Amercian Ghost Story

Hi there, I'm K-Town, and on this edition of Mysterious Radio. So actually, my publisher, Visible Inc. Press, who is great, and Roger Janik over there, We have some mutual acquaintances, and we were just kind of hanging out one night, and I was kind of pitching actually some fiction stuff to them, but it's not really their milieu. So we just happened to go down a path where we started discussing ghost stories, and I related a personal one that I'm familiar with, not really that I've been affected by, I don't want to say, but just one that I kind of grew up with and kind of told him the story. And he said, can you tell, you know, like 50 more of those? That was really interesting. I said, well, maybe. So we started bouncing around some ideas and, you know, got to where we were going to do this ghost stories. And we decided we'd try to pick something from each state. It was kind of how I wanted to do it, just so I could, it could be diverse and, you know, reach a larger audience. Do you think you'll continue to do stuff with Visible Ink and kind of mosey over to another type of finale now? Or are you going to stay around paranormal? I will. I'm still working on the horror fiction, of course, but I have some research going for another ghost storybook. And I'm kind of bouncing around a few different ones. I'm doing Michigan, which is where I live. I'm a Detroit native. And so I'm doing all the local ones. So paranormal events around that area? Yeah, just different stories. stories. Eloise Asylum is popular here. Actually, they recently turned it into a haunted house, and they had Alice Cooper out and his whole big thing. But as a kid, that was a place where you snuck around down the abandoned hallways and tunnels underneath and all that good stuff. So I'd go on a visit there, do some research there and some investigations, and then just whatever I can find around Michigan, some bigger well-known haunts, some smaller ones, some personal ones, and do sort of a regional book. I don't know that I'll do that one with visible ink because it's a tough sell, you know, just to do a small area like that. But I'd also like to do the Midwest, and I could do another probably four books similar to this American Ghost Stories book where I could include all 50 states because I whittled down stories from, You know, each state kind of got the best three to five that I found and, you know, whittled that down to which one I was going to include. So a lot more fodder out there to be had if I want to keep going. And so far, it's been a great experience. Yeah, there's a lot of fodder out there. There's tons of it out there. Let me ask you something. So how did you narrow down the ones? I mean, you just took one from every state, but man, there are just thousands and thousands of them. So how did you find yours? So I have a decent following online and nothing huge, but, you know, a small following in the horror community. So I asked to reach out there and asked for stories from around the country. I just researched, you know, sort of in real simple ways, you know, top 10, you know, haunted stories from Nevada or whatever. and just kind of started looking at which ones were interesting, which ones had some good history behind them, which ones had some good stories as far as – a lot of them are like, I saw an orb. And it's like, well, okay. It's pretty boring. So the ones that were exciting and interesting and that had, like I said, good history behind them and just a good story, really. And I think the fiction writing helped with that to be able to kind of parse that down to things that I thought readers would be interested in. Got you. All right. So let's start off by talking about the one that you are familiar with. Tell me about the one you pitched to Visible Inc. Mini Quay is the story, and it's from Forster, Michigan, which is about two hours north of Detroit in the Thumb, right on Lake Huron. My family has had a farm there, a working farm for over 100 years. So a lot of family in the area, cousins and uncles. My brothers and I have property there. We hunt. We vacation, things like that. So I grew up with the story. My mom knew it when she was a kid. The story of Minnie Quay, who was a young girl, 15, 16 years old, way back in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And she fell in love with a sailor. Forrester at the time was a huge timber area and it was a huge port for loading and unloading. And it's the old story. Her parents didn't want her, you know, coercing with this ruffian sailor and, you know, kept them apart. lost love. She goes off to sea. He perishes in a shipping, sinking. And distraught, she throws herself off of the pier, forced her into the cold, icy waters of Lake Huron, and dies. Now, the story is that she comes back and haunts the area. The story I tell in the book is one that my mother experienced. Maybe I embellished a few little details, but it's pretty solid. And the idea is that Minnie Kwe beckons people and young girls particularly into the water and sort of hypnotizes them in and they'll walk in and they'll perish in the waves. She's haunting the town because she lost her love and all that great stuff. But as I said, It was one we grew up with, and I wish I told it better. I probably would tell it better with a few drinks in me. No, you're good. But I'm trying not to be too long on all of it, and I don't want to give everything away. So that was the story, and there's still areas that you can go. You can see the old pier pilings in the lake. You can see where some of the Quay family lived. But now the town's not even a one-stop-light town. You just kind of breeze through it. So that was the first story that kind of got me out of the way. And I will say that I've had no personal experiences with Minnie. I have visited her grave, which is very – it's been well taken care of, well maintained. There's a large family tombstone there, and people leave trinkets for her. You go to visit Minnie Kwe, you're supposed to leave a trinket on the tombstone. Otherwise, she might come and give you some grief. It can be a penny or a toy or whatever. Or a cigarette or anything. Right. Pretty much anything. Got you. And so is the area known for any other type of strange sightings or phenomena? I don't know of any particularly