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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

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0:00:10
Celestia Ward: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is your co-host, Celestia Ward. And with me as always is…

Ben Radford: Your other co-host, Ben Radford.

CW: Well, this is episode 108. 108! Can you believe we made it this far?

0:00:51
BR: It’s, I’m surprised and pleased. Yeah, it’s, we began in, actually on April Fool’s Day, 2017. And here we are approaching 2020 and still plugging along. So, that’s kind of cool.

0:01:06
CW: It’s nice to have some sort of staying power. We’ll see how far we can go here. We are going to be looking into a very interesting and somewhat cautionary topic this week. We’re going to be looking at ghost hunting, but from a different sort of angle than we’ve looked at before, right, Ben?

0:01:21
BR: Yes, I thought we would talk about the sort of the darker side of ghost hunting, including the harms that can come from ghost hunting. Oftentimes, it’s of course, thought of and seen as being a fun hobby or sort of silly scares, legend tripping, that sort of thing. But as we’ll discuss, there’s some very real consequences to it.

CW: Including some things you wouldn’t have thought would be a danger in ghost hunting. But there you go. Usually it just seems to be harmless fun with some rap, tap, tapping and spooks and staying up all night with your friends. But there’s some very real things that can go wrong, as well as some risks to life, limb, property, reputation, and even for people who run museums or sites that are allegedly haunted.

0:02:07
BR: Yes, indeed.

0:02:08
CW: Now, listeners might remember we mentioned last episode we were planning on having Erik Kristopher Myers on, and unfortunately a few things came up and we had to sort of switch tracks and go in another direction for now, but we’re going to be circling back and getting to that topic. In fact, this will give me even more time to look up subversive elements in children’s entertainment, which is one of my favorite topics.

0:02:30
BR: Yes, I’m looking forward to digging into it. I’ve been doing a little bit of research when I can and found some lurid and funny things.

0:02:40
CW: It’s lurid and funny. They often go together. I’ve certainly dug up quite a few things from my childhood and before and since that have surprised me. So we’re going to have a fun time digging into that next episode, hopefully. We’ve also got some other things in the pipeline. So you never know. We might just throw you a curveball again. We’ll see how things go. But for this topic, Ben, you were lucky enough to wrangle another expert. Not that you’re not expert enough in the ghost hunting realm, but you found somebody almost as good as you, right?

0:03:11
BR: Yes. Well, we got a friend of the show, Kenny Biddle. So it was always fun to to talk to Kenny and hear about some of his recent investigations. And as it happened, a very recent investigation he did and published online ties in perfectly with the topic. So here we go.

CW: That’s perfect. I love Kenny Biddle. He’s Mr. Awesome. He’s in fact, he’s he’s often showing us up on Squaring the Strange. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s looking up a few things right now and he’s going to scoop us on something.

BR: Those darn kids.

CW: Without further ado, let’s get into the dangers of ghost hunting.

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BR: We’re here today with our buddy Kenny Biddle, a long time contributor and a guy who our listeners will recognize. He has chimed in on a couple mysteries, solving a few of them that we discussed here on the show, including, if I’m not mistaken, whether Elvis was in Home Alone. Kenny, are you there?

Kenny Biddle: Yes, I am here. How are you?

CW: Welcome. Kenny, where are you joining us from? Where do you live? Remind listeners where your, your locale is.

0:04:31
KB: I am in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area. And right now I actually sound kind of weird because I’m actually at work. I’m not really supposed to be doing this, but I am anyway.

0:04:42
CW: We’ll keep it to ourselves. Okay.

0:04:44
BR: And if the audio is a little bit wonky, that’s why. So thank you. This was a last minute thing. So Kenny, thank you for joining us.

0:04:51
KB: Oh, you’re welcome. You’re welcome. And yes, that Home Alone mystery, that was one of the first conspiracy mysteries that I worked on with you.

0:04:59
BR: That’s right. That’s right. So, today we’re going to be talking about a topic that’s near and dear to our hearts, which is ghost hunting. It’s something that, of course, Kenny and I and others have done, sort of quasi-professionally and skeptically and so on. Of course, we’ve done lots of first-hand investigations, but we wanted to focus for this episode on the harm in ghost hunting.

0:05:18
CW: Is it mainly that it leads to really terrible movies and then reboots of those movies?

0:05:24
BR: I can’t help you with that. Well, you know, you raise a good point. I mean, you know, if you think about it, typically when you see ghost hunting portrayed, number one, it’s nothing like we actually do, typically. But more to the point today, it’s almost always portrayed as helping people, right? In movies and on TV and you know all the reality shows, the heroes of the shows, the ghost hunters, they cast themselves as the heroes because they’re bravely fighting the ghosts and the demonic forces, whatever else, and they’re helping the lost souls to cross over and they’re helping ghosts, they’re helping the homeowners to accept or to move on to whatever else. It’s all about this sort of resolving issues and it all has this positive side to it.

0:06:11
CW: It’s kind of on two different planes too because they’re helping the homeowners like rid the home of evil spirits or whatnot and they’re helping the spirits move on and get peace. There’s really no losers here.

0:06:23
BR: There isn’t really, except the audience of course.

0:06:26
KB: Yeah, the only people that get help are the ghost hunters. At least on these TV shows. They help themselves. That’s it.

0:06:33
BR: Yeah, and essentially, I mean, I talk about that in my book, Investigating Ghosts, where there’s a really interesting altruistic aspect to it. They really, sincerely believe that they’re doing good and they’re helping people, and it sort of puffs them up to have homeowners come and thank them profusely. Oh, thank you for ridding my home of the ghosts, even if maybe there was never a ghost. And so they get a lot of positive feedback and you don’t really so much hear about the negative side. So today we’re going to be talking about the negative side.

0:06:59
KB: Yeah, I think, I definitely think there’s an issue where most of the ghost hunters, at least that I’ve dealt with and engaged with, they have good intentions. I can give them that. They have good intentions. They want to help. But when it comes down to it, I really don’t think they are.

0:07:15
BR: No, they’re not. I mean, and what a lot of people don’t realize is there’s very real harm that can be and is done by ghost hunters and legend trippers, because it’s not cute. It’s not funny. You’re talking to people who, in many cases, sincerely believe that their house has a ghost. And sometimes people consider a ghost to be comforting of, you know, both Kenny and I have interviewed lots of people who it’s a fun, you know, “Oh, that’s just old Betty, she’s a little ghost, she does little playful things.” But there’s oftentimes people who are afraid of ghosts, who believe there may be some sort of demonic spirit or evil spirit or something, that’s when they call in these amateur ghost hunters and these TV crews. You’re dealing with people who sincerely believe that there’s something evil surrounding them that can harm them and hurt them. And when you understand that psychology, it becomes much more serious.

0:08:06
CW: Now, since you guys are both about cutting down to brass tacks here, I’m assuming we can quantify these harms into different categories. You got this psychological anxiety that is wrought upon homeowners and their families, their children. You’ve got probably financial harm. I mean, what do you guys, what, what, Kenny, Ben, what do you guys want to tackle first here?

