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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 back to Monster Talk.
Last week, we hit the open road with folklorist Chris Woodyard chasing headless motorcyclists, ghostlights, and the faceless hitchhiker of Dead Man’s Curve.
If you haven’t heard part one, go back and do that first.
We’ll wait.
This week, we’re pulling off the highway and through the gates of something older and quieter.
Though not, as it turns out, all that much more peaceful.
Cemeteries are among the most commonly reported haunted locations in the world, which is interesting when you think about it, because there’s actually a solid theological argument that they shouldn’t be.
Ghosts, the thinking goes, return to where they live, not necessarily where they’re buried.
If the body’s there, sure.
But the soul?
The soul’s supposed to be somewhere else, right?
Yet, here we are.
I guess it depends on what you think a ghost is.
But the history of cemetery haunting is longer and stranger than most people realize.
Long before ghost hunters were pointing electromagnetic field detectors at marble angels, medieval monks were writing down accounts of the restless dead clawing their way out of churchyards to confess unpardoned sins.
Before Victorian garden cemeteries transformed burial grounds into places of pastoral beauty, parks where families could go and picnic among the monuments, urban graveyards in cities like London were genuinely terrifying and horrifying places, bodies stacked six deep, things leaking, and an atmosphere of genuine physical dread that really didn’t need supernatural assistance.
We’ve sanitized death considerably since then.
We’ve pushed it to the edges of town, behind iron fences, and into the care of professional groundskeepers.
And in doing so, we’ve made graveyards strange again.
Strange enough that a Tesla’s auto sensor apparently now picks up ghosts among the headstones.
Strange enough that every cemetery of any decent age seems to accumulate weeping women, bleeding tombstones, and statues that step off their plinths at midnight.
Chris Woodyard has decades of collecting these stories, glowing tombstones of Dayton, the Phantom House at Bachelor’s Grove, the Bronze Lady of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the spooky shenanigans at Highgate, and the taxi-hailing spirits of New Orleans who just want to get home.
As Chris herself puts it, she’s ambivalent about most haunted cemeteries, but she loves a good story about one, and so do we.
Monster Talk
I’m so glad you’re willing to stick around with us long enough to talk about two topics.
This is so cool.
Oh, sure.
It’s all fun.
We love having you on.
You are a treasure of these things.
Well, I mean, you know, we I think what you have is not just the sort of encyclopedic memory of these topics, but the ability to spin and weave a tail.
And that is a that’s a really good combo.
That’s what I just got a lot of notes.
But yeah, these are topics that our listeners are very interested in.
So today we’re going to talk about haunted cemeteries.
And I don’t even know where to begin.
I just think about haunted cemeteries.
We’ll start with the plot.
you had that up your sleeve i’m not sure i’m afraid not sorry and i think it’s interesting because cemeteries are among the most commonly reported haunted locations and i think some people will say well cemeteries can’t possibly be haunted because the people the bodies might be there but they’re this the soul the spirit is not there right you get the means but where’s the motive right you know
And then other people thinking, oh, well, cemeteries must be haunted because all of these bodies, all of these deceased people.
And then when we think about the history of cemeteries, that they were parks and they were seen as quiet, peaceful places where families would go strolling or have picnics, that kind of thing.
So why is it that nowadays cemeteries attract so many ghost stories, ghost hunters and paranormal claims?
Well, there was a time when cemeteries were a very haunted place, even in the medieval times.
There was one story written by a monk of Byland Abbey.
He wrote about a guy named Robert who haunted the churchyard where he was buried.
And he would keep coming out of the grave and haunting people until two young men got very brave and seized him and kept him until the parish priest arrived and the ghost needed to confess his sins.
He was absolved.
He haunted no more.
And that was a good thing.
And you find a lot of stories even that far back in the 13th and the 12th centuries.
So there were a lot of—a lot of the cemeteries in, for example, the London area were very unsavory places.
