From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They call me Ben.
We're joined as always with our super producer Paul, Mission Control decand most importantly, you are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know, coming to you live from various places, emphasis on live, which will be important later in the show. One of the most amazing things about our imperfect country, the United States, is no fooling, it's national parks. It's a huge, huge country,
and a lot of it is dedicated to wildlife. And I think we've all had that experience when you talk to someone who's not from the US and they're like, Hey, we're gonna land in New York. What are you doing this weekend? Oh, we thought we'd drive over to Chicago.
All right.
Yeah, there's so many amazing national parks in the western side of the contiguous United States. I've not done extensive traveling over there, but man, it makes me want to just exist on that side of the country for a while just to see the parks.
Well, I'll tell you who has done that to a great degree is a friend of the show, Alex Williams, who has posted up in many a national park in that and other parts of the country.
He is a bit of an outdoorsman.
I love it, I love it and a huge fan of maps as well. Check out his show Ephemeral, which in my mind proves what podcast can be and can do. You also, a spoiler, might hear some familiar voices in those episodes. Now we have been fortunate to explore some, but by no means all, of the US national parks in person, and they're absolutely worth it. The US is vast to a degree, it's still filled with wild country, and it's home to so much amazing flora and fauna.
Yet depending upon whom you ask, these national parks may also be home to something else ghost. Let's begin the tour. Here are the facts. We won't spend too much time on this, but it's important to know the history of national parks.
That's right.
The story of the National parks system officially begins back in March of eighteen hundred and seventy one, when Congress created the Yellowstone National Park and the what was then territories of Montana and Wyoming under the control of the Secretary of the Interior. So I've always found to be a bit of a perplexing concept, the interior of what like everything within the United States.
I don't know, it's a weird one, but what are you gonna do?
And this was as a benefit for the public, the idea of you know, having green spaces where people can hang out and maintaining them.
Yeah, son, gone are the days of you know, the European royal reserves. Right, Like back in Europe, under various monarchies, the king or the crown would have their own hunting lands and peasants could be executed for venturing onto these grounds. So it's a big step to say, hey, we were keeping this green space for everyone.
Well except for the indigenous peoples prior to that, right, and even some homeowners that you know, people who had moved west especially and kind of staked their own land. And then somebody came through and said, actually, this is part of our thing now, so you've got to go, you.
Guys, I was about to say, I recently kind of started thinking about the idea of how much we take for granted, the idea of land, you know, owning land, who does the land belong to? Luckily, I guess through a lot of convoluted legal practices and documents and things like that, we've more or less sorted that out. People can't just come and plant a flag in your yard, but there was a time where that would come and you would pay the blood price.
And litigation continues today with various Native American communities who are regaining control of land that was repeatedly stolen from them. This is simply an historical fact, and I think it's also very American for there to be these beautiful ideas and writing and concept with ugly real world practices behind them. I mean, what happened, as imperfect and at times evil as it was, is that the creation of Yellowstone led to a global movement to create, maintain, and if needed,
protect national parks. And that protection clause becomes ever more important as industry starts coming in and saying things like, hey, we'll sponsor this park, and all we want in exchange is the mineral rights you know what I mean?
Well, yeah, or a little chunk of we want to have access to a little chunk of land to do our thing, and you can you all keep the rest. We don't want that. We just need this one area because there's lots of copper.
Over here, so we'd all us Yeah, we'd also like a right to renegotiate this based on what we find.
You know, every two to five years.
Well we still see stuff. We talked about it pretty recently with when huge car manufacturers are trying to expand or something, and that practice of just deciding, well, actually we kind of need where we need the stuff that you're occupying right now, Like that whole thing, we need that, so we're going to use the laws to take it.
Our domain is imminent. Yeah.
Yeah, And Ben, I don't think this. I really like where you're going here with the positive side of national parks because I think for me personally, national parks are on the whole a majorly positive thing. I just I think you're right to say that there's like this this side to it, right that like everything is a little darker than we we'd like to think about it.
Well, look at what we've got, look at all this natural splendor you know that exists under our purview.
But let's not talk about the ugly way.
We got it right right.
People stumble into places like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon or glaciers and they say this is amazing, and then millennia old cultures say, yeah, we know we live here.
We were there, so we were there, dude, we're there.
The whole time. One more step in history we owe to President Theodore Roosevelt, most famous of course for inspiring the stuffed teddy bear he creates. He's like the famous amateur wrestler Abraham Lincoln. He creates the National Parks movement, the big one, because he's inspired by a naturalist and very eccentric convenor named John Muir.
Wasn't Roosevelt also like a big game hunter. He liked the sale stuff.
Yeah, conservationist meant a different thing back then.
I guess it did.
It's sort of like Darwin eating every example of a species that he discovered.
Yep, just so true story.
And shout out to our pal Jack O'Brien who hits us to that one a while back. So Mure stood tall against the dominant sort of zeitgeist of America at the time, which said, look, progress is what we're about. We're manifesting destiny. That means the land is here to be used, it's just resources to extract, and he would say, no, we've got to protect this, and luckily his argument won the day he pushed for the eighteen ninety Act that created Yosemite National Park, and then he was also instrumental
in the creation of multiple other parks. That's why he's called the father of the National Park System.
Well, I mean, if there are no kind of base level rules around what's like on the table to develop, you know, to destroy and kind of like piece together other stuff out of, then everything's on the table. So it's very important that this was established when it was, or else you wouldn't have any of that stuff.
No, No, we pave the we would pave the world. And now the National Park System covers four hundred different areas.
We're talking about.
More than eighty four million acres across all fifty US states and then the territories and commonwealths including Saipan. Weirdly enough, huge Marine Reserve. The service employees over twenty thousand people, and that's a lot, but it's nowhere near enough to have a single person monitoring every single acre of land. The wildlife is dangerous at times. That means that if you visit national parks, you are responsible for your interactions
with the wild adam. It also means that some unscrupulous visitors can get away with breaking the rules, polluting, littering, starting forest fires and you know, murdering folks well.
And the people that maintain and you know, watch over these parks do it out of passion.
You know, they love it.
They're not like highly paid, and oftentimes there's a skeleton.
Crew kind of situation.
If there's ever a government shut down or funding gets scarce, park maintenance is kind of one of the first things to go, as we saw with Joshua Tree and there was like a government shutdown and so many people you know, vandalized and destroyed a lot of the titular Joshua trees.
And perhaps most controversially, there is to date, as we record, no official tallly of just how many people go missing on public land in the United States, and there's there's
not a great way to fix that either. And we've had episodes with experts in this such as Professor Brian Colt who talked about the Zone of Death and yellow Stone and David Politis from missing for one one, But there's another conversation, one that sends a shiver up the spine of true believers, and every year, to be honest, delivers piles of cash to the park system. Guys, there are so many stories of ghost in these public parks. Let's gather around the campfire, maybe spins some spooky tales.