0:08:29
BR: Well, I thought first we would sort of tackle the psychological harm and then move on to some of the more physical tangible harms because there really are some and then maybe wrap up with the harm to people and reputations. You know, in many cases, these ghost stories are not wholly fictional or at least they’re not presented as wholly fictional. In those cases, you have real people being referred to as being evil or ghosts or haunting a place when in fact, uh, they may not be. So let me start by talking briefly about a case that I investigated. It was actually one of my better known and earlier investigations. And then this was in 2003 when I was living in Buffalo at the time. And I got a call in November from a family that was concerned that there was basically demons in their house. They had fled their house two weeks earlier and this was in a suburb of Buffalo called Lackawanna. So it was about about half hour or so from where I lived in Buffalo. And this sort of blue-collar area, lots of workers and just sort of a bedroom community there. And they called me desperate because they believed that there was a ghost in their house and they contacted a local psychic who confirmed for them, yes, your house has demons in it. As you can imagine, I was not real pleased about this, but I was glad that they at least called me up because, you know, I don’t know exactly how they got my name, but I was glad that they asked for a second opinion rather than just going by whatever the local radio psychic said. And it’s a long, complicated story and I won’t go into the whole thing. If people are interested, it’s one of the chapters in my book, Scientific Criminal Investigation. But basically, I went to the house and they were terrified to be in their own house overnight. This has happened between Halloween and Thanksgiving. And because of the things they were experiencing in their house and because it was supposedly verified, using the air quotes here, by a psychic, they came to believe that there was in fact this evil force in their house. They took photos, they did their own amateurish investigation and came up with all the typical ghost hunting signs, you know, those EVPs, those ghostly, those demonic faces they saw in a photograph, for example. But I’m actually pretty proud of that case because in the end, I took them through my investigation and I showed them step by step how I debunked each of their pieces of evidence they thought was part of the ghost activity and in the end they believed me. They were reassured by my investigation that there was not in fact a ghost in their house and everything was fine and they moved back in by Thanksgiving but it just really struck home for me the damage that can be done by these ghost hunters because I asked them I said why do you I said I understand you showed me these photos you told me that you know what you experiences but why why do you think it’s a ghost specifically and the wife it was a husband and wife and a young daughter and the wife told me flat-out well it’s on TV I saw it on TV I walked these ghost hunting shows and what they’re describing on TV I’m seeing in my real life. I’m like, oh my God. It was really kind of irritating and frustrating. It kind of made me angry because what I was seeing was literally a mess, a psychological and emotional mess being made of these people and their family life which was disrupted. They couldn’t even sleep in their own home overnight because they were terrified of this thing. And much of it was due to this misinformation that they saw on TV. So in that regard, there absolutely is harm done.

0:12:04
KB: What? A TV show giving bad information?

0:12:07
BR: Imagine that, man.

0:12:09
KB: You can’t be talking about the History Channel or anything, right?

0:12:14
CW: Yeah, well, I mean, to their defense, I have often caught old episodes of like This Old House and HGTV, and it’s made me overly concerned about all the things in my home that need to be fixed.

0:12:26
BR: Well, that’s legitimate.

0:12:28
CW: I’m not terrified of black mold or something that’s gonna send me out of my home, but it’s true. You see stuff on TV and you get hypersensitive and aware of the things that you remember noticing, so it makes sense.

0:12:40
KB: Yeah, I get it. You have this idea, you see it on TV, you’re like, oh yeah, you know, that’s happening here. I wonder if that’s what I have. Like I have a demonic presence or I have a haunting or a poltergeist. And then you start talking to friends and family and they reinforce it by saying, oh my gosh, yeah, you know, that’s what it sounds like to me. You probably definitely, absolutely must We must have a demon in your house now. And it just goes on from there. And unfortunately, the byproduct is that trying to convince them otherwise is a monumental task. It’s really hard for us to try to go in there and I hate, I really don’t like using the word debunk, but to explain everything in a rational way. It’s very difficult for us to do that.

0:13:35
CW: Yeah, the cards are stacked against you.

BR: Yeah. In the case in that particular case I investigated the harm was basically their family life being disrupted for several weeks as they were so so scared they wouldn’t even be in their own home. But you’ve I’m sure you’ve encountered even worse cases right?

KB: I have a similar case like that. And it happened. Oh man it’s probably about 15 years ago now. And it was a resident here in the Philadelphia area. A homeowner had called in a ghost hunting team to check out some mysterious things that were going on, noises and seeing shadows. And so the team had come out once, and they were scheduled to come out a second time to do another investigation to see what they could come up with. And I happened to know the leader of the group, and he invited me along to tag along, basically. And when I got there, I really felt bad as soon as I walked in because the homeowner was visibly disturbed. His hands were shaking. You could tell that he hasn’t slept in a while because his eyes were all bloodshot, his hair was not combed or brushed or anything. He looked, I mean, I hate to say it, but he looked like shit. That’s the best way I can explain it. And as this investigation went on, this ghost hunt, I observed one of the ghost hunters sit down with the homeowner and start talking to him. And the conversation was about these bricks, okay, like red bricks that were wrapped in aluminum foil. The thing was that they had found one of these in each bedroom, and then they found a bunch of them down in the basement by the furnace. So the ghost hunter in question here told the homeowner these were binding spells that inside each brick was trapped a demon.

CW: What?

KB: Yes. I did the same thing. Wait, what?

CW: This is in Pennsylvania where there’s like red bricks every building is built with red bricks and there’s tons of them everywhere?

0:15:36
KB: Well these like I mentioned they were wrapped in aluminum foil.

BR: So it was that that’s clearly a whole different thing. If you if you take a regular brick and you put aluminum foil, it becomes satanic. We all know this.

KB: So, yeah, I mean, obviously.

CW: OK.

KB: They were all wrapped in aluminum foil and they had they had a string. They were tied with string. And this this particular ghost hunter was telling the homeowner, look, this is what happened. Somebody had come in here, the previous owner came in here and must have done binding spells in every room because you have like six or seven demons in here. And that the first thing you need to do is get these bricks out of your house. You can’t have them in here. They have to go. This is what’s causing all your troubles. You’re seeing demons. And we’re sitting at a dining room table. And as this ghost hunter is explaining this bullsh** to this owner, I’m watching the homeowner’s hands shake more violently. I see him, like his hands are all through his hair. He can’t take it. And I felt so bad. Yeah, of course I spoke up because, you know, I can’t keep quiet. And I chimed in and said, you know, this is not what’s going on. This is not real. Because most likely, the cause of these bricks, the reason these bricks are around and they’re wrapped in aluminum foil, is that they’re a cheap form of heat. The previous owner was a very old lady. And I know from historical research, and I’m sure Ben, you’ve come across this too, that people used to use bed warmers. They were pans that you would literally put the coals of a fire inside this pan and you would stick it between the sheets and it would warm up the bed instead of having the heat on all night. And these things, when I looked up the folklore, found out this to be true, that bricks were often wrapped in aluminum foil and they were put down by the furnace right next to it and they would heat up and those bricks would be then taken up to the bedrooms put in between the sheets and it would warm up the beds. That’s it. No demons from hell, nothing paranormal or supernatural or anything like that. Unfortunately, my explanation didn’t cut through the anxiety that the guy was having. And after we left, I found out that the guy just couldn’t do it. He wasn’t sleeping in the house anyway. He was very nervous about being alone in the house, so he would often go over to his girlfriend’s house and stay there, but he had just bought it. Like it wasn’t even a year since he had purchased his house. And within, I think it was two or three weeks of my visit, he had sold the house. He sold it at a loss because he just couldn’t go in the house anymore.

0:18:18
CW: So now you’re compounding the psychological harm with financial harm.

0:18:22
KB: Yes. I mean, the guy lost money on this. He I can’t even imagine what was going on at like work in his daily personal life because he just wasn’t sleeping. I can’t describe how bad his hands were shaking and there was no medical condition that was responsible. I mean, this was stress. This was anxiety. He was freaking out about being inside this house and it’s all based on what the ghost hunters told him.

0:18:46
CW: Yeah, and of course, lack of sleep is not exactly going to lead to a clear head so that you can assess evidence. It’s going to compound the problem. Yeah.

