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come from the bottom part of this lane here, oddly enough, where we are now, and as if it was coming from the abbey there.
Oh, yes.
It was a wonderful feeling of peace.
It seemed to take away all my tiredness after a long day.
How I wish I could hear it.
I wonder if I should have the ears to hear.
You may, you may not.
Maybe tonight.
You’ll have to wait till around midnight.
Never mind.
We will keep tryst.
It’s actually quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
A giant hairy creature, part ape, part man.
In Loch Ness, a 24 mile long bottomless lake in the highlands of Scotland.
It’s a creature known as the Loch Ness Monster.
Monster Talk.
Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
Welcome to part two of our two-part coverage of 1965’s The Stately Ghosts of England.
An NBC made-for-TV movie about haunted estates in England, with an interesting cast featuring the husband-and-wife team of actress Margaret Rutherford and her husband Stringer Davis, along with celebrity clairvoyant Tom Corbett, tour a trio of homes to find evidence of the paranormal.
If this isn’t the first such television show, it’s certainly pioneering in the field and includes some use of early ghost gear to try and capture something unusual, including time-lapse photography and parabolic microphones.
Check out the show notes for links to the full movie and the book upon which it was based.
Now, let’s continue part two, our stately Ghosts of England coverage.
Monster Talk
Let’s go from there to our Salisbury Steakhouse.
Salisbury Hall.
So Hertfordshire, East England.
And I’m saying Hertfordshire because Blake screws it up.
Hey, now.
Salisbury Hall, this is a tough one to initiate.
Close to St Albans.
So Matt and Blade and I, we went there last year.
It is a fantastic town of old Roman settlements, a bustling modern city today.
But Salisbury Hall is, well, they described as being a small…
premises but I think it’s still very beautiful currently owned by a Mr and Mrs Goldsmith well I think I think they’re still the owners but this was reputed to be the home of Nell Gwynn so I’m sure lots of our listeners will have heard of her so she was a
an actress in the 17th century, but probably more well-known to us today as a mistress of King Charles II.
And I did laugh when Margaret Rutherford said, the king’s mistresses were notorious and legion.
The king’s mistresses were notorious and legion.
Very appropriate for St Albans.
Yeah.
So the claims are that visitors and researchers have reported…
general hauntings, cold spots, eerie atmosphere and the ghost of Nell Gwynn as well.
And what I thought was amusing was when they started speaking about, or the owner said that he’d never seen her.
And then he said, well, actually, Nell Gwynn’s ghost was seen by Sir Winston Churchill’s stepfather.
So you think they’re going to say by Sir Winston Churchill, but no, it’s his stepfather.
No less a person than Sir Winston Churchill’s stepfather.
But then it’s said that Sir Winston Churchill had seen the ghost of…
Abraham Lincoln when he stayed at the White House.
So maybe he was sensitive to this kind of thing.
Imagine Abraham Lincoln appearing and saying, put out that cigar, please.
I will let Matt talk a little bit about Tom’s findings here.
Oh, Tom’s findings here.
Tom is our psychical clairvoyant, or excuse me, celebrity clairvoyant.
Celebrity clairvoyant.
Society clairvoyant.
Society clairvoyant, yeah.
Society celebrity clairvoyant, not a medium.
No, no, he was…
He’s a large.
Extra large.
So, yeah, this one was interesting.
I mean…
What I remember them hearing were footsteps.
That there was, you know, someone as a…
I think the lady at the house when she was a little girl growing up.
And that was a sister, wasn’t it?
Or was it a wife?
I don’t think we ever found out.
I believe that was his wife, Mrs. Goldsmith, is how they referred to her.
And she talked about how when she was a little girl, she was sick.
She had a horrible cold.
And she heard these footsteps coming down the hall.
She thought that someone was coming to check on her.
And yet the footsteps went one way and never came back.
And she found a letter, I believe, of someone who had lived there before that had also stated the same things, that these footsteps could be heard.
And it’s just kind of interesting because I believe that Tom had found out that, oh, you know, was there something behind this wall?
Was there a fire or something?
So there was nothing there now, but it used to be.
the hallway would continue down.
Right, the fire burned down that whole wing of the house.
Yeah, that was another wing of the house that had burned down.
I believe 1813, I think, is when that had burned down.
So the ghost…
walks down the hall and through the wall, and they only hear the footsteps going one way.
So that was an interesting thing.
