SPIRIT TALES AND MAGIC
Our host; Dr.G had his first paranormal experience at only eight years old. With over five decades of storytelling, magic and paranormal story collection he is an award winning story teller on a mission to revive firelight and the telling of stories!
SPIRIT TALES AND MAGIC
Unveiling Ghostly Memories
What if the ghosts of your past weren't just metaphorical but real, shaping the person you've become? Join me, Dr. G, as I recount the eerie tales and personal encounters with the supernatural from my childhood on Woodrow Avenue. These aren't just ghost stories; they're vivid memories of a mysterious neighbor, Mrs. Polk, and ghostly figures seen in the moonlit shadows of my backyard. In this episode, we venture back to these formative moments, sharing the complex tapestry of relationships and beliefs that these spectral sightings have woven into my life, including a surprising family revelation and the captivating allure of haunted houses.
The spectral landscape of my past is rich with spine-chilling tales and mysterious happenings that will make you question what lies beyond the veil of our everyday reality. From unsettling conversations with family to the magic of ghost storytelling, we'll explore how these experiences have transformed my understanding of the supernatural. These stories aren't just about ghosts; they're about the power of storytelling to open our minds to the unseen and unknown. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I invite you to gather around the metaphorical campfire, share in these haunted tales, and embrace the thrill that comes with pondering the mysteries of the supernatural world.
Good evening everybody. It's Dr G, spirit Tales and Magic. I hope your evening is going well. It's about 8 o'clock. We are in the back of an apartment doing a quick podcast. Spent most of my day well, let's just say in a state of chaos, going through emails and snail mails and feeling like if I sat down and closed my eyes, I might never open them again. It's been a weird day like that. Might never open them again. It's been a weird day like that, talked with some folks about ghost stories and things like that.
Speaker 1:Do you ever find it odd that someone will ask you your opinion about something and in my case I usually say, well, I'm not entitled to an opinion and I make them ask me at least twice but someone will ask you for your opinion. They may even insist that you give them your opinion on a particular thing, but they really didn't want your opinion, but they really didn't want your opinion. So today I spend 90 minutes of time I don't have talking with someone about ghosts and in a kind of condescending way he says well, what makes you think that any of that garbage is actually real? Well, what makes you think that any of that garbage is actually real? Now Cassandra will tell you that I have the right to remain silent, but I don't have the capability, and you'll probably hear me say that a few thousand more times. We won't go into the oratory. That followed very much.
Speaker 1:But for me, if you're a frequent flyer of the podcast, you know about my Aunt Agnes coming to visit me when I was eight. Now that happened in a place that we call Woodrow One. But Aunt Aggie wasn't the first creepy thing that happened in Woodrow One. I was five years old and the kitchen was an afterthought at least I believe that it was was an afterthought, at least I believe that it was. So if you went out the back door, which was in the kitchen, and you walked straight up the hill, you'd be in a little alleyway. So you had to take two steps down off of a porch that was maybe three feet by three feet, take some steps down and then you were in the side yard, which was where there was the dog house, where the beagle was. There was a small window in the kitchen that looked out on that house where the dog lived, and then, as you went around and went into the TV room or the living room, if you will, there was a little bit bigger window and there was a seat there where you could sit and some days I would just sit there and look out the window or watch the Beagle.
Speaker 1:And I thought I saw our neighbor, mrs Polk and you'll hear about her if you're a frequent flyer of the podcast taught us on Mrs Polk walking in the yard. We have to remember this is back in the time when it wasn't such a great time to be black and there were a lot of prejudiced people. I escaped that as a young man, but I just felt odd that Mrs Polk would be walking in our yard. They were very private folks and I remained friends with them until they passed and I remained friends with them until they passed. Mr Polk was the first person to teach me how to cook things and we had a lot of fun and a lot of stories. But so I thought I saw Mrs Polk in the yard and the next morning I said to Grandma, who at the time I thought was Mom. That's a long story, but so Mrs Polk was in the yard when I don't know, just right before dark about twilight, and she had a basket and she was walking through the yard. Well, bernice Griffith and Mrs Polk got along just great. She would go over to Mrs Polk's house and they would talk about baking things and things that housewives did back then Different recipes for this and that. So she comes back in and grounds me and I'm like what did I do? Now, mrs Polk was never in the yard. That's when I saw her. So I let it go because I had begun to learn at that time to let things go sometimes.
