Haunted Funeral Homes, House of Wills & Ghostly Residences | Paranormal Locations (Ep 184)

0:00

ah

Podcasting and memory

very spooky lovely lovely i don't know why i wanted to say i'm old greg i'm old greg this is a picture of bailey's this is a picture of bailey's a little bit closer this is a picture of bailey's so close you get your eyes wet i freaking love them greg i'm old greg i'm on greg hello do you love me hi i am playing your love games with this is this is two girls one ghost two girls one ghost

1:00

it always amazed me sorry it always amazes me how i know like one line from old nostalgic videos and you'll like repeat the line and then i don't know and all of a sudden you can verbatim go line by line and you just keep going and sometimes i just have to sit here and be like in awe of where like where do you keep all this information it's it's in the spot that it should be removed from for me to be able to remember normal english and most other

Nostalgic internet culture

things that come out in this podcast where i'm like what's the name what's the word who's the person it's all just youtube videos from like 2005 through honestly through vine it was like youtube to vine and that took up all my memory i was actually just so impressed telling um or brian just told me the other day because i posted a video and i was like nature is pretty neat

2:00

and then he's like oh you misspelled nature and i was like no i didn't because have you did you see that youtube video you spell it nature meet your uh it's like no one's seen this video and yet they have millions of views on youtube it was from like 2 000 i don't know 10 or whatever okay but to be fair in your defense because i'm going to come to it the sentence was nature's pretty neat so you spelt it like nature's nature nature yes it's an amazing video i made brian and my dad sit through a three-minute long youtube video to watch it i was cackling they're like not laughing and i was like okay i guess this is something that it's mostly funny when you're 14. but it still lives in my heart you know 28. it's fine or right now that's basically why our podcast is named what it is too because because we are mature adults in your heart when you're 13 14. yeah yes uh this is two girls one ghost two girls one ghost i think we did this

3:00

already but hello again we didn't we yeah we did we totally whispered okay

Podcast updates

as you're saying my memory is good well okay here's the thing i'm supposed to say who this podcast is sponsored by so yes yes and we are your justices that's corinne and i'm sabrina and the next episode we will be together yeah yeah we're gonna film it by the time oh yes the next episode that we record will be together the next encounters and then this episode comes out a few days after our live show so yeah we are yeah it went really well you guys enjoyed it it went so well so well bigfoot paid a visit yeah oh yeah we can say that because no one else will know until because no one knows watching yeah um

4:00

yeah and we're really you know just so stoked about like i don't know what to say can i it's so funny that you just spoke that way because you came on to screen picture this i'm like getting ready setting up and then your face pops up on the screen and you look like a beautiful like surfer girl mermaid and so like the way that you're wow so stoked i was like yes you were a little california girl at heart

Hair and beauty advice

this is my natural hair when i don't do it it's beautiful but thank you i think it looks okay because the right side is a little bit better but the problem with this hair is that i always love the underside because it's like wavy and curly and then the top is flat yeah you don't know how to fix it it's just like straight hair on the top maybe get some good product oh i mean i've had my hairdresser get me the huge bottles of olaplex

5:00

i love i wear old i do olaplex living proof oribe like i that's only but i mean like a post shower like some there's got to be like some mousse or something that you can put in to help maintain the the murals the murals yeah pearls if anybody has extremely low porosity hair and wavy hair please help me because my hair does not you just said a couple words that went over my head there's a porosity i learned everything from tic toc now there's a porosity test where you can see how porous your hair is meaning like how much moisture your hair keeps in and based on that you have to match your products that you use to your hair type and so there's a bunch of quizzes you can take online but the easiest way to figure out your porosity is if you take like a strand of hair you don't have to pluck it from your head you can just grab it from the ground or whatever or your hair brush and you put it in a cup of water okay you leave it for a few minutes and when you come back if your hair is still floating on top that means you have low

6:00

porosity because the hair isn't taking in any moisture it's just like dry and like chilling at the top if it's normal it's floating in the middle and if it's if it's high porosity did i mix those things up if it's high porosity it's at the very bottom because it's sucked in all the moisture now it's heavy so it floats down to the bottom whoa okay i'm gonna try this yeah and that's about the extent i know of paranormal this feels like this feels like something that would be at a science fair in middle school and i love it yeah oh that is a fun test that's it for

Science hour and coffee

all the people of kids out there that's like a good little yeah did you ever do the thing where you put you put like pepper and dish soap in a dish and they run from each other oh never seen that yeah i don't remember anything uh in terms of what it means but it's just really cool to see and this has been science hour with two girls one ghost yeah one percent science

7:00

just like one percent history it's like the tidbit that we remember and absolutely nothing else yeah yeah it's great everything is great do you ever drink so much coffee that you feel ill and like you're gonna throw up but you won't let yourself stop until you finish the whole thing um i have done the first part but not the second part oh okay i'm i'm nauseous but i'm gonna keep so do you want me to yell at you to stop drinking your coffee because i don't want you to go throw up in the middle of

Kittens and overalls

this episode no it won't work i don't listen to anyone i don't want to listen to anyone i don't even listen to myself i don't my body saying stop drinking no i bought this i paid for i'm like this is where i get cheap i'm like i paid four dollars for this iced coffee so i'm gonna drink all of it because right now i've only had a dollar eighty worth so gotta keep going so i will do that but then i'll save the other half in the fridge this is coffee

8:00

from yesterday that i put in the fridge and now i'm drinking it as iced coffee today brilliant brilliant i love iced coffee the most i drink it all year round do you switch to hot coffee in the winter i love hot coffee leah is chatty and i think she wants to be in my lap so come here let's see come on lai she ran away you should get one of those baby carriers that you can put her in and put her in here yeah do you think she would like i do have a little freak out kangaroo pouch in my overall that pocket i would argue is not the appropriate size for leia but is the appropriate size for a kitten oh so it means i must get a kitten yeah exactly that's earlier today i was like going around like this with my phone just in my pocket like this and i was like this is the perfect way to