in that area. That story itself, very popular. There's been a lot of research on it. And there's been a few back in the more in the 80s when more the satanic panic kind of time where people were coming up there trying to do seances and all that kind of stuff. The locals kind of chased him off. But I mean, that was a real that was a real thing. Yeah. Mini Kwe was a was a real person. So, you know, the history of it is true. Her death is true as well, from what we understand and the circumstances of it. But there was, I forget the woman's name, it's like Witch Grindwald or something like that. I'd have to look it up now. I can't remember. I may have even mentioned in the book, but she had come out and tried to, you know, make it sort of a big thing, right? And bring people out to the graveyard, have people around the town. And it's a very sleepy community. Like I said, it's not even a one-stop light town. You know, it's just farmhouses and mostly cottages along the lake. So people chased her off pretty quick. They keep Minnie kind of to themselves. It has had two huge fires through the thumb in the late 1800s, shortly after, one of those shortly after Minnie's death. So some people say she may be responsible for some of the tragedy that's occurred there. I'm wondering, like, okay, so you're near a lake, or you're on the lake, Lake Huron, right, up there? Yeah, Lake Huron, literally within a mile. The mini quay would have been, you know, probably 200 yards or home from the lake shore. Any strange, if not like UFO sightings, Bigfoot sightings, anything like that in the area? No Bigfoot sightings. UFO sightings are not uncommon in just in all of northern Michigan. I wouldn't say specific to the Thumb area. lots of stories along that coast and along Michigan related to shipping and shipwrecks of course lakes are basically if you're not familiar with the Great Lakes and some people are only passingly familiar, they're huge I don't think most people understand until they actually see them, right? It's an ocean they create their own weather patterns and tons and tons of shipwrecks on that which is crazy Fitzgerald probably being the most famous in Lake Superior. So most of the stories around Michigan, around those areas, tend to fall toward haunted lighthouses, which every lighthouse, by the way, is haunted. So I can tell you that now. And shipwreck stories and things like that. What about ghost ships? Definitely ghost ships. People see ghost ships in the fog, right, off the shore. there wouldn't be many kind of pirate type ships so it's more like freighters and stuff kind of more modern ghost ships not your black pearl coming out of the fog I think ghost ship stories are really fascinating too I do believe that's a phenomenon people are seeing ships that really aren't there for some reason they're just manifesting for moments at a time and then they just disappear some of that I think is just I'm a skeptic I'll get that out right in the beginning. I lean towards skepticism. So I haven't had the super convincing experience yet that tells me, you know, ghosts are real. But I think, you know, the way our minds work, right, you definitely tone what you think you're going to see. You know, you look into the fog long enough, you know, and think about the idea that there might be a ghost ship out there, you know, and those strange patterns and shades that are in the fog behind, you know, it's not hard to convince yourself that one just drifted by. Yeah, yeah. But you know what? It's the accounts from people that, you know, they've been doing it for a long time. Other captains and things like that. They're really credible sightings. And I wouldn't discount anybody's experiences. You know, just because I'm not a full-fledged believer, that doesn't mean it's not real, you know, or there's not something paranormal or some other explanation that we don't understand yet. And that experience is every bit as real, whether it's paranormal or something we have yet to figure out. I want to first start off in your book by talking about the Winchester mansion. I think the more interesting part of that story is just, you know, Mrs. Winchester's actions and what she did. Because that's certainly true. I mean, you can go see the house and the crazy, you know, construction doors that don't go anywhere, stairways that lead to ceilings, you know. So that bit's definitely true. So just a little background on that for anybody that might not know. The Winchester House is a reasonably popular one. Sarah Winchester was married to the heir of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. He died in 1881, and Sarah became 50% owner. She felt that she got messages from the other side, from people that had suffered from, you know, either were killed by the Winchester guns or, you know, their families were, you know, whatever pain was caused by that company. She had an immense amount of guilt around the fact that they manufactured, you know, these deadly weapons. and to keep those spirits at ease she had gone through some I think she was likely manipulated by some charlatan psychics and things like that they told her well they want you to just keep working on the house, working on the house and that was her idea as long as she was working on the house that it wouldn't be haunted, they wouldn't bother her she was doing something so it was just a constant construction just well let's add a room on now we're done with that room let's put a stairway here that goes nowhere Let's add a doorway. So just really kind of the madness of her is the more interesting part of the story to me, I think, than some of the stories of hearing voices and seeing shadows and all that good stuff. There's really not much by way of physical entities or interactions with the Winchester house. What about other people experiencing phenomena in the house? Yeah, very few reports from other people. More, it was about the craziness of the house and the nonsense of it that people experienced. So back to your point it kind of lends to the idea that it was less haunted and more fantasy know more fantasy than anything else i wonder if you know right off hand i wondering if it ever been um investigated by any paranormal teams over the years i'm certain that it has um and i know they do ghost tours and all that