And it's every one. It's every single one. By the way, it's not just a couple of parks are haunted. Every single one that we've looked at has at least one ghost story, whether it's directly tied to, you know, one of the most sought after places in the park or one of the most sought after inns that is immediately on the park, you know, property, or of right like adjacent to it.
Scooby and the gang really have their hands full.
Everybody gets one Spider Man rules. Here's where it gets crazy. We're not kidding conspiracy realist. Now, sure, some of the more skeptical amongst us may automatically roll our eyes or tentacles or algorithms, I guess at the thought, but you still can't deny millions of visitors appear to at least believe they encountered something in as you said, Matt, every single National park covered by the Park Service. I mean we can start with more notorious examples. The Grand Canyon, dude. Honestly,
people think the Grand Canyon is haunted. If you've ever been there, it looks haunted. It lives up to the hype. It is indeed grand.
There's stuff in them cracks.
It's probably ghosts or agent civilizations.
Yeah, Ben, what do you what do you think is accomplished by the tentacle rolling? Is it the same? Is it the same kind of thing with it? It just lets just lets people know.
Yeah, have you I mean, have you ever bored an octopus? It's very apparent.
They do this.
No, do they find me fascinating.
When I hear roll tentacles? I'm picturing like it doing sort of like a breakdancing move, you.
Know, nice, nice and h And I also wonder this is unrelated, but this is fascinating. We know the octopus dreams. I wonder if the octopus encounters ghost or one it thinks of the afterlife, that'd be cool story idea octagosts.
Have you seen the vampire squid? I mean, that thing's a demon from hell.
There's some new pictures of I think it's the glass octopus, which is so cool. It's been making the rounds on the nature nerd stuff.
But enough about octopus is let's get to Eldovar Hotel.
Yes, known for its octopus ghost We're kidding, but it is known for ghosts.
It's uh exclamation marks.
Oh gosh.
Yeah, And a lot of the reporting met you and I were talking about this off air, and we made a little joke about it in the notes because a lot of places would copy and paste for lack of better work some of the stories and things that come directly from the Grand Canyon's official website. And you can tell because a lot of them.
And how'd you put it that? I like the way you put it.
Well, it's ending a sentence as though like all of this was happening at the or or you may think that was spooky, but what wait until you hear about the Eldovar Hotel.
And it's almost as if the narrator is turning around dramatically as soon as they say elov our hotel.
But yeah, the writing about this hotel, as well as a lot of the other stories we're going to be talking about today. Do seem to be stories that would be easily retold by like a guide, let's say, or a bus driver or somebody working at a hotel that's going to tell you about the stories that are occurring within this specific hotel or this national park.
Ring ring. Hello, it's me folklore. Yes, because I'm also doing the telephone game.
That's what it feels like, and maybe that's why it's a little frustrating as we're you know, researching this topic in general. But it's also it does send tingles up your spine if any of us to believe. So, I guess that's what we're on that journey today.
Yeah, and if you don't have, I mean to exercise empathy, right and understand the perspective. A lot of these people who hear these stories and maybe take them at face value, they've never heard them before, they don't know how often they've been retold. They're hearing them from one person and that is key, right.
And they're just rolling through for a couple of nights, probably.
Right, exactly exactly they want an experience, right.
So expectations a hell of a drug.
Right, Yes, Actually you nailed it. This place, the Eltovar hotel is located in a very dramatic spot. It's like about twenty feet from the south d of the Grand Canyon. It opened in nineteen oh five, so before the Grand Canyon National Park was really a thing. And when it opened, it was seen as the absolute peak of luxury pun very much intended. And I didn't know this, but it was part of a chain, a hospitality chain of restaurants
and lodgings owned by a guy named Fred Harvey. It was one of the most famous Harvey hotels of the day.
Yeah, and I didn't know what that meant. I had no idea what that meant. The Harvey Company's mister Fred Harvey. But this guy was apparently one of the most what would you call, I don't know, Like I imagine someone who owns a hotel that's really excited that you're at his hotel, And that is what I see when I imagine Fred Harvey.
Yeah, and he came up along with the age of rail you know, and so he would purposely build stuff to service passengers on various important railway intersections or passages or stops. And yeah, he was an absolute nut about it because he was very good at promoting tourism in the American Southwest.
Looks to have also made a stand in Vegas with things like the Nevada Lake Tahoe Harvey's Resort, hotel and casino, which comes up if you're googling, like crazy Neon signs nice.
He also got a One of the other things he'll be remembered for is being one of the forces that kind of tamed the wild West, which was a very short period of American history. But he's the one who was like, let's bring some sit down restaurants where you know, Harvey hotel restaurants, you can eat here without being shot.
Well sort of the almost like fantasy of the wild West that was more sanitized. Like that's a big part of what Vegas was was giving people some way to feel like they were participating in that kind of like legacy, but it was all very you know, kind of buttoned up in like disneylandish.
And this all leads us to El Tovar because obviously.
He's sounds so cool and sinister.
Because you have to say it like you've just turned around to announce it to the camera exactly, we should do a commercial for Altovar. So if it's if you're listening Fred from the Afterlife. So okay, this thing's been around for more than a century. As the ghost stories start, and over time it gets this reputation for bizarre experiences.
The things you'll read.
Most often in sort of the copypasta tour guide notes are a ghostly figure wandering through the front entrance, a painting whose subject appears to like track you wherever you move, and so much more.
We'll get to it, but like.
First, not to be too much of a MythBuster, but we all know what's up with a painting whose eyes seem to follow you wherever you go, because we've all seen that, Uncle Sam, I want you for the US Army picture. It's just perspective that you can paint that does not imply a ghost, That implies a pretty talented artist at best. But it doesn't answer the questions about the You guys saw the thing about the gravestone, right right, So.
A lot of these stories around, some of these alleged hauntings at the hotel hinge on this mysterious gravestone hidden and mixed the foliage. The foliage to the left across the drive from the front entrance. It's humble small and flat on the ground, bearing the very humble, small and flat inscription Pearl A Ward eighteen seventy eight nineteen thirty four.
P I rl Right, I've never seen that spelling before. Pearl.
Yeah, and a shout out to anybody who just heard the ghostly squelches there as we're talking. That is indeed my stomach, My stomach is now haunted.
We'll keep it in.
Get a meat pie, some fish and chips.
Is somebody guess where Ben is?
Oh?
Gosh uh so in in in the red lodge apparently, so this is this is weird to me because you can we can paint such backstories off such small things.
Is Pearl p I r L?
Were Pearl's parents perhaps not very literate, and wanted to name their kid after something precious? You know it always yeah, breaks your heart. But we won't know because no one is exactly sure who Ward Pearl Ward is or was well?
And is the hidden nature of the stone more a product of if things were built around it, or was it like obscured for a reason, you know, like the questions do come up.
That is a great question.
