The Haunting of Asylum 49: Chilling Tales of Aggressive Spirits, Phantom Doctors, and the Secret of Room 666

Hi there, I'm KTown and on this edition of Mysterious Radio. Alright, thank you for joining me tonight for another edition of Mysterious Radio. I'm your host, KTown, and tonight we're going to be talking about the paranormal with author and researcher Richard Astep. The book he's written is called The Haunting of Asylum 49. Now, now everybody loves a good scare at Halloween, but visitors to the most haunted houses know that the most frightening things are just actors and monster makeup and spooky special effects deep down. We all know that the ghostly habits are fake, except at Asylum 49. Which Richard says are very, very real hauntings and truly terrifying, can be very terrifying. These spirits are supposed to be aggressive. Some might even say malicious. So it makes you wonder why anyone would even want to own it. But someone bought it and he's going to tell us about that. From my understanding, this is one of Richard's favorite places to go conduct his research. So we're going to find out exactly how haunted Asylum 49 really is. So I want to welcome my special guest, Richard Astep, here to discuss the haunting of Asylum 49. All right, joining me tonight is my special guest, author Richard Astep. And he's going to discuss one of his many books, great books concerning the paranormal. This one is called the world's most haunted hospitals. Richard, I want to thank you very much for taking the time to join me tonight on Mysterious Radio. Oh, thank you for inviting me. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. Now, Richard, you're the author of all these books concerning the paranormal. And one can only assume, I'm assuming, that you've been affected by it at one point in your life. But, you know, I don't want to say that if that's not what it is. So so what is the driving force behind writing all these books? Well, really, I've spent 24 years investigating haunted locations on both sides of the Atlantic. Excuse me, I come from England. So I started investigating there. And then when I moved to the US in 1999, I kept it up. And I've come across some great stories and experiences over the years. And I wanted to share them with readers. And the nice thing is that real life paranormal investigation is really, really dull. I mean, it's boring most of the time, right up to the point where it isn't. And when I'm writing for people to read, I can give them the experiences I've had without the boredom. I get to cut out the dull bits and cut straight to the interesting. A lot of people don't know that, you know, when they go out on a ghost hunt, they're expecting it to be, you know, just a lot of activity all the time. But in, you know, just being realistic is not that way. So thank you for bringing that up. Now, are all your books on some type of true haunting? They are apart from the fiction. I do some fiction, but mostly I write nonfiction about true hauntings. Yes, locations that I've visited or have investigated or in the case of what's most haunted hospitals, I visited some, but not all of them and spoke to the paranormal investigators that did investigate there or people that work there and former patients. OK, all right. Now, let's talk about this first one. And we can really do an entire show. Matter of fact, I've heard an entire show about this first location that I want to talk about, and that's asylum 49. Did you visit that location? OK. I did multiple times. In fact, I go back every year. It's probably my favorite location in the world, to be honest. Oh, it is. OK. All right. It's great. So I'm glad I picked this one first. All right. So tell us about this. Where is it located and what types of things are reported to occur there? Well, I wrote an entire book about it, too, called The Haunting of Asylum 49. The short version is that it's a former hospital in Tula, Utah, the old Tula Valley Hospital. Many people think it's an asylum, but actually it isn't. The name comes from the fact that it was bought by private owners and converted into a full contact Halloween haunted house attraction. So it's the kind of place where you go in there over the Halloween season and you sign a waiver because it can get quite hair raising. And you walk through this haunted house and you are grabbed and moved and handled by the actors that work in there who are all playing these characters, ghosts and monsters. But the rub is that it really is a haunted hospital. And most of the year, it's quiet and dormant. But if you go over the Halloween season, when you have thousands and thousands of visitors going through, you find that the spirits which haunt the old hospital seem to be drawn out. Oh, really? OK. So tell us something that happened to you that was unusual while you were there. Well, really, multiple things. The first time I went was when I was researching World's Most Haunted Hospitals and it was a quiet visit. I only went for an evening, but I ended up going back for a week the following Halloween. And I actually moved in with the team of paranormal investigators. And while we were there, we had doors slamming, saw an apparition of a young girl in the middle of the haunted house. We recorded some crazy EVPs, some of them fairly dark and disturbing. So one of my investigators was scratched at that location quite badly, sitting in the middle of an empty corridor while we're doing a spirit box session with some very angry and frankly, lewd voices coming through that device. Oh, goodness. All right. So now they brought they bought