good stuff now um you know it's more of a commercial uh entity uh than just a haunted house right um but uh i don't know of any you know every time you see a ghost adventures ghost encounters one of those things there's always something there's always a sound you're not quite sure what that was you know whatever right there's always something they got to make the show interesting um but i you know again i don't know of any solid evidence or anything particularly interesting that came out of that outside of again you've never seen any pictures captured around or inside the house of anything wow no occasionally uh you know you'll get a i think there might be even a picture in the book i can't remember but um that uh you know somebody sees a shape in the window you know or something from the outside you know and it's it could be the reflection from the sun or you know whatever but um but nothing really solid out of there just a just kind of a crazy lady that probably was more mental issues than it was supernatural Yeah. And I get why that would, you know, if you keep kind of focusing on that and you think that spirits are haunting you, then you could, you know, just scare the hell out of yourself, you know, eventually. You know what I mean? Just crazy stuff. And a lot of, I mean, a lot of the supernatural stuff, again, not discounting anybody's experiences. Are you familiar with the term egregore? Oh, yeah. Right. So the collective thought sort of that. That's all form. A lot of people think about it, right? Yeah, you'll form this manifest entity, which can be, you know, separate, right, in its own being, just that you created it and now it's separate of you. You know, whether you decide you don't believe it anymore, it doesn't matter. You know, it kind of goes to the Slender Man. That's kind of a good example, I think. That legend, you know, it just got so popular that, you know, now it's like, oh, it actually exists. Yeah. Yeah, I think Buddhists believe in that, too. I think I saw that in some research about Buddhists. They really believe that that is a thing. And I think they use it actually for their own protection. And I mean, really, it's kind of the basis of religion if you get down to it. Right. I mean, enough people agreeing that this is the supernatural thing that we believe in. Whether that thing actually manifests or whether it's just the collective thought that becomes, you know, the manifestation amongst those people. I guess that's the argument. But I saw it on the X-Files, too. Watch the X-Files. One of the episodes is about that, too. Oh, yeah. I haven't seen those in forever. Huge fan. That's something I need to go back and watch. Yeah, you need to do that. And so there's something else I want to talk to you. Oh, yeah. It's the First Avenue Club in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Let's jump to that one. So, yeah, this one, I really one of the reasons I chose this one. And I'm just going to pull up another file up here I have on my computer. So just for instance here for Minnesota, I had there's a four pods restaurant. That was an interesting story. The Great Cloud Island, which had some interesting rumors related to cults. cults and KKK things and whatever. But, uh, first Avenue is the one I ended up choosing and, and largely because I'm just a big Prince fan. Um, but, uh, yeah, it's a, a famous, um, you know, music venue, uh, people like YouTube, uh, Black Keys, um, and of course Prince played there. Um, it was, uh, built in the early, uh, mid 1900s, 1940-ish. And a bit of story there about a woman who was waiting for her husband, her boyfriend, was it, and was notified that he had died. She was at the club. She went into the bathroom and killed herself. So many ghost stories based on that love lost and then the suicide after, that sort of thing. The whole white woman legends kind of come from that. But that was sort of the first story there. So often it's said there's a ghost that's seen in the stall where she died, a blonde woman usually wearing a green jacket. And often they say her throat is wrenched from the noose that she used or had kind of lulls to the side. there was a Flanagan movie recently that The Hung Woman was there it reminded me of that that one has definitely been investigated regularly the happy psychic Jodie LaVon visited First Avenue with paranormal investigator Dave Schrader they didn't know about the suicide and claimed to have seen a woman in the bathroom with blood on her so I suppose they didn't know about the suicide the basement of the first avenue is said to be kind of the most active area where a lot of people feel touches, they see shadows, they get the chilly goose bumps cold water running up your spine feeling down there. Not all the ghosts seem to be particularly violent or mean. There's a ghost they call Flippy, who just kind of likes to mess around and screw with the music equipment and play pranks on people, flip chairs over and move tables. They say that he can manifest a balloon out of thin air and it'll float down the stairs and then floats up and down the staircase, you know, regardless of how any air may be moving through the theater. A few other stories. Any videos or any video evidence or pictures? I have not seen video evidence. There are some pictures you can search online and find of some from that paranormal investigation with Trader and Levon. Has it been responsible for anyone quitting? I haven't seen any. So most of the, again, I think because most of the experiences people have aren't particularly frightening. They're just more strange and almost funny sometimes, you know, with the balloon and whatnot. So it's not the sort of thing that scares people out. I would say another one of my favorite stories in the book is the Bobby Mackey music world, if you recall that one. That, I would say, is just the opposite, where it has kind of scared a lot of employees and people out of the building. for experiences that they've had there. Yeah, I like to hear stories about bars being haunted. You know, you'll hear a lot of them, but I like hearing them. The Bobby Mackey one was really one of my favorites, in part because I got to spend a lot of time there investigating. It worked out well. While I was writing the book, I was taking a trip to Louisville, and I was