in that ward in the 1890s. She hanged herself in her room with a pillowcase.
Over in the children’s ward, spirits have been known to get playful during ghost tours. One night as a group of eighteen made its way through the corridor, a ball rolled out of a room on the left side, about three-quarters of the way down the hallway. It stopped in the middle of the path. Just as the tour guide calmed the startled group, a second ball rolled out of the same room and stopped just beyond the first. The first ball then rolled a few feet back toward the room from where it came. No one was in the room. The guide checked for drafts and tested the floor to see if there was an uneven spot that might have caused the balls to roll, but there was nothing to explain the event. Attempts to recreate the phenomenon failed.
If the soul can survive death then surely some of these former patients are causing some of the disturbances at the asylum. Myers suspects some of the experiences may also be due to what’s known as the “stone tape theory.” The name comes from the title of a 1972 British TV movie, which was inspired by ideas put forth in a 1961 book called Ghost and Ghoul by English archeologist and parapsychologist Thomas Charles Lethbridge. In the film, a research team sees a ghost in an old Victorian house and determines it’s a psychic impression recorded in a stone wall. A “stone tape,” if you will. Lethbridge never used the term but he had suggested that apparitions might be nothing more than a recording of an event in an environment. Through “a sort of surrounding ether” he believed these moments could be stored in rock and other substances and might capture electrical discharges from especially traumatic or emotional moments. This residual energy is like a memory captured in a place that gets replayed and perceived by others. Parapsychologist and paranormal investigator Loyd Auerbach describes it as being similar to watching an old movie from the thirties. All those actors still look the same on film today, even though they’ve since aged and passed on.
“It may be that certain people have more sensitivity to the recordings so the phenomena may not be observed every time the physical conditions are met,” Auerbach explains. “Throw in the possible influences of mood and belief of the observers, and the perceptions can be affected even more.”
No one knows how, if at all, these recordings might actually work, but if Lethbridge’s supposition is correct, Myers may be in the middle of a massive ghost media center. She notes that the asylum is made from blue sandstone—it happens to be the largest hand-cut stone masonry building in North America—and that there’s a high concentration of quartz in the ground in the Weston area. Both contain silica, which is known to be a good semiconductor and might be capable of capturing human energy. “Take that as you will, as far as stone tape goes,” Myers says.
This type of residual activity is believed to explain hauntings in general. Ghosts don’t create them; the living do. Shadowy forms and ghostly figures could be these types of historical imprints.
The dark, dank conditions around the asylum, along with the overall creepiness of the place, might also lead to experiences people believe are paranormal. “Being primed for it is an environmental cause,” Myers says. “But it doesn’t explain the welts on my skin or the ball rolling.”
This paranormal stew of dark history, environmental conditions, and spirits extends far beyond asylums, prisons, and other ominous places. It even happens at the residence of those who devote their lives to God.
Borley Rectory
Across the pond in England, one of the country’s most famous hauntings mixes poltergeists, a twelfth-century monastery, the ghosts of an executed nun and her beheaded husband, and a house that committed suicide. Welcome to Borley Rectory, which renowned ghost hunter and psychical researcher Harry Price called the “most haunted house in England.”
Like any good haunted house, it has its lore. In this case, it began in 1863 when Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull allegedly built the infamous rectory on the site of the aforementioned monastery in rural northeast England. In the seventeenth century, so the story goes, one of the monks got distracted from prayer and contemplation by a rather fetching nun from a nearby convent. The two fell for each other and rendezvoused in the woods for a little clandestine canoodling. Their scandalous affair led to an elopement with the help of a friendly coachman, but the pair were soon missed. The sweethearts were quickly found, brought back, and severely punished. For the sin of falling in love and breaking her vows, the nun was walled up alive in the convent and her beau, as already noted, was disposed of much quicker by beheading. So was their coachman accomplice.7
With their deaths, a legend was born (and perhaps embellished over the years).
An illicit affair between a twelfth-century monk and nun, and their torturous deaths in a monastery that once stood on the property, led to centuries of terror at Borley Rectory in England.
In 1929 a Daily Mirror reporter invited Price to join an investigation of Borley’s current rector Reverend Guy Eric Smith’s claims of shadowy figures, spooky noises, and other paranormal phenomena. Price accepted with reserved enthusiasm.
“My experience told me to look for a mischievous adolescent, rats, practical jokers—or the village idiot,” he later wrote. “I have wasted very many weeks in acquiring this knowledge.”
Upon his arrival, Price unloaded his ghost-hunting kit and began exploring the large two-story Victorian house situated on nine acres of land.8 Interviews with the staff revealed that at least one of the maids had seen the spectral nun in her flowing white veil walking near the house. Others claimed to have been awakened by movements in their bedrooms and witnessed wraiths reclining next to them. Price also learned that Reverend Harry Bull, son of Henry Dawson Ellis, had died at the rectory in 1927 and a few others had stayed more than a few months since then. Mrs. Smith, the rector’s wife, said that shortly before Bull’s death, he often spoke of a “remarkable experience” while walking outside the rectory. “Suddenly he heard the sound of horses’ hoofs, and on looking round he saw an old-time coach coming up the road driven by two headless men,” she recounted.
That evening at dusk, Price and the newspaperman waited outside in hopes of catching a glimpse of the notorious nun and her decapitated lover. After an hour the reporter excitedly grabbed the ghost hunter’s arm and whispered that he’d seen her.