9:00

secretly like film someone oh it is i didn't even think of that but those pockets are so epic i went to in boston they have the head of the charles it's basically just like different types of regattas a couple times a year and i went to the one this past fall and i was wearing overalls too in the pocket in the front of overalls is life-changing i had my wallet in there i had my cell phone in there and i had my beer in there i was free hands i was i mean i looked real top heavy but i like cargo pants exactly but right on your chest keeping everything close to the heart i like it all of it and this is why i want to be

Voldemort makeup chat

buried in them because when i am a ghost i'm going to require many uh utensils and right tools it's utility pants but just a whole whole body full body but they're cute they are really cute yeah well i've always wanted the best fashion actually i was thinking today about how we should do a tick tock

10:00

um segment where it's our ghostly skincare and i just end up doing my voldemort makeup instead of like real skincare wait you should that's so funny i love that how did you do your nose again did you do band-aids or something i did masking tape actually i did it like this so i masking taped my nose down like this yeah and then i drew the two and then it was funny because i couldn't really breathe so i put like a little like went like this with my pinky under the tape so there's a little like breathing a tiny little tiny little hole and then i drew the nostrils on i love that

Halloween and live shows

it's so good it's so good i was screaming when you time to me in your voldemort outfit because you called me twice and the first time i didn't pick up and the second time was like yeah i was like i feel like i should really be picky i need to answer yeah yeah and then you just really take your little mold of my face

11:00

it was so good oh man oh my gosh we start we need to start thinking about what we're doing for halloween this year so if anyone has ideas please comment below because this is on youtube now hello um and also email us ideas because i don't know how to one-up voldemort that's well tomorrow yeah yeah and we're not gonna be most likely together on actual halloween but we will be together we're going to do we're going to come here i think in october we're going to chill in there in the boston area so yes i mean we could still theoretically put on our costumes and like walk around salem or something 100 right and we could maybe do some events and i don't know knock on wood guys maybe more live shows maybe let's hope let's hope that whatever happened a few days ago went really well okay well should i find out yeah magic eight ball let's see okay

12:00

dearest magic 8 ball and all the spirits of the universe who are with us in this magic 8 ball will karen and i be doing more live shows or what's the more specific question in in uh within this calendar year within this calendar year and then the follow-up question if it says no is next calendar year what do we have cannot predict now oh screw that i'm going to go get my crystal hold on

Pendulum divination

my pendulum okay i'm going to keep i'm going to keep shaking it until it gives me the answer i'm going to go get yeah wow karina's gone oh this one says as i see it yes because this is how it works of course i i can't but i can hear your little voice okay okay all right now it says as now it says as i see it yes okay i'll take that that's extremely

13:00

favorable thank you yeah exactly do you remember when i was asking the pendulum a bunch of questions about myself and then i was like do you want me to ask you questions about you and every single time i asked it it completely stopped moving because it hates me yeah i was trying to like i literally propped up my phone and i was filming to basically be like all right sabrina i hear the answers to your questions and i've never seen the pendulum so damn still in my life it was like the universe doesn't support sabrina right now so we can't answer the phone right now i think it was more of just like a mind your own business corrine yeah but sabrina wants to know she's in

TSA stories

my business should i bring this to la yes you can ask it i would love to okay i'm nervous tsa won't take it right actually i get i get through tsa with a knife almost every single time karen this is recorded what okay well it's i it's not like a normal metal knife it's the go guarded ring

14:00

the one that is for runners and like geared yeah or marketed towards female runners i don't know what it's made from it's like that thing is it's dangerous i don't purposefully bring it but i often forget it wherever it is in one of my bags or purses and it has gone with me on the plane multiple times meanwhile i get pulled over every time pulled over every time i bring my microphone anywhere oh me too okay it looks suspicious okay so normally i think when you use a pendulum you're supposed to be basically say like tell me yes or like show me yeah show me no but here's the thing every single time it goes up and down for yes and back and forth for now so i'm gonna try to be really really still okay i'm like holding my breath in this calendar year will sabrina and i do more live shows isn't this creepy it is i can't tell where it's going i said no

15:00

okay thank you spirit we don't appreciate your answers right now but thanks okay all right well you know what you're moving on you can change your own future and manifest so we'll see yeah we're in control of our own destiny okay korean you're first this week but

Listener email clarification

this is another topic picked by our patreon donor this one is picked by cat and it is funeral homes funeral homes yes which yes before we even start that i'm going to read an email so we got an email from our listener sierra and there's a lot more that i did not understand in terms of terminology when it comes to like mortuaries versus funeral homes versus like all of these things and so i found this email after already doing my research

16:00

and i didn't tell you about it either so what we're about to say there's probably going to be some things that we get mixed up when it comes to terminology but we're going to learn now and so the listeners can fill in or correct what we say correct us future us yes yes okay okay so really quick um so sierra emailed us she's a new listener and wanted to write in after listening to job hauntings she is a biomedical and forensic photographer for a large county in michigan and works at a medical examiner's office mostly in the autopsy suite but occasionally we'll go out to death scenes with investigators uh medical legal death investigators different from law enforcement um but basically she's in the field and she understands what's going on and we get a lot of our one information all about your job right it sounds super

17:00

cool um yeah okay but she writes i'm writing

Death industry terminology

in to give some clarification i feel like there are a lot of terms thrown around regarding the death industry that people think are interchangeable i definitely did but really are we are guilty you guys talked about mortuary hauntings which i loved but i think there are some medical examiner slash corner office stories mixed in you see mortuaries are funeral homes and they would not be doing autopsies i.e finding cause and manner of death funeral homes transport embalm and prep bodies for funerals and burial they closely or they work closely with a medical examiner coroner's office because they will pick up bodies there after autopsy medical examiner offices slash coroner offices are the ones actively figuring out how someone died they are the ones doing actual autopsy autopsies to find cause and manner of death hospitals also have morgues and will do autopsies so a