able to contact the, it's called Gatekeeper Paranormal. They run ghost tours through the bar. And I got a private tour set up with them, and I also visited during business hours. It only operates as a bar a couple nights on the weekend now, and really it's kind of leaned into that supernatural paranormal reputation and does a lot of its business based on that. But that was a really interesting one, and it's a bar that's – you're familiar with the Urban Cowboy movie, right? Oh, yeah. So it's very Gillies-like. It's got the mechanical bowl, everything else, just a little bit smaller scale, but still a huge bar. I mean, I can't remember the square footage on it, but you'd fit hundreds of people in there. Big dance floor and a couple different bar areas, pool tables, all that good stuff. But it's also very dated, so that was kind of interesting as well, because I almost felt you have walked back into the 80s when you walked in. I don't think the decor has been updated probably since it was brought to life in the 70s that Bobby bought the place. But that one's a very interesting story. So there's a lot of that story, the initial research that I found. And I found this in a lot of stories that I did in the book. The initial research, the farther you dug down, you could really peel away a lot of the nonsense. Bobby Mackey's and just stop me if I'm rattling too long but Bobby Mackey's was I think actually the first episode in Ghost Encounters the Zach Bagans show which I'm not really to be fair not that much of a fan of but a lot of what they put down as the history of the haunting was it turns out to be nonsense it wasn't really related to that location I just saw that like two months ago. Yeah, it was his first investigation, and I didn't watch all of it, but I just saw some of the things he was talking about. Yeah, so it was one of the big stories of Bobby Mackey's is that there's a well in the basement, which does exist. There's an old well there, but it's actually part of an old – the bar at one time was a speakeasy and a house. And that lower portion was used as a house by the owners, and the well was just a well out to the river. But there was a story about Pearl Bryan, which is another true story documented from 1896. A 22-year-old student who had come down to Cincinnati to meet her. She was from Indiana, I believe. She came down to meet her lover. And there's different stories about what happened. But anyway, her lover, Scott Jackson, and his friend Alonzo end up being convicted of murdering her. And they found her body in Kentucky, her head severed near the location of what's now Bobby Mackey's. And there was a slaughterhouse in the area. Those were two different locations, but they've become mixed where people now, you know, the story and the story you'll hear in Ghost Encounters is that the slaughterhouse was where Bobby Mackey's was and that they took the head and they threw it down this well, you know, for whatever reason. And, you know, there's not really a really good reason behind it, but more likely they cut off her head. But you're saying that didn't happen at all? Not the down the well part so much. Like, we're not sure about that. They definitely cut off her head. I'm guessing just to, you know, maybe hide the, you know, who it was. You know, you're talking 1800s. So if you just find a body, you know, they're not fingerprinting or anything. So they probably just threw it in the Licking River, which runs behind the bar and through that area in Wilder, Kentucky. But, you know, as the story came out later, and again, this was one that really took off in the 80s. The supernatural kind of stories behind Bobby's Mackeys really didn't happen until Bobby Mackey owned the bar. And then there was a lot of backstory, right? And like, oh, we're having experiences. And this is usually how it works. You have an experience and you go try to find out the history of, you know, where's this ghost from or whatever. Or you know a history and you kind of develop a ghost story from that. In this case, it was the going back. So they found the story about Pearl, which was a true story, horrific. And she was actually identified because of the shoes she had on. But then they related that into – rolled that into the Bobby Mackey. And now this well, which was just a well, was now a portal to hell. Now there's steps that lead to heaven. It gets crazy after a minute. But there are great stories that are really true about Bobby Mackey's. Like what? Tell me something that really happened and was scaring the employees there. So the bar was never a slaughterhouse, but it was a distillery. It was a speakeasy several times. a bar even during Prohibition. There were a lot of ties back to Cleveland for the mafia group working out of Ohio. So it went through a lot of hands. It was called the Latin Club at one time. It was called the Primrose Club. So when it was the Primrose Club, the story was re-related to me when I visited the story, although I knew it ahead of time. So it was while it was operating as the Primrose Club. And a couple of guys get in an argument in the bathroom. One guy punches the other, he falls, he hits his head, he dies. So the guy that died was named Paul, and the guy that punched him was named William. Years later, after the bars become popular as a haunted place, people are investigating this, and they say they hear Paul, they hear William speaking, they'll see people in the bathroom, entities that are there and then gone. I had the private tour and they played for me an EVP that they believe was caught from another couple that was on a previous tour and shared with them. And they're speaking. I'll probably put this on my website before too long, but they're speaking and you can hear them kind of talking about, you know, Bill and Paul and the story. And they're in the area supposedly where the bathroom had existed previously. And the bar has been changed around a bit. And they say something about, you know, like, what was that guy's name? And you hear this voice. And it really does sound like it says, Bill. And it whispers, you know, and his hair stands up on you. So while I was there, she's telling the paranormal investigator, Laura, that was going to meet a tour. She showing me around and she telling me where this is and she playing the tape