Yeah, can can the altovar somehow not afford landscaping. I mean, is that just not in their budget? Do they want it to seem like it's in disrepair. In some stories, Pearl Ward is a cowboy who dies sort of drifting through the area and no one knew their name, this person's name when they buried him, and other stories, Pearl is a she Pearls a female who is one of
the hostesses from the Harvey Hotel. They were called Harvey Girls at the time, and according to that legend, she lived, worked, and died.
Under unknown circumstances on the property those tours, Ben, it'd be great.
Well, I just you should, Ben, But come on, Usually, if this is someone who worked at the hotel, there's no record of their passing in the nineteen thirties.
Right exactly at that point, they would have had to have something because it becomes increasingly suspicious, right, especially if you're living on the property, you're working with tons of other people in this big operation.
Oh yeah, I mean, you know, entrepreneurs of that scale in that era.
I would have wanted to cover their butts.
Okay, there's one scenario where I see it working. Hit The gravestone was created by somebody who knew the truth about what happened to Pearl ward this person that's not actually where Pearl is buried. That has nothing to do with that. It's to remind whoever did it, who works and or owns the hotel, that of what they did.
Do we know what you did last summer and.
Every time you leave the property, you got to see your gravestone.
We could also I mean maybe maybe that birth and death date. Maybe it's some sort of code. Oh at webs we weave?
And did they plant the hedge around it? Why didn't they just dig it up?
You know what I mean? Like just no one's exhumed it exactly.
So is it all smoke and mirrors or we should say stone and dirt.
Let don't have some shovels.
Boys, let's do it.
And you know what, when we're digging, what we need to do is have two of us dig a one of us be on the look I call look out. Okay, the for the caped figure that is often reported to exit the hotel's front stairs and entrance rocket a black cape by the way, and then go over two pearls grave, hang out there as if in contemplation for a minute, and then wander off behind a nearby building called the Hope House before disappearing.
Oh yeah, and this is my favorite part about Eltovar Hotel. There is an elderly gentleman that has been seen walking around. He appears sometimes when there's a big party going on, sometimes when there's no hardy at.
All, walking the grounds, you say.
Walking the grounds and or the house itself, the hotel, and he's often giving you a little like if you walk up to him as a guest or walk past him, he's just kind of there for a moment. He's like, hey, oh hey, make sure you head up to the ballroom. We got the big gathering to get together. It's gonna be a swell time. Head on up there. And guess who people think that is?
Is it Fred Harvey?
Old Fred Harvey? But there is it is. It does get a little weirder because the people see him all over the place, right or somebody that they attribute to Fred Harvey, but the timeline maybe doesn't match up so good.
Yeah, the profiling is a little weird too, because old Man is not you know, the most specific thing, and you know, the spooky, dooky part is when they show up at this party, there's no record of them being invited. They're like, this old man told me, and they're like, what old.
Man, you've always been the caretakers exact, yeah, exactly.
There, or there's no party at all. The hotel staff is like, what are you talking about?
You know, we don't have a holiday party for Arbor Day, my friends.
I've always thought it was so interesting that Stanley Kubrick, being such a snob, glombed onto the Shining, because it is a bit of a broad you know, Stephen King is a bit of a broad rider. But the Shining there's something about it that does capitalize on all of this stuff we're talking about, the idea of haunted places, the idea of like what is the history the tortured kind of legacy of a place or whatever it might be. And a hotel is the perfect kind of like location for stuff like that.
Yeah, it's e liminal space exactly.
Think about how difficult it would have been to create a giant hotel at the edge of the Grand Canyon in the early nineteen hundreds, right late eighteen hundreds to the like brand new nineteen hundreds. You're having that stuff
built and people are probably getting maimed and injured. Really badly because you're so far from civilization, right there's you can't can't send them on over to the local doctor because there's no local doctor, you know, for a couple hundred miles or whatever, right Like, that's insane, first of all. And also I think this is for me the reasoning
behind the Fred Harvey sightings. If you were able to achieve that feat of creating a giant building out in the wilderness like that, you would be massively proud of it, right or you, I think likely you'd be massively proud of it, and it would be not only an achievement of human ingenuity, but placing it where it is to be able to look from from within that place you built looking out upon the Grand Canyon must be I don't know, very close to religious.
It's ozmendious look upon my works, he mighty. And there's one catch though, As as much as I agree with you there, Matt on that on that excellent observation, Fred never got to see this particular feat because he himself passed away in nineteen oh one, four years before the completion of.
That's why he's there, Ben. He never got to see it in real life. So now he's got to hang out there for just give people, like be their personal concierge and.
Lie at them about when the party's going.
In his timeline, there as a party and he's super excited about it, and he liked.
Yeah, exactly. It's like a superimposed reality.
And I love it.
I'm a huge propos I actually kind of believe in some of that stuff, but our beliefs or our own. This is one of the most famous stories, but there are two other incidents. You can find them reported in the local newspapers usually around Halloween. To be honest with you, there's a couple from New Jersey and in the story no timeline attributed. This is the Griffiths couple and they they woke up in the night. The wife woke up because an unseen presence was quote pulling on her clothing
in the middle of the night. I don't know about you guys, but when I first read that, I immediately thought there was a ghost who was like, get dressed, lady, and started like throwing her dress on her slacks or whatever. But no, it was just like tugging at her PJS.
I saw this meme the other day where it was like every HP Lovecraft story. It's like I saw a monsters what was it like?
Yeah, I can't describe it, but let me spend four pages doing just that.
Shout out Lovecraft. I like Lovecraft, but yeah I.
Had some problematic views. Yeah. Yeah.
But as for the clothes pulling, that's that's weird. I would not enjoy that. But you know, maybe your maybe your clothes got stuck, or maybe I would enjoy it.
I don't know.
I don't know situation. I guess it depends you guys.
Seeing that that film from back in the day called High Spirits starring Liam Neeson, it's.
Not when he was in his rom com era kind of.
It's a nineteen eighty eight fantasy comedy about uh oh wait it's is it Liam Neeson? Yeah, it is Liam Neeson. It's about a haunted castle that is being turned into a tourist destination and the ghosts have you know, lovable high jinks, Beetlejuice esque with the with a visiting couple played by Daryl Hannah and Steve Gutenberg.
Oh, Daryl Hannah was such a babe.
There's a close pulling scene in there that may not have aged well.
Steve, I cannot believe Steve Gutenberg was ever like a leading man.
He is.
Late Daryl Hannah is so above Steve Gutenberg's pay grade it's not even funny.
Well, you know Hollywood magic, right.
Uh.
Speaking of Hollywood magic, there's a couple from Los Angeles who said the following At the Alto var they walked past their television and stopped because when they looked at the screen there was the face of a bearded old man peering back at them. And I was trying to figure out more about this tale, which gets just tossed around so often. It doesn't seem that any investigator asked them, Well, was the television on? I feel like that might explain it.
Yeah, it was the duck was a duck show with all the big bearded guys, duck hunters.
Duck show. Wow, I got there? Or you know?