They had bodies buried six feet—six deep, and things were leaking out.
It was very unpleasant.
So they were not—
very good places to hang around, and people felt that there was something uncanny about them.
It wasn’t until cemeteries went outside the parishes and into the countryside where garden cemeteries were made, and that’s when they became to be parks and quiet, peaceful places.
But now, most people spend very little time in cemeteries.
So we go to them only for funerals.
We think of them as places of the dead.
And what do the dead do?
They haunt.
So it’s almost inevitable that now we think of them as haunted places.
I personally don’t.
I like cemeteries and I like hanging around them.
Me too.
Yeah.
You’ve got things online like these people with their Teslas and somehow there’s some kind of screening screen.
The sensors.
Yeah.
Sensors.
Yeah.
And they show ghosts in the cemeteries and people are making videos of this stuff.
I don’t know what what’s going on, what the glitch is.
That’s it’s picking up heat from some tombstone and registering as a human.
I don’t know.
I didn’t hear about this.
That’s interesting.
I’m going to have to look into that.
It seems akin to the people using Xbox sensors to spot ghosts where motion and shapes can be used to interpret in the computer.
Let’s just say that I don’t think the software was ever really geared up for spotting ghosts.
So it’s maybe maybe misapplying the technology.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Most of the ghost hunting tools.
But yeah, when I think about cemeteries and just how removed society is and we are from death nowadays and just how euphemized it is, everything surrounding death.
I’m kind of ambivalent about haunted cemeteries because I’ve always said that ghosts go where they live, not necessarily where they’re buried.
Like you said, the soul is gone.
But there’s an awful lot of haunted cemeteries that have stories of real people who are buried there actually haunting them.
You know, Marie Laveau in St. Louis No.
1 Cemetery in New Orleans.
President James Garfield has supposedly been seen at Lakeview Cemetery in Cleveland.
And he can only be appeased with lasagna.
But he hates Monday.
No, that’s a different Garfield.
Sorry.
Different Garfield.
Different Garfield.
And we’ve got a wonderful story here in the Dayton Woodland Cemetery.
There’s a statue of a little boy sleeping with a big dog watching over him.
And the statue is kind of uncanny because the dog’s nostrils are drilled and it seems to breathe when you put your hand under the nose.
Oh, cool.
And the little boy drowned in one of the canals in Dayton in August.
And he was the only son of his parents in Dayton.
supposedly the dog tried to save him and drowned also.
I don’t know that the dog is actually buried there.
I kind of doubt it.
But he’s on the tombstone, and supposedly they come off their pedestal and walk around the cemetery at night.
People have seen them.
So I don’t know.
We have one like that here in Marietta near my house where it’s allegedly if you go there at midnight, you know, one of the statues will a little girl will come and look at you or say something.
And that that does appear to be.
pretty common to nicer cemeteries with cool tombstones.
The way they build them now, they don’t even want to bother having to mow, so they put the tombstones flat and there’s no…
No beauty there.
I don’t know.
No.
I’ve told my family that I will come back and haunt them if they put me in one of those places where the tombstones are laid flat.
Yeah.
That is so lazy.
I hate that.
Well, I’m also thinking about that there was a – I think it was in San Luis Obispo or around that area when I lived in California and there were stories of – so we’re talking about the deceased not necessarily haunting cemeteries but –
people or the living.
And there was a story associated with the cemetery where a woman, and again, like you said, like at midnight, she would turn up and she would go looking for her lost child, baby she’d lost.
And so people would stake out the cemetery at midnight or waiting for her to appear.
And so I think that’s a kind of common story.
Yeah, it is.
You know what ghosts hate?
really hate daylight savings time it messes them up so bad but all these times i i i really do love we don’t really talk about this much on the show and probably should at some point but the time oriented folklore and ghost legends and it’s like what uh
OK, I get it.
But like, how does that work with all the time changes, time zones?
Yeah.