for me you know So of course even though I mean not necessarily be a believer you still ready for the jump scare right Just like going through a haunted house you know you know it not real but you still you know hyped up and scared and whatever. So, I walk over to the area and I have my tape recorder going and I say, okay, well, Bill, you know, Paul, if either of you are here, it'd be great to hear something, you know, if you could say something to me, if you could reach out, if you could touch me, you know, stop for a second, and everything's quiet and the bar's dark and nothing's happening. And the ice machine kicked on and I almost pooped my pants. And I believe it was just the ice machine, but oh my God, the timing of it was great. It just scared me to death. But a lot of people have had those kind of experiences and heard voices and things there and got chased out. There's the real sort of thing about Bobby Mackey is that people lie on. I like that story because there's a history to it. There's a true history to it that you know of. The well became this whole sort of an employee there of Bobby's named Carl, who was an alcoholic, clearly suffered some mental health issues. But he he was one of the first employees that Bobby hired kind of a caretaker of the place. And he lived in an upper apartment at the bar. And he pretty quickly started telling Bobby about, you know, hearing voices and seeing things and, you know, whatever. and Bobby Mackey, his goal was to make it a big country music place and promote his own country music career. So he really tamped down that, so he didn't want that information getting out for a long time. And eventually it did. A friend of theirs interviewed Carl and ended up writing a book about it. The guy happened to be a writer. So that book is called the last one that came out was Hell's Gate Terror at Bobby Mackey's Music World. The final version published in 2005, but it was written originally in the 80s and whatever updates. But Carl, when there was a hole, he was possessed. They did an exorcism. You know, he was he said he found a diary. I mean, that really happened. the the exorcism and all that and him saying he was possessed absolutely happened like he's a real person uh the book was written you know there was all these investigations he was you know there's a actually you can find online the exorcism of uh uh of carl i don't remember his last name i don't want to get her carl lawson um you can find like i think it's on youtube you can find it but uh the actual video of him being exercised? It's the video of them doing an exorcism, yeah. So it's pretty interesting. But he said he found a diary in the well that was supposedly from a girl that she was the daughter of one of the owners previously when it was a bar and I believe when it was the Latin Quarter. And she was in love with a dancer or a singer there. And same sort of story, you know. father didn't want him dating. And eventually he was killed. And then she ended up poisoning her father and killing herself. That's all probably fiction. Like that's, you know, that's just from this supposed diary that Carl found. But then Bobby wrote a song about this girl whose name was Joanna, apparently. And that's one of his most popular songs that he plays all the time. So that became a big thing, you know. So then it was the portal to hell and Joanna, And most of the stories that people go there aware of are probably nonsense. But there's some good, real historic stories that they should probably be focusing on, whether they're supernatural or not. They would, you know, the same sort of stories that would cause supernatural events, you know, traumatic deaths or very emotional experiences. I think the focus about this guy being possessed and I'm wondering what brought them to that. What brought them to actually follow through with, you know, having him go through an exorcism? I would love to know, like, what types of things he was doing and experiencing. You know, what witnesses say they saw him doing? He had to be doing some scary stuff. I mean, I don't know, but that's crazy. Well, he would talk in voices, say that he was being attacked in his apartment. There weren't a lot of people actually seeing things that he was doing. It was more that things that were happening to him. And then he was saying that he was possessed by this evil spirit and it made him act out, even though he didn't hurt anybody, but he acted just strangely. He would lock himself up in his apartment and be there for days and that sort of thing. And just saying that, you know, it was driving him crazy that this thing was in his head and it was trying to control him. And that was those were the experiences he was giving off to people. And then was he ever staying on that property at night? I'm sorry to interrupt you. Yeah, he stayed. He lived in the apartment above the bar. That's what I thought. OK, OK. Yeah. So so he was there all the time by himself. And, you know, Bobby's first wife said she had an experience there where she felt like somebody had touched her and pushed her down the stairs and forced her out of the bar. So she wouldn't go back to the bar. So there were other people having experiences while Carl was having experiences that would sort of, you know, support what he was saying, at least to some degree. But that also kind of falls back to that kind of groupthink. Once people start telling you something's there, it's a little easier for you to find it, whether it's really there or not. But also, I think it was just that time period, that late 80s, early 90s satanic panic thing where if you could – and the novelist, I'm sure Hensley was embellishing for his own good. But it was a really, really big story. I mean, it ended up, you know, interviews and like I said, the exorcism. I believe they were on some of the daytime, you know, shock television shows. I think if I remember right, it was Jerry Springer, maybe in Geraldo. You know, so it was that time period. Same time period when Tipper Gore was, you know, warning us that we were all going to be Satan worshipers if we listened to Led Zeppelin backwards or something. So I think it was just kind of a perfect storm for Bobby Mackey's and for Carl. And, you know, with Carl having mental issues, I'm sure there was some, you