But it seemed like there was another ghost.
Oh, that was the extra ghost.
That was a ghost on top of Nell Gwynn.
Yeah, because Nell Gwynn was the…
the impish gutter snipe, I believe she was referred to.
And when you have Margaret Rutherford calling you an impish gutter snipe, she made it sound like a good thing.
And I was amazed just what an accent can do.
She was 18, a redheaded, impish, witty, loyal gutter snipe who had made her way up from the streets to be an orange seller, to be eventually the best loved actress and comedian of her day.
Well, Nellie came from the poorest streets of London, where life was lived to its fullest, and pleasure taken when and where one might.
But then as soon as Tom tells you about this second ghost… Did it feel like there was things?
She worked her way up from being an impoverished imp to being the king’s whore.
Right.
Exactly.
Okay.
But I do want to add, too, that Mrs. Goldsmith, I thought it was just…
suspect that she had been drugged up when she had this experience.
Yeah, because she had such a bad cold.
Had a few hot toddies.
Probably.
Those are medicinal.
I didn’t get the feel.
You guys may have felt differently.
The vibe I got from this is this is posh celebrity ghosts
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
This is not proof of life after death.
This is proof that…
ghosts also have class, like they have a class structure, right?
But it really didn’t feel like I was supposed to initially believe.
I was just supposed to believe that if you have a fancy house in England, it’s probably haunted.
That was the thing I was supposed to believe.
I don’t know.
Yeah, yeah.
And it was well done because I think that message really came across.
And one of the interesting things that I didn’t see…
And the credits that you do see in the credits of most ghost hunting shows these days is for entertainment purposes only.
Oh, yeah.
Because that should have been there.
Oh, true believers.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
But as soon as Tom talks about the second ghost, he says that, oh, you’re wrong.
There is more than two.
There’s a third one that I met on the bridge.
And then they didn’t say anything else.
Yeah, well, she gets just, again, I think Margaret Rutherford at this point ends up in the…
the the hangar and finds the the airplane wasn’t that cool and surprising with the mosquito fighter yeah yeah uh and it’s uh so and she’s like oh another ghost um the prototype of the gallant little mosquito fighter bomber um you won’t find that in council housing right that’s interesting
In the infield house, yeah.
That’s right.
Exactly, exactly.
But while she’s walking back, you overhear Tom on the bridge talking about the third ghost.
So we don’t get to hear much about it other than she’s really nice.
Yeah, she was a woman.
But what does he then say about Nell Gwynn?
So we basically have Margaret Rutherford asking Tom, can you feel her presence?
Is she here with us?
What does he say?
Yes, yes.
You do it so well.
It’s basically, yes, she’s here, but she’s fading.
I don’t believe she’ll be coming here for very much longer.
Fading, she is.
Yeah.
She’s reaching her state of rest.
She’s very definitely here.
Is she here?
I mean, is she in our midst?
Oh, yes, without a doubt.
but she’s fading.
I don’t think she’ll come to this house much longer because she appears to me as though she’s finally reaching her state of rest.
So there you go.
I want to kind of like tie this bit up with a bow before we go on to Bowley, Bewley.
But I looked into this because I just, I wondered if Nell Gwynn had actually ever lived there.
And so it’s a little bit more complicated.
That’s bold.
She lived here.
She gave birth to their first son upstairs.
This was such a romance.
And she says, this, this is Nellie’s house where she loved and laughed and to which she now returns.
And she didn’t.
actually live there.
What?
She didn’t live there.
She spent some time at a cottage on the grounds, but she actually lived in London, in Palmore.
So she didn’t live there.
I don’t know if she gave birth there.
There might be some documentation on that, but her spirit apparently doesn’t linger there because she used to visit…
Charles, when he was going there to attend to business matters.
And that was the cottage that she stayed in.
And presumably he stayed with her there.
So she didn’t live in the house.
So how could she possibly be haunting the place?
Wow.
There you go.
She’s faded.
Well, that’s a bummer.
I feel like the rug’s been pulled out from under me and now I’m questioning everything.
Anyway, I guess we should move on to the third and final property.
So we have Beaulieu, and that’s in Hampshire.
So it’s Beaulieu, the palace house.
Which I would have totally thought was Beaulieu.
Beaulieu or Beaulieu.
And I’ve actually heard different pronunciations, but Beaulieu is the most common pronunciation and the one that they use in Stately Ghosts.
So let’s go with that.