this location knowing that it was haunted with the intention of turning it into some type of haunted. Well, they didn't. Well, they knew it was haunted, but honestly, the owners, as I interviewed them anyway, were less than. Concerned about it being haunted at first. They took those stories with a grain of salt, you know, it's an old hospital. And of course, people have died there and they had ghost stories. But you'll find that most abandoned buildings do, especially hospitals. So the owner, Kim Anderson, said, sure, whatever, and he bought the place. But it was when they were working on construction, they started to find strange things going on. Tools that they would set down would disappear and reappear elsewhere in the building. They would hear voices calling out to them, sometimes calling their names. And again, the building was absolutely empty. They knew this. They were locked inside. So this stuff happened during the construction process. And it seemed to be a function of the fact that the building draws out paranormal activity. Whenever you have structural changes to a building that's haunted, it tends to stir things up and draw the entities out. I know you had to talk to some of these actors there, and they have to be in some parts of these buildings by themselves, I'm assuming. So have they told you or shared any stories with you about some strange things that have happened to them? Have they told me or shared any strange things? Oh, yes, absolutely. When I was writing the book, I interviewed a number of the actors, and they now keep records. The owners keep a record of the ghost stories that are going on. There is an area in which many of the female staff members won't venture or at least won't venture alone because it's haunted by an entity nicknamed the Guardian. And they believe, according to certain mediums that visited the location, that the Guardian was a former hospital employee who was not a nice man by all accounts. And he's nicknamed the Guardian because he's the Guardian of secrets inside that location. He liked to know everybody's business, who was doing what with whom. If there was something worth gossip, if there was something salacious, he liked to know because it gave him power over people. And it seems as if he's not really changed in death, which makes sense. So you telling me that, you know, people apparently this is a very active location. Have you known anyone at this location to pick up an attachment? I actually picked up an attachment two years ago, and I'm not 100 percent certain if it was from Asylum 49, but I believe that's the most likely candidate because I visited there for Halloween and started having strange things happen in my house almost immediately afterwards. And the owners gave me a gift. They allowed me to bring home the old whiteboard from the emergency room. And that now lives in my basement. So this is the board on which in every year, you write who's on call, you know. So who's the physician? Who are the nurses? Who's on OB obstetrics and so forth. And they very kindly let me bring that home as a souvenir. So I did. I brought that on home and then we started to get some very strange things happening around the house. For example, we would hear the sound of a woman's voice. My wife had this quite distinctly calling from downstairs. And my dog went absolutely berserk. Went running downstairs and of course, nobody was there. And then my wife saw a shadow figure inside the house, which I kind of took with a grain of salt until I saw the same thing in the middle of the day at the end of my hallway. And then the last straw was that we had some framed pictures fall from the mantelpiece and shatter nearly landing on my cat. And I said enough is enough. I called a friend of mine who is a Catholic priest, Father Stephen Weidner. And he very kindly came over and despite the fact that I'm an agnostic, bless the house for me and that cleared everything up. Oh, it did. OK. All right. Well, that had to be a little disturbing, you know, to experience that firsthand in your home. So wow. Well, you know, it's kind of interesting. We don't like we all like to think we're immune to this stuff when we investigate. We go to a location and we think we leave whatever is there there. And when you bring work home with you, it's it's a little disturbing sometimes because home is our comfort zone. It's where we're safe and vulnerable. Well, OK, so now you're going to you're exactly right. You are right. And that's a lot of a lot of people do not take that into account. They just go out to these locations and don't think at all about bringing anything back. So now I want to ask you after that experience, are you protecting yourself in some way before you go out? Yeah, I was very blasé about doing that before that experience. And I've done investigation for 20 years without any similar results. So I just got in use to it and I make my living as a paramedic. So it's kind of the same thing where you treat all these illnesses and injuries and you never think it will happen to you until it actually does. Ever since then, I've been a lot more diligent about protecting myself and it doesn't require a great deal. A lot of it is mental exercises and a bit of light work and and clearly directing that nothing is permitted to come home with us or attach itself to any member of the group. And that seems to have worked really, really well. Now let's move on to the next location. And that's Rolling Hills Asylum and that's located in East Bethany, New York. And the last time I saw it, I believe you can still tour this