0:18:57
BR: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, keep in mind that for those people that are genuinely concerned about this, who sincerely believe that there is some malevolent spirit or ghost or whatever else in their house, this is very real. They have anxiety. They can’t sleep. They’re wondering if there’s some evil spirit going to come for them as they walk around their house at night or something else. I mean, that whole world, it sort of reminds me of on occasion when I’m contacted by people who believe they’ve been cursed. And I have to sort of bring psychology to it and explain to them why they’re probably not cursed and how basically due to the placebo effect and due to expecting attention, if you believe that your house is haunted, you believe that you’re cursed, you’re going to selectively notice and remember the bad things that go on. So if you miss your keys or someone starts a fire or something bad happens, it’s all part of the evidence, right? It’s all part of the whole same thing. And so it’s just so frustrating to see in that case where some ghost hunter, you saw them, I didn’t, but I would just be appalled. I am appalled at that. Right, if you don’t know why the brick is wrapped in aluminum foil, then shut up. Don’t pull stuff out of your ass. Don’t come up with something to make you seem like the authority when this could do harm to somebody. Just shut up, let Kenny talk.

0:20:20
CW: Speaking of appalling things, and Ben, you just mentioned the comparison to people who make others believe they’re under a curse. In a lot of cases, I’ve seen the ghost hunter wants to saunter in and be the hero and give some way to remove the ghost, give some way to free the trapped spirit. Like Kenny, you mentioned this guy was just telling the homeowner, you got to get rid of all these bricks. That seems to be a simple solution. This is where somebody is offering to remove a curse. You get this whole very dishonest undercurrent of people saying, Well, I’ll remove the curse, but you’re going to have to bring me a bag of $10,000 that Iíll need to remove the curse. Do we have any instances that you guys know of, of ghost hunters pulling the same sort of shenanigans, or is it only a matter of time before ghost hunting takes on a level of what you see in the fortune telling realm of people getting really taken advantage of by money hungry people who claim they’re providing a spiritual service?

0:21:22
KB: I haven’t come across any ghost hunters that have done that. I mean, I’ve come across plenty of psychics that have done that. I mean, unfortunately, that’s like par for the course That hobby, trade, con. But for ghost hunters, no. I personally haven’t come across anyone.

BR: Yeah, I would agree with Kenny on that. I mean, it is sort of a slippery slope there, but keep in mind that for most ghost hunters, as we talked about before, in a lot of cases, they’re sincere. They genuinely believe that all the theology about ghosts and the stuff they see on TV and EVPs, it’s all part of this constellation of beliefs. You know, they may not believe that every ghost photograph is actually a ghost. I mean, there is some modicum of skepticism there. But in general, they truly think that anything weird going on is a ghost. And this is why you have these ambiguous EVPs that to Kenny or I or Joe or someone else is obviously garbage or gibberish. To them, it clearly says, you know, get out and you know, my name is Mary and whatever else. So it’s really their worldview that they’re coming from.

0:22:34
CW: I guess that’s a little bit of good news and all this that we don’t have a whole ream of dishonest people trying to really take advantage financially of people who are trapped in an anxiety state, except I guess you might throw Ed and Lorraine Warren into that pile of dishonesty.

0:22:51
BR: I would. I would. There’s a big pile I’d like to throw them on. It’s flaming, it’s fecal, and I guess that ship has sailed.

0:23:01
CW: Because there were, as we’ve covered in previous episodes, and as I’m sure you guys are going to be getting to in other aspects here, there is a lot of evidence that other writers have pulled out that Ed and Lorraine were knowingly dishonest about a lot of the stuff they pulled with their supposed ghost stories.

0:23:18
BR: What? No.

0:23:20
CW: I’m just saying what other writers have said that we covered on this show before.

0:23:25
BR: I’ll be happy to say they were frauds. Legal teams can send it to me. That’s fine. I’ll deal with it.

0:23:33
CW: Okay. Well, and they did it clearly for financial gain in terms of publicity, movie rights, script deals, books, etc. etc. What sort of behaviors do you guys see in other more amateur, less incorporated ghost hunters in terms of that sort of damage to, like turning somebody’s home into a freaking theme park because you swear they have a ghost there?

KB: I see more of the authority figure complex come out. Most of the ghost hunters, well not all of them, and I want to make that disclaimer because I do work with a lot of people that run paranormal teams and for the most part many of them are sincere and they’re nice people and we actually talk and work together well. They actually listen to my side of the story, which is really cool, but you do have a great many that have that authority figure complex where, you know, they have their black t-shirts, you know, and they have their photographer’s vest filled with all kinds of gadgets and gizmos and they walk into a place, whether it’s a conference or a private home or whatever, and they think they know their s*** and they don’t. But that doesn’t stop them. And they still go to these private residences and they talk to the homeowners and they give their opinions, their unsupported opinions as factual and that’s I guess that’s where most of our problems come in because the homeowners see them as an authority figure and think, all right, you know, they look professional, they have all this equipment, they must be telling me the truth.

0:25:06
CW: Wow, I’m talking about naturopathy and Gwyneth Paltrow. All of those would be easier if people just didn’t get an authority complex and present their opinions as scientific fact.

0:25:23
KB: Yeah. I mean, whenever I give an opinion, I make sure to state that this is my opinion. This is what I think. But if I know what I’m talking about, I’m going to tell you that too. These are my references. It’s been checked. You want to check what I say? Here it is. But it’s an opinion. I’m going to let you know.

0:25:40
BR: The other part of this, of course, is that for every science-based skeptical ghost investigator, I mean, I can think of maybe a dozen of us off the top of my head, there are hundreds, probably not thousands, but certainly many hundreds, yeah, hundreds or thousands of amateur ghost hunters. And I don’t mean amateur, I don’t mean dismissively, but just weekend warrior ghost hunters who they’re self-proclaimed experts because they’ve seen all the seasons of Ghost Hunters and they got their photograph taken with Jason Haas. And they’re out doing this stuff. They’re with their local groups and they get reinforced, oh good job, let me share my evidence, oh that’s amazing EVP, and it’s this very insular organization, it’s a very insular group. And they occasionally they will invite a skeptic in or hear us out or whoever else. But 95% of the time there’s no skepticism anywhere near there. And so it’s this echo chamber because the homeowners that are having this experience, they’re seeing the same TV shows that the ghost hunters are seeing. They’re both using the same frame of reference that they’re watching Ghost Adventures or Ghost Hunters of Rez. of res. And so it’s this echo chamber of authority where nobody’s breaking in and saying, hold on guys, there’s, you know, question your assumptions.

KB: Yeah. I mean, if somebody says, if a ghost hunter comes in and says you’re having demons because of A, B and C and the homeowner actually saw like a reality television show where they saw A, B and C play out in the same way, boom, that’s validation for them. That’s a reinforcement of that authoritative attitude and yeah, they go along with it.

0:27:21
BR: Absolutely.

0:27:22
CW: I’m just blown away by the fact that if there are only about a half a dozen legitimate skeptical ghost hunters in the world, we have one third of them right now today on Squaring the Strange.

0:27:33
BR: That’s probably largely true actually, but let’s move on to some of the more tangible harms of ghost hunting. I mean, obviously there’s quite a lot of psychological and worldview harm just in instilling belief in ghosts and demons and people. But let’s talk a little bit about some of the physical harms either to people or to property. There’s a couple that jumped to my mind. There was a case in August 2010 that I wrote about for Discovery News. It was a North Carolina man named Chris Kaiser, and I’m sure Kenny remembers this case. It was a, there were a bunch of ghost hunters who were over a bridge over a place called Third Creek, and they were hoping to see a ghost train. Because of course there’s not just human ghosts, there’s also black dog ghosts as Mark Norman has talked about in this and that. And so they were, according to the local legend, on the anniversary of this train’s crash, there was a fatal train crash there, I think 119 years earlier, and they were there hoping to see this ghostly train come through over this bridge. The ghostly train did not materialize, however, a Norfolk Southern did come around a bend towards them, and everybody freaked out and jumped from the bridge, and Kaiser was killed. And again, it’s, you know, that’s not unique to ghost hunting. Of course, it’s a form of legend tripping, but it’s clearly he was there hoping to find a ghost, and he was killed in the service of a self-evidently fruitless ghost hunt. There are a couple other ones. There was a case in August 2006 in Ohio, where there was a girl named Rachel Bezerinski, I think it was. And they were trespassing on property that was reputed to be haunted. In most towns and cities, there’s always the scary place, you know, on the street or down the corner. In this one particular case, there was a guy named Alan Davis who lived there, and he heard someone lurking around his property and thought they were vandals, and he shot him with a rifle. And the girl was critically wounded and she survived, but she’s disabled. Again, it was a case of where, you know, she was lurking around there looking for ghosts or some sort of adventurous legend tripping. And somebody heard a rustle outside the window and thought it was trespassers or burglars or who knows. So that’s another scary case.