And this is owned by the Montague family, but they will – Still owned by them.
They’ll capulet it out to renters.
So next door you have the crumbling abbey ruins dating back to 1204.
So going back to the time of King John, who’s of Magna Carta fame, was forced to sign the Magna Carta.
But it was run by the Cistercian monks.
I love that word.
Cistercian.
It just sounds so cool.
It sounds cool.
I don’t know what it means, but it sounds cool.
It means a German shepherd.
Oh, that’s Alsatian.
Sorry.
Cistercian is a flower.
It does sound like Cistercian.
We used to have those growing in our backyard in Sydney.
But anyway, we’re digressing a lot tonight.
So Beaulieu is haunted or said to be haunted by a grey lady and a blue lady.
So, again, we go back to the idea that ghosts, you know, aren’t seen in colour because of the ectoplasm, but they talk about a grey lady and a blue lady and they talk about specifically phantom monks, as they say, chanting.
And the sounds of bells as well.
So there is a church nearby.
It’s the Beaulieu Abbey Church or Church of the Blessed Virgin and Holy Child.
So it’s Anglican.
That sounds a bit Catholic to me.
It does.
But it’s not because this place was wound up into the whole disillusion of the monasteries.
Henry VIII basically…
seizing the wealth of all of these uh these churches and right which i thought was it that the little side quest thing was the cistercians were a subset of the benedictines and they were saying how that they had originally had a poverty vow but then by the time henry the eighth uh does his whole i get to divorce and i also get to keep all the catholic wealth thing uh they had already sort of gotten corrupted from the original values and had wealth apparently so
Yeah, yeah.
So apparently they had been, I think, pretty legit at one point and then were viewed to be, I think, heavy drinkers and stashing wealth and all kinds of corruption was going on.
But, yeah, certainly earlier on they were very well known for their commemoration of the dead.
And so at Bewley, there are lots of claims of people chanting at 2 a.m. in the smell of incense and people seeing monks, in particular a monk in a brown habit on the ground.
If somebody woke me up at 2 a.m. chanting, I would be incensed.
That’s a fact.
This was all really an enigma.
Yep.
The Lord said, I was in the water.
For everyone who remembers our 1990s electronica chanting phase.
That was a big thing.
No, no, I didn’t know about that.
Oh, yeah, that was a big thing, yeah.
It was the hotness.
I was going to talk about Tarboli Rectory and the reclaims of the sound of chanting.
But I did some digging into those claims.
Some of the claims at Beaulieu are that people can smell incense.
And that makes me think of some research that I did into Borley Rectory, where some of the residents, especially the foisters, would talk about the smell of incense or the smell of perfume or…
bacon even wafting through the premises at night and in doing a little bit of research into that it seems that there was a company that wasn’t too far away maybe a kilometer away or which is a little under a mile away called Bush Boken Allen and my father used to talk about them so it was a company that made perfumes and they made syrups too so like brown sugar syrups and honey syrups and
various syrups for foods.
And so I think that that was accounting for those strange smells that they were getting.
And there might be something like that taking place at Beaulieu if we think in terms of natural explanations over paranormal ones.
But, yeah, that’s one of the claims.
But the sister, the sister who was saying that.
Margaret Thatcher.
Yeah.
I saw Ms. Slocum from Are You Being Served?
Stunning hair.
Stunning, stunning hair.
She was talking about that incense while standing next to a bunch of flowers.
And I’m sure that there have always been flowers in the house.
That’s a good point.
Beautiful gardens, yeah.
Oh, totally.
You can see Stringer Davis, like, knocking her away.
No, you fool.
You’re doing this terribly.
I did think that was a fun story, though.
It was.
She’d heard the chanting and then she spoke with, I think it was a friend of hers, and she just started mindlessly playing a tune of the chanting that she’d heard.
And this friend then said, oh, so you heard it too.
I thought that was creepy.
Yeah.
They were very loud last night.
But what I want to draw your attention to, Blake, I don’t know if you picked up on this, but there was an interview with a guy, they referred to him as Michael Sedgwick, and I think he referred to himself as an author.
Here’s a little informational insert on Mr. Sedgwick.
Michael C. Sedgwick, 1926 to 1983, was a British motoring historian, author, and curator who served as a preeminent authority on automotive history.
Educated at Winchester and Corpus Christi, Oxford, Sedgwick began his career in publishing in 1948 before becoming the curator of the Montague Motor Museum, now the National Motor Museum, at Buley in 1958.