You know, like what?
What is it really midnight?
Exactly.
Exactly.
And it’s like, what?
Like, you know, like daylight, if you said noon is when the sun is right overhead, maybe, you know, but like at night, who even knows?
I don’t I don’t know.
It’s just time has no meaning for the dead.
Exactly.
That’s what I think.
I think people who are fixating on folklore around time are, you know, missing something there.
Like there’s a, there’s a really, that is a human technology that is being superimposed on the supernatural.
So I think, I think what it might be, you know, when you hear about stories of ghosts that are kind of like a videotape repeating itself.
So I think that that’s probably more the idea that’s behind that, that they’re bound to continue this behavior or this habit.
And so it might,
oh, it’s at midnight for us, but it’s just the same time for this ghost.
Yeah.
They’re like, you know, those states that don’t respect it, you know?
So like you came at midnight, but I was out at 11 because I don’t believe in your daylight savings time.
Yeah.
That’s a good excuse for why people miss the ghosts, I guess.
Yeah.
So wrong time.
Well, speaking of the St. Louis Cemetery in New Orleans, they’ve got their own Resurrection Mary type ghost.
Oh, really?
Supposedly, there’s a woman in a white dress who always hails a taxi outside the gates of the cemetery and says, take me to this address.
Trying to get to Cafe du Monde, right?
Yeah, and use some coffee.
That’s right.
She wants to go to this particular dress.
And she says to the driver, go up and ask the man of the house to come out.
And when the man answers the knock, the driver says he’s got a lady.
And the man always sighs in a not again tone.
kind of way and says that’s his wife by the way she died years ago and she was buried in her wedding dress and she tries to get home in a cab ever so often so of course when the driver opens the door the lady in white is nowhere to be found
Now, I have not done any research on this because it just occurred to me.
But I wonder, it may already exist or maybe it will emerge, but I’m wondering if there’s any folklore using these modern ride-sharing apps associated with these ghosts, you know?
Like the Uber ghosts, that sort of thing.
Yeah, I haven’t heard of any yet.
That would be a good topic.
It seems inevitable, doesn’t it?
It does seem inevitable, yes.
I’m thinking about stories of vanishing hitchhikers too, and they might leave behind an item of personal property, a scarf or something like that.
Does she ever leave something blue behind?
No, no, she doesn’t.
But yes, others ones do.
I mean, it’s the usual thing about, you know, you talk to the family, they say, oh, that was our daughter.
She was killed at the…
after the prom and you go to the grave and the jacket that the gallant young man put around her cold shoulders is found hanging on the gravestone.
Yeah.
That’s just a classic story.
Yeah.
I want a beignet so badly right now.
King cake.
You need a king cake.
Those are all right, but man, I really love a beignet.
It is unbelievable.
Too much sugar for me.
Those beautiful cemeteries in New Orleans.
I want to just mention it once again because…
There’s that story that they have above-ground burials because the water tables are so high.
And I did some personal research and found that that was not the real cause.
And I did historical research and discovered that the real origin of that was because when it was under Spanish control, Spanish-style burials were in vogue.
And if you go to Spain, you’re nowhere near the beach, but you’re on a mountaintop and they’re exactly the same kind of burial.
So these are really – yeah, this has nothing to do with the water tables.
And it is such strong folklore that it’s really – I don’t think it’s ever going to go away, that idea of the water tables being the root cause.
But that is not what’s really going on.
People did not like being buried in wet ground because they petrified.
Ooh, cool.
Gross, but cool.
You get the adipocere forming.
Yeah, yeah, the waxy stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
Joe Nickel wrote about that a lot.
Pretty creepy looking.
Oh, it is, yeah.
Yeah, I wonder if we should talk about any other infamous haunted cemeteries.
Now, Blake, one of your favourites is Highgate Cemetery.
Oh, it absolutely is.