18:00

mortician would not be performing an autopsy but they would be embalming someone and do whatever else is needed for the funeral also in my experience if a family member has to come in and identify the body that would be dumb done at a medical examiner coroner's office not at the mortuary funeral home once a body is at the funeral home the family has already been in contact with them and made all necessary arrangements like i said though i work at a large county with many cities so maybe it's different in smaller counties slash cities or in rural areas and this is a death is such a taboo subject in america and i always want to clarify things for people to help them understand what i do and what happens after we die i think it's a fascinating field to work in and i wouldn't choose anything else i hope this was okay to write in about it definitely was uh

Gruesome funeral stories

maybe one day i'll have a ghostly experience to write in about because how can a me's office not be haunted

19:00

okay so this was super helpful sarah yes i do feel likely forget but i feel like because i worked on prodigal son and adrisa was a medical examiner and we were in that world a lot i ended up learning a lot more about this industry so it totally makes sense like mortuary and funeral homes are the like burial and like death services process i thought that morticians and autopsy techs and coroners were essentially all the same thing so this helped me yeah i do wonder my one question is like what degrees is it a similar degree that they all have to have or is there yeah i don't know we're not yeah because remember and i think we probably have talked about this in a podcast like three years ago there were there was like all these news stories about and now i'm not sure if they were

20:00

mortuaries or morgues or what the situation was or me offices but like there were such small towns like kind of spread out within the united states that like they were hiring the butchers to become the again i'm not sure the specific term yeah of those news stories but like to become like the town's mortician or me and they didn't have any like real expertise and then there were that there was that one place that they found that guy was like frankensteining bodies yeah oh my gosh yeah i almost forgot about that yeah and there was just so many like do you remember all the drones that were going over and just yeah there were like bodies stacked in the back it was disturbing there was i almost actually chose so for this we said haunted funeral homes smash morgues um and i almost chose for this a morgue or a funeral home that had basically like shut down because there were a ton of dead bodies like found abandoned there

21:00

like many years after they had shut the place down that just weren't taken care of but i didn't do that one because i think that was basically like the most disturbing and scary part of it there was no i couldn't find actual ghost stories yeah the place they would have been just more like the gruesome stories something i'm so fascinated by and if

Body farms

any one of our listeners works at or knows anything about these please tell me more they're called body farms and it's basically like like you donate your body to science and they like try they put your body in different way places or not yours like but they put bodies in different experiments technically to see how they decompose and it helps them solve crimes later down the line right because you can see how it interacts with different like weather and elements and soil types and in fauna and whatever it's really really fascinating non-natural substances exactly yeah is there more than one for

22:00

some reason i when people say the body farm i always thought it was just one place i would imagine there's gotta be more than one just for like climate sake and resources but yeah i don't know especially because like say you donate your body to science and the body farm is not nearby you not necessarily that you have to go to a body farm but like that would mess with the control right if you're being shipped cross-country then you're not following the decomp decomposition properly true yeah i don't know but what about this is this is why this is a call to action right have you ever been donated in your past life to the body farm please let us know what happened are you a ghost at a body farm please call in yeah it very it is interesting there's uh a book and i haven't read it yet but it's called stiff i'm pretty sure i downloaded the

23:00

audiobook but i'm fearful that i'll all faint while listening to it but i think it's all about what happens like in rigor mortis and basically like post-death and in decomposition two bodies so

Cannibalism exhibit

we could probably learn a bit there as well okay oh also san diego right now has a exhibit on cannibalism and i may or may not go i don't know it also feels like something i'll faint at but i think me and marisa might come yeah yeah she was like do you want to go to the the museum about cannibalism kind of seems like something you'd be interested in doing i mean if there are photos of it then no but if we're just like learning about the psychology of it and history of it then yes but i can't i can't compliment ever to be like you look like the type of girl who would like to go to a cannibalism museum will you come with me oh god what does that say i mean i feel

24:00

like people people already know who we are okay so anyway what did you pick okay so we are going to venture over to ohio i'm going to tell you about the most long-standing and successful black owned funeral home in cleveland ohio it was the city's second oldest black owned funeral home and was reported as the

House of Wills history

largest in the state and this is the house of wills so i'm going to tell you all about walter wilkes like w-i-l-k-e-s no wills like do you do you have the will to live oh okay so do that in a sentence please um okay do you want an answer to that question i don't know yeah i probably could have picked a nicer sentence but that's where my mind is right now spelt it out yeah w-i-l-l-s okay got it copy that walter wills first arrived in cleveland ohio in 1899 after graduating from antioch college and he was a son of

25:00

former slaves and was one of the 18 black men who were brought into the city to work as strike bearers for the cleveland street whale railway company wow i'm stuttering a lot already um so there was a strike that happened at this railway company and it led to most people essentially being fired including walter so he lost his job after basically moving there for this job after college and so then he's kind of like okay what do i want to do with my life what what career choices can i make all while you know trying to keep in mind that he is a black man in the late 1800s in ohio who is the son of former slaves and has a family of his own and he's really trying to like do well and and establish himself and you know yeah start to build good resources and involve his community as well so he's got a lot riding on him and like in his on his plate and in his mind when

26:00

choosing what he's gonna do so totally he dabbles in a few other potential careers the possibility of becoming a physician he then looks into insurance and i probably didn't have to include this but i want to because it makes me mad so he did end up landing an insurance job at mutual life in new york but when signing contracts and getting ready to be essentially onboarded onto the job the manager told him that mutual agents could only sell policies to white people and walter then realized that this man didn't realize that he was a black man and so he he told his manager that he was black and so he was like i don't i'm not okay with this no and the manager was like oh okay well what okay let's just strike that from the record tell me basically any other ethnicity and we'll be good to go and he was like i'm no i have way more pride than that so walter will go walk away from it but luckily for him he came across uh well he experienced that in a lot of his