building, correct? I believe that you can also. All right. So have you actually been there? No, I did not visit Rolling Hills Asylum. I wish I'd had the budget to visit most of these locations. What's most haunted hospitals is one where I actually visited relatively few. But being a medical person, I was able to reach out to the folks that had worked in those locations and talk to them about what happened to them. OK, that's that's that's perfect. All right. So tell us what types of things have they said that they experienced there? Well, really, the gamut at Rolling Hills, shadow figures, of course, are ubiquitous everywhere, but they've also had a little bit more aggressive contact. People getting tripped up, pushed over. And of course, there are the scratches and things of that nature. And yet the folks I talked to that that worked at Rolling Hills still seem very fond of the place. That's a question you always want to ask, isn't it? Is if a place is kind of dark and kind of frightening, why on earth would you stay there? And the folks that I interviewed said it's still very homey to us. We like it here. It may have a tragic past and some of that may still linger on. But but we we love this place. It was nice to hear. At least they weren't scared. You know what I mean? Yeah. Let me let me say this and let me get back to my notes here. OK, so, you know, being that hospitals and asylum, the mass majority of them have had people die in these locations. So they have to be soaked in psychic energy, you know, by the people coming there, the people that work there, the people that have been patients there. So it's safe to say that probably every hospital asylum period is probably haunted. I think to a greater or lesser degree, you can assume that to be the case. The big problem, writing, Walt's most haunted hospitals actually was what to leave out. There were so many places. And one thing I found was that the mental health institutions, the asylums and places like that seem to be far more active than the standard community hospitals. And I think it's because you had such emotional torment going on in those places, you know, health care as it relates to psychiatric and behavioral disorders is still in its infancy today. And we like to think that we are so very enlightened. But the truth is we we don't really know a great deal about many of these conditions. And my hat goes off to the men and women that work in the mental health care services. They're absolutely heroes and angels. But our treatment in the past, it's safe to say was quite barbaric. And the conditions in some of those facilities was nothing short of horrific. So how could that not leave some kind of psychic scar or stain that can be detected years and decades later? Absolutely, you are exactly right. Now, Richard, I want to know if you've had any reports of doctors and nurses haunting these locations. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Hospital in Texas, which I believe was Yorktown Memorial or Old Yoke and one of the two. I forget which and I apologize. But the I interviewed people there that had seen the apparition of a doctor walking into what was the Old Physicians Lounge, which was something that this doctor would have done during his lifetime many, many times. And I didn't know if that was a residual apparition or an intelligent one. I think it was impossible to tell based on those eyewitness experiences. But as Asylum 49 again in Tuella, the ER is haunted by the ghost of a physician that used to work there. And the owners had had some complaints. Actually, when they first opened, they would seek customer feedback. And a number of customers said, we really enjoyed the experience. But you should probably do something about the guy playing the doctor in the emergency room, because he looked really angry, like he was genuinely upset that we were there. And it kind of freaked us out at which point they had to tell the customer, well, we're sorry, but we don't have anybody in the ER tonight. That is that's chilling right there. It is. It is. And one of the owners, Kami Anderson, told me very matter of factly that one night when she was working in the ER as part of the haunt, she was laying on a table. That was her role playing a patient. And in between, because it was a slow night in between customers, she drifted off to sleep and then woke up and found this guy standing over her staring down at her. And she was quite shocked by that. I bet. Oh, wow. Amazing story. Thank you for sharing that. But you know what? That wouldn't be. That would be understandable. I mean, they work in hospitals for years and years and years. So I would only assume that there's going to be some type of residual recording left in those hospitals. And let's see here. The next one I would like to talk about is St. Albans, Sanatorium. How's it all been? St. Albans. OK. Is that New York State? I believe so. Tell me the difference between a sanatorium and a asylum or are they the same thing? Usually sanatoriums were quite often used for tuberculosis in the early days. So you've probably heard of the the most famous haunted sanatorium would have to be Waverly Hills in Louisville, Kentucky. That's the one that everybody knows, the one where they had several thousand people die there. And I've actually spent a night in Waverly Hills. It's a very cool location. If you ever get the chance to investigate there, you should go. But yeah, that was used for tuberculosis patients. So sanatoriums you would find in places like Colorado where the air was clear. We have a lot of them around here, not