0:29:58
CW: Yeah, trespassing is a dangerous business. And even more so depending on what you look like, you know these days Intruders get shot with varying degrees and I know This is this is a dumb example But if you play any of those online games like Pokemon go or you know I’ve dabbled in the wizarding world of Harry Potter the first thing that pops up is when you’re looking for magic, and you know, in the case of my stupid little online augmented reality game on my phone, or in the case of ghosts, trespassing is a dumb thing that can get you shot or killed or any other number of problems.

0:30:41
BR: Yeah, I’ll just mention two other quick ones and Kenny may have other examples, but there was a Canadian woman ghost hunting late at night around two in the morning at the University of Toronto in downtown Toronto. And she was there with, actually with a first date. They said, hey, let’s go look for ghosts. She entered this building and she fell three floors to her death because it was an area that she wasn’t supposed to be on from the roof. And so she was killed. And then more recently in in November 2013 there was a case where there were some ghost hunters who burned down a house, a plantation house in New Orleans. They were maybe inspired by the TV show Ghost Hunters or whatever else but apparently there were a group of them and they had climbed through some fencing at this plantation house, this old historic plantation house, and they broke in and were smoking weed and looking for ghosts. And they started a fire that burned the whole place down.

0:31:42
KB: That’s what you do. Smoke weed, you’ll see some spirits.

0:31:44
BR: Well, there you go.

0:31:45
CW: Let me get some clarification there. They accidentally, while they were trying to light a bong or something, burn the place down, or they were honestly trying to burn the place down because they thought it was evil or something.

0:31:57
BR: No, from my recollection of the story, they weren’t trying. It was it was accidental. They were ghost hunting and getting high just to be clear Uh, but no it wasn’t it didn’t burn the place down because of its reputation for ghosts It did have a reputation for ghosts obviously because that’s why they were there. But yeah, they weren’t trying to exercise spirits they were just trying to sort of screw around and um, and I think there were like five or six, uh men and Were arrested.

0:32:23
CW: Wow, you know this this kind of thing should be a warning to people who might be interested in capitalizing on, hey, I’ve got some property here that’s haunted or something and oh, I’m gonna have people, I’m gonna have ghost tours on my property or something. Bear in mind, you’re inviting a whole bunch of like, like after hours trespassing and shenanigans and kids getting high looking for ghosts, stumbling into your place and possibly lighting it on fire and who knows what else?

0:32:50
KB: That’s a big problem, at least around here in the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York area. Because most of the events that I attend, because I do attend a lot of paranormal themed events, and they’re at public places, they open them up to ghost hunting and all kinds of teams. And one of the questions that I do ask is, how many trespassers do you catch? And most of the bigger places, the well-known places that are not private residences, they’re always like, yep, we get them all the time. They’re constantly coming out. And not just kids, I’m not talking teenagers here, although that’s part of them. Most of them are grown-ass adults that are ghost hunting. For some reason, there’s been a few that I’ve spoken to that for some reason, because they consider themselves ghost hunters or paranormal investigators, that it somehow gives them a right to trespass. They don’t think that no trespassing signs apply to them, so they go ahead and just walk by the fence. You know, they don’t care.

0:33:53
CW: That’s got to be super frustrating to like historians and museum curators and people who are in charge of historical buildings.

0:34:01
KB: Well, yeah, because they constantly, I mean, most of the historic places around here that are struggling because they don’t have the finances, they don’t have the funds to upkeep the place anyway or to do needed repairs. So whatever money they do get, falls right into that. But now, because of trespassing, they have to have someone either on site all the time, just living in a trailer, or they have to spend the money for surveillance systems that is extra money they really don’t have because they have to watch for the trespassers.

0:34:33
CW: And then if you’ve got surveillance video running all the time, you have a higher chance of something anomalous popping up on one of the surveillance cameras and then you got the whole cycle started again.

0:34:45
KB: Yes, yeah. If they actually put out that footage, if they get something they can’t understand, they put it out. That just generates more interest.

0:34:52
CW: Oh man.

0:34:53
BR: Yeah, just this self-perpetuating process. And as Kenny mentioned, I mean, that’s one of the problems is they consider themselves to be experts because they wrote a book or they, you know, they were on some TV show, and so they’re like, well, you know, that just means the little people. Like, no, that means you. That means you. Just because you’ve talked about ghosts at your local library and you have a couple members in your ghost hunting team doesn’t mean you can violate trespassing laws.

0:35:19
CW: I’d like to point out that Mr. Ben Radford that we have talking here is an expert and he has written a book.

0:35:24
BR: Exactly.

0:35:25
CW: But it’s a better book.

BR: And I also respect trespassing laws.

0:35:31
CW: Yeah.

0:35:32
BR: Ipso facto.

0:35:33
CW: Why is it these trespassers, these wannabe ghost hunters, think that ghosts are only going to show up after closing hours like when nobody’s around you know during the witching hour or something they they won’t just pay for a ticket like everybody else and go see the thing during daylight?

0:35:50
KB: Well you know I guess ghosts have ghost jobs you know and you only work at night. I don’t know I don’t know that reason. I mean I. You can’t be there all the time. I think I think I have an extensive library of ghost books you know like ghost stories, reasonable books, and I would wager to say that less than half of these stories actually take place at night. Most of them take place during the day.

CW: Really?

KB: Yeah. They see people walk, they see ghosts or apparitions, and they have weird things happening, but most of the time it’s during the day. So that’s why I don’t get, I guess it’s just a creepy factor. You know, it’s not only creepier at night, but everyone or most people have off, except for me. Most people have off at night and that’s when they can do it.

BR: Exactly as Kenny is saying. I mean, that’s one of the ironies of a lot of the ghost hunting is that the stuff you see on TV, they do it at night, just as you mentioned, partly because, you know, they can use the infrared and all those other things, but most people across the board, not just in Kenny’s sample, but just statistically, they don’t see ghosts only at night anyway. So it’s like, it’s all just based on speculation, conjecture without any recourse to any actual evidence.

0:37:05
CW: Now, on to the third part of what you guys wanted to talk about. And Kenny, I love this phrase, you use this in one of your recent articles about the Conjuring House. You called it historical appropriation, where people convolute and sometimes purposely take over different bits of legends or they fabricate from whole cloth something, and as a result, reputations sometimes of long dead people, sometimes of fairly recently deceased people, get kind of thrown under the bus?