During his eight-year tenure, he established the museum’s library master index and conducted extensive research for several major works by Lord Montague.
Although he resigned his curatorship in 1966 to pursue freelance research and writing, he remained an integral figure at Bewley as director of research and a member of its advisory council until his death.
In 1984, the Michael Sedgwick Memorial Trust was established in his honor to support scholarly research and publication within the field of motoring history.
Sedgwick’s association with the 1965 television documentary The Stately Ghosts of England arose from his first-hand experiences while residing on the Beaulieu estate.
In the film,
He provided a measured account of an unexplained event from December of 1959 in which he observed quite definitely chanting, drifting in uneven waves from a hill opposite his residence late at night.
Sedgwick noted that he had unsuccessfully checked his radio for a Latin service at the time, only later discovering a potential correlation with a local villager’s death.
Rather than definitively attributing the sound to the abbey ruins or identifying it specifically as Gregorian chant, Sedgwick’s testimony offered a historical and personal narrative of auditory phenomenon linked to the estate’s monastic past, contributing to the broader folklore of the site.
But when he spoke about the experience that he’d had, that I think he was sitting there, he was in a cottage on the premises.
and maybe Nell Gwynne lived there as well, but he spoke about how he’d heard the heavy and painful sounds of men carrying a burden down the garden.
So a burden, they’re referring to a coffin.
And that made me think of the Lord Dufferin.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
I thought, oh, my God, that’s some kind of omen that a death in the village had occurred that day.
And he referred to that, too, and said that.
It did in every way sound like they were hiding a body.
It really did.
It really did.
So I thought, oh, Lord Dufferin.
And again, it’s just these stories coming out in.
You know, the same stories, you know, ghosts, ghostly monks and ghostly nuns and ghostly coffins, but just different premises, but same stories.
The chanting was an interesting addition to this one, though.
The monks.
Well, yes.
And I, yeah, when we were watching that, Matt, it just made me think about…
some of the investigations that you’ve done and one in particular you’d spoken about, I think it was in Colorado Springs.
Do you want to tell us a bit about that?
Something that could possibly account for the apparent sounds of chanting?
Well, they were referring to this chanting as kind of fading in and out, like it was on a bad radio station or something, a distant radio station.
So, yeah, when you brought that up, yes, exact same thing happened in this place that I was investigating in Colorado Springs, which was an old church that had been converted into a newspaper office.
It was the Colorado Springs Independent.
and uh spending the night in there now these these you could hear the sounds of a choir singing uh in the middle of the night in there and it only happened at night yeah um and it was probably i was just part way through the night i realized what it was that was making the noise that was making this this choir sing and that was uh snow tires
driving down I-25 in Colorado Springs, not too far from the church.
And snow tires have those nice little studs in the metal studs.
And when there’s no snow on the road, they sing.
The tires will just sing on the road.
And of course you get a Doppler effect where as they’re coming near you, the sound goes up in pitch.
And when it goes away from you, it goes down in pitch.
So you’ve got multiple different pitches going and they almost get to this point of harmonizing with each other.
And you get into a place that has a lot of interesting acoustics, like a church.
And you have a choir singing for you.
Now, with all the noise and everything else that goes on during the day that we don’t really pay attention to, you don’t notice any of it in the daytime.
But at nighttime, when everything is calm, you start noticing this.
So I thought, I wonder if something like that could be happening.
And there, absolutely, because tires during that time were called a bias ply tires.
And the rubber was harder.
The spacing of the tread blocks, it was more uniform.
They were evenly spaced.
They weren’t very acoustically engineered at all.
They were ribbed in like a zigzag sort of pattern on the treads.
For her pleasure.
Exactly.
And a lot of the roads during like the 1950s, when they were hearing this so much, were a grooved concrete.
And they were like large slabs with expansion joints and everything.
You do that on like I-10 if you’re going through Louisiana.
Yeah, exactly.
oh life could be a dream if i could take you up in paradise up above if you would tell me i’m the only one that you love life could be a dream sweetheart hello hello again um yeah that’s that’s how that song was uh written um but uh the thing the thing is is is
People have referred to those as singing tires, or they would hear the highway hum or the concrete choir.
These were normal for people to refer to these kind of sounds this way.
And it would, at night, there would be probably less traffic than there would be during the day.
So it would fade in and out.