Or could it? Was it a reflection in the black mirror?
Right?
Was the person actually in the room.
Perhaps the guy just needed a shave and didn't realize how how much he'd let himself go.
Maybe it was a window and they didn't understand televisions. I don't know, dude, Maybe they were just I'm gonna say it, maybe they were high.
High spirits. Indeed, by the way, I was just watching a trailer for that movie. I've never seen hide nor hear of this, and it looks like a delight.
It's fine. I loved it. Yeah, it's it's a fun romp.
Es.
Yes, yeah, that it's of that era. It's of that era, but not of that caliber.
So there are a couple other things in Grand Canyon. Really quickly. I just want to throw out here if anybody ends up going there, because I've not been and I want to go now. Of course, there's a place called the Phantom Ranch that exists there that allegedly there's this this thing called Phantom Ranch. There's a it's the property, I guess, that's called the Phantom Ranch. There's a place called Phantom Creek within the park that is in immediately
adjacent to it. And according to the stories, the folklore, there's this guy named John Wesley Powell who set that thing up. All right, this is in the eighteen sixties eighteen seventies when all of this is happening, and he's this one armed person who was in the Civil War. He's considered a hero. He did not die there. According to the folklore. But again kind of like how we were joking around about mister Harvey. It's thought that this guy was proud of this achievement or he it was
in some way impactful in his life. So his spirit haunts this Phantom Ranch, which is aptly named, I must say, but.
It does and very Scooby Doo.
Sorry, the Phantom Ranch, Scooby Doo, and the Phantom Ranch it does.
But there's this the little twist thing to it, and that a lot of the folklore in the Grand Canyon, I feel like, has this kind of thing. There's another place within the Grand Canyon call Bright Angel Creek and there are there were huge stones from that creek bed in that area that were used to build a lot of the structures in Phantom Ranch. So you've got angels worked in there, right, and phantoms just in the names, which feels like a great way to sell sell people are.
Going, and rumors of giants back in the days. There was also, of course, we're not joking about the ancient civilization thing. Check out our earlier episode on that. That was a weird comment on reporting of the time as well.
Yes, yes, and one other thing, guys, this story of we've we've heard so many tales like this when we've covered ghost stories. A crying woman right out in the woods somewhere that you can't really see this person, but you hear the whiling. Yeah, exactly that. But it's it's again a twist on that. Right, you can look up a place called Transsept Trail t R A N s e Pt Trail where I think it was again, I
think it was the nineteen thirties. There's a place called the Grand Canyon Lodge that burned up and after that fire, it's thought that some spirit involved in some way haunts that area.
To this day, in this very day, and here we can already see those common traits of folklore stories told repeatedly. Small changes over time give it a twist to make your lier on a different and then there's always a lack of certain specificity. It adds to the overall mystery and at the same time it makes it increasingly difficult to nail down some concrete facts. We'll see this in other ghost stories as well. What do you guys think, should we take a break and go to some more examples. Absolutely,
and we have returned. Now we're traveling to Yellowstone And you know, we talked about this a little bit off air. You can find the history of Yellowstone Park, the history of all these parks. Really, we're not gonna spend too much time on them. We wanted to get to some of the juicy ghost stories speaking of haunted female figures,
haunted women. Here's when Matt Nole we I think all read about this one, the Headless Bride of the Old Faithful in yet again another in with an interesting, unique experience of the paranormal.
Yeah, it's an inn, but it's not in love. You know what I'm saying. Don't force others to marry people they don't want to marry. That's the story of the Old Faithful Inn.
Just don't do it, even when you know it's not gonna work out, don't do it, you know what I mean.
You gotta let people do what they want.
And you can find this story of the Headless Bride all over the place, including the official website Yellowstone Park dot com.
It goes like this.
Back in nineteen fifteen, there's this guy in New York and he's sort of a blue blood. He's the one percenter of his day. He owns a shipping company country here. He owns a shipping company, and he's got a rebellious teenage daughter just full of hijinks, and he has arranged a marriage for her with a young guy from an equally wealthy New York family. But she says, no, you can't control me, old man. I'm in love with an unnamed household servant.
Right.
Right.
So Dad's like, ah, this guy's got bad intentions, unnamed person. But you know, despite the father's let's say issues with the person that his daughter's going to marry, she went in and did it. She got hitched.
She did.
Indeed, she said, unnamed older household servant, I am in love with you. And the dad was bad about this, but she would brook no argument. He tried to talk her out of it, and he said, look, this is not just me being a stodgy, bossy old man. I am genuinely concerned that this dude's intentions for you are not romantic. I think he has an evil, sinister plan. And you know, in the modern day parlance, he thinks that this guy's a gold digger. And she says, I'm
not going to hear it. She goes ahead, she gets married. The father tries to make a poison pill, as we would call it in corporate mergers and acquisitions. He says, Okay, if you guys want to get married, I will give you an extravagant dowry as your wedding gift. And as a condition of this dowry, you have to agree you as a couple, have to agree that you are getting
no more additional support from our family. Ever, you're not getting an inherent and so you're not getting a share of the business fleetwood Max style, go your own way. As a matter of fact, you need to leave New York forever. According to the story, this was a bluff on the father's part. He thought this would force these people to call off the wedding because it would remove the servant's access to the larger fortune.
His gamble was a failure. The couple said, okay, yeah, we agree. Because we're so much.
In love, we're going to go have a baller honeymoon at Yellowstone and we're going to stay at the hottest inn for We're going to stay at the hottest in for honeymoons, the old faithful in. And there's a little specificity here because they were staying at Room one twenty seven. That doesn't always happen in these ghost stories. We know, the Old Faithful In was pretty new at the time. It was still less than ten years old. It was
the scene and be seen place for family vacations. But as we heard from various versions of the legend, things went wrong for the couple very quickly.
Yeah, why is it important that they were in room one twenty seven. Well, that's because there was a huge argument in that room that other people heard on let's say, The Faithful Night. And why were they arguing This is a happy new couple, they're on their honeymoon. Well, according to the story, it's because the new husband basically did kind of what the father was warning the daughter he
was going to do, or what he was about. Allegedly, according to the stories, he was gambling a ton, and not just while hanging out somewhere at the Old Faithful Inn, while they were making their way to the end, right and hanging out in tavern, spending a ton of money on drinks and all that kind of stuff. And they were arguing because basically the guy blew through all the money they had and they couldn't even afford to pay the bill at the old, faithful.
Right, which makes the staff a lot less helpful. And about a month into the honeymoon, you.
Know there, squiches a long honeymoon.
I was thinking that too, you know what I mean, Like, I get that they're wealthy, but I I read that with no small amount of envy. The idea, it's up there with the idea of people in this in that day and age saying oh, well, we're abroad to Europe for the summer. I do love the continent, not too
long a stay, merely a third month or so. And it was just a different, different world, right, because it would it would take it would take a significant it would take a significant amount of work for us, any of us to figure out a way to not be at work for a month.