0:37:39
BR: Yeah, I’ll jump in with one case that I researched and that’s the case of the chemo theater ghost here in Albuquerque, where I live. I’ve written a book chapter on that and at some point we may do a whole show on it because it’s an interesting case, but basically the story is about this haunted theater in downtown Albuquerque about half hour from where I am. It’s a really beautiful historic art deco building and it opened up in the 1920s, but it’s best known around Albuquerque, certainly among ghost hunters, for being haunted. And this is a story that I’ve heard for many years and eventually I and a fellow investigator, Mike Smith, did an investigation on and talked about that. But it begins with an actual death. So again, the theater opened in the 1920s and it was very popular. On August 2nd, 1951, there was an explosion and about a thousand people were in the theater to see an Abbott and Costello film before another film and a water heater supplying the concession stand exploded into the lobby, just shot plaster and scalding steam and glass everywhere. Eight people were injured, but there was only one fatality, and that was a young boy named Bobby Darnell. He was a six-year-old boy, and he was there with a couple of his friends. He was actually watching the film at the time, and a siren in one of the scenes scared him, and he ran into the lobby. And just as he went down the stairs into the lobby was when the water heater exploded. This is a known fact. You can find references to it in the Albuquerque Journal and elsewhere. But for reasons that I won’t get into at this point, he said to haunt the theater to this day, and the story goes that people who are performing at the Kima Theater, which is still open and still very popular here, that before performances, people will give offerings to the ghost. And this is a pretty common thing. So in a lot of rituals and legends and folklore, you leave a little something for the ghost, a little something for the departed, for the dead, that sort of thing. In this case, there’s a small little cubby hole in the back of the stage. And before performances, people leave little trinkets for him. Originally, they left donuts. I’ll save the whole investigation for a later episode because it really is an interesting, intricate story. But, spoiler alert, there’s really no ghost there.

0:40:02
CW: You mean nobody was eating the donuts?

0:40:04
BR: No one was eating the donuts and certainly not a ghost. Mike Smith and I investigated the case and we determined pretty definitively that the chemo theater is not in fact haunted by any ghost and certainly not by that of Bobby Darnell. But the part I want to focus on is the fact that Bobby Darnell was a real kid. He was an actual person and he did die at age six in the boiler explosion. So you have this legend that evolved around the chemo theater and its alleged ghost that involved a real person. And I wrote about this case in a local newspaper, the Weekly Alibi, and I later published it in one of my books. And I got an email from a woman whose last name was Darnell shortly after I had published one of my pieces. And I was kind of surprised. I mean, I recognized the name, obviously. She claimed to be, and she probably was, the niece of Bobby Darnell Jr., the boy that is claimed to haunt the theater. And she basically was, she was angry, not necessarily at me, but at all the people that are promoting the chemo theater ghost story using her dead uncle as exhibit A, as the scary ghost or the ghost that was the mischievous boy ghost, whatever it was.

0:41:19
CW: Now, the ghost story that’s kind of evolved around this boy’s death, how, as a folklorist, can you trace how fast did this story pop up? I mean, because after something tragic like that, I’d imagine there’s a time of grieving. You know, the whole town is probably horrified that this little boy was killed. And then, I mean, five, 10, 20 years later, when does it turn into cute little Casper the friendly ghost eating donuts off stage somewhere? How does that happen?

0:41:51
BR: Well, that’s a really good question. And that’s it’s kind of a complicated… I don’t know that I have time to go into the whole thing on this episode, but basically the short answer is that Bobby died in 1951, but the stories of him actively haunting the theater didn’t emerge until the 1980s, which is one of the reasons if you’re doing the math on that, as many of our listeners probably are, you realize, well, that’s weird. Why is there a 30-year gap between the time when this boy dies and the first time that a ghost is said to haunt the place the ghost being identified as him.

0:42:34
CW: As the mother of a small boy I can tell you because you need 30 years to pass otherwise that child’s mother is going to come over and whip the sh** out of you.

0:42:42
BR: Well there’s that. I actually have a pretty good idea of how, of why the legend reemerged. And again, that’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a topic for, for the deserve its own show, but, but that’s basically what happened is that enough time had passed and the Darnell’s had moved. And as I recall, uh, Darnell emailed me, I think, uh, from Florida. I think they were surprised what I could tell when they realized that their, you know, their brother and their, their, their uncle were being claimed to haunt this theater. It was bizarre to them like well, that’s the first of all that’s my that’s my family member second of all Nobody at the time thought anything about it was only decades later that the story emerged Containing his containing his name, but anyway, so so she wrote to me In part according to email from her She says get the names right and remember that it might be selling item for you, but not for us. It’s something that affected my family. Everyone should leave my uncle’s memory alone and let everyone rest in peace.” And that was a kind of a moving moment for me. And I replied to her and I said, I agree with you. I said, you know, just so you understand, I’m the guy that’s investigating it. I’m not the ghost. And so I didn’t want her thinking that I was exploiting her. If anything, I was protecting her uncle’s name. So anyway, I just wanted to bring that out because, again, it was an example that I had investigated personally where it was crystal clear to me that there were ethical issues with using a real person and sticking them into a either intentionally or accidentally fabricated ghost story.

0:44:31
CW: Yeah, that’s like a weird intrusive fetishization of what should be a memory of a tragically killed child. There’s something really wrong about that. And I can see a number of ways it could go wrong. Let’s say the family found out about it and as you said they were dumbfounded, but they could have just as easily been completely taken in and honestly believed the soul of their, you know, departed brother was trapped in that theater. What happens then? How does that help them?

0:45:02
BR: Right. Good question.

0:45:04
CW: A question for another time, perhaps. But Kenny, you’ve you’ve investigated quite a few hauntings, alleged ghost hauntings that involve alleged real people. What have you come across that’s throwing some real people under the bus in one way or the other?

0:45:20
KB: Well, the best case that comes to mind is my recent one, the article I just released about the Conjuring House and the historical aspects to that.

0:45:30
CW: That was a great article. Yeah, I just got through that whole, it’s quite a meaty, hefty article. I urge listeners to go check it out Kenny Biddle. What is the title of it the truth behind the conjuring correcting the conjuring history the conjuring house history? Look up Kenny Kenny Biddle conjuring house there you go, and you will find it.

0:45:50
BR: It let me just say it really is an excellent piece of investigative work I was very impressed by it, and I’m glad that Kenny did it. It’s a solid piece of work and people should seek it out.

0:46:05
KB: Awesome. You guys are so nice. I love you guys. But anyway.

0:46:10
CW: Now you had to go a bit farther back than the 1950s, didn’t you?

0:46:19
KB: Yes, a little bit. I was well into the 1800s and actually even before that. What you don’t see in the article is that I actually went to the 1700s because I was tracing families back that far, just to make sure. Because one of the things that the main person that I’m going to talk about is Bathsheba Sherman, which is, if you’ve seen The Conjuring movie, if you’ve read any of the books that are out there, she is the main character. She is the main person that is the witch. She’s evil. Some of the rumors about her is that she killed a baby. That’s the main thing, that she killed a little baby with a sewing needle that she plunged into the base of his skull. And that was to sacrifice it. It was more of a witchcraft kind of sacrifice to keep her ravishing beauty. I mean, she used to be able to have any man she wanted. These are all the rumors that surround her. But she is the main component. And her name is Bathsheba Sherman. And the conjuring house is often referred to as the old Arnold Estate. And one of the claims is that Bathsheba was an Arnold. She was part of the family. And the reason I went back to the 1700s is because Arnold is a very popular surname in that area. And I wanted to make sure that these Arnold’s over here weren’t actually related to these other Arnold’s over here. That was actually difficult. That took me quite a few weeks to get through that, to make sure that these families weren’t related. Because there’s several figures that are past, they’re real people. So, Bathsheba Sherman was a real person. There’s Johnny Arnold, there’s Susan Arnold, there is Prudence Arnold. These are all real people that really lived and they really died, but not in this conjuring house. That’s the big deal. So, Bathheba Sherman is the one that I really focus on because her reputation is what has gotten completely decimated with this story. Basically, as I mentioned, she was accused of being a witch and that she killed a baby. And there’s three books that came out by Andrea Perrin, who was one of the Perrin children that lived in the house from 1971 to 1980. And in her books, she describes research being done by her mother, Carolyn, where they found records of an inquest into Bathsheba Sherman to see. They were questioning her. They were trying to decide whether she actually did it. Was there enough evidence to prosecute her?

CW: So Andrea Perrin, who is a living person right now, who is one of the children that grew up in the Perrin house, reputedly haunted, exploited by Ed and Lorraine Warren. Just I’m getting the story right.