27:00

job searches and similar scenarios which is just absolutely horrifying um yeah but he finally ended up at a massachusetts bank that had anti-discrimination laws so he was able to work there and while working at this bank he also attended cleveland law school at night so he was in insurance going to law school had already graduated college was still trying to figure it out but also like collecting hustling yeah like a lot of education and good connections so then an interesting opportunity arose in 1904 he received a letter from william gee a new mortician who needed a partner and so the two men worked out an agreement and opened the ghee and wills funeral home walter okay i'm just imagining like william gee is that his name yes just sending blind letters to a bunch of people like or i know they probably had some connection but i'm now imagining a scenario

28:00

where i just find people's names in the phone book and i just send letters to them and see if they want to be my partner in life yeah but also me yeah perhaps but also i don't know how it worked back then maybe it was just kind of like anyone who works in insurance or has bank connections yeah a certain level of education you're kind of just like who will give me money here who will take a chance on me who will work with like the the original versions of hi sharks here's my idea will you join me but yeah he just mailed out a letter but walter was like yeah man let's do it so they went in on a funeral home together and walter then transformed his deceased father-in-law's house into the mortuary downstairs was the funeral parlor and upstairs was a home where he and his wife alberta lived and their family okay so walter wills and his partner william mcgee

House of Wills legacy

did not make this an ordinary funeral home this is where i chose this place because it's actually very very cool oh

29:00

so okay walter thought that funeral homes were much too glum and depressing and sad and made everyone upset yes so they decided that they were going to make theirs as bright and as beautiful as possible vibrant dancing colors to honor all of the amazing people who'd passed and to celebrate their lives rather than mourn their death and this is the early 1900s i don't think anyone has so basically never done this very yeah yeah so just a couple years in walter's partner william gee passes away and walter's left to run the business on his own so he moves the business to a larger building so out of his his late father-in-law's house and into a larger building and he leans on his family to help him out a lot his sisters anna and mary were funeral attendants his son walter jr helped as a teenager before becoming more permanent fixture in the business in adulthood and walter soon bought his own carriage and a team of horses named barney richard and colonel

30:00

and then he also purchased a car as well making alter the first black mortician in cleveland to own a funeral limousine i love it i love this this is also just such an empowering story yeah and

Funeral traditions

it reminds me of any time i talk about funeral homes which is apparently a lot um uh i think of the show six feet under if you've never seen it it is so good i haven't i have okay so good this is who else there's a bunch of people in it but it's i love michael c hall i need to watch it yeah you would like it this is reminding me of when my aunt and uncle had lived in a retirement community while their house was getting built and i was biking around with them and we were like biking in one guy or my uncle was like hey how's it going to one guy and the guy was like oh woke up on the right side of the grass today so pretty good and it was the funniest joke i'd ever

31:00

heard i was like hackling almost broke my bike so good but yeah we all want to be this side of the ground for yeah as long as we can be comfortably okay so walter was making a name for himself he built this beautiful colorful funeral home and there were some other traditions that were a little bit old and antiquated or just didn't make sense to walter so he broke them and replaced them so for example one of these things was that the city's he was the city's very first undertaker to stop hanging black crepe fabric in the doorway of the home of the deceased which i hadn't even known was a thing so basically if you died the funeral home would come and hang a black or someone would but i think the funeral home would hang a black curtain to basically it's almost like like lowering a flag being like someone so dear

32:00

i read a book and i'm blanking on the name orphan something orphan the orphan collector i just read this and it takes place in like 1920s-ish when the plague first hit or not first like then the plague hit um philadelphia and when people were dying from the plague they were doing that on their doors like if someone died they put black or then they would put white if people were still alive like they would use different colors to insinuate like what was happening inside their doors oh that's kind of that's feels very apocalyptic to basically have to wave a white flag to be like i'm still in here yeah it's a little scary but yeah i mean i guess that was i don't know if that's a practice anywhere else in the world

Community support

still but it definitely was a thing uh okay so he was like that's we're done with that so instead he purchased floral wreaths made by various black florists in the community and placed those in the doorway instead

33:00

that's much more positive much more positive and also involving the community right yeah you know supporting yeah multiple businesses and and entrepreneurs now that he's purchasing these florals from so i think he did a great job good job well yes in 1935 he again had to move buildings there was let me preface this by basically every single time he moved buildings it had something to do with the housing authority the housing authority would basically be like you're kicked out we're we're gonna put condos here or do this or that and there were a few times where people really tried to fight for for walter in his funeral home uh but yeah he basically lost every single time and just had to like find a new space so how many times did he move i don't know like three or four times i think so in 1935 he moved buildings again and he spent a lot of effort and money remodeling this new funeral home he

34:00

added mosaic tiles oil paintings expensive murals colorful furniture dazzling chandeliers and this spot became known as house of wills so everyone started nicknaming it that it was now his his uh basically like the newest version of his funeral home after pretty much establishing himself as a lone funeral home director so was he still in in business with william gee because that's also a will so will wills yeah i'm sweating um take it out no william gee passed away a couple years into the owning the funeral home okay yes so they owned the first funeral home together which was or they started the business together i don't know how if how the business worked out in the end when when william gee passed away if if walter had to like buy out his half or something i don't really know how it how it worked out but

35:00

basically like after they left after walter passed that's when they moved for the first time and have moved a few times since so the only time they owned the funeral home together was when it was walters his late stepfather's house there's okay a lot of moving parts but it's most the majority of the time this funeral home is walter and his family they only william and walter only had the funeral home together for two years

