Behind the Scenes Minis: Ghosts and Their Towns

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and we talked about ghosts of Drury Lane, which I love very much because they're just super fun. I really really liked the quote that we included at the end about how theater is kind of inherently given to yeah, ghost sighting, Yeah, because of its nature.

00:00:37
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:00:37
Speaker 1: There was one article I read by an actor. It was from some time back, who was due in the middle of a play run there, and he took the ghost tour on one of his days off, and he was talking about how, you know, he had never seen a ghost and some of the stories are very like me whatever, and he was like, ah, but then when I got down lower where apparently some of the old foundation can be seen of the third theater or second theater, one of the two, he was like, I see where this could be spooky and make people think they saw things, because it's just an inherently, you know, scary dark place where there's lots of everything's blacked out because those theaters are painted black. In the back end, you could see some of the old beams from previous versions of the theater. There was apparently, I want to say it was in nineteen thirty nine, and I did not include it because of this a story that an entire cast saw the man in gray at the same time. Wow, and that like, clearly this was evidence that he was real. But that's been chocked up by a lot of people to a publicity stunt on the part of the theater manager to kind of you know, bolster ticket sales, and that really there aren't a lot of actual accounts from that cast saying yes, we all saw the same thing. The other thing that I loved that I kept turning up no matter what I was looking for, even if I was trying to look.

00:02:02
Speaker 2: At very old things.

00:02:04
Speaker 1: It was article after article of Patrick Stewart talking about the many ghosts he has seen in his life. Yeah, and I just loved it. He was doing, you know, famously a while back, he and Ian McKellen did Waiting for Goodod together at Theater Royal Haymarket. But like, one of the big stories that came out during that was that he kept saying that he was seeing a ghost in the theater, and I just sort of loved it. There were also many discussions of articles that I would not include because they mentioned the play whose name I am still too superstitious to say aloud. Yeah, I wrote it into a podcast one time, not knowing that you're superstition about it extended beyond the walls of a theater. Oh yeah, no, we don't ever, No, thank you. It's very silly. I know that's silly, and yet there's a part of my brain that just refuses. It will shut down unless you are in situ in the middle of that play having to say the name. You don't say that name. Can you say the name historically about people with the name? I guess, but it would be I wouldn't.

00:03:19
Speaker 2: I wouldn't look for that. Okay, I'll tell you that.

00:03:23
Speaker 1: Like if it were on my list of topics to cover, I would scratch it out and move on.

00:03:27
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:03:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, which I know again, I know this is silly. No one needs to tell me, right, you're being a ding dong that is not having a rational reaction.

00:03:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know. It's one of my things.

00:03:39
Speaker 1: I'm just about. I had always understood it as a superstition about things that should not be said in a theater, and it had never occurred to me that it could be extended beyond to the theater of life. I don't know. Maybe it's one of those things, right, Like my degree is in theater and film study. Yeah, and so I feel like maybe it's just I will never ever say it anywhere ever, in case you don't know, maybe where you're standing used to be a theater at one time. We don't know all the stuff that's been there. You got to be safe. Theater of life says no. Yeah, I've had many friends who just to taught me would just like say it over and over and get out, get out of my house, get out of my party, whatever you do.

00:04:23
Speaker 2: We're not no, not, haven't it No? Not for me?

00:04:27
Speaker 1: I will say. Also, I want to do an episode and there probably will be one in the not too distant future on Dan Leno, because I loved reading about his life. Yeah, particularly I mean, as tragic as it becomes in the end, just how much work he did to take care of other people with his fame. Like he's one of those people who found himself with an extraordinary amount of privilege financially and a platform that he could use to help other people, and he did it and I want to talk about those kind of people all day, every day, especially lately. This seems like a good time to ask you. I know we've done this at live shows before. Have you ever seen a ghost? So I've had a couple of unexplained experiences. The creepiest one when I was in massage school, some family friends generously allowed me to rent a small cabin that had been passed down in their family that was up in the mountains.

00:05:29
Speaker 2: And the first night that I was there.