KB: Absolutely.

CW: She didn’t do research herself on Bathsheba Sherman. She claims her mother did research on Bathsheba Sherman.

0:49:16
KB: Yes, that is how it’s worded in the books.

0:49:20
CW: And she claims that her mother found historical evidence that Bathsheba Sherman was brought under inquest about being a witch back in Sherman’s day?

KB: Yes.

CW: Back when Bathsheba Sherman was alive.

KB: That’s yes. That she’s

CW: OK. All right. Because there’s multiple timelines going on here.

0:49:43
BR: And just to be clear, so is was her mother a historian a genealogist a researcher. What was her background?

0:49:50
KB: No, she was not any of those they moved into the area and I didn’t recall any kind of actual employment I think she was a stay-at-home mom, which is, to be fair, one of the hardest jobs ever. So credit for that.

BR: But doesn’t necessarily qualify you to dig into 17th century history.

0:50:13
CW: She probably had a library card.

0:50:15
KB: Right, right. I mean, anybody can look up history. Anybody can look up this stuff. You know, it is difficult. It is tedious, to say the least. But people can do it. So it really doesn’t matter what your background is, but you can do it. It’s just the fact that you actually have to do it before you say you did it. And I think that’s where the problem is. There is a rumor that there was a notebook that Carolyn had. So Carolyn Perrin is the mother of the family. And there’s a rumor that she had a notebook where when she had her first experience, she wrote down extensive details for something that was most likely a waking dream. But she wrote down extensive details and sketches. And then after that event, she continued to do research, going to libraries, going to courthouses, and looking up records and keeping notes. Unfortunately, this notebook, which has all of this important information, was handed over to the Warrens with the promise that they would return it in a timely fashion. That never happened. That never happened.

0:51:23
CW: Did it ever show up at Lorraine Warren’s museum? I know she has a bunch of stuff over there.

0:51:28
KB: It has never come up. I’ve never seen a picture of it. I’ve never seen a mention of it except for in Andrea Perrin’s books.

0:51:36
BR: So is it is possible that the notebook never existed at all?

0:51:40
KB: It is quite possible, yes. And even if Andrea got a look at it and read it, we’re talking this happened in 1971 to 1980 and the books were published in 2011. That was the first volume. So you’re talking what 30, 40 years after the fact where you’re trying to remember somebody else’s notes.

0:52:02
CW: That’s leaving room for errors of a biblical proportion. And I mean that quite literally.

0:52:08
KB: Yeah.

0:52:09
BR: Well, and the other thing, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but if what she says is true, he says advisedly, Perrin would have a case against the Warrens’ estate. I mean, if it was for theft, if it was not a gift and you could show it, then you could absolutely sue the estate for the return of that property.

0:52:32
KB: I agree. I had asked Andrea, because I did have the opportunity to meet her briefly, and I asked about the notebook. She kept referring to the notebook as her, that’s where she got her information. I said, well, where is it? Oh, the Warrens took it. Okay, so why didn’t you get it back and I guess the best way to describe it is she gave me a look like, oh honey I tried and it looked like a default look. I didn’t believe it at all and that’s just my personal opinion. I didn’t buy into her idea that she had tried to get it back. And again, photocopy machines, Xerox machines existed back in the 70s and 80s as well. Scanners, you know, there’s yeah. So and like you said, Ben, I mean, I would be pursuing this. That’s a family heirloom. That is something that would would help. It wouldn’t it wouldn’t. It’s not proof positive that all these experiences happened, but it would be, hey, this is documentation from somebody from the 70s. And I have their notes now. You can at least look at their notes, right? And compare it with what they did.

CW: Yeah, that’s always always go to the original. That’s the Rosetta Stone, really, if you’re going to look at it.

0:53:43
KB: Yeah, that’s the primary source. Yeah. So we definitely go back.

0:53:46
BR: And, of course, in this case, we’re talking about not just the family story of the haunting and the scary things that happened, but you’re also talking about a real historical person’s reputation.

0:53:58
Yes. Bathseba Sherman was a real person. And when someone that has the skills to do real research, and I’m not trying to brag, but I do pretty damn good sometimes. When you do the research, and it wasn’t just me, I had help from other authors, Jamie Rubio and Shannon Byers, they’re authors that have tackled this before. Norma Sutcliffe, who was the previous owner of the Conjuring House, I talked to her and I met her in person, talked to her. And I also had a retired journalist, Kent Spotswood, that was phenomenal. He had a lot of information. And we all got together, and we looked into this. And all of us, independently and together, when we looked for all of these records that are allegedly there, from the courthouses to libraries to historical societies, everywhere, they do not exist at all. There’s nothing. There was no inquest. There was no trial. There was nothing. There was not even mention of a Bathsheba Sherman doing anything bad. The only records that exist that mention her name are a few census records, her will, and then her obituary. Besides that, that’s nothing else. There’s nothing else about her.

0:55:08
CW: Did you find anything about whether or not she was born an Arnold?

KB: Yes, she was born a Thayer. Her parents were Ephraim Thayer and Hannah Taft. I went back through both of their genealogies and no Arnolds in their families.

0:55:25
CW: Wow, okay.

0:55:27
KB: So she was Bathsheba Thayer and then when she married, she married Judson Sherman, became a Sherman, moved from her family farm, which was the Thayer’s, right to the Sherman farm. And that’s pretty much it. Later in life, I think the last few years of her life, her husband passed away and she remarried, which I think was more of a financial arrangement, to a Benjamin Green. And that only lasted until 1885 when she passed away herself. So there is no record of her being an Arnold or married into an Arnold or have a family member of an Arnold at all.

0:56:05
BR: Nor killing children.

0:56:07
KB: Nor killing children, no. She did not work on the farmhouse, that conjuring house. She did not live in there. She did not kill a baby. She didn’t sacrifice. There are no known pictures of her. That’s another rumor that she was a ravishing beauty and men couldn’t resist her at all, but there are no pictures and no actual physical descriptions. You can’t find any description of what she looked like, except for an Andrea Perrin’s book.

0:56:33
CW: Now, it’s interesting. One of the I’m going to just tell listeners here, one of the currents in Kenny Biddle’s article is the fact that there are a ton of Arnold’s in the area and miles and miles and miles away from the actual farmhouse. The story that was kind of cobbled together by Andrea Perrin and others just kind of takes every single bad thing that’s ever happened to an Arnold in the whole county and just kinda pretends they all happened in the farmhouse and all these Arnold’s were of the same actual family but they’re not. So was this poor Bathsheba Sherman, was she sort of patient zero of all these people that were hijacked, their stories were hijacked and put into a haunted house story for the good of a scary narrative?

KB: I think so. I really think so. I mean, the other deaths that I talked about or that I mentioned, like Johnny Arnold, Prudence, Susan, these were all people that had obituaries that had the last name of Arnold. They also appeared in what’s called the Black Book of Burrillville, which is a, it’s an interesting little book. I had to actually drive up to Rhode Island to get a copy of it. But it’s all the unusual deaths that have taken place since the early 1800s, I think, or even before that. And it’s all listed by suicide, murder, drownings, everything. And it just looks like they went through that book and whenever they found someone with the last name of Arnold, they were associated with the farmhouse. They didn’t bother to do research into the family to see if they were actually related or not. But I don’t know how Bathsheba got picked. I really don’t because she’s not an Arnold at all and there’s no stories about her. There’s no actual historical stories about her that would associate it with the farmhouse.

CW: Bathsheba, that first name of Bathsheba that just has kind of a biblical name. Yeah. Yeah ominous biblical sort of Somebody who’s got this gravitas to them And I’m wondering if if in this waking dream the name Bathsheba could have appeared to I’m just totally conjecturing here if you just if you just kind of because we were talking on a previous episode about somebody who decided that a crystal skull was actually named Akbar and something else.