And we were talking a little bit, excuse me, about cemeteries in London, and I guess some of those spooky ones might have been, what, burial sites for Black Death and various plagues throughout the centuries?
Well, a lot of those are – you find them in plague pits.
They were – I think they were doing a new excavation for either one of the railways or one of the undergrounds, and they found a couple of plague pits and –
very packed.
Right, multiple bodies.
Those people weren’t usually buried, although there’s more archaeological evidence showing that they were properly buried in coffins and things, not just thrown into pits, but some people were.
So I’m not sure that…
But Highgate, it’s one of the magnificent seven cemeteries which were built around the outside of central London.
They were meant to replace those overflowing London churchyards.
And it was the site of a really infamous flap over a supposed vampire.
This was a vampire, and it’s really not clear what was going on because there was this big quarrel between a man named David Farrant and Bishop Manchester, the old Catholic church.
dueling it out, claiming that this guy did this and this guy did that and there was a dead man and that we staked.
Honestly, I’ve read the books by both of them and I’ve read things in the papers and so much of it just seemed to be fueled by the tabloid press.
But what was really going on, I don’t know.
It’s a very overgrown cemetery.
They’ve done a better job of maintaining it, but it’s very spooky looking.
Yeah.
If you’re a listener and you want to go see what this looks like, go find the amicus film Tales from the Crypt from 1972.
And in that movie, which is…
pretty contemporary to when these alleged vampire incidents happen they film in the cemetery and it is stunning because it’s there’s like the egyptian section yeah it’s very victorian oh oh it’s amazing yeah uh and you can see what it really looked like at the time so
I mean, obviously at some point they switched to a movie set.
So when the people start having supernatural events, that’s just movie stuff.
But the shots of the cemetery are a great little snapshot of the history of that beautiful place.
Yeah, it is a gorgeous place.
I’m wondering if another one of these – sorry, how did you refer to them, the top seven?
What was the term you used?
Oh, the Magnificent Seven.
Oh, yeah.
The Brompton is one of them, and they supposedly have a mausoleum that’s a time machine.
I’ve not been able to figure that one out either.
Again, I think it’s a little bit of tabloid imagination, but who knows?
Cool.
I’m wondering if, is it the Père Lachaise?
Oh, Père Lachaise, yeah.
Yeah, I’d love to go there and see the grave site of Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison.
Yeah, and Jim Morrison supposedly was photographed.
Some fan was there at his grave and had a snapshot taken of himself.
And Jim Morrison is supposedly seen in the back looking kind of fuzzy and white and like a ghost with his arms upraised like he’s on stage performing.
That could have been Will Ferrell.
They look very similar.
But, yeah, they’re very popular sites for fans to visit and leave all kinds of tokens and gifts and things.
They do that at the tomb of Marie Laveau.
Oh, yeah.
Although I’m not sure whether it’s her or her daughter.
That’s a big mystery, too.
But visitors leave offerings.
They ask for favors.
And supposedly she will walk around the cemetery at night.
Another favorite cemetery that’s haunted is Bachelor’s Grove.
It’s got a phantom house.
And I love stories about buildings that disappear.
And there was a famous photograph taken at Bachelor’s Grove showing a woman sitting on a bench, a ghostly woman sitting on a bench.
She looks very, very solid, but nobody was actually there.
Mm-hmm.
All these places I want to visit on my bucket list.
You said bucket, right?
Sorry.
He kicks the bucket list.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, Chris, we spoke a little bit behind the scenes about a topic that really fascinated me.
So I’d love to delve into this a little bit.
So you’ve come across stories of glowing tombstones and statues and graves and tombstones with mysterious pictures that form on them.
So I’d love to hear a bit more about this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, in the same woodland cemetery where there’s the little boy with the dog, there’s a glowing tombstone.
And you can see this from the local university.
Nobody quite knows who is buried there, but it’s haunted by a young woman who sits on the grave and cries.
So various students have gone there and tried to see what was going on.