00:05:32
Speaker 1: I went into it had an old part that was well over, like over a century old, like made of logs, no original plumbing or electricity that had all been added much later. And then it had this like mother in law addition that had been built out of a kit And I was staying in the kit part and I walked into the old part after dark the first night that I was there, and immediately was like, something malevolent is in this place. And I left and shut the door behind me and never went back into there after dark ever again. And I also like, I didn't want to look at it after dark because I was afraid something was going to look back at me out the window, and then what would I do, Like I was in the woods with no one around to help. I would not be in this position to begin with. Yeah, So one night I heard something very strange outside that frightened me and I couldn't figure out what it was. And I realized the next day it was Apple's falling out of the tree. And I was like, okay, well that explains that one part, but not how when I walked in there the all the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I would say, all of the theaters that I was in as like a participant in the play or the or the musical, they were all creepy.

00:07:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, like all of them.

00:07:06
Speaker 1: I mean their big, open, cavernous spaces that until you actually do the performance, is empty aside from the people participating in the play and the crew and the director and all of that. Like right, you're just in this big, echoey dark space with a lot of shadows and a lot of corners, and they were all creepy. When I was a massage therapist at the Grove park In, there are lots of stories about the ghosts at the Grove park In and the most direct experience I ever had there was we were in the spa and I was talking to a couple of the staff that like arranged appointments and stuff, and a spoon from the counter where we made drinks for people just launched itself onto the ground and we were all like, what did that quaw?

00:07:59
Speaker 2: No one was near by, No one was near.

00:08:01
Speaker 1: It, No one was nearby, Like it wasn't like it was precariously on the edge of the counter. I don't know what caused that. It did not scare me nearly as much as the old cabin that I stayed in in massage school. Yeah, I wouldn't have been in an old cabin in the woods to begin with. No. No, there was also the very first day that Patrick and I spent in this house. We did not have any cats at this time, but we had had the you know, the long grueling day of moving our stuff from the one place to the new place. Uh, And we had put sheets on the bed and we got into bed, and I think Patrick was like in the bathroom. Patrick hadn't come to bed yet, and I had the distinct sensation of a cat jumping onto the bed. And we had no cats at that time, And I was not frightened by this. I was just like, there's a ghost cat in the house, and the ghost cat has not made any other visit.

00:09:11
Speaker 2: We had a ghost cat.

00:09:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know I've told this one during a live show, but I don't remember if I've.

00:09:17
Speaker 2: Ever said it on the recorded podcast. Before.

00:09:20
Speaker 1: There was time we were in our old apartment where I had been seeing out of the corner of my eye a cat that wasn't there. And then I discovered when I finally mentioned it one day, that Brian had also been seeing a cat out of the corner of his eye that was not there. And we had cats at the time, but it was not one of our cats. Like we would think, oh, that's gg or whatever. We'd look over and there was no cat there.

00:09:43
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:09:44
Speaker 1: And then there was a night where we were sitting in the living room of our dinky little apartment watching TV and we both clear as a bell heard my dead mother's voice. Oh wow, And it was weird. I don't know if there was just someone in an adjacent apartment that sounded just like her and the sound traveled exactly right, but we like looked at each other like, did you just hear that? It was weird? And then the next day the cat was real, but he had a brother, and we kept them, both of them. So I've always joked because my relationship with my mom was not amazing, right, But she is exactly the kind of person that would dump a stray cat on me, I'm sure, And she was like that was probably her way to try to reach out if if in fact there was a ghost involved that. She was like, you like kitties, here's kitties. Oh, breat great kitties that you wanted. And we had those cats for twenty years.

00:10:31
Speaker 2: We loved them.

00:10:32
Speaker 1: I used to work in a college library that was very old and castle like, and for a while Brian was working for a Dutch weather company, so he worked Dutch hours, right, and they let me work the same hours as him, so our lives matched up. Because I was down in acquisitions, I was not like working the desk and stuff, and so I would get there sometimes that like I would be there in the middle of the night or get there or start my shift at four in the morning, like it shifted, but I would be there alone in the dark. And similar to how you described that cabin, there were just parts of that building that felt weird. Yeah, I was like not interesting going in them. So there was like, if I had to go to the bathroom, I had to walk through part of it and it always scared the heck out.