0:58:54
BR: Jehoshaphat.

0:58:54
CW: Jehoshaphat. And it’s like, these are names that people pull out of their subconscious when they’re just looking for something. If this woman, Andrea Perrin’s mother or Andrea, if they just pulled out the name Bathsheba and they just decided to look in records to see if there was ever a Bathsheba, well, they found one. She doesn’t have the right last name, so they just decided to make a story about, oh, well, that was her name before she got married. I could see how this could all come together.

0:59:20
KB: I think, and this is something I do mention in the article, that there was, there’s two demonologist brothers, Keith and Carl Johnson. They’ve been on a couple of TV shows, but Keith Johnson wrote a book two years before Andrea Perrin did. and he included a chapter that describes some of these same stories. He does refer to Besheba Sherman, but refers to her as Besheba Green, which was her her married name when she died, but doesn’t associate her with being a witch. There’s actually a separate story of an unnamed person being a witch and coming over and killing a baby. So I’m I’m kind of guessing from reading one book that that book chapter from Keith Johnson and then reading the stuff that Andrea wrote It almost sounds like she simply lifted the stories and then gave it her own twist. And again, that’s my opinion interesting That’s what I see when I when I read everything and that was a pain in the ass

1:00:17
CW: I trust your opinion far over mine because I’m just listening to to all of the research that you’ve done and I haven’t lifted I haven’t set foot in any libraries over there. Now as far as, now this is somebody’s great great grandmother potentially and I’m assuming she’s got a grave site and she was an actual real person. She’s not alive to watch her reputation get tarnished and be called a baby killer.

1:00:46
KB: She does have a grave and unfortunately it’s been vandalized several times. I was just up there about a month ago. I think I went up to visit. The stone is gone. The headstone is gone. And it wasn’t stolen. The Historical Society has it. But it was broken in half some years ago. The fire department, which is right across the street from the cemetery, actually tried to fix it. They did a crappy job, but to their credit, they tried. So I’m not going to fault them on that, but they used some kind of like caulking glue and they glued the top part of the stone back on. It looked bad, but at least it was intact again. And then it wasn’t too long after that somebody else vandalized the stone and it’s just gone all together now. Whether it’s going to come back or not I have no idea, but I have no reason to believe it’s anything other than all the stories that came out about it.

1:01:42
CW: Yeah, that’s what I think.

KB: This is just a byproduct. You know, like people see her as a witch now and they see her as an evil person and someone that’s probably just a little too religious, you know, went over and vandalized it, which is, you know, yeah, it’s ironic.

1:01:59
CW: And this could happen to anybody. She wasn’t she wasn’t a particular person of notoriety. She was just a lady who lived back in the day and died, lived and died a pretty unremarkable life. And now her gravestone is being vandalized and she’s being thought of as a person who sticks needles into the skulls of infants.

1:02:21
KB: It’s really horrible. And she’s always going to be remembered like that because of the film and because of the books. And I mean, Andrea does lectures. She does these conference circuits, so she goes around and talks about it. And I will say that she has changed her stance on some of this now. She does tell people there are no records of the inquest. There are no records for this. But she still promotes that idea that Bathsheba was part of this story.

1:02:52
CW: Oh.

1:02:52
KB: And she wasn’t. I mean, that’s plain and simple. It wasn’t. And if you had, to be honest and blunt, ten minutes of f***ing research, she would have figured this out.

1:03:02
CW: Yeah.

1:03:03
KB: I mean, I know you’re going to bleep that out, but I mean, seriously, within ten minutes, I already knew for a fact that Besheba had nothing to do with this house. And then the weeks and weeks after that was spent just going over fine details and making sure I crossed my T’s, dotted my I’s, and did all that stuff.

1:03:22
BR: Well, to my mind, it just really highlights the differences between people that are perpetuating a legend or story for their own benefit or to sell a book or to tell a good story and researchers who are trying to get at the truth. And if the truth happens to align with legend, then that’s fine. But if the truth doesn’t align with legend and it’s maligning real, you know, living or dead people, then that’s a problem.

1:03:47
KB: Yeah. And it’s so much easier to screw up someone’s reputation when they are dead, because you don’t have somebody fighting you. They won’t fight you because, you know, they’re dead. And especially one that died more than a hundred years ago, I mean, and might not have surviving family, that’s easy pickings. And to be honest, in the 70s or 80s, when the stories first came out, it was probably really easy to get away with this. You know, with the power of the Internet and Google in your pocket, it doesn’t take that much work to verify facts. It really doesn’t. And it’s just it shows you, like you said, it just shows how lazy some people are when it comes to quote unquote research.

1:04:27
BR: Kenny, I’m glad that you brought up this case because it actually folds perfectly into the last case that I was going to talk about. As you were telling the story, and I read your article of course, the parallels were jumping out at me. I’m going to talk a little bit about the White Witch of Rose Hall, which is another case that I investigated and it’s in one of my books.

1:04:48
CW: Before you say we should do a show on that, Ben, we actually did a show on that.

1:04:52
BR: We have done a show on that. It was way back.

1:04:56
CW: Episode four, as in zero zero four, our fourth episode ever. So if you want a full, a full digestible nugget of information about the white witch of Rose Hall, check back there. But yeah, I was also yeah, there’s definitely similarities. A ravishing beauty when she was younger. Take it away, Ben. Tell us about the folklore.

1:05:17
BR: Yeah, this is a fascinating story. And again, I’m just going to give sort of a thumbnail sketch because if people want to hear the full story, they can go back to Episode 4. But just as you said, it involves a woman that was said to be a ravishing beauty, also accused of evil and witchcraft. In this case, she was the mistress of a plantation called Rose Hall, which is near Montego Bay in Jamaica. And it’s a mansion, it was a great house, and it was once the center of a sprawling sugar plantation. In the 1800s, it was the finest great house in all of Jamaica, this beautiful stone mansion surrounded by terraced, lush lawns. I’ve been there several times. Most recently, I was there on an episode of The Dead Files a couple years back for a season premiere. It’s a show with a retired New York City detective and his psychic sidekick. I, I got along better with the, with the detective than the psychic. They, they already kept their part, which is probably just as well. But anyway, so the story of, of the white witch of Rose Hall, who’s Annie Palmer begins with a 1929 novel of the same name, The White Witch of Rosehall, published again in 1929. It was written by a guy named Herbert DeLisser. And it’s this interesting sort of story that’s allegedly based on a true story, allegedly based on a true story. So, in this famous novel, again, set at this real place in Montego Bay, DeLisser talked about, it was a story set in 1831, and there’s this English bookkeeper that arrives on the island to learn the sugar trade and he soon becomes involved with a beautiful young woman named Annie Palmer. And unfortunately, Palmer’s husband had recently died mysteriously and unexpectedly, and leaving Annie the plantation and soon this innocent English bookkeeper realizes that this woman with whom he’s having this affair is this evil woman that has trafficked in voodoo and whipped her slaves and did all these horrible things. Again it’s a very well-known novel. It’s probably one of the most famous novels of the era in Jamaica. And even though it’s clearly a fictional novel, it is said to be based on a real person, that is woman Annie Palmer. So you take a step back and say, okay, well what was that based on? Well, Rose Hall actually began as a sugar plantation founded in 1746 by a guy named Henry Fanning. And this is the supposed true story behind the fictional White Witch of Rose Hall story, which as I’m explaining, as you can imagine, all sort of get lumped together. So for people that are perpetuating the legend, whether you’re talking about De Lisser’s version in his novel or whether you’re talking about the so-called true story behind it, it’s sort of, you know, they exploit the ambiguity for their own benefit, of course. So, in the so-called true story behind the story, the mansion had been built in 1746. The man, Henry Fanning, that had built the place was married to a woman named Rosa Kelly and she later remarried after he died to a man named John Palmer. This is where we get the Palmer name. And so again, it’s just as with Kenny discussing the names and the Arnolds and the Bathsheba, it’s exactly parallel. It’s a really interesting case to sort of tease out. But anyway, Palmer’s husband eventually died, which is not unusual certainly for the tropics in the 1800s. Dengue fever and malaria and everything else will get to you. But Palmer met, he eventually had a grandnephew and according to one account, John Palmer lived for three years after their marriage and Annie claimed that he drank and the second husband went mad and the third one married her for money and the rumor was that poison and stabbing and strangulation did them in, one by one. So here you see the so-called true story behind the legend. This is the woman that Delisleur based it on coming to the fore. There’s a well-known author by the name of Jeff Bellinger who founded a website called Ghost Village. And in one of his books, The World’s Most Haunted Places, he says, quote, Annie killed John Palmer with poison and then she closed off his bedroom and would not allow anyone to enter into it. So, you know, Belanger is explicitly promoting the so-called true story behind the Annie Palmer legend. And it just gets worse. Supposedly Annie not only left a trail of dead husbands, she was cruel and perverse. She would have the slaves whipped and go and watch it and just watch it for hours as these slaves were whipped for no reason. One story was that one of her escaped slaves was captured and beheaded and she had his head stuck on a bamboo spike to rot as a warning to other slaves. One author named John Spencer claimed that Annie had actually had an incestuous relationship with her stepson and had done all these horrible things. So it’s just the more you look into the so-called true story behind Annie Palmer, it just gets worse and worse. And so again, this is allegedly the Annie Palmer that the Delister based it on. However, if you peel that layer back, you realize that in fact, exactly paralleling Bathsheba’s story that Kenny mentioned, the person this was allegedly based on was completely innocent. The so-called real Annie Palmer was actually a woman Annie Patterson and she was a British woman born 1802 and she traveled to the Caribbean as a child and she did marry a guy named John Rose Palmer in March of 1820 and they moved into Rose Hall but by that time the family’s fortunes had ebbed and basically they were they were destitute. He died several years into the marriage at the age of 42, which again, not uncommon for the time, and she inherited little or nothing.