But uh, but there we have it.
And it turns out that kind of privilege doesn't necessarily make people happy, Like you said, Matt, It goes to this one night the couple had already been arguing on a regular basis. It was the scandal of the hotel, and the daughter had called her father for help and he refused, kind of cold, but he set those terms and during this very violent, louder than usual shouting match. On this evening, the husband storms out, never to be seen again.
The hotel staff gives the bride her privacy for a while, after about two days. It's a weird number. But after about two days they go to room one twenty seven to check on her. She's not going to be like, where is our money? Right?
And also sorry about your loss. Also you owe us for this plus these other two days.
Call your dad.
And the maid who is looking around because you know how hotels are laid out. When you walk in, there might be a foyer or a hallway and you'll see like a maybe a living room, suite or a bedroom. First you have to walk in into the restroom. It's not clearly visible. So she walks into the restroom or the bathroom, and she screams because the bride's corpse is filling the bathtub. It's riddled with blood. It's a dexter
level or animal level crime scene. It's got all the ingredients of true crime except one thing's missing.
Her head.
Yeah, yeah, head's missing. Bodies in there, lots of blood. Not great, not great for the bathtub. For you know, the reputation of the hotel, especially for the new bride, probably not great for her, and they basically looked for the head. They didn't notice the husband carrying you know, a human head when he stormed out, which you know, obviously he is the suspect, right, the last person to be seen with this person. They were arguing a whole lot.
What I think the tales say they searched the property for like a week or maybe even longer.
Yeah, yeah, they searched up and down across the hotel property for yeah, at least a week. The amount of time they's been searching varies depending on the version of the tail you hear, but it was definitely more than just like a one afternoon search. We know this because they did eventually find the head. They found it due to the smell emanating from an elevated area, the highest interior point of the hotel called the Crow's Nest, where
the band would play and just to pause there. That's a really cool idea to have the band playing from that elevated area. But somebody, somebody got a bad width figured out something was rotten in the Crow's Nest and they went up there, and you guessed it, that's where they found the head rotting away. And ever since then, guests have reported seeing a ghostly woman walking down the stairs of the Crow's Nest in her white dress, carrying
her head under her arm. This is brought to you by under Armour.
Yeah, I'm sorry, no.
Stally fine, but you know, this is one of those stories where it's on the official website.
It very much is. It's on the official website. It's on numerous blogs about the area. You can find it published as fact in multiple like collection of paranormal Things paperbacks you know which we grew up loving. And you have to ask yourself, is this true? Is this false? Is this embellished?
Well, it's got to be helping the hotel in some way to even be to have a place on their website, right exactly. If it hurt, you would just leave it off, and you could, you know, anyone who was interested could go to any other blog that's out there that writes about these things. But if you went to the official Yellowstone website, not there, leaving everybody who is you know, thinking about going, oh well maybe that's just a tall tale.
When you put it on the website like that, I feel like it gives it such credence or it lends so much more credibility. Yeah, I guess it is credibility legitimacy here. It's just weird to do that unless unless gonna make some profit.
Exactly.
It's what we kind of were setting up at the at the top and through all this, we can tell you the truth about this story for sure. It's this Ghosts are only real when someone was decapitate it. It's the only time scientifically proven that's a real headless horseman is a thing. Yeah, it's proven French Revolution. That's why they still have ghost or or we're funning with you, just like the assistant manager of the Old Faithful In
George Borman, who made the whole thing up. He's got a nineteen ninety one interview with Desert News and he says, Okay, here's what happened. I was in the hotel one time when it was deserted overlook style, and I heard some footsteps down the hallway, and I walked out and looked because there was nobody there but me and one or two other employees, and I couldn't find anybody who could have run down that hallway at that time outside of my room. And so I went and looked again, and
I saw nobody. He says, he went and looked three times, and he said later this got him thinking, huh, what if there was a ghost story for the Old Faithful in that would be interesting, that would add a hint
of mystery to the inns vibes. And so he says he made the whole thing up in nineteen eighty three, and then ever since that moment, because he was still working there for a while, he says, people would come to him and repeat the fictitious story to him, and like even to the point of like man explaining his own story to him.
Nice. Nice, There's more, there's more telephone details, sir, to this story. That's that's fascinating. It checks out to me.
However, not all of the ghostly activities or alleged paranormal experiences of these different parts have such simple explanations. And you know, I think it's really important for us to point out as well that it goes into this expectation idea that Noel mentioned earlier, the idea that we have to the idea that people came into Old Faithful having heard that story, perhaps accepted it as fact, and we're
therefore on some level primed to see or experience something. However, we we have other cases where the answer is not so clear cut. We got to go to a cool place next a place called Mammoth Cave. And you know we're talking about this off air Mammoth Cave. When you say we want to go to it, we don't just mean go to it in this conversation. We want to go as a crew.
Yeah, well, let's just go ahead and mention it at the top. We want to do this thing called the Violet City Lantern Tour. Yeah, where because this is okay, So Mammoth Cave. It's the longest known cave system in the world. It's got four hundred and twenty six miles worth of cave that you can kind of check out. Some of the areas you can't check out, and there are new areas being discovered still, which is my going.
To the extent.
Also, I love I love the worth of cave. Like, how many miles worth of cave is this before I pave for the tour?
Four twenty six miles? And what they do with this, I was going to say, velvet With this Violet City Lantern Tour, they shut down all the lights because there's a ton of human made light that exists in the cave system so that when people go on tours they can see right, nobody gets hurt. There's illumination via electricity throughout the cave system. But in these tours they turn off those lights and they've got lanterns and they take
you through the cave by a lantern light. I want to do that because it appears that there's more than just bats down in them caves. Oh there's coughing. Wait a second, I know this story. Bed.
Also, we should mention this story scares our colleague Gnols so much that he has left the episode for today. Actually, we're kidding, is a little bit under the weather with the bit of a cough, and will be rejoining us soon, But for now, he gives us his blessing and wishes us to continue the subterranean exploration.
Oh yes, So let's put our minds in the place of being inside a system that consists of four hundred twenty six miles of cave worth of cave worth of cave. Imagine being there, deep beneath within the earth, let's say, and just what your mind, the tricks your mind would play on you, and the other worldly things you might imagine could be down there.
Oh sure, yeah, I mean it's true because subterranean flora and fauna are still being discovered. We don't know how far these cave systems go. We don't know what's living in there. There's some cave systems that are for all intents and purposes sealed off. They've become their own ecosystems, unreliant upon sunlight and all those things surface dwellers love.
We can also we can also say that for most people who have never been in absolute darkness, and being an absolute darkness will lead you to hallucinate.
Yes, Now, let's bring in the history of this cave system, or at least the the like American version, I guess, the the Anglo centric existence of this cave and the history of that, because it is, it gets dark pretty quickly. The wasn't it purchased for some I mean, I guess it was a fairly large sum back then, but like ten thousand dollars US.