00:11:17
Speaker 2: Of me, but I did it.

00:11:18
Speaker 1: And then the one real what just happened to me moment that I have ever had was in San Francisco at a hotel that is reportedly haunted, and we had been joking like, hey, I wonder if we'll hear ghosts, and at first we heard this weird ringing noise and we finally realized that there was like inside the wall a loosish plumbing washer that was jingling, and we were like, oh, fully explained. And then later in that same trip, Brian was taking a shower and I was like, I'm going to just lie down on the bed for a minute, take a nap. And I felt clear as any actual physical thing I have ever felt the feeling of, like finger scratching lightly on my back, and I just said, no, thank you, And that was the hand of that. I mean, I don't know, I may have just been having some weird Listen, we are both women of science in our hearts, yes, yeah, but sometimes weird stuff happens. I don't know where it was. I honestly I did not like the fact that when I walked into this old cabin that it made me feel like something malevolent was there. Because the people who loaned it to me were so nice. They were great people. It was a cabin that had been handed down through the family, and there was just stuff in it that was so interesting, and a lot of it was really beautiful, and I would have just explored all through it, happy as a clam. But even though it had, like the first day that I had gone up and they had sort of shown me you, like, here's how you have to turn the water off from the outside, and like this kind of stuff, I was like, Man, this is gonna be so great. I'm gonna be up here two or three nights a week. This is such a great space.

00:13:12
Speaker 2: I love it. And then after the first night, I.

00:13:15
Speaker 1: Was like, m mmmmmmmm, Nope, I there's nothing in that house that I need to see and I never need to lie in a hammock on the porch again, because what I had been doing when I went in there after dark was to put the hammock away because it was a fabric hammock that they didn't want to be left out because it would get mildew right.

00:13:36
Speaker 2: And I was like, well, Nope, no more of that for me.

00:13:40
Speaker 1: Ever, Great we talked about ghost towns this week, sure did. I didn't put in my normal introduction about six impossible episodes and how it's when I round up six things that are related usually somehow and for some reason or another, can't.

00:14:11
Speaker 2: Really be a whole episode.

00:14:12
Speaker 1: And if we did a full on history of some of these, it would probably be possible to do a whole episode. But I thought they were fun together as a whole collection of ghost towns, something I cannot take any kind of credit for, but that I really liked because this was one hundred percent listener suggestions, so they were the topics that listeners asked for. I liked that these were six towns that were all with the exception of Jerome abandoned, but it wasn't the same story all six times, Like all of them I felt like had very different nuances, and even the ones that were like this was a boomtown and then it disappeared like those also were not identical in terms of exactly what happened. Because when I uh kind of went through and wrote down all the ghost town suggestions, I was like, is this going to be six of the same story and it wasn't. So thanks everyone who contributed one of these ideas. I had a semimnal retraction after something I said during recording, Okay, because when we were talking about Centralia and I was like, this seems surprising to me that people would stay there for a decade while this burned out their town. Uh huh. And then I was like, Holly, how much do you love your house and how unwilling would you be to leave it? And the answer is, yeah, quite a lot? Actually, yeah, yeah, I think I also framed it as like people dealing with it for a decade, and it was like when the fire first started and it was more contained, it wasn't that big of a deal, so like people were just dealing with it for more than a decade. The fire had been burning for more than a decade at that point, but it was like more than a decade, but really affecting life in the town.

00:16:03
Speaker 2: On a day to day level.

00:16:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's also like most people can't just afford to pick up and leave right and sign a new place to live. That is as a refrain so many times in so many contexts historically and today. Yeah, there will be the well, why don't people just move if it's so bad, And it's like a lot of people don't have the money to just move, or they have family ties to a place, or like you just said, they love their house and that's their house and it's their home and they don't want to leave their home. I similarly have trouble imagining living in a place where there are toxic gases sweeping out of the ground and possibly a sinkhole just opening up in your backyard one day or under your house or whatever. Sinkholes being one of my weird fears. Oh really one day my house. Yeah, I'm just like, what if one day my house suddenly falls into a sinkhole?