“Sure enough there appeared to be a shadowy figure gliding down the path under the trees,” Price recalled. His co-investigator ran after it for a better look, but it “melted away” before he reached it. As the two reentered the house a pane of glass came crashing down from the roof, narrowly missing them. Other phenomena followed, just as advertised. Bells rang randomly. A candlestick flew down the stairs. Books, stones, and bricks were thrown. Throughout it all, Price found no signs of rats or rapscallions. The troublemaker, it seemed, was something much more unusual. All of it was enough to make the Smiths move out a month later.
Reverend Lionel Foyster and his wife, Marianne, were next in line to take on the rectory in 1930. Right on cue, the weirdness started on day one, including a voice calling Marianne’s name, the sounds of footsteps, an apparition of Harry Bull, and disappearing jugs. As the days and weeks passed Foyster documented his experiences in a diary and managed to fill 180 pages. Though most were just creepy oddities, at times the phenomena became violent, like the time Marianne got yanked out of bed and suffered a black eye after getting socked by an “invisible assailant.”
Price returned to Borley in 1931 to meet with the Foysters, eager to hear their latest strange tales. His obsession with the rectory continued with visits throughout the decade, most notably in 1937 when he leased it for a year to facilitate a more thorough investigation. The ghost hunter found plenty of help after placing a classified ad titled “Haunted House” that sought “responsible persons of leisure and intelligence, intrepid, critical, and unbiased.” Between Price’s want-ad helpers and more than a hundred observers and two hundred witnesses over the years, he built up a pile of evidence, including scents of perfume stinking up the rooms, keys rotating in locks, red wine turning into ink, white wine turning into cologne, and scribbled pleas for help appearing on paper and walls.
Following Price’s adventurous and fruitful ownership, the Borley Rectory was purchased by a retired army officer, Captain R. G. Gregson, who happened to enjoy psychical research. His new home would become his new hobby. Little occurred at first, but then one evening a lamp began to flicker. Was it faulty wiring or a bad bulb? Or was Gregson finally getting a peep of the paranormal?
“Ah,” he exclaimed jubilantly, “a poltergeist at last! Let’s see if you can do something spectacular.” So it did. The lamp exploded, sprayed burning oil around the room, and ignited a fire that consumed the rectory. The “most haunted house in England” became known as the “house that committed suicide.”
The “death” of the rectory, however, didn’t mean the death of the ghosts. After all, they’re already dead. When Price visited Borley in the aftermath of the fire he spoke with numerous witnesses who claimed to have seen “figures moving amongst the flames” near the window. Captain Gregson reported seeing them as well, stating two cloaked figures had exited the rectory during the fire and that the figure of a girl and a “formless figure” could be seen in the upper windows. He also stated he was alone in the house when the blaze began.
Price, who was an amateur magician and had exposed many mediums throughout his ghost-hunting adventures, found himself at a loss with the Borley case. There was no one answer for all the phenomena. He attributed the “stone-throwing, furniture-moving, bottle-dropping, hair-ruffling, bell-ringing, belt-raising, soap-pitching, and door-locking annoyances” to poltergeists, but believed other occurrences were caused by “the persisting remnants of the egos or personalities” associated with the rectory or the land it sat on. Ultimately, he summed up his theories by stating, “I can only say that I do not know. But I will also add that no one knows.”
In the mid-1950s, years after Price’s passing in 1948, a new investigation by members of the Society of Psychical Research determined that their predecessor might have embellished a few stories and too often accepted hearsay as fact.
A reporter who’d once been silenced came forward in agreement. One night, during his own investigation alongside Price, he got suspicious of the ghost hunter after being hit on the head with a large pebble.
“After much noisy ‘phenomena,’ I seized Harry and found his pockets full of bricks and pebbles. This was one ‘phenomena’ he could not explain,” the journalist said. His attempt to expose Price was stifled by lawyers who threatened to sue the newspaper for libel. So the story died.
In 1978 another team of investigators tracked down Marianne Foyster, then in her late seventies and living in Canada. She admitted that she and Lionel made up many of their stories, though she added some unusual things did occur that she didn’t believe Lionel was behind. Marianne suspected that Price might have turned the ink into wine through sleight-of-hand magic. But while she questioned the ghost hunter, her own believability has been called into question.
“Marianne Foyster has never ever told the same story twice,” explains English paranormal historian and writer Paul Adams.
Marianne, who was some thirty years Lionel’s junior, had at times claimed there were no ghosts and that her husband was just a forgetful man who’d blame spirits for moving things around. In addition, graphologists determined the writings on the wall were done in Marianne’s hand, possibly because she was simply bored there and liked stirring up excitement. Aside from ghosts, she also found entertainment in the form of an affair with a man closer to her age. Lionel knew about the relationship and may have participated as a voyeur. Shortly after leaving Borley—and taking their hanky-panky away from the church—the Foysters needed money, so Marianne began a new affair with a wealthy commercial trader and married him bigamously. Lionel pretended to be her father, and all seemed to be going just fine until the new husband learned the truth and had a nervous breakdown. Considering Marianne’s proclivity for mischievousness and ever-changing stories, Adams understandably considers her an unreliable witness. But her antics certainly add to the intrigue of Borley Rectory.