Yes, ten thousand dollars in eighteen thirty nine, and we can borrow a bit from our handy inflation calculator, ten thousand dollars in eighteen thirty nine is the equivalent of three hundred and twenty nine eight hundred and thirty four dollars today, so very expensive. But still that's a lot cheaper than I thought a cave system would cost.
Yeah, a huge cave system that was not again like it not its super early stages of mapping, but early. Right, A lot has been discovered since then. But he didn't just buy the cave system itself. In the property above the caves, he also bought humans.
He did.
The deal included you know, adjacent property, and they defined adjacent property as also enslaved human beings because again this was eighteen thirty nine, and one of the enslaved people that he took ownership of as part of this deal was a cave guide named Stefan Bishop. And at this point, Bishop probably knew the caverns better than any other person alive.
And I really appreciate that you point out we're starting the story from the kind of Anglo central view, because native populations again knew about this cave for thousands, thousands and thousands of years.
Bishops has a celebrated important places for those cultures. It's not yeah, it's not just a cave.
It has immense cultural and spiritual significance. Doctor Krogan does not care about that. He doesn't give a damn about it. He immediately starts tours. And so Stephan Bishop is giving people these amazing tours. He's showing them Echo River where blind albino fish have evolved, miles of all these unique
twisting passageways. Meanwhile, on the surface, doctor Krogan is busying himself brainstorming new ways to monetize this natural wonder, to turn it into a cash cow, to make his ten thousand back as soon as possible, and then just make more and more money. And you and I were talking off air about is more his strange idea, one of
the strangest that he put into place. It was the idea that he could build a special camp inside the cave for people suffering from tuberculosis or consumption as it was called in the day.
I don't know. I think it's a good idea for something to try.
It's not trying, I agree, you know.
Well, because a lot was there wasn't a lot known about what could actually like, what are the conditions that would help someone get over tuberculosis?
Right?
And the thought came up, well, what if this the low relatively low temperatures of the cave system compared to the outside world at the time. What if those temperatures would be conducive to reducing the effects of tuberculosis on the human body. Maybe again worth a shot. So they actually built a fairly large area included. There are several they call them huts, but they're these like they look almost like it does look like a hut, I guess, but it's a mini little stone and wooden structure.
Yeah, they call the hut, call it a cabin somewhere in between.
Yeah, they're tiny, but it's enough for a human being to be in and not to live comfortably, but to survive, right, I think I don't know how many they built, but they built a bunch of them, and there are two that remain to this day that you can go visit.
Uh.
Yeah, I think most of the reporting I read said that you originally had eleven huts built in there, and the idea was that you would get fifteen patients, which means some of the patients were couples, because that's you know, or maybe parent and child or siblings. But they say fifteen patients arrived, and honestly, folks, we don't know whether
these patients genuinely believe this treatment would work. But we can only imagine, given what you described met at this time, that they were desperate enough to try anything.
You know.
That's kind of it's like when we look at cancer cure conspiracies and the con artist involved in sort of bilking desperate people. As far as we can tell, doctor Krogan is not himself a con artist. He is actually trying to see whether this will assist people who are suffering from consumption. However, as history reprove, this treatment did not work, two patients died that same year. All fifteen
of the patients got worse. Doctor Crogan himself would go on to die from tuberculosis in eighteen forty nine.
Yeah, ten years after you buy the cave system. He does of tuberculosis too, So you might imagine, oh, there's been some death in this cave that we know of, and we can tribute tuberculosis to those deaths. That that disease comes with a lot of coughing. It would make sense right to hear coughing in the distance somewhere within the cave system, right as you're touring through it, especially by lantern.
Light, especially by lantern.
Yeah, if you elect to take the Violet City tour of the cave, the tour guides will take you to that blackout like you described, Matt, where you actually go down into the dark that most people have not experienced. And then they'll give you the tour with the oil lamp and they'll tell you the stories and you can actually see remnants of this tuberculosis camp experiment. That is
a real thing, that's not a legend. And some rangers will tell you that they have experienced strange things down there, that they have seen shoves from unseen forces, They've heard inexplicable footsteps, or coughing in the distance, or even being grabbed or touched when they knew there were no other people around. I have a question for you, man, because you know I go to you for audio advice often. Is it possible with the acoustics of a cavern that
you could frank someone with ghost coughing? Like could you be far enough away around a bend or something and cough and have the cough reflect off the stone to reach the person observing the camp.
I don't know the science behind that, Ben. What I would do is get a really long tube that is highly flexible. I got set it up at one end of it higher up in the cave system, and then I would have it go all the way down to lower in the cave system, and I would do a little cough into the tube, okay, at one side or the other, and make everybody think the cough's coming from way up there or way down.
There ever, Okay, because I was thinking, you might say, set up like a time delay motion sensor with w with a speaker, so that it doesn't start coughing right when you trip the wire, but or trip the light, but it starts coughing, you know, four minutes after.
So I think, love it. I love the way you think. In his high tech I'm going to say the tube system is the way I'm going imagine the sound of dragging the tube back to your location after you've used it.
How long is this tube? Wait? It's huge? Crazy, it awkward? You know what, Let's do both.
Let's do both.
Uh how much will they sell the caves for this? Is?
We do have specific folks like one guide, Larry Purcell, had another story.
He went on.
Record and he said that he experienced something unrelated to the tuberculosis camp that terrified him.
He said, he was.
Giving in tour and during some part of this tour, it was the Violet City tour, he noticed an African American family standing behind the rest of the group and he was surprised to see them because he hadn't noticed any African American tourist in this particular group. And he said, huh, it's crazy. The father is wearing a white panama hat and he's watching with rapt attention as we're giving the
oil lamp tour, right. And then when he reached the part where they turn off the oil lamp and turn the electric lights back on, he looks for this family and he can't find anybody. There were just extra people there when the oil lamp was on.
Yeah, no, thanks, extra people while the oil lamp was on. Don't like that phrase. Don't like any of them.
Yeah, it reminds me when we went on our brief excursion to the Hoover Dam. I think that's a close recent comparison for US. Hoover Dam very much man made cavern. But what we saw is that the tour guides at regular, frequent intervals, we're counting the number of people in the group.
That's why sometimes there are extra families.
Oh man, I love that idea. Okay, so do octopus believe in ghosts? And then the extra extra tour guide members. Okay, gold, Jerry, we're making gold here, Rebel Stiltskin style, all right. Apparently the room where the rangers saw this family is called the Methodist Church because miners used to have religious services there when they were exploring resources in the cave, and during those days, because of the rampant racism, if an African American guide or his family attended the services, they
would have to stand back at a distance. Wow, I know it's a bummer. And those two things aren't necessarily related. They're the kind of things that have just enough commonality for people to put some red string together, turn down the lights and tell you it's scary.
Yeah, you know what, Why don't we Why don't we pause here? We've got a few more parks to visit before we're done today. But we need to hear a word from our sponsor, so we'll be right back.