00:17:00
Speaker 2: I had no idea. Wouldn't that be terrible and terrifying?

00:17:03
Speaker 1: It would? But like, yeah, if that were actually my house that I had bought and that I had put love and work into and had raised a family in or whatever, like, I might not want to leave it either.

00:17:13
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:17:14
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, the Centralia story being associated with the Silent Hill franchise, I didn't realize until doing this that that really was about the movie and not the original video game, because I have not seen the movie or played the video game, but I knew that there was a connection. Boy, it's been a million years since I played the video game. I don't think I could conjure many details from it.

00:17:41
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:17:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, the photos of a lot of these places, regardless of whether they are rumored to have some kind of ghost story attached, the photos of a lot of these places are really eerie. I mean because body looks like the like the pro what a typical ghost town that you know, with buildings they're kind of falling apart, and the remaining chimneys and smoke stacks and old khaba that kind of come up out of the ground, out of nowhere. That's its own level of eeriness. Having a place where the one thing remaining is the cemetery, that's not that uncommon, but it's also so remote that it's sort of like, here is a cemetery with really nothing around it now, right, So yeah, I feel like all of these are kind of eerie in their own way. And then of course Jerome, which is like, from my understanding at least a cute little town where tourists can go and have ghost tours and look at a bunch of art and have some wine. And I would do that. That would be a great, great little trip. In my opinion, it sounds amazing. Although then when we had the statistic in there that like four hundred and fifty people live there.

00:19:00
Speaker 2: Like, no, that is very small.

00:19:03
Speaker 1: No, yeah, that's too many people knowing all my business. I don't Yeah, nope. I was scrolling through somebody's blog post of photos from their trip they took to Jerome, and one of the pictures was of an artomat And every time I see an artomac, I get excited. And so I don't know if I've told the artomat story on the podcast before, but I'm going to now. So, once upon a time you could buy cigarettes from vending machines in the United States. You know this, of course, Holly, but our our younger audience members may not know this, that you could just put money into a vending machine and get a pack of cigarettes. And when those machines eventually were outlawed, there a lot of them were still around, and so an artist converted one into an art vending machine with little works of art the size and shape of a pack of cigarettes. And the first one of these machines was at a coffee shop called Penny University, which is in Winston Salem, North Carolina, which is one of the coffee shops that I spent some time at when I was freshly out of college. And so now anytime I am anywhere and I see an arto Matt, I buy something out of it.

00:20:21
Speaker 2: Yeah. I love it. I think it's great, and.

00:20:26
Speaker 1: I feel like there used to be one in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but I may be misremembering that when I looked at the map of where they are located, because there's a big map showing where they are, and they're all over the world, at this point, there was not one. Well at the MFA. It's possible it was. There was one there and elsewhere, because they do move sometimes. Yeah, so yeah, I love I love the art of Matt and I love getting a little thing that pops out of it and being surprised by whatever little piece of art I have found.

00:21:03
Speaker 2: It's the best. So yeah.

00:21:05
Speaker 1: I think this was my final October contribution to this year's October episodes, and it only kind of skirted the world of the eerie and ghostly, but it was fun.

00:21:18
Speaker 2: I know.

00:21:18
Speaker 1: I feel like this year I haven't been as spooky uky yuky as I usually am. Yes, sorry, well I had a werewolf episode, so very in skeptical village anymore. I'm like, it's not real. I don't know if this is my age speaking or what, but yeah, yeah, Well, whatever's happening on your weekends. If you want a chance to go out and look at some art, I hope you get to look at some art. If there is an arto Matt and you get a little, little cigarette package sized piece of art, I hope it is something that surprises and delight to you. Whatever's happening in your world, boy do I hope it is going as smoothly as is absolutely possible. I know there's a lot going on and a lot of it's not going smoothly. So whatever's happening, I hope it is as easy as as possible. We will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We will have something brand new on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.