Speaker 1:And about a month before the Agnes Wagner incident, my uncle, hubert, who was a raging alcoholic. Hubert was drunk more than he was sober, but he was also an incredibly talented stonemason and there would be times when Hubert wouldn't drink at all. He'd get all dried out and his stonework and brickwork was positively genius, genius. Hubert wasn't drunk and he came over and he was working on some pieces of brick around the foundation of the house and Pat looks at me and says hey, why don't you go out there and see if you can learn something? So I went out and, talking to Hubert, hubert had this really weird voice. I don't know that I can do it. He's like hey, buddy, what's the matter with you? I just get angry sometimes. Oh, what are they doing now. So I told him about the Mrs Polk incident.
Speaker 1:Now this guy we'd had talks before about creepy things and he didn't believe in any of that kind of stuff. Hubert was always outside so he was. I couldn't tell if he was dark-complected because he was out in the sun all the time, or what his DNA was or anything like that. Of course back then you didn't know anything about those things, but he just turned pale. Immediately he said did she look like Aunt Jemima and was she carrying a basket? I didn't really know how to answer that because I didn't want to go get a switch and you know there's no right answer for that. It's like someone coming up to you, you know, when you're in a bar or a club and saying, hey, don't you think my girlfriend's pretty? What's the right answer for that? You're in the Kobayashi Maru Skippy, there's no way to win that one. So I said I don't know about the Aunt Jemima part, I don't know what you mean, but yeah, she was carrying a basket. I don't want to talk anymore. So I went back in the house the Aunt Aggie things happened. There's a podcast on that. It says Agnes Weidner. Look it up.
Speaker 1:And I'm trying very hard at that point to just concentrate on doing the magic I was doing and trying to stay away from problems as much as I could. And and one of my cousins, wendell, came up. He was going to help Pat do something with the back porch. Grandma wanted a bigger porch, I guess, so they were working on that Most of the time. I didn't like being left alone with Wendell. He never did anything, he was always kind to me, but there was a trouble in there. I don't know what kind of trouble, like a soul that wouldn't rest.
Speaker 1:So I ended up sitting out on our little, teeny, tiny back porch with Wendell having an iced tea. He's having a beer and he says hey, I heard they gave you some trouble about your Aunt Agnes. I said well, I was told not to talk about it, so don't think I'm going to. He says yeah. He says talk to Hubert about the woman with the basket. Why are you doing this? He says well, they're not home. Tom and Bernice aren't here. We're just talking.
Speaker 1:And you know I believe in ghosts. Do you believe in ghosts? I believe in what I saw. I know what I saw. I know that Aggie came to say she couldn't come to the show and I know that it upsets Pap a whole lot when we talk about it. That woman with the basket was walking down the alley one night. She got run over, killed her. I think that the driver did it on purpose. I think that the driver did it on purpose. No charges were ever filed, but about a month after the incident he disappeared.
Speaker 1:There's been several sightings of her from one end of this alley to the other. But she can't cross Marietta Street. Marietta Street is Route 9. It divides the town I grew up in in one part. So Woodrow Avenue starts down close to a place called Hedgerson Drive. The Woodrow one was on about a 300-yard street and then it turns into, I believe, hutchison. Then there's Marietta Street or State Route 9. You cross that and it becomes Woodrow again, which is where Woodrow 2 and 3 were. So there's your geography lesson for the day. But apparently this ghost could not cross that street so it had to stay in the alley in back. I said have you talked to Pap about this story? No, I don't discuss stuff like that with Pap. He doesn't want to hear it. So there's that.
Speaker 1:Then we moved to Woodrow 2 so that Grandma could be closer to her church, and you'll hear some stories about that. But it had a really creepy basement. It had an old mammoth coal furnace that heated the house and it was a big basement. You had to open a door in the floor and walk down these stone stairs that you know to a small boy resembled a dungeon, and you'll hear in one of the other podcast episodes about who I thought was my brother, tom. He's saying hey, better watch it, forget about the boogeyman. The devil's down there and he's going to eat your face off. There was a whole fiasco about that, which you can hear on one of the other podcasts. So in Woodrow 2, there were always footsteps upstairs when nobody was there.
Speaker 1:When they divvied up the three bedrooms that were on the second story, I got the smallest one, of course, and Ada got a bigger one, and across the hall was the biggest one of all. That was Tom's, tom Jr, but he couldn't sleep in it. He'd have terrible nightmares. So he tried to talk Ada into trading rooms, which she wouldn't do, so he took mine and put me in there. The room was big enough to have an extra bed put in, which meant that I could have friends come over and spend the night occasionally, which I was all for that. But there were times when I could swear that someone was talking to me and when I had friends over they'd only come over usually once, and they wouldn't stay there anymore unless we slept in sleeping bags downstairs or out in the backyard in a tent. Steps and voices, the bathtub would turn on by itself, and then there were many, many other things.