And a lot of people have supposedly seen the young woman.
Now, I was there doing a TV show and I’d already shot my bit and another friend was doing her bit.
And I’m just kind of wandering around and it’s twilight and I love cemeteries.
And all of a sudden I see this seven foot glowing tombstone.
And it has like a pointed top, very gothic looking.
And it just is luminous, like it’s lit from within.
And I thought, okay, I’ve lost it.
Absolutely lost it.
So I start walking towards it and suddenly it shifts.
It’s actually the lights over in the bar district.
framed by some tree branches.
But it certainly looked like a seven foot lit from within glass tombstone.
It was amazing.
So that was one glowing tombstone, but that’s not the one where the girl actually sits on the grave and cries.
I also like bleeding tombstones.
Who doesn’t?
And it looks like blood had just burst from the stone and smeared as it flowed.
And the story was that when Elizabeth was dying, she called her husband to her bedside and said, I know I’m dying.
I just want one thing.
You take good care of my children.
If you don’t, I hope to God my tombstone will burst and bleed.
Well, he didn’t remarry immediately, but he did remarry.
And the new wife, it was said, began to treat the first wife’s children badly.
And it was then that the tombstone burst in half in a dozen or so places, and it’s got deep red stains all over it.
Wow.
So is that a kind of mold or something?
It’s hard to tell.
Some of the stones have iron in them that tends to rust and looks like it’s bleeding.
But I haven’t analyzed it, so I can’t say.
I haven’t taken a sample.
And when you’re talking about glowing tombstones, too, I was thinking about a silver cliff cemetery here in Colorado.
It’s said to be America’s most haunted cemetery.
It’s little known, but at the same time, a lot of it’s kind of got a there is a group of people who are really into it and have heard about it and camp out at the place.
And so it is quite well known, but also a little known at the same time.
But there were claims that there were lights.
I mean, lots of different stories associated with it.
But one was that maybe there was a wood phosphorescence or bioluminescence or something from the crosses.
I mean, it turned out to be, as you said, in this case, lights from the nearby town and from also headlights from cars.
Well, that’s the thing.
It’s dark and then you’re surrounded by these white marble tombstones.
Yes.
Everyone I’ve investigated has turned out to be either the lights of the people filming or passing reflections on the stones.
And when you’re out in the dark, those white stones will catch any light and show up.
And it’s very, although also note that if it’s the people’s own cameras doing it, they usually don’t notice it until they go back and review the film.
Like, Oh my God, what’s going on?
It’s like, Oh, you poor guys.
I was like, I hate it.
But, but, uh,
But we all want, I mean, even the skeptics would love for there to be continued existence after our death.
It would be so cool, especially if we get to have cool adventures or continue to watch the living or make rocks glow in the dark.
You know, all those important things that we want to do.
There’s a statue called the Bronze Lady in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in New York State.
Oh, wow.
I didn’t know that was a real place.
Yeah.
Oh, it is.
And wrapping us back to the previous episode about headless horsemen.
Anybody foolish enough to insult the statue or slap its face is instantly cursed.
If you sit in the statue’s lap, the statue is said to cry tears of blood.
So that just sounds like a great place to visit.
Yeah, don’t do it, Blake.
He’s got a habit of going to places.
It’s cursed.
I’m cursed enough, I guess, at this point.
I probably should stop.
It’s like one of those witch’s graves.
Every cemetery seems to have a witch’s grave.
And if you disrespect it, there’s a problem.
And I’ve told my family, if they ever bury me, spread the word it’s a witch’s grave and anybody disrespecting it will die horribly within three days.
And I think that will bring a lot of traffic.
Yeah.
Put your URL to your Amazon landing page there for an author.
Yes.
I’ve really enjoyed meeting you through the show and having these conversations.
And I’m curious because the search is ever onward.
Like there’s always more to discover out there.
Are you working on anything interesting right now?