1:11:20
CW: I’m trying to remember, did they even own any slaves?

1:11:26
BR: That’s a good question. They had some slaves because they were plantation owners. all white people on the island had slaves or were involved in slave trade, but few if any because again at that point they were basically selling off all their property. So there were probably slaves that were attached to the plantation itself.

1:11:50
CW: It’s always hard with modern ears to hear like, oh that plantation owner was completely innocent but you just mean she wasn’t having demonic orgies and beheading her slaves.

1:12:04
BR: Well, no, in fact, it’s interesting because there were slave revolts around that time and Rose Hall was actually spared precisely because the owners were said to be especially kind to their slaves.

1:12:19
CW: Oh, so in the mixed bag of slave owners, they at least, they were not the bottom of the barrel.

1:12:25
BR: Yeah, I mean, no one here is defending. No one here is defending slavery. It just it’s just a matter of that’s as part of the story. That part of the story is simply not true. So in a nutshell, virtually everything in the sort of so-called true story behind the story is false. John Palmer was not rich and he wasn’t murdered for his money. Annie Palmer was never she never learned voodoo. She wasn’t in the dark arts. She never there was never any cruelty. She had one husband and she died of natural causes 15 years after her husband. So, you know, when you get down to brass tacks and you tease out what’s going on here, the whole convoluted story of the White Witch of Rose Hall is this blend of an entirely fictional character that was sort of lumped together with a real person’s name. So, it wasn’t Annie Palmer, it was Rosa Palmer, who was Annie’s husband’s great-uncle’s wife who was born nearly a century earlier who had four husbands and none of them were murdered. This sounds like an episode of Spaceballs. Yeah, I mean it’s just it’s this process and again we saw this with the Conjuring case, right, where later people trying to build up a story and legend of something scary, they just, you know, cherry pick little different parts of different people’s biographies, right? So, you know.

KB: And I’ll throw in real quick, something I didn’t put in the article or mention is that Bathseba with the Conjuring House was also accused of beating and starving her staff.

BR: Yeah.

KB: So when you mentioned how cruel the White Witch was, you know, like, I’m like, Oh, that’s what she was accused of, too. Like, there’s so many some, we really have to get together and compare to still would it would really be interesting piece, we maybe we can, we can collaborate on that.

BR: But no, there’s really it’s just, you know, when you look at it from a folkloric perspective, it all it all fits together, the tracks are all there, the you know, the highlights are all there. In the case of Annie Palmer, I mean, number one, Annie Palmer didn’t exist. And to the degree to which she did exist, her name was basically stolen and tarnished from a real person who had, who by all accounts, and there’s a quote in my book, it says, to all accounts, a lovable and gracious lady. So again, we see whether it’s Bobby Darnell Jr. or it’s Bathsheba or it’s Annie Palmer, you have these people that are basically being co-opted into these legends. When I was writing my chapter on this, I’ll just quickly read a quote here because I think it’s an important quote. There’s a guy named Terry Hawkins, a researcher whose uncle was an engineer at Rose Hall. And he says, quote, Annie was the blameless lady who has been constantly slandered by generations of ignorant people and whose very name is still being exploited to sell admission tickets to Rose Hall Great House. I hope that James Costello and H.D. DeLisser, who originated and embellished his legend in 1868 and 1929 respectively, are spinning in their graves. And I agree. I mean, you know, just as a researcher and historian, looking at these cases, other people just randomly co-opt other people’s names and biographies for their own legend and to infuse them with cruelty and sadism and murder and dark arts and evil and Satanism. It’s just garbage and this is one of the harms that we see.

1:15:56
KB: Preach it, Ben. Preach it.

1:15:58
CW: Well said, Ben. And Kenny, thank you for bringing your story. I do look forward to seeing you guys kind of compare notes and kind of do a little side-by-side comparison, develop this idea more to kind of contrast Annie Palmer with Bathsheba Sherman. That’s interesting stuff.

BR: Absolutely. Yeah, let’s do it.

1:16:19
CW: All right. Well, Kenny, thank you so much for joining us. Where can listeners see more of you and your awesomeness?

1:16:26
KB: Well, you can see me, you can either go to skepticalinquirer.com and look up my name or you can go on Facebook and type in I am Kenny Biddle and that brings up my blog and I actually started a new blog called Sherlocking the Paranormal and that’s more of a personal thing where I don’t have to be so nice if I don’t want to be. So that’s about it for now.

1:16:50
BR: Cool.

1:16:51
CW: Well, thanks, Ben. And thanks, Kenny.

1:16:53
BR: Great talking to you guys.

1:16:54
KB: You’re welcome.

(MUSIC)

1:16:55
CW: Well, that about does it for this episode of Squaring the Strange. I hope everybody enjoyed hearing what you should not do on a ghost hunt.

1:17:19
BR: And furthermore, things to be careful with. If if you or your friends or family members or acquaintances are approached by ghost hunters, beware of some of those things.

1:17:30
CW: Yes. And if far, far in the future, if you happen to become a ghost and you find out your reputation is being sullied by ghost hunters, you should probably at least send them a cease and desist from the great beyond. So, well, next episode, we’ve got a few different possibilities on the pipeline, so we’ll let you guys be a little bit surprised. Speaking of happy surprises, though, Skepticrate patrons, you wonderful, wonderful patrons who have signed up for $5 and up per episode. I’m going to be sending out fantastic Skepticrates for the end of the year. Got some cool stuff in there. I’ve been assembling some baubles and this will be a nice little nice little bundle package that you can put under your tree if you wish or even in your stocking. It’s not going to be that large. I can’t afford that much in mailing costs, but there should be some nice things to bring a smile to your face.

BR: Very cool, very cool.

CW: All right everybody, take care and stay strange. Bye-bye.

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1:18:47
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1:19:17
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Transcribed with Cockatoo