know, they took advantage of that. Not Bobby, but, you know, maybe this writer and other people. Interesting. And that sounds like a really creepy bar either way. Just a lot of creepy things happening. And it was because it's so just kind of stuck in its time period. You feel like you're walking a little bit back in time. It's a bar, so it's dimly lit. It almost looks like it's going to fall off the hill that it's on into the river. It's just sort of barely hanging on to its own existence. So it kind of lends itself to be haunted. And underneath, where the well is, is actually beneath the operating, I guess, area of the bar in more of a storage area. The bar is almost like a tri-level. You'd walk in from the street side on the bar level, but you could walk in from the side underneath, sort of like a dugout basement kind of. And it's just all kinds of junk and garbage in there. There's a small room down there that was at one time when the mafia was involved, and it was a gambling area as well. They had a little cell down in the basement. If you lost too much money and you couldn't pay, you'd get held down there until somebody could, I guess, meet your debt. And it's still there. You mean to tell me the mafia never threw anybody down that well? They probably did, or at least out in the river, right? I'm sure there's a number of other deaths that we don't know about that happen there. So like I said, the actual history of the place lends itself to the idea that it would be haunted without even having to exaggerate the Burrow-Bryan story or whatever. But I found it interesting that I caught that particular episode of Ghost Encounters and was like, I know all of this is bullshit. Can I swear? I don't know. That's funny. I just saw it like a month ago. He looked really, really young, too. That was his first investigation, and it was just crazy. I thought, man, I still wouldn't stay in that bar. Is that well uncovered, or how do they keep that well? Uncovered, but it's filled in with dirt. So originally it was maybe 14, 15 feet deep, and it just kind of angled out to the river. So you just, you know, would throw whatever in there or pull whatever out, I guess. You know, whether it was, you know, that's where you were getting your water, that's where you're disposing of stuff. I'm not sure which way it went, but it's now mostly filled in with dirt, and you can just kind of see the hole that there's a, I believe there's a picture in the book of the well, if I remember, I'm paging through right now. We did not include that picture. But they show it in that investigation, too, if you remember. It's just sort of almost more of a depression at this point because it's so filled in. It's maybe a couple feet deep, and it's kind of – they've got sort of a deck around it that you can walk around and look at it. But it's nothing much to speak of at this point. Okay. But if you take the tour, they'll still take you down through there and let you look at it. Yeah, absolutely. Got you. that's really interesting um and you said a couple of nights a week it does still operate as a bar yeah we went in uh i went down with my girlfriend uh we were taking a trip down to louiseville when we stopped it well it was uh just a uh friday night i think and it only operates like friday and saturday as a bar there's a uh i don't know if it's ufk that's close or one of their offshoots but there was a lot of younger college age uh people in it not a bad crowd but But for the size of the bar, it seemed very empty. If it was a little corner bar, it probably would have seemed pretty full. But they were doing their line dancing, which at the time, because they were playing Achy Breaky Heart, I thought maybe I had zipped back in time and I was actually watching a residual haunting of 80 blind dancers. That's funny. But yeah, it was still a going concern. But I noticed a lot of people there that weren't participating in the dancing and were just sitting at the bar having a drink were asking bartenders and whatnot about their experiences. They were there more because of the haunted reputation than anything else. Yeah, yeah. Very cool. I have one more that I want to talk to you about, and that's the Congress Plaza. Ah, yes. Congress Plaza. I was there as well, or in the area. I got to take some pictures from the outside. We did a tour there beneath the Congress and kind of beneath Chicago of what used to be Prohibition-era tunnels. There's still tunnels now that are used, but they've been updated. So that place is a lot of fun. I just like Chicago anyway. It's a great town. So I can get there in four hours. So Chicago is a good, fun visit. And the Plaza Hotel was tied to a lot of ties to Capone and ties to H.H. Holmes, who was the country's first known serial killer. There was actually a recent movie, I think, on him as well. But the Congress was opened in 1893. It was originally built as an annex to Auditorium Theater across the street and then linked with an underground passage. It was the premier hotel in Chicago. So everyone, you know, presidents stayed there. Taft, McKinley, Coolidge. Benny Goodman hosted a radio show out of there. It's a really popular place. And Al Capone kind of took it up as one of his primary residences and would operate out of some of the upper levels of the hotel and also use corridors beneath the hotel for smuggling alcohol in the Prohibition area. A funny kind of ironic note is that the hotel hosted the 1963 Prohibition Party National Convention after it had been famous for all the alcohol and stuff that had been run out of there. It's considered one of the most haunted locations in Chicago. There's a ghost. One of the ghosts frequently seen is a Captain Lewis Austinheim, who was a veteran of the Spanish-American War. He probably would have been diagnosed with PTSD these days, but he would have night terrors and ended up actually in a brutal episode and walking through a daze and killing himself. And now his ghost is said to haunt the area, haunt the halls, follow guests and staff. Some people believe he was waiting for a woman he was going to marry there. And when she didn't show up, that triggered his PTSD and led him to kill himself. So he's a spirit that a lot of people believe they see there. Security guards have believed to chase thinking it was an