Podcast wills

gotcha yeah i have a question for you corinne when i die why would you like my face you weren't looking but i immediately went uh oh she's gonna ask me about her death i was prepared for it you were like uh i don't know it was the look on my face that you could tell yes um i know where this is going do you i don't know are you gonna like is nick replace you or something

36:00

that's close i was gonna ask who would you like me to put i can make a verbal will right now okay the second half of the podcast do you want me to burden you with the fact that you have to now do the podcast by yourself and that will be in my will or should i bequeath my role onto someone else i feel like the right thing to do would be to just dissolve the podcast i can't keep going if you're dead sabrina oh my god but what if what if in my will i say korean you must continue the podcast until i from the other side gain enough strength to come through and communicate with you and continue the podcast from the other side but you must continue it until it happens this feels very hairy houdini of you i know i was just thinking that and if that were the case then yes i would continue it and i think

37:00

that here's the thing i wouldn't want to fully replace you because i feel like that would be your spirit might feel spited by that or or that you're like spiteful sabrina spiteful sabrina yes i just feel like it would be harder like if you start to build a connection and and who's my i think we'd have to have like yes it would just be like a series of mediums just every single episode a new medium would be on to to have the ability for you to come through i have another idea who is my i need to create a nemesis i need to find a nemesis in this world and when i and i will also be their nemesis it's going

Host wills

to be a mutual nemesis situationship and when i die i'm going to leave my role in this podcast to my nemesis because i want to be a spiteful spirit i think that will give me more energy in the spirit world

38:00

so instead of someone who's given you a really tough time about believing in the paranormal like a like a mean skeptic someone who's like you're so stupid and naive there's no not yet but i am accepting um applications okay we'll see what happens we'll see hopefully not but okay if i die sabrina yeah my wish for the podcast is for you to stop this podcast and put all of your efforts into making the best sleepy time ghost story podcast there ever was because i've been asking for that for four years so this is my will for you to feel guilty into doing it okay i just need a constant i love how now that we have video we like pretend to shake and reach across the room

39:00

also i am sweating so bad my underboob sweat is unreal i'm like trying to make

Funeral home community

sure that we can't see it though you're okay yeah i'm blocking with the ipad yeah alrighty so they've moved they've redone this funeral home it is dazzling just so gorge but then during the great depression walter wills converts his third floor into a food pantry for those in need so he is doing way more than just the the normal list of things to do for a funeral home he's becoming really serving the community yeah exactly yeah so for many people who are unable to pay for funerals at the time as well during the great depression he conducted them at no cost he allowed the home to be used for many black civic events it was a place for music recitals it was a gathering space walter was super involved politically he was on many many boards he invested in insurance companies that

40:00

would write mortgages for black people he engaged the community and took care of them and the community took care of him in return so wow

House of Wills relocation

the house of wills was normally in this relationship we hope we never end up there it was yeah it was special yeah oh i want to read this sentence i wrote it so much better than what i just said but it's basically the same sentiment i wrote this is not some scary house with dead people at the end of the street this was not the how home little kids dared each other to go up to this was not the place that people feared ever finding themselves at this funeral home was a symbol of community strength and life that is a picture sentence yes so walter did a great great job engaging in his community then again despite everybody's annoyance he has to move the funeral home once more the housing authority came in and said get out and he was like ugh at that point it feels targeted which is annoying to me uh mom it probably was

41:00

yeah i hate that hate that okay so he moves but this is this is to our benefit because he moves to a huge 50 000 square foot gothic style building

Themed rooms

this is a 42 room building so walter now has largest 42 42 rooms it's a map i'm gonna google it oh well yeah you're gonna you when you google it you're gonna be like this can't be right but it is because remember he's very into interesting decor which i'll talk about in a second okay so he moves to this massive massive building he now has the largest black funeral home in the whole state of ohio previously this place this building had been a german singing club and then a hospital for immigrants and then a hebrew institute and now it is the new house of wills i see your face you're looking at the pictures of it so again yeah he remodels

42:00

it to add a little flavor add a little spice with his decor and he themes all of the rooms there's a 60s themed room with a shag rug a kidney-shaped table and a half moon couch called the dream world room there's a room filled with dolls there's a greek style chapel with large columns and decor there's a casket showroom called the cloud room a blue and yellow egyptian slumber room with sphinx sculptures engraved columns stucco decor an egyptian motifs and there were just so many more rooms like this like everything yeah was something okay if the kidney-shaped table is my favorite because that is it's very punny to me i'll show okay yeah super cool it was awesome is it i mean still do you know um i believe so it was a band well i'll get to it but

Abandonment and restoration

it was abandoned and it's being restored

43:00

currently so i think if it's not beautiful if it's somehow not pink right now it will likely end up pink again because the person who purchased it is trying to bring it back to its former glory okay i love that that is i love when someone purchases something and decides to restore it because right it probably would be easier just to like demolish it and rebuild but for them to be like this was such a historical place yes let's pay homage to it i warm is my little cold heart yes we apple yeah to your point too i'll talk about it in a in a minute but it definitely would have been easier for him the new owner to knock it down and i'll tell you why in a second but okay okay so this place is it's basically a theme park now like imagine being a little kid and having to go to this funeral home and feeling like oh no i'm about to experience something so sad because my relative past or

44:00

friend passed or something but then you're just like in the coolest rooms ever it just helps helps lift you up again a little bit yeah and also they used a lot of these rooms for community-based events so it was much more than just going and deciding what to do uh yeah in terms of arrangements for your loved ones yeah so eventually uh oh well let me also say this place held up to eight funerals in one day and employed 50 people i always picture funeral homes as like i don't know having maximum five people which i could be completely wrong but i was like this place is huge it's like a middle school yeah i feel like i've only been to one funeral home and then i've the all the other funerals i've been to are like in churches but yeah it was small like very very small is that the hearse backing up to your