that St. Albans is, but many places had sanatoriums where they would send their TB patients. Waverly Hills is infamous, as a matter of fact, I was glad to hear that you stay there. So now I'm going to ask you about it. You should first ask why it's not in the book, right? Yeah, why? Why didn't you put that one in there? To be 100 percent honest, I'd asked for permission from the owners as you always have to. And they said, we we really don't want you to put that in your book and to make money from Waverly Hills. So you cannot write about it. We won't give you permission. Oh, OK. That's something you have to respect, of course. So I wrote the book on a tiny, tiny budget, of course. And I spend more money having my ghost adventures than I ever make writing about them, you know? So I had to say, well, that's unfortunate because I love this location and it's very, very cool. But if you won't let me, that's fine. But anyway, that's a terrific facility. And there are numbers stated about how many died there, which are, I think, grossly exaggerated. It wasn't 60,000 or 80,000 as a number of this out there on the Internet. But certainly it was in the thousands. You had a great many people die and going to Waverly Hills today and standing in front of it, it has the wings that come out on either side at an angle and it kind of enfolds you. It's a building that looks like it has its arms open to scoop you in. It's it's really quite creepy. And walking around it, the owners are doing a great job as best they can of trying to keep the elements out. You know, they've even in Kentucky, you have the forces of nature which which batter the building and it lacks windows and most of the floors and things like that. But as you walk the halls, you get a very real sense of what it must have been like 70 years ago to be in this place and to to perhaps it would be your last stop. And so one of the nice things that that you can find in some of the rooms there, the old patient rooms is that the owners have left photographs in a small biography of some of the former patients. And you really do feel like there's a connection. Oh, really? That's unique. OK, I didn't know that. So did you spend the night in the building? I did. I was with some good friends and my wife, Laura, was there. My friends, Jason and Linda Fallon came with us to investigate. And we had the run of the place. And so the only problem we really had was there was so much ground to cover that you couldn't possibly do it all in one night or even one week. And in terms of being paranormal active, I have friends that investigated Waverly Hills 2005, 2006, and they have the most hair raising stories, shadow figures crawling on the ceiling, you name it. And these are credible investigators who I trust implicitly. But when we went was 2016, I believe, and things were much quieter for us. In fact, we only had a couple of incidents, which I think could have been paranormal. One was the sound of footsteps following my wife, Laura, up an empty staircase. And the other was when my voice was heard down in the death chute, which is a tunnel that runs at the back of the facility down to the bottom of the hill. And they could use this to remove the bodies of the deceased without taking them past the patient rooms, because it would be bad for morale to be seeing a constant stream of bodies leaving the facility. And down in the tunnel, two of the investigators heard my voice talking, which is no big deal, except I was on the roof and at the other end of the building at the time, and they should not have been capable of hearing me at all. Oh, wow. How creepy. Oh, goodness. You know what? I contemplated on staying, not staying there, but actually touring there this year. And I don't know. I'm just a little hesitant. I know I do this show, but I don't know if I want to visit these locations. You should go. Definitely. I mean, a number of reasons. Number one, when you spend money to go there, you're helping to support the upkeep of the building. And I think that's that's a fine thing. It's somewhere I'd like to see preserved for future generations. And number two, it's one thing to watch it on TV or read about it in a book. But there is no substitute for walking the ground yourself. One hospital that isn't in World's Most Haunted Hospitals that I just investigated was actually in Gettysburg or just outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. And that's such a hallowed stretch of ground. I think all Americans should make a pilgrimage to Gettysburg at some point during their lives. And that particular hospital is one that is now a guest house. You can actually stay there overnight in comfort. And we took the place over for a week and did exactly that while we investigated. Oh, really? OK. So getting out, I had a show in Gettysburg this week, actually. And so he was telling me how haunted, extremely haunted that area is. So did you experience anything there? I did. I did. And a shameless plug. But my book on that called The Fairfield Haunting on the Gettysburg Ghost Trail actually came out today in paperback. So one to look for. But yeah, I'll tell you what we had happen. The Fairfield Inn is in the town of Fairfield, which is eight miles southwest of Gettysburg, so just outside the town. And we investigated on the battlefield itself. And we recorded the sounds of cannon fire early in the morning when there was nobody around. Certainly no reenactors firing cannons. And more importantly, we didn't hear the cannon fire with our ears. It showed up as an EVP on our voice recorders when we reviewed the evidence