intruder, and then the person they're chasing just disappears in thin air. The most interesting probably is H.H. Holmes. His story on its own is just crazy. but he was known to come to the Congress to find travelers from out of state that he could then take back to his own hotel Well home I guess which is a huge home that he built And he built it with hidden rooms and passages and stuff like that And he would, I can't remember the amount of people that he was said to have killed there, but it was a ton. But his tie to the Congress was saying that it was sort of like a hunting ground for him. And then there were just a ton of, a bunch of tragedies that happened there. elevator operator falling down an elevator shaft, a woman falling six stories down an empty elevator shaft, another one that committed suicide. Elevators are bad business at the Congress, apparently. I guess I would take the steps. You got that right. Stay the hell away from those elevators. Five people down in an elevator. What's going on? That is crazy. So that means, you know, a door opened and a lady just stepped through there, you know, thinking okay the elevator's there yeah yeah like just walked in wow right exactly and then another purposely you know down in an empty shaft um but uh yeah just a laundry list of uh people found dead in their rooms and you know and then of course all the mafia ties and uh um room 441 particularly was one that was supposed to be uh uh kind of the most haunted why so many deaths occur in that room or what's happening? Yeah, lots of deaths and eventually sort of harshened off because people had so many terrible experiences in there. So now it would be like a special room. If you wanted to go stay there you have to make a special event. But it was not so much people dying as experiencing people touching them or hearing voices or having the supernatural experience in the room. It was actually the room that Stephen King based his 1408 story on. It's the John Cusack movie, if anybody's seen it. And then room 1252 was another one, but that one no one's allowed to stay in. They've even removed the door. It was on the 12th floor, 1252. And a family had been there that had fled Czechoslovakia during the early years of World War II, 1939. And the wife was waiting for her husband, but he didn't arrive. She had a couple of children and he never showed up. Days turned to weeks and she wasn't hearing from him, became more and more despondent and ended up throwing herself out the window along with her two sons and dying there on the sidewalk in front of the Congress Hotel. Well, she was 43. Yeah, I'm trying to remember her children's age, six and four. And one of the children, for some reason, his body never even made it to the morgue. But they had been waiting for refuge. And her husband had been out trying to basically find them either a chance to go to Canada. He was going to Canada to set up a new business. They were on a U.S. visitor's visa. So he was really out around just sort of trying to get them someplace safe to stay. And only days after they died, they found out that they had been granted permanent refuge. A letter arrived granting them refuge. Just poor timing. He probably would have returned to them. And again, likely some mental concerns with the mother, of course, right? I think any time you see that, you can assume. But just a couple of days off and, you know, the tragic death of a mother and her two sons. What about what about kind of things that the staff and guests may be experiencing from all these tragic events that occurred at the hotel? Again, a lot of a lot of people feel, you know, get touched. They see in the window of the room 1252. No one goes in there now. They'll see a woman in the window, sometimes a woman and a couple other figures, presumably her children. There's been sightings, residual hauntings sort of of her actually falling. You know, people say they see that happening. Rarely do they say they see her actually hitting the ground, just sort of falling from the window. So a lot of people, again, touched, lots of voices, lots of shadowy figures. I mentioned the security guard. He chased a figure. One of the security guards chased a figure through the hallways, up steps. The figure always just a bit ahead of him, up onto the roof where there was nowhere else to go. But then the figure just vanished off the edge of the building. So those sort of things are kind of typical. I mean, most hauntings I think I found in my research tend to be similar, right, the experiences. It's usually, you know, feeling a touch or hearing a voice or seeing a figure. You know, there's not rarely do you get, you know, something more dramatic. And when you do, it's usually big news, like, you know, a poltergeist, right? What about instances where multiple people saw the same type of phenomenon? I'm not aware at the Congress of any. One of the more interesting stories for that would be the Nellie Butler story from Maine. That's a story from – it's an old, old story, 1799, first documented ghost story in America and very well documented. I won't go too much into the history of that one it's a long and kind of convoluted it's a great story to read though so make sure you pick up a book and read it but that one there was a lot of groups of people together in places in a cellar where this spirit would manifest who collectively would say they saw it and they saw the same thing and they would report the same sort of experiences You know, that they all, you know, their stories matched. Right. And this was early 1800s. So, one, you could say that, you know, sort of the religion and understanding in the 1800s might have been such that, you know, the more common elements, they just gave supernatural meaning. But also, I think that the amount of people together, you know, and it would be, you know, in the 20s, the 30s, you know, numbers of people gathering together to witness these phenomenons and many of them skeptical. So surprisingly for that age, even though you had all the witch trials and, you know, very religious beliefs, you know, Puritan beliefs and that sort of thing. The people in Maine were fairly progressive, I'll say, and they, you know, were doubters. Many of them thought, you know, it was all some sort of scam by the family to promote a marriage