45:00

door right now it might be my nemesis is here to kill me it's a colonel in the other two horses cleveland and i can't remember all of their names all right so walter lives a nice long life creates this amazing place for his community is so well loved house of wills is like the place to be everybody the place to die yes yes to live and to die because you do a lot of both in that place

House of Wills haunting

so he passes away in 1967 and his adopted son keeps the business going he expands it they have two locations now operating at once but this location the one that you just looked at photos of and that we'll post on our instagram this location was shut down in 1996 and was abandoned the homestead 1996 you said 1996. yeah so it operated for quite some time so let me remind myself let me scroll up

46:00

uh doo to do i did not put dates but sometime after sometime during the great depression yeah or after when they had to move into the new space yes okay so it did operate for a very long time in this specific building so it shuts down in 1996 and it's abandoned and the home starts to fade it starts to deteriorate people break in they steal all the copper wiring there's flooding there's natural disasters a lot of weather that goes in that messes up everything that's there there are thieves walking through probably plenty of teenagers and just like whoever going in and messing things up and whatnot so it is it's a disaster inside old body bags and embalming fluids are strewn throughout the rooms old papers and records are littering tables and floors collections of items belonging to the the deceased are still there like

47:00

out in the open for basically anyone to take and the once fanciful and lively decor is turned a bit more macabre a bit more decrepid dancing around your nightmares the kidney-shaped table haunting your dreams turns into a real kidney it feels like we've talked about it before where there's these things called like the back rooms where people essentially say back rooms are or like a version of what happens beyond the the like simulation that we're in where you're like stuck on the in between the photos of this when it's abandoned which i know you saw a few of them when you were looking this feels like a back room to me this feels like a weird

Airbnb listing

creepy place it's like the upside down version yes exactly that like everyone's like yeah you just get a bad feeling in there which is so unfortunate because it was such a beautiful beautiful place for people for so so so long yeah okay so now it is it's a wreck and then in 2010 so this is 14 years after it was

48:00

left abandoned eric freeman from la buys the house he hopes to restore it and use it for more community-based programs basically give a second chance to it to what walter had walter wills had created and so he he goes there initially he's shocked by the condition of the property uh and did he buy it before he bought it from like over online photos probably yeah ebay craigslist probably something like that yeah so people had contributed to the trash inside of it copper wiring is ripped from the walls yeah but he said the reason that he felt like he could take on the project was because even though so much of this was like destroyed very little was disturbed architecturally so it still had the good bones so he was like oh i can

Restoration struggles

do this so he begins the project

49:00

the good the good bones the house has the bones that are good uh but like you said before where it would have been probably easier to just knock it down that's a very much the case because bless eric and his friends they were his friends were helping him restore and he said it was near impossible because every time they got anything done within a few days people would break in and scalp and steal it all so they were just like you're gonna say like the ghosts were doing it but that's even worse no i think the ghosts want it to be back yeah yeah no it was just like yeah people i mean they've been abandoned for so long so i feel like yeah it's it just was everyone thought it was for them yeah so it was very difficult i'm sure he sunk a crap ton of money a ton of money uh and he's still restoring it so it's taking a long time what he learned even though he built or he's intending to have this place for for community outreach and community

50:00

programs what he learned was the people that are most interested in using this property weren't necessarily groups from the community but in paranormal investigators

Airbnb paranormal

because this place very hard our favorite so for a hot second eric posts the property on airbnb for 200 a night which would get you access that's it yeah yeah you could freely wander the crematorium in bombing rooms egyptian caskets room basement but there was no electricity there were no showers of course not cameras were encouraged ghost stories encouraged but he also had said in the listing or i don't know if it was in the listing or it just him talking to reporters that extra flashlights were also very much encouraged because something about the energy in the space batteries would drain very quickly it was like i so wish that we could go do this i wish it was still on airbb for 200

51:00

how cool would it be to do like a tgog meetup not a live show but like a paranormal investigation together oh that would be freaking fantastic it would be so cool and this place is so big too it's like yeah i feel like it would be so fun because it's one of those things where you don't have to stick together like everyone can kind of meander and then you get spooked when you come into like another group of four in the hall and you're like ah you're like creeping backwards out of a room and then you go back into it yes yes what did you creep backwards into a room and then you end up in the same room you were creeping backwards into and you're like stuck in this glitch forever and then i would die and give my role of the podcast to my nemesis and come back as a spiteful spirit you don't you can't die yet though because you don't have a nemesis so i know i know i need to oh gosh life goals i need another but it doesn't work man what are you doing just to work harder work harder pick up more people making nervousness

52:00

nemesis yeah yes you can do like a like a casual nemesis maybe it's more of just like a competition of of uh good spirits i don't know like we're like no one's actually i

Tours and seances

don't know i'm trying to think of a way hated anyone yeah oh gosh i have i probably still do a lot of people are like i believe it let go of things i should be more therapized than i am this is this is what i've come to learn i don't like forgiving we all could you hold a little bit of grudges you could be a spiteful spirit but i'm a spiteful living human human so yeah whatever happened okay so it's overwhelming how many people want to stay at this airbnb listing so eric's

53:00

like never mind i'm removing the listing i'm just gonna focus on other things so he then opens it up to architectural tours and ghost tours so people can go in and take a tour of this home and you still can and there are a lot of ghosts because this place was both a funeral home and once a hospital and many other things so it has seen plenty of deaths and bodies yeah the last death being in 2006 on the front door of the property

Paranormal sightings

this poor person what murdered uh oh my god right there i know very soon right in 2006 it was abandoned too so that person was probably just trying to find cover and succumb to their injuries yes so visitors have reported hearing ghostly footsteps and seeing shadow figures dart around people have heard their name being called out to them when there's nobody else present there are orbs there are evps banks and rustling noises heard from deep within the building and a man in a white suit is