And the sounds would rise and fall.
And there were plenty of roads around there that could have generated these sounds.
But at night, when you’re creeped out just slightly, your mind does the rest.
Your mind just takes over it.
We like to interpret patterns and everything else.
That’s what we do.
But it does.
It sounds like multiple voices.
And it just…
You know, if your windows are slightly open, like with the author there, he opened up the windows because he was letting all the smoke out from him smoking.
So he let all the smoke out opening the window and that’s when he heard it.
And, you know, so if like you’re fatigued and it’s nighttime and the landscape is kind of empty.
Your brain really loves to anthropomorphize.
That’s right.
They had that member of staff who they interviewed as well, and she spoke about hearing the sounds at midnight, so not 2 a.m., but she spoke about having a long day and hearing the sounds lifted her, picked up her spirits, and made her feel less tired, even though it was midnight.
Yeah, I think that’s rather telling.
But I also looked into wildlife in the area just to see if the sounds of animals could account for the sounds because we’re going to talk about this end bit in a second where we hear, I guess, toads and frogs and things like that.
But the area is part of…
the New Forest National Park.
Which we’ve talked about the New Forest before because that ties in with the birth of Wicca.
And Gerald Gardner claimed that his original magical learnings came from an old witch from the New Forest.
Well, yeah, a magical place that has…
I thought this was really interesting.
It’s home to free-roaming ponies and donkeys and deer.
So you’ve got all kinds of…
creatures there that could be making sounds as well that could be misconstrued.
But the show actually wraps up at this point because they go outside the walls of the Abbey and they do a stakeout.
They do, with sound equipment.
So it looks real modern, very modern.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it’s like a modern stakeout.
Let me throw in here to say, if you want to watch this video, there’s a one…
one video version that cuts off.
It starts early without the beginning and it cuts off without the ending.
But there’s a two-parter that has all the information.
So I’m going to link to the two-parter in the show notes.
So if you want to see the whole thing, that’s the way to do it.
Well, yeah, it’s 50 minutes long, but I think there’s a little bit more that we want to discuss at the end here.
But when they listen and then you hear the bells from the local church, so they don’t hear the chanting, they’re disappointed, but she sums up the program and she sums up her personal feelings when she says, let those deny who will.
I, for one, will choose to believe in them.
So that’s how they…
Finish the show.
As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
Yeah, it sounds very biblical.
It sounds a little biblical.
It certainly does.
But I thought what was interesting is a kind of, I guess, a postscript to all of this, and that is that Bewley was investigated in quotey fingers by Most Haunted, one of their live episodes back in 2003 with Derek.
We’ve mentioned him a couple of times, Derek Okora.
I don’t know where to begin with that episode.
We should almost cover that, I think, for a separate episode of Monster Talk to talk about their findings and just they have a sceptic on the show and they have a historian who’s absolutely not a sceptic and they talk about the monks and they said Derek kept referring to these monks.
as having been there in the 1700s, the 18th century.
But the monks would have been gone by the mid-16th century.
Yeah.
With Henry VIII getting rid of them, it would have been, I think, by the 1530s or 1540s.
By that time, I think they would have all been gone.
So he was just making stuff up.
And what did you make of that?
We suffered the entire episode.
Well, it was a live episode, so they had huge audiences sitting out there on folding chairs.
And it was ice cold.
It was so cold out there.
And it was like…
You know, there used to be a TV network or channel called Spike TV.
Do you remember that, Blake?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, they did the Bigfoot challenge.
They did, yes.
Yes, but they had so many shows.
They literally geared their show to be like, this is a man program for man-type men.
But the thing is, they had a lot of, like, spring break-type shows that were live.
And everybody that they would go, oh, yeah, I’m having fun here.
Woo!
You know, it was the same, and that’s how the crowd was.
Yes, and that’s what this show was, this live Most Haunted.
One skeptic in the audience, and she was shamed, and one skeptic who ended up bringing down Derek a couple of years later, and then that must have been very satisfying for him because all of these, throughout these years, the producer of it…
fielding that annoying host said there’s no acting on this program none whatsoever everything you see and hear is real so that’s a quote so she said that and then a couple of years later she’s saying well we tell people that everything is real but then it turns out that he’s a fake so he had to go but then they replaced him with someone else but I think that that’s deserving of a separate episode because of everything that goes on
It was an amazing episode, and yeah, we probably should talk about it.
