Show Notes
In tonight's dead letter, listener John is nineteen, home from his freshman year and a few shifts into a summer dishwashing job at a grand old house on Michigan's Old Mission Peninsula that has been a restaurant since the 1950s. The staff there blame anything strange in the building on a ghost they call Genevieve, and John doesn't believe in any of that. One warm night he goes upstairs to change out of his kitchen clothes, and the bulb pops the second he flips the switch. Strange enough on its own, but what happens next is why this particular night stuck with him. Note: The room referenced at Waverly in the Episode is 503. It should have been 502.
Relevant Prior Episodes
Greyfriar's Kirkyard Halloween Special
The Sallie House – Ghost in the Machine Part 1
Lockdown at Waverly Sanatorium
The True Story behind the Conjuring Part 1
A Live Reading with Jim Hunt - Psychic Medium
Links and Further Reading
The Mission Table Restaurant of Bowers Harbor: A Splendid Building, But Not a Residence for a Ghost — Julie Schopieray, Grand Traverse Journal
Would the Real Mrs. Stickney Please Stand Up? Setting the Old Mission Ghost Story Straight — Northern Express
The Haunting of Bowers Harbor Inn – Is It Genevieve Stickney's Ghost? — Old Mission Gazette
Bowers Harbor Inn — Wikipedia, on the 1927 fire and the house built around the old farmhouse
Mission Point Lighthouse — History, the light at the tip of Old Mission Peninsula near the 45th parallel
Occupational Folklife — American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
Meet the Mackenzie Poltergeist of Greyfriars Kirkyard — Icy Sedgwick, on the grabs and marks reported on the tours
Waverly Hills Sanatorium — American Hauntings, on Room 502 and the nurse story
The Buxton Inn — Wikipedia, the Granville, Ohio inn Forrest visited
We're looking for more stories! Send your Dead Letter to [email protected]!
More from Astonishing Legends
In tonight's dead letter, we're in Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania in the 1990s, a few years after the revolution, where our listener Nadina, six at the time, had the run of a Soviet-era apartment block with her older sister and their best friend while their nanny visited a friend upstairs. They climbed past the last floor of apartments to the metal door at the top, and before anyone could touch it, something huge, aggressive and feral sounding on the other side began attacking it so hard they fled. Nadina still doesn't know what was up there.
Our Halloween tradition continues with three more listeners sharing encounters they still can’t explain. At a church summer camp in the mountains above Southern California, Ray and two fellow counselors spot a girl standing alone in the parking lot after lights-out. She silently returns to the bunkhouse when they call to her… but that won’t be the last time they see her. In San Luis Obispo, Brian and his wife move into a guest house with a long history and a curious warning from their elderly landlady: most tenants don’t stay very long. Soon they begin to understand why. And Terry takes us back to the night shift of a hospital coronary care unit, where a dying patient starts asking every nurse the same unsettling question: “Who’s that behind you?” Turn down the lights and settle in for Part Two of our Halloween listener stories. Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.
In tonight's dead letter, our listener TM was the office manager at a Catholic parish in the upper Mississippi river area, and part of her job was digitizing the cemetery's paper records, so she'd walk the rows with a camera, say hello to everyone, and tell them what she was there to do. One marker sat outside the cemetery’s plot map entirely: a boy who drowned in the river in 1936, with fresh flowers by his stone and no file in the office. One July afternoon, someone or something unseen let her know it was there.
In 1933, a Scottish botanist watched a seemingly abandoned steamship drift past the Alaskan coast on an ice floe. It appeared upside down in a strange mirage, with no crew and no one at the wheel. This ship was the Baychimo, which was abandoned two years earlier, but refused to disappear. Having repeatedly resurfaced across the Arctic, it earning a reputation as one of history’s great ghost ships. In this episode, we explore the strange history of ghost ships from the the Baychimo, to the frozen Octavius, and the Ourang Medan, whose crew was reportedly found mysteriously dead shortly before the ship itself exploded and sank. Three ships, three enduring legends, and at least one vessel whose final resting place remains unknown. Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.
In tonight's dead letter, Corey takes us back to Omaha, Nebraska in the year 2000, when he was the overnight host on a Top 40 station and a call-in topic about haunted places kept circling back to one private family cemetery. He sent a carload of listeners out there on a Friday night to report back live on the air. A few days later his boss got a phone call from the cemetery's caretakers. And, to paraphrase a Dateline episode…things got weirder from there. We mentioned a TON of old eps in this one!