54:00

often seen wandering the property which many people believe is walter wills just keeping an eye on his property and making sure nothing too bad happens to it so it definitely sounds a lot like a lot of the hauntings that we have heard before you know you're like running the bell orbs noises sound image

The cloud room portal

yeah but there's one thing that's very odd here okay beyond the sphinxes and the greek columns beyond the saturated furniture and the elaborately carved ceilings in the casket display room the cloud room as people call it uh-huh it is a large ballroom that had numerous caskets inside it once upon a time and now replacing the caskets is a mist that grows larger or missed and swirls for several moments before disappearing a portal has opened up ah

55:00

there is a boarding portal but oh my gosh yes so this place you can you can look at it online and we'll we'll find a photo and post it on our instagram too and i know we always say we're gonna post on instagram but we actually will um i gotta start writing these things down after we we do the episode when you listen back you should like write it down write it down back i definitely need to um but so there's this room is huge it almost looks like a like a indoor pool like it looks like a big like abandoned indoor pool because this thing was huge like this is where people would go and shop all of the caskets in this giant ballroom to choose which one they wanted their loved one to be buried in yeah so it is massive and it i mean from the photos it looks

The owner's perspective

windowless too and so it just is very creepy that like people will walk in and basically we'll start seeing this thing start going and does it really towards them no it just kind of gets bigger and stays for a few moments before

56:00

disappearing has anyone tried to go into it maybe but i'm sure they disappeared and we'll never find out i was so tempted and that's how you get sucked in and never never told never come back never come back yes but if it's better on the other side well maybe that's a risk you'll have to take is the grass greener in this new dimension maybe oh speaking of diversity from the story for a second so in our in paranormal news that we post yes on patreon which are like exclusive episodes i had mentioned cern in cern's new project and we talked about that a little bit on one of these episodes too the last one or the one before a bunch of people are saying that there's new glitches in the matrix that have started and because

Mandela effect

of this yes and a lot of the old glitches in the matrix like the

57:00

berenstain bears versus the berenstein bears or like the name of chick-fil-a and how to spell it and logos and whatever are getting merged together so now people are finding copies of like each version like someone has the berenstain and the berries yes so everyone's freaking out and everyone's like figuring out which timelines they're from i don't know i don't know but here's my question to you okay how do you think chick-fil-a is spelled because this one made me really shocked okay see this i'm not a good um test subject for this because i've never gone to chick-fil-a or ever entertained or wanted to go so i don't really pay attention to that yes i think i've only been one time but this

Timeline shifts

is what free the i think i'm from i would assume you're with the in the other dimension with me too unless we're like weirdly converging and there's like multiple versions of us that always do this podcast and we like don't know which one of us is here uh

58:00

but i'm fairly certain that this thing is real like a real timeline shift because i remember chick-fil-a being c-h-i-c and then hyphen phil hyphen a a and then the like billboards was a cow saying eat more chicken with a k apparently and actually i don't know why i was talking about chick-fil-a the other day but i typed it out in my phone and it auto-corrected to c-h-i-c-k like the real spelling of chick and i was like that's weird and i looked it up and it said that that spelling was correct and i was like this is really strange and then i didn't really think about it too much until on tick tock there's a big group of people being like i'm from the chic timeline and now i'm in the ch i see k timeline and i'm like oh my god i was from that timeline too it's so confounding it really is yeah people are yeah it's very often do we jump back and forth i don't know and which one are we in like do we ever go back or what happens to that previous timeline like is it just absorbed

59:00

i don't i don't know i don't know either okay so we're back at the funeral home yes

The owner's plans

there's a vortex there's a portal no one knows really what happens or what it is uh and perhaps i think maybe the owner eric the new owner eric might find out one day he is a classic skeptic he says he does not believe in spirits but he's seen some stuff that he can't explain which is like the classic skeptic so it's like i believe but i don't want to admit that i believe because yeah changes my reality you're like i've seen a ghost but i don't believe in ghosts what is it then which one are you it's like it's like when people email us and like i really haven't experienced much and then email us like a hundred experiences like yes excuse me say what yeah i'm like okay and then you're also saying that your brother has seen something and your mom and then your great-grandfather i'm like this is generational hauntings like this and that you also maybe your great grandfather reincarnated uh

1:00:00

right we're like okay but yeah peace of mind if you don't believe in ghosts or want to say that thank you do you that's fine but thanks for listening and thanks for emailing us we enjoy that okay so uh to end this because that's

Haunted locations

pretty much all of the activity that's happened thus far eric is hoping to bring some new life to the building as well as some ghost hunts too so maybe one day we'll be able to go and do a tgog ghost hunt there yes but i do want to let everyone know that you can go on an architectural tour you can go on a ghost tour uh and on halloween they occasionally have hairy houdini seances to wrap it all back together to my for my harry houdini episode oh i know okay well it feels like we have plans for next halloween i know

1:01:00

yes you know what we should do i think we already talked about this but but now that it is still july when this episode comes out but nearing september and october when everyone starts to like do all the spooky things we really need to compile a list of all of the really cool yeah festivals activities that are going on yeah yeah like what towns and like people's favorite like i remember growing up in jersey and like the haunted attractions like haunted houses honda tea rides and it was always my goal to find the scariest best one so yes we should put like that to be part of the list wait sabrina when you come out here we'll have to find one nearby no one ever wants to do this with me but i went as a young kid i don't know what my parents were thinking um there are

Surveillance and security

corn mazes in new england that have people with like chainsaws or like the it looks like a like hay bag

1:02:00

or like a potato bag like the burlap sacks like stitched into their faces and they don't walk the normal past they like cut through the corner and it is so fun at least i'm remembering as like an 11 year old kid it was the best i think everyone else was scarred from the experience but i really want to do it again i would love that it is as i've gotten older and i really hope that no serial killers listen to this oh but that would be the perfect place to truly murder someone murder because people are already screaming people are already using chainsaws and like scaring people with them and people are wearing masks so you would like no one would know your identity wait now i don't want to go you ruined it for me you ruined it oh now i'm really scared that is really disturbing i hope none of that i know