afterwards. But anyway, the town of Fairfield has this in the in dates back to roughly 1757 and was a favorite haunt, if you'll pardon the phrase of the Eisenhower's Dwight Eisenhower and Mamie Eisenhower, the president and first lady. Mrs. Eisenhower used to like to go to the inn and meet her friends and play cards. But during the Gettysburg campaign on the third day, the there was a battle, a cavalry battle in the town of Fairfield. While the main event was going on in Gettysburg, a U.S. regiment, the sixth cavalry, was sent to Fairfield because they'd heard rumors of a Confederate supply train being in town, you know, wagons carrying bullets and bandages and beef and all that kind of stuff. And they thought that they could basically ransack this supply train and take it from the Confederates. But what they didn't know was that they were going to be outnumbered by a force of Confederate cavalry coming in the opposite direction. So when the sixth U.S. cavalry met this much bigger force of Confederate cavalry, they were cut to pieces. They suffered 50 percent casualties and the wounded and dying from that engagement were taken to all of the houses in and around the area of Fairfield. And so the Fairfield Inn, which was this tavern until that point, was suddenly pressed into service as a field hospital. And this is where you have surgeons amputating limbs and all of the the brutal medicine that civil war doctors had to perform. So it's no wonder when you consider what happened in those places and how many of the poor young soldiers died under the surgeon's knife and saw. It's no wonder that some of that should still linger behind today. And so when we investigated, we got some interesting results there. All right, I'm talking to Richard a step about his book, The World's Most Haunted Hospitals. And I will have more for you when we return right after this. All right, we are back and I'm talking to Richard a step about his book, The World's Most Haunted Hospitals. You can pick up your copy at Amazon.com. And I will have the links on the mysterious radio website. Now, Richard, I want to ask you your opinion about the ghost hunting craze. Do you feel that these teams are really helping you? I mean, I think it's a great idea to have a great team of people who are really helping you. I mean, I think it's a great idea to have a team of people do you feel that these teams are really helping the research into supernatural activity? Or are they adding to the negative connotation to the field? I think it's a double edged sword and what we're really talking about is paranormal tourism, I would say, would you agree? Yes, it's a double edged sword on the one hand. The interest on the on the part of the public in the paranormal has never been greater than it is today. We have more people from all around the world that are fascinated in the subject and they're asking questions They're inquisitive and they are fueling well books like mine I wouldn't really have a writing career unless people wanted to read about ghosts, you know On the other hand, I don't think you can go to a location for four hours Poke around a little bit wave a K2 meter and call it research Real research takes time and effort and a lot of boredom It's very very dull and often it's unrewarding. So Really, it's it's paranormal sightseeing and I have no issue with that at all. I mean again one of the benefits of it is It is keeping some of these locations Active it's drawing people in to some of these historic places and it's supporting them with the dollars of those people that are going there But let's not let's not confuse that with genuine research Which typically requires immersion and an extended stay at the location Absolutely longer than 24 48 hours. You're exactly right. Yeah. Alright, so Richard, do you have a favorite location that you like to talk about out of these? You know, it's always gonna be a silent 49 for me And I know we've talked about that earlier on but it's an ongoing project I return with a team of paranormal investigators every Halloween and we move into the old hospital And we also work the haunt now on Halloween night So if you go to a silent 49 on Halloween night, the zombie doctor could well be me or one of my fellow investigators And there's a very real family atmosphere there I love the fact that most of the performers at a silent 49 are the local teenagers who in most towns on On a weekend there aren't a lot of things for for young people to do that are Wholesome and will keep them out of trouble A silent 49 is almost a community center. In fact, it actually is a community center So it just has this great appeal for me of having a fantastic haunting behind it So it's really going home to family every time I go there and investigate and I get to ask what's happened Paranormal wise anyway over the past year and I just hear the most hair-raising stories From these folks that spend all year round building this haunted house It sounds amazing actually maybe I'll have to you know, just Go ahead and throw in the towel and go visit that location. So it's absolutely should it's terrific Alright now I want to discuss a haunted hospital that's in this particular book and this one is Spencer State Hospital It's located there in West Virginia at one point. It was an asylum before it closed in 1989 Can you tell us? Which is well, let me I'll say this reported to be extremely haunted. Have you been there? No, I've not again most of the locations in the book. I didn't get to visit This is the only book I ever wrote that I wasn't able to visit most of the locations