And we have returned.
Let's visit we don't if we don't do anything else, let's at least visit the Devil's Dead.
We've got other places to go.
Like you said, Matt, every single national park has some kind of ghost story, and we will tell you why by the way at the end. But the Devil's Dead is in Gettysburg National Military Park, Matt. Have you visited Gettysburg.
I feel like I did as a kid, but I have no recollection of actually going through there. Yeah, because it's getting muddled with other Civil War parts I've been to.
Right, because we've seen a lot of Civil War parks in our time. Yeah, this is a site commemorating one of the most historically significant and a very bloody battle of the US Civil War. There is a site in the park called the Devil's Den. It's world famous amid paranormal investigators, ghost hunters, psychics, you name it. And it's really interesting to look at pictures because it's like, imagine if you are if you are a Union or Confederate soldier and you are in the midst of you know,
unreliable ammunition. You're probably not feeling great because you've been malnourished, you're probably suffering from some disease, and you're being forced to fight Napoleonic style, which means you're told to line up and then just sort of march at each other and hope you don't get shot. It's a really shy way to wage war, honestly. So if you're in that situation, you need to make friends with geography. So a place with a bunch of boulders is great. You can break
up your death march line. You can hide behind rocks long enough to reload without getting shot. This also the same advantage carries on to the enemy forces. So it's no surprise that the Devil's Den became a bloodbath.
Yeah, I did. I kind of want to describe it a little bit more. You found a great description from someone named Mark Nesbitt, and I guess we should just the quote is awesome, Ben, do you want to just do it?
You should do it, You should do it?
All right?
Well, okay, this is what it looks like, according to Mark Nesbitt, who was a paranormal investigator and a former park ranger, which that is very important. Here's how he describes it quote, the Devil's Den looks like some giant just dropped these huge boulders the size of houses down onto this one spot on the battlefield. On a sunny day. It's not too bad on a cloudy day. It's kind
of ominous at night. It's just ridiculous. Yeah, exactly. I love as in it's creepy, right, that's that's what he's implying.
Yeah.
Yeah, And I like to point out he is a former park ranger. He's also the owner of the Ghost of Gettysburg tours. Uh, he's coming there with experience, but also it's good for him if you go on a ghost tour.
Yeah, that's the way. He said.
He would often get the willies when he was just walking around the area at night doing security checks. And he spoke in depth with our pals at how stuff works, about this are alma matter, how SFT works. And he wrote a book or he wrote a book series I should say, called Go of Gettysburg, wherein he chronicles a lot of unexplained experiences at Devil's Den. And they have all the you know, all the usual stripes of folklore, right often unnamed people. The timeline is a little vague,
but the experience itself is sobering. One lady said she was climbing around the boulders with a friend. She felt a hand grab her ankle. Could it be her friend? She looks down she sees a ghostly soldier grabbing for her. She screams for help. She looks up, Oh, and there's her friend. Her Friend's not touching her at all. She looks back down. The man's gone.
Whoa stranger danger.
Gotta love a good ankle grab.
M let's take full Can we cut that? Keep it out of context. I'll never forget.
Well, my good friend Matt told me all those years ago, you gotta love a good ankle grab.
I don't know how that would be in a weird way, but that's that's to me. Just uh, that's one of the creepiest things that I remember having to me as a kid. My sister like, be under the bed and grab my ankle.
Just frightening.
Right, It's a very vulnerable part of your body. And then additionally, since you're laying down you're trying to go to sleep, that's terrifying. That's terrified to the point where even if you know how it happened, Yeah, like you see your sister, I would still be furious.
Well, yeah, it feels fun though. I think that's why I like horror movies. Now, I'm not sure.
We enjoy the things that scarred us, right, I'm in a similar situation. Well there's there's the other one that's a little bit less weird, which is did you see this the helpful hippie story?
Yeah, this one's This one's great. This one is like, oh, man, I'm lost, where do I go? I don't know what to do? And then an apparition appears out of nowhere and says, it's over.
There, man, exactly that way.
Look where you're looking for is over there.
And then you look in that direction and then you look back and he's gone, wow, and he's like flower child, weird hat all like picture the hippie.
It's the hippie stereotype. He's got a shoulder length hair, bare feet, you know. And Nesbit says this, we'll give you what Nesbit says. First, he says, I can't believe she's describing exactly what a Texan looked like at the Battle of Gettysburg. She would not have known that as a tourist. However, with great respect, mister Nesbit, we have
a proposition for you here. A lot of people do live off the grid in national parks, you know, and there are people who wander from park to park or live in nomadic existence, like the people who follow rain bow gatherings things like that. You know what are oh gosh, what are they called? Rubber tramps? You know, train hoppers. People are living outside of the system. I think it's completely possible. A lot of those people, by the way,
are very very cool. I think it's completely possible that there could just be a guy living out around that area who shows up and helps people.
Amongst the stones, amongst the stones, stones, stones.
I love it. By wait, speaking of stones, just before this is an interjection everyone, Ben, I was looking at Death Valley, and I know we looked at that one too, because there's a national park called the Death Valley National Park, and they've got this phenomenon that I think we've mentioned before but we haven't looked into it in detail. But it's these stones that are heavy and stone, and somehow, without any intervention by human hands or seenly animal hands, they move.
Yeah, they sort of slide along.
It's a dry lake bed where these stones are, and they move and you can see the trails of these stones having moved over time. No footprints, no any just explanation outside of oh, those stones move, I guess.
Right.
And also when you see that you're already in death Valley, so your primary concern is, Man, I hope I get water before I die.
Yeah.
Yeah, these But it's just really cool because there is there are like pretty good scientific concepts ideas about what could make those stones do that. It has a lot to do with ice forming when it gets super cold, but like small amounts of ice forming amidst all the particles already imagine of sand and dust and all that
other stuff that's out there. Somehow, when there's enough lubric lubrication right at the front facing part of that stone, and then there's a strong enough wind and then all these other factors could potentially make it happen.
It removes the friction maybe, Yeah, I mean that's the idea. Also, because that area is so it is so dry, so arid. Uh, there's the idea that like the flash floods that occasionally or the rain that occasionally encurage plays apart. I think there is a scientific explanation. I'm with you though, as to my knowledge, and this may be incorrect, there is no documented like video footage of them moving.
It's just point A and then point B.
Right.
Not to cut you off, Ben, I'm not kidding, not hidting anyone out there that's listening right now. I'm sitting in my house. My son and my mother are downstairs hanging out. My dogs are both asleep behind me, well behind me. Yeah, as you were talking, Ben, I felt something touch my leg and then my shoulder and that was it. And there's nobody around me. I'm not kidding.
I can confirm by the way that we saw. We saw Matt look down first at his left leg.
And then it is right, and then look behind him.
And because he was so crazy polite, you were like, hey, not to cut you off, but.
I'm just kind of sitting with the feeling in this moment. But okay, Harvey.