I did want to talk about the end of the stately ghosts of London, though, or of England, because it –
At the very end, what I did is I turned on the captions on the YouTube thing so I could, you know, see what was being said.
I understand the British accent.
Yes, because I just couldn’t keep up.
Well, you know, sometimes they would talk over each other or whatever.
And there was like one line where.
Was it Lord Montague that said, come and eat my sister?
No, I want you to come and eat my sister.
Yes.
That’s what it sounded like.
Blake, did you hear that?
I didn’t notice that, no.
Yeah, he said, come and eat my sister.
But both Karen and I looked at each other because we swore.
He said, come along now and eat my sister.
No, I want you to come and eat my sister.
And it was like, what?
What?
and uh so i had the captions on and then i did a transcript from those captions and
it does say eat my sister in the caption.
Just so you know, just so you know.
So there’s some cannibalism going on there as well.
But the thing is, or other things, the thing is, is at the end when they are sitting there and you just hear the frogs croaking really loud for the choir.
This is, this is what’s interesting about voice to text.
The captions thought that the frogs said, foreign, so you.
So the frogs knew that I was not from there.
Wow.
Wow, I think that’s the most paranormal aspect of this.
It is, it is.
It is really, it is very cool in the end.
They’re basically sitting there in the ruins of the abbey.
The camera’s pulling out.
They’ve got all this fancy sound equipment, like they’ve got like a…
uh what parabolic mics they don’t really comment on it but you can see if you know what it is that’s what it is yeah it’s it’s well it’s something kind of beautiful about it and and sad too because i mean she’s up in years and she has her biggest successes in the next couple of years because she receives her her uh oscar and then she received becomes a dame and then a couple of years later she’s gone so this is something kind of poignant about
That scene, I think.
Yeah, yeah, quite.
So, yeah.
But anyway, so in conclusion, I want to say, first of all, thanks for bringing this up because I had not seen this before.
I didn’t realize the significance.
It was extraordinarily entertaining and wholesome.
And while I may not agree with the conclusions that they drew, it’s really neat to see this sort of prototypical example of what would become paranormal media.
We did see a ghost in it, though.
We did see a ghost.
Oh, oh.
Yeah, Karen, what they drove up in.
Oh, that.
That’s right.
Yeah, the Rolls Royce Silver Ghost.
Yeah.
Gorgeous car.
Gorgeous car.
Yeah, still on display at Buley.
Oh, nice.
Well, they had the fabulous Lord Montague drive up in that, in the episode of Most Haunted, didn’t he?
He’s like, oh my God, that’s the Silver Ghost.
It’s the same one.
Wow.
Comes with the estate.
Okay, good to know.
What a bargain.
It is really, it’s fun to watch.
Yeah, as you say, it’s wholesome.
I guess it’s still in the Hayes era, isn’t it?
1960s.
But it does seem to really predate ghost hunting, ghost hunting culture, haunted houses, and also just the fact that they talk about this being bad for business in those days.
Now it’s the source of business today.
Yeah, exactly.
What an inversion.
Well worth watching, and I think our listeners are going to enjoy watching it.
It is quite literally a gorgeous bit of film.
I mean, the colors are really rich.
They don’t make them like this anymore.
That’s a fact.
So maybe for our benefit, but still.
Well, I’m enjoying all of these archives, and so I think we’ll continue to do these shows.
So we’ve had a lot of good response to these.
Good deal.
All right.
Well, thanks so much for bringing it to my attention and to the listeners’ attention.
And thanks for joining us once again for an in-depth discussion of media that probably doesn’t get this much attention normally.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, there isn’t enough.
There’s really nothing out there on this.
We’re the only ones right now.
All right.
You guys have a great night.
I really enjoyed chatting with you about this.
Monster Talk.
You’ve been listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
I’m Blake Smith.
And I’m Karen Stollznow.
You just heard part two of our two-part look at the 1965 television special, The Stately Ghosts of England.
While we didn’t find it to contain a smoking gun proof of the paranormal or psychical, it does seem to serve as a template of sorts for what eventually becomes ghost hunting television in the 21st century.
Shows like Most Haunted certainly owe something of their format to this special.
Interestingly, self-proclaimed clairvoyant Tom Corbett also went on to consult on the Richard Matheson horror movie The Legend of Hell House.
So even though I didn’t recall him when I saw him on this movie, I had seen his influence before.
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This has been a Monster House presentation.