to another family. I'm trying to say this without giving too much away or getting too much in detail where I go down a rabbit hole. But but that was anyway an instance where there was a lot of people seeing the same thing, reporting the same thing. Even some religious people, even some skeptics who originally didn't believe who came around later, you know, with their own experiences. that was and i like that story because the things that happened uh seeing the apparitions hearing voices and and because they were supported by so many people and because it was in you know basically 1800 it would be hard to fake right like in 1800 how are you gonna you know you don't have uh you know recording devices and you know video devices and things like that so um to see those things it's interesting to try to figure out what was causing them that is really interesting the Congress Hotel. So it's still open and... Yes, Congress Hotel is still open. You can still stay there. What about that room you were telling me about? The one room, yeah, the one room you can get into, the 441. The 1252 is sealed off. They don't let anybody in that one. But 441, you can stay in that one. So yeah, 441, you can still make a reservation in. There's that particular room, There's more calls to security from any room in the hotel. I guess, you know, say they've been awakened by a dark figure there, often of a woman, kicking their bed. They see objects moving on their own, all kinds of terrifying noises. To date, no suicides or deaths. It's just that room just seems to be super hyperactive as far as activity, you know, that people believe is paranormal. That's okay. And the room that sealed off? That is 1252. Yes, that's the room. So that's the room that Adele Langer and her two sons jumped from. That's the room that she jumped from the window and committed suicide and killed her two sons, thinking that her husband had abandoned her. Wow, that is just, that's crazy. That is so crazy. I've never even heard of a hotel sealing off a room for that. I wonder if that's a common thing. I mean, I wonder if there's been any more rooms like that sealed off. Because people do commit suicide. Like I have a friend that actually runs a hotel. And she told me that a guy came down from Canada all the way here in Tennessee and committed suicide in her hotel. And so I don't know if they make a point to, you know, if something bad enough happens that they will seal a room off like that. You wouldn't think so. I guess it probably depends on how much publicity it gets. I'm probably not going to say too much about it if they can help it. But if people are experiencing things there, who knows? there's reports of seeing on the 12th floor a young boy running around on the floor who people think maybe is the one son whose, for whatever reason, body didn't make it to the morgue. We're not really sure what happened to his body, but they report that it never showed up at the morgue. Just Adele and her other son's body were there. So they believe that's the spirit of that restless child running around the hotel, although not maliciously. They say he's, you know, just kind of in worn out clothing. You'll see him standing at a corridor or running down the hall. And usually they'll grin and then, you know, disappear. So just just a child kind of mischievous rather than, you know, malevolent. Yes. All right. Well, your book is is is really good. And I love the, you know, the cover on it. A great cover, actually, that was created by John Gowen, who also did my most of my website work. So a really talented guy. Yeah, that looks really good. All right, Michael, why don't you tell my listeners where they can find out more information about you or any other books that you may be working on? All right. So on Amazon, you can find you can search Michael A. Koslowski and you'll find the American Ghost Stories and you'll find a couple of books that a couple of fiction books that I have out. one is the first well two it's the first two books in a series they're called the John Angel series and it's sort of a zombie meets Jason Bourne sort of mashup it's a post apocalyptic novel had a lot of fun with the first two books are out for that and I'm the other probably two more in development on that I also have a short story collection of horror stories that were published in various magazines and whatnot available on Amazon as well. Some of my earlier work and some short stories and special items, I'll call it, along with these novels can also be found on my website, which is www.mikekozlowski.com. Lots of fun there. There's a mailing list you can sign up for. I do a lot of giveaways and specials, signed books, all that kind of good stuff. Those are probably the two best places to find me. And the website also has all my contact information, social media links, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, where you can connect with me. And I'd love, would absolutely love to hear from people and listeners of their own ghost stories and own experiences for future books that I'm hoping to continue with. As I told you before we started, the paranormal investigation stuff's a bit new to me. I've been mostly a horror fiction writer, so I'm learning right along with my readers, and I'm having these experiences and making my conclusions just like anybody else. I don't claim to be an expert, just an interested horror person just like the rest of everybody. So, you know, interacting with fans and others that have those experiences or coming out to events and talking about the book or particular stories, I'd love to do. So any contact with that group of people would be great, whether it's, you know, one-on-one with fans or, you know, bigger other paranormal researchers or investigators. Looking forward to the experiences. Very good. And I will have the link where they can actually contact you and send you their stories directly. OK, in the show notes. That'd be fantastic. All right. Very good. The book is called American Ghost Stories. True tales from all 50 states. Michael Kowalowski, my special guest. Michael, many blessings to you. And I really appreciate your time. Thank you, Ketan. Thanks. It was great being on. Had a blast. To find out more about our guest and all others, please visit our website at mysteriousradio.com.