Hovey, Hovey, you heard you were talking Sack about ELTIV.
There's so much more to learn about all of these parts. Again, we mentioned there's not a single park I think that you can look up that doesn't have something haunted. Look up the twice hanged man. Also in Death Valley, story of a guy who allegedly killed a banker, got convicted, got hanged, then he was cut down, then he was put back up hanged again for like a press opportunity. This is in nineteen oh eight in a place called Skidoo.
Really it's called skid Do ski Doo. You can see remnants of the town that are still out there in Death Valley. There's so much to that story. But allegedly they, I guess the medical practitioners at the time cut his head off to see if he had syphilis or some other brain disease that would cause the his erratic behavior because he was like a I guess, he was a
pretty well known businessman at the time. He was well known in the town, and he killed a beloved, allegedly beloved banker, and so they're like, what the heck caused him to do this? So they supposedly cut his head off, and now even now you can see basically this headless ghost that's walking around trying to find his head.
Wild Again, like we said, it's scientifically proven that the only real ghost are people have been decapitated. They you know, don't get mad at us, folks, that's just science. And also don't fact check us on that one. But yeah, we might even return with more ghosts from national parks, because, like you said, Matt, there are so very many out there. If we did one for every national park, we'd be looking at over four hundred.
Yeah, well over dude, the Indiana Dunes and look up Diana of the Dunes. That's a thing, Diana of the Dunes. It's a fascinating, great, actually wholesome ghost story. If you want to check that one out.
Look up also all the myths surrounding mounds burial mounds which were around, you know, well before the idea of the United States, and indeed they were actively suppressed by the United States, in some cases destroyed. And also if you happen to live near any take the time to go visit them. It's a fascinating peak into the hidden history of this continent.
Oh. Last one, ben, Yeah, last one.
Last, if you have ever gone through it's the Smoky Mountains. What's that one called Great Smoky Mountain National Park, I think is the name of it. There's an area, Oh, let me see if I can find it. It's called the Thomas Divide Ridge where you can find Oh, you could find the Thomas Divide overlook that is on one of the one of the main roads there. If you look out at night at this Thomas Divide Ridge, allegedly you can see lights that flicker and shine in this
area that is not populated. They call it ghost lights, smoky mountain ghost lights. I have seen video of these things, but I've never heard anyone give a better explanation. I guess for what possibly could be.
Because it can't be swamp gas.
I don't fit miss mountain gas.
Maybe Mountain I've had Moore may too.
Oh boy, Yes, we're talking about this off air, and we could. I think that one could be an entire episode because we can take what we learned from previous ghost light conversations and will of the Wisp things and kind of case test, right.
Yeah, I just want to go. I want to go spend a couple of nights out there in the wilderness on the ridge that you can view from the from the street there. Yeah, because I I you can get footage of it from a certain angle. I want to know if the angle of observation has anything to do with the way the light looks. Right.
Yeah, yeah, you were saying, you were saying, we need to find the specific spot, right, And it could be a multi person operation too, where we find the specific spot and we have one person stay there and maintain that, and then we have somebody else try to move toward it and see what they can.
I don't know.
We could triangulate, we could do some interesting things, especially in the age of GPS.
Dude, it's not that far from us. It's Tennessee, right, that's like me, it's ours. But we can make it.
Yeah, we can make it happen.
We can also, you know what, let's tell the bosses this is valuable research. And then we don't have time to explain why we can't be in the meetings.
Yeah, guys, we are exploring the wilderness.
Let's just call into the meeting from there.
Where are you would go?
Great? They make satellite phones, still right.
They do? They do?
Okay, so we'll get with accounting first to get the sat phone, and then we will okay, Yeah, wheels are spinning.
I think we got this.
Yeah.
X thirty seven B still up there is gonna be there for a while. We'll be able to make contact.
Yeah, well, who knows what. We'll ring out there into the ink and we might get X thirty seven B. We might get the Chinese one. You know, we know how to say hello and all those languages. It'll work out.
So why I'm sticking with you, buddy.
Well, see that's why I'm sticking with you. That's why we hope you are sticking with us. We'd like to answer this question, folks, why would national parks in particular garner so many tales of ghostly activity. Well, without saying whether or not ghost or real, we can tell you expectation plays a big role. You were talking about this
a little bit too, Matt. When people enter a place being told, perhaps numerous times that paranormal activity might be present, on some level of consciousness, even if you're a skeptic saying I'll disprove this, you are going to be more primed to look for unusual things. Some stuff that you might ignore otherwise become you know, takes on other implications, right like if you're if you're in a grocery store or in a crowded part of your city or town, there are a lot of things you ignore just to
get by. You know other people are around, you know there's going to be other stimuli hitting hitting your wonderful sensory network. But if you're in a new environment where people have already told you look out for that headless person, then you have a higher likelihood of feeling like a visual movement you can't track in the distance, or something comes from somewhere beyond the mundane realm, and I think that's something we have to remember. Plus it makes for
a heck of a story. And we did reach out to the National Park System. We went to the top of this one, folks, and what we found is that there's so many allegations of ghost in individual parks that the best way to learn more is to contact the parks directly and they'll answer you because they are awesome, tireless people. The rangers and other officials who maintain these resources are, in our opinion, heroes. And I don't know, man, something you said earlier, which I think is such a
good point. We have to apply the willingness of the park system to say play along, or maybe, let's say, encourage interest in naturally human history. They've got a sense of humor as well as respect, and they're kind of leveraging the interest in the paranormal as a way of encouraging interest in the stunning, very real beauty of the world around us.
Yes.
Yes, so if it's a conspiracy, it's like a good conspiracy.
It's a wholesome conspiracy. Again, it makes you want to do, like what I probably wouldn't want to travel to Chickamungo, which is another place in Tennessee. It's like it's an historic National Landmark, I guess kind of, and it's got a forest connected with a natural area. It's another Civil War related thing, and I would ever go there. But there's a thing there called Old Green Eyes that's allegedly this thing at night that you can see. Want to go see Old green Eyes way more than I want
to see the Civil War history. The Civil War history then becomes a little cherry on top that I get for my green Eyes exploration.
Mmm, like how they give you candy at the dentist. Also think about that one. Oh man, Yeah, I think that's a great point.
That was. The timing was just so good.
So folks, we know we went long on this. Thank you and apologies and condolences to our super producer Paul Mission Control decand for sticking with us.
As we.
And I'm in a weird place too, man.
Probably we probably want to call it a day. We'll have no Old joining us for future adventure very soon. And for everyone who's hearing this, we would love to hear stories from the ghost in your neck of the Global Woods, your.
Local national park.
Even if you don't think there's a ghost story there, go check it out and help us learn more about it as well. As you're a fellow conspiracy realist. You can find us on Instagram, you can find us on Facebook, and can find us on x You check out our weird avant garde social media videos that we're doing, and if you don't want to do any of that, if you don't sip those social meds, then why not just give us a telephone call.
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