Speaker 1:But then we moved to Woodrow 3, which the entire village knew was a haunted house. That was its reputation. You hear a lot of stories from there, like Ruby was in there. That's one of the ghosts Our most listened to story the man, the girl and the tiger originated from that house. And that's also the time that I find out that my sister Pat's my mom. She's a forensic psychologist and that's what she wants me to be and there is no other discussion available on the matter. That's it. So then I wind up doing some internship with her in trans-alegheny lunatic asylum, which didn't last very long. But there were a series of adventures there. I have of adventures there.
Speaker 1:I have been in so many haunted places in my lifetime. I sat down when I was in my 30s to discuss some of that with my mother and she just laughed. But it turns out that she had seen the lady with the basket as well as had her mother, but her father wouldn't talk about it at all and they never brought it up to his attention. So with all the spirits that I've encountered in houses and everywhere else, I guess to your question I'm pretty much qualified to tell a ghost story. Most of the ghost stories I tell are shared by listeners, but I have a whole lot of my own and we'll forget about that, dr G, parapsychologist stuff which should count for something. I grew up in a very haunted place and you'll hear about all that more than once, all the things that went on there.
Speaker 1:Real science versus real ghost stories who comes out on top? So I guess the first question to decide is if real ghost stories are in fact real. Are there really ghosts? Now, having run across a number of them in locations a number of times, you won't ever convince me otherwise. But what are they? You won't ever convince me otherwise. But what are they? If you had to define it exactly, what is a ghost? It's a hell out of me.
Speaker 1:It's almost arrogant to say that they don't exist. There's too much evidence Stretching back far too many years and across cultures and civilizations, to say with any degree of certainty that nothing is there, or imagination, or just awakened minds experiencing what they would call half-dreams. Then, on the other hand, it's pretty arrogant to state with any certainty that, if they do, here's the set of rules that they have to operate by. Now, if anyone actually knew that crap, it would be so easy to prove that they exist and how they, how they do exist. What are the rules of their existence?
Speaker 1:And I get tired sometimes of people saying well, science can't prove it. Well, science can't prove it because of its own limitations. A scientist has to look at evidence and apply it to what we know of the rules of nature. That's the same for the historian, the archaeologist. They can only speak on what they can back up with sound evidence. Now, that causes egos to get in the way, and you know that that always happens. And then people start speaking loudly and with certainty over things that they have positively no idea about. Science gets things wrong all the time. The origin of species is filled with inaccuracies and even if the basic theory is sound, these people with initials behind their names are only qualified to speak on the existence of things they understand and are within their realm. No one knows the laws of the supernatural, so no one can explain it and there isn't a scientist that can say, yes, it's 100% real or yes, it's 100% fake. Yes, it's 100% real or yes, it's 100% fake. It's not like it's DNA, it's not conclusive.
Speaker 1:You know, growing up in that house gave me some good insight on haunted houses. I've got to say the modern version of some of the TV paranormal investigators somewhat laughable. The house I lived in was as haunted as any of the ones that you've heard of. It didn't have money or TV ratings involved. You know, I could list between probably 15 or 20 unexplained occurrences, but those stretch over years, about 25 or so, maybe 30. So what then are the odds of a team of investigators going to a house just on the right night to experience all those encounters?
Speaker 1:At one time, when other kids were reading books on their favorite baseball players, I was either doing magic or studying haunted houses. It was the golden age of haunted houses. I saw a lot of films, probably more than I should have at that young age. That got me into some gothic literature and gothic magic because, let's face it, ghosts are the realm of the storytellers, not the scientists.
Speaker 1:The question my friends are ghosts real? The question my friends are ghosts real? Is answered by each individual Based on personal experience and, more often than not, a feeling. A good storyteller, author, filmmaker, even an innkeeper Can make you believe for just a few moments, and that's usually enough to open the door to your mind Just a crack, to let in the possibilities.
Speaker 1:Because, after all, what is a haunted house? But a house of possibilities. It's a place where not always it seems, where invisible hands move freely, and sometimes you see the results of those hands, sometimes you feel their cold touch on the back of your neck. You don't come away from the experience like survivors of an investigation into Hill House, but remember there is indeed a world unseen. It's a world that exists all around us all the time and every now and then, for whatever the reason, we catch a glimpse of it and the dead get in. Find yourself a circle of friends, sit down and tell your stories, ghost or not, but take a minute and tell a ghost story if you will. It's good for you. We'll talk tomorrow. Good night from Arizona.