But what I do recall about Spencer State from having talked to those who? had first-hand experiences that a lot of Icepick lobotomies will perform there at Spencer State and if you're not familiar with that technique It was something that was used right up until the 1950s where they would essentially hammer a small ice pick in through the bottom of your eye socket Back through the the rear of the eye and into the brain into the lobes of the brain in an attempt to cure you of whatever your psychiatric disorder was Terrifying barbaric procedure and it would turn people into part in the expression practical zombies, you know, they would be in this catatonic state It was meant well, it was it was meant to be a therapy But instead it was there's no other way to put it. It was deliberately inflicted brain damage And it caused a great deal of unnecessary suffering and Spencer State was one of the places where that was pioneered Have people reported patients? You know haunting that location Patients and to a lesser extent the staff and some some entities that are unidentified again mysterious shadow figures that we tend to think of a haunting in terms of An apparition that's solid that we can somehow identify But there are there seem to be a number of unidentified entities at that location that none of the paranormal investigators could could establish the background on Now, okay now I want to ask you since you talked about these horrific procedures Some of this stuff had to shock you because I know you wanted to know, you know What occurred at these hospitals to possibly account for the hauntings? I mean did anything Shock you besides what you found out about Spencer State? As far as the procedures are concerned Well, one of the things that shocked me the most Wasn't just procedures but as I went back a little bit further in time and looked at some of the Australian institutions a Good friend of mine William Tobone has investigated those personally One of the terrifying things about those facilities was they weren't necessarily used for those who were genuinely Mentally ill they were often used as a convenient place to get rid of people that society didn't want to deal with So for example, it was a very easy way for a man to get a divorce You could declare your wife insane It only took one or two signatures from a judge and a doctor who could be easily bribed To get her thrown into a place like that and it took anywhere between three to five signatures to get out again So once you were in one of those places you were basically cast away Sometimes for decades or the rest of your natural life all for No good reason people were thrown in there simply because they were promiscuous or adulterous or alcoholic Or had seizures It was a terrible terrible thing and rather than rather than curing these conditions Which to be fair medical science in many cases couldn't do anyway It was a place for normal society if you will to throw them away and lock them out of sight to place of forgetting And that's so tragic it is and it's unbelievable it makes you Makes you very angry when you read about some of these things. It's so unfair so unfair that a human being has been You know subject to these horrific medical procedures and I know that Some of those procedures were even Performed at Waverly Hills, correct? Yeah, I mean they did a number of things and tuberculosis even today It's not something we can cure that we can treat it But it's a pretty nasty way to die Essentially drowning in your own blood so some of the techniques that they That they performed one was the sandbag which doesn't sound that bad at first But what they would do is they would place heavily weighted sandbags on the patient's chest For hours and hours every day and every night and the idea was that your chest wouldn't be able to expand as much and Therefore hopefully should heal and get better Makes absolutely no medical sense at all and what it ended up doing of course was making it harder for these poor souls to breathe They would perform surgeries and again with the very best of intentions They would cope and the chest crack the ribs and deflate the lungs and again the hope was that by deflating the lung They might somehow Arrest this process this process of tuberculosis this disease and of course it did nothing of the sort It was far more likely to send you into respiratory arrest or in the long term give you an infection that you may never recover from So these were I always like to point out that if you watch horror movies and read those kind of novels There is the stereotype isn't there or the archetype of the mad doctor the one who's Experimenting on his patients and he's tormenting them and all that kind of stuff Well, the truth of this is these were men and women who had the very best of intentions but the state of medical science at the time was so primitive That they had no conception. They weren't truly helping people and so they ended up doing these terrible terrible things in the hope of curing An illness that could not be cured. It's very very sad for all people involved It is and it's even scarier scarier to think that it wasn't too long ago that they were doing these things No, what it makes me wonder and what it makes me lose sleepover is that in 50 or 60 years time As a practice in medical practitioner myself What are they going to look back on that I do although a physician would do now which we think is therapeutic Which is going to seem absolutely barbaric and inhumane Good point medicine evolves doesn't it and Unfortunately, you can only do the best you