What’s going on in your research?
Well, I’m working on more books about Victorian death because that’s what I do, it seems.
And I’m working on transcribing a whole bunch of 19th century ghost stories.
It’s sort of like we have on Reddit today people telling their own personal experiences.
So I’m always fascinated to hear firsthand what happened to this.
And some of them, of course, are their own versions of the –
vanishing hitchhiker.
But some of them are really unique, and I’m always excited to find new stories.
I mentioned earlier in part one of our discussion that I’m really interested in that intersection between folklore, fiction…
And how they bleed together.
And that people’s real experiences often seem to be reflective of one and end up influencing the other.
And I got it in my head that maybe things like the Enfield Poltergeist case might have been influenced by news stories of some other case.
So I thought, well, how often…
Does the term poltergeist show up in British tabloids or British newspapers?
You know, maybe there was a story, you know, previous to the Enfield case that the kids could have read about or whatever.
And as I started looking, I’m like, oh, my Lord.
Yes.
British newspapers tell poltergeist stories like every couple of years.
I mean, it’s like always something.
Always.
I mean, poltergeists are in the British news all the time and it goes back all the way to the early 1900s.
It may go back before that, but I followed it back to the early 1900s and sort of that spiritualist revival around World War One.
But I mean, it was just continuously poltergeist cases coming up every few years, keeping it fresh all the time.
So that really surprised me.
I want to urge people to follow Chris on Blue Sky.
So, Blake, I know you’re not on social media.
No, but while I was, she was a great person to follow.
She really was.
Oh, yeah, the Victorian history and Victorian morning jewelry.
You post so many interesting bits of information.
Absolutely.
I want everyone to go and follow you there.
Thank you.
Again, I’m not goth.
I mean, I’m goth on the inside and redneck on the out.
But yeah, absolutely.
My daughter says I was goth before goth was cool.
There you go.
Well, yeah, let’s keep in touch.
And I’m sure we’ll have something else to talk about again soon.
All right.
For real.
Thank you so much, Chris.
All right.
Absolutely.
Have a great night.
You too.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
See you, Karen.
Bye.
Bye.
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 conversation with folklorist and author Chris Woodyard.
And if you’ve enjoyed these episodes, I’d strongly encourage you to seek out her books, particularly the Haunted Ohio series, which is about as deep a dive into regional American ghost stories you’re likely to find.
You can also follow her on Blue Sky, where she posts wonderful and eclectic mix of Victorian history, mourning, jewelry, and the kind of macabre ephemera that makes you glad the internet exists.
You can check out our show notes for further reading on the fascinating history of famous and infamous cemeteries.
I do worry that the literal flattening of cemeteries to facilitate easy lawn care will also flatten the narrative landscapes of these once monumental places.
The angst-filled goth teen that I used to be now mourns as much for the homogenization of cemeteries as for the dead therein.
And there’s little I can do but enjoy the places that still remain beautiful and somber and legendary.
Chris mentioned that she’s currently at work transcribing 19th century first-hand ghost accounts.
I guess that’s the Reddit thread of their day, as she would put it.
We look forward to seeing what emerges from that project.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Monster Talk.
Each episode, we strive to bring you the very best in monster-related content with a focus on bringing scientific skepticism into the conversation.
If you enjoy Monster Talk, we now have a variety of ways to support the show, all with convenient links at monstertalk.org forward slash support.
That’s monstertalk.org forward slash support.
We have links there to our Patreon page as well as a donation button.
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Thank you.
And please share our show on your favorite social media platforms.
Monster Talk’s theme music is by Pete Stealing Monkeys.
Here at Monster Talk, we try to help you stay grounded and we hope you stay above ground.
This has been a Monster House presentation.
What is this place?
This was their burial ground.
Whose burial ground?
Micmac India’s.
I brought you here to bury Ellen’s cat.
Why for God’s sake?
I said why, Judge?
I had my reasons.