can do with the science that you have right you're exactly right All right now. I want to ask you why you included Preveglia island. Oh, that's a fascinating tale. Isn't that Pavilion? so this is basically off the coast of Italy and it was the island of the dead Pavilion had a Facility upon it which was supposed to house The mentally disturbed but prior to that it was the equivalent of Ellis Island So when the plague came to the mainland the black death They would either use Pveglia as a place of quarantine at first But then afterwards when it became widespread they would take the bodies of the dead and they would dump them onto Pveglia island and Allow them basically to rot or burn them and then the the whole surface layer of Pveglia at one time was essentially ash The ash of the dead so it was a very macabre and sad story Oh goodness, okay, so and then at one point the island was turned into a hospital or something, right? Yeah, yeah, this is the facility that I was mentioning earlier. It was primarily Supposed to be a hospital for the mentally ill there are Legends and folklore surrounding it about a supposedly mad surgeon that was chased to the top of the bell tower by the ghosts of those he'd experimented on and Chased to his death. There's no evidence for that whatsoever But what we do hear a lot of is reports from the locals who who see all kinds of strange things when they're looking across the water towards Pveglia And many of them avoid it you can only get there by boat and most of them will just give the place a wide berth so have you Known anyone to actually go to that island or can you go to that island and investigate or do some type of? Paranormal research you're supposed to get a permit to do so or at least the last I heard and I believe that Pveglia as of today is in private hands I'd heard that it was sold. I'm not entirely sure about the specifics of that But you used to have to get a permit otherwise you were trespassing But from people that I talked to you could pay a local a very small amount of money and have them Sale you out there drop you off and come back for you whenever you wanted So I talked to people that had done that and they said the place is indeed it's very eerie It's overgrown. So the old medical facility is full of weeds and shrub Greenery you know trees are coming in from the outside and it looks abandoned and derelict Wildlife owns the place now for the most part, but there is a steady stream of ghost stories that have come from that island Okay, very good. All right. So the last one I would like to talk about is the Danvers state insane asylum and it is an unbelievable place. I've been all over that website. It's amazing. The building is huge and You know it looking at the website you really just step back in time because they've got a lot of old pictures They show a lot of the old autopsy photos or whatnot Tell me what people told you about the haunting at that location. Well, so that particular part of the country is very interesting it has this connection with Witchcraft I Don't know if you if you saw that and the American witch trials were fairly ubiquitous in that area so Pardon me for just one second while I clear my throat. Excuse me The old Danvers state hospital in Massachusetts was built in an area where they had they'd hanged a number of witches Very very close to that What I don't know if there's any connection between that and the haunting But right now one of the sad things about it is that the place had its own cemetery out back and This was where a whole bunch of former patients have been buried Essentially in the woods and many of them in relatively unmarked graves. So that's interesting there That's a I did not see that so thank you for bringing that up. Did that asylum house Children as well. I'm not a hundred percent sure on that so I don't want to steer you wrong But I know that it did have not just the insane but a large number of the criminally insane too so When you look at you look at that fact and you have this high percentage this high proportion of people there that were violently disabled I think that plays a key role in why many of the reports from Danvers of ghosts were were quite dark and nasty Do you have any plans to go there because I looked at the website? It's still open apparently not for business But it looks like it's probably open for you know, maybe tourism or something like that Well, actually last I'd heard Danvers is I believe now apartments I believe they turned it into a private a series of private condos and residences. Oh Wow Wouldn't it be interesting to know what they're saying about it, you know some of the tenants there it would and if I were ever in The area then I would probably consider knocking on the doors And then taking a look and asking the people myself, but yeah right now you're looking at private residences All right, Richard. I've truly enjoyed this conversation I'm going to give you an opportunity now to tell my listeners where they can find more information about you and your books Certainly come visit me online at www.richardsstep.net That's Richard estep dot net you can find my books on Amazon or all of the usual retailers And in bookstores too your next book that comes out, please let me know and actually came out today, right? It did Can you please come back and talk to us about that one? I'd be happy to come back I know you just did a Gettysburg show, but we could certainly do this one in future and talk about some of the Fairfield haunting All right. Thank you so much. 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