1:03:00

that's what i think about every day so my brain is disturbing i feel like in order to prevent that from happening i would hope that because assuming that someone were to do that i would think that they're also hoping to get away with it if they're going to like hide in the corn field and not just be out in the open killing someone i think that everybody who owns a haunted cornfield like this or or maze should it's required to have a drone constantly going over the top of it like a surveillance so you can chase them too like you'll know where they go in the

Haunted mansion apartment

corn because you can see them like running through so they can't they'll have to be caught okay no murderers allowed i'm gonna buy seven seventy two thousand drones and i'm gonna start a drone leave where everybody gets assigned one drone everybody who listens to two girls from ghosts you get assigned one drone and you have to monitor that are you paying for all these drones it is volunteer based oh the particularly on your own but by

1:04:00

am i paying for it no okay so i don't know how i'm gonna get the money let's hope that more owners of cornfields listen to this than serial killers oh that would make me sad if we had a serial killer who listened to if it's like how would you know you don't and they cite us as they're like when if they get caught they're like well two girls one ghost gave me the idea and then i would feel very very guilty leia too okay crim before i tell you about my funeral home i have a question for you okay what we're involving the audience if it's raise your hand if you've ever this is what i feel like it's happening it's never have i ever about ghosts never have i ever been possessed by a demon drink if you have i have been not that i remember that we know of that we know of

1:05:00

okay what would you do if you moved into an apartment with in a stunning historic mansion just blocks from the downtown area of your small town i like that it's like beautiful it's great but then your first night there you wake up at 2 a.m to uh disembodied voices and whistling in your ear i would do what leia's doing right now i would scream

The Jewett House

yeah that sounds horrifying come here unprepared chatty catty she's like i want to tell the story yes she's like that's what happened to me and then i was cursed and put into a cat's body sometimes i do wonder if leia's communications to me are like i have a ghost story and i want to tell you about my past life i bet it is you should get a pet psychic oh we should have one on the show one day i was just thinking that we should

1:06:00

definitely do that with leah one uh like a special yes okay okay we're gonna do some research into psychics i like this a lot put this in your business ideas notes that you have for us i am okay i'm writing it in right now okay you would scream if this happened to you absolutely a lot of people this happened too and many people moved out because that is what happens at the jewett house in mason michigan built in 1855 the jewett house was home to many prominent figures in history and then housed a tea house during the great depression before turning into the jewett funeral home it then went on to be a rental property but like i painted the picture in that question i asked you many tenants moved out just as quickly as they moved in because no one really signs up to have ghostly roommates unless i guess you buy like the conjuring house or one of those houses

1:07:00

that yes you know is haunted and it's like then i don't feel bad for you because you asked for it so the jewett house is stunning it was

Tea house and prohibition

built in 1855 by a wealthy developer whose name was jp coastworth and is one of the most well-known and significant houses in the small community of mason michigan and the former mayor orlando barnes lived there until 1910 and then it became a tea house during the great depression which some people were like yeah it wasn't a tea house it's prohibition this was for sure like a secret cover for you know a place where people can drink and write do their illicit activities the tea houses just make me think of did you ever have a fake id when you were younger oh for sure okay so id chief which is where so many people got their ideas yeah that's where

1:08:00

i got mine from and it was hidden in a tea set in a tea cup set oh it came over from china and i had to like break the tea set no way that's so yeah crazy it was very prohibition very i'm pretty sure we just like had a friend and met them and grabbed them oh they were just like dishing it out yeah no i distinctly remember mine being in in a tea set um that's cool it is it's very um totally illegal stranger things yeah totally illegal don't arrest us we're of age now you know what it's part of life yeah it's fine and if the police come

Fake ID stories

for me now it was hearsay yeah it's not a true admission of guilt yeah show me the truth still have it yeah i totally do you oh yeah it was good i think i got mine taken away oh really oh shoot yeah and i'm pretty sure i looked up the address that was on

1:09:00

the id and it was like an empty parking lot in pennsylvania so like it just like wasn't even real yeah but if anyone looked it up you can be like oh yeah like that i don't know why google earth hasn't updated but there's new residential buildings and my parents live there just be like oh yeah that's my parents new condo building i don't know why it's showing up you gotta lie with conviction i would just like break down and cry like i'm so sorry uh it reminds me of never mind we can get back to the ghost stories now i'm curious what you're gonna say

Underage drinking citation

it was do you remember freshman year of college where a bunch of us went out and were at at haciendas at haciendas yes and everybody got a uh citation for underage drinking except for me i gave my fake id to the cops but i was the only one that got away with it

1:10:00

and it's because everybody else started crying but i was already i was in the middle of the table so i had some time to think about it and our food my enchiladas had just gotten there and i was like i want to eat my enchiladas and i just thought you know what it is what it is i'm not going to let this ruin my night i'm going to keep drinking my drink they can't get me as they're there what did they i'm they're already going to take it away like they're going to yeah they're going to write it for more they can't yeah it didn't matter how much i drank so i was gonna enjoy my i don't even know what i got like a slushy margarita or something and my enchiladas and i just like continued eating and drinking and and to them they thought this girl must have nothing to worry about she must be the one that's legal so they thought i was the ringleader audition out the ids i gave them my fake id and then they were like are we going to find any more id fake id's in there and i said no i can assure you you're not going to find any more because i'd given them my one yeah they handed it

Jewett house history

they handed back back yeah they thought it was real and i

1:11:00

was giving everybody else their fake ideas so i walked out of that restaurant and i sprinted home so i was like oh no what if they changed their mind yeah i was the only one that got away correct so lesson learned just keep eating your enchiladas and sipping on your drink because they can't get you for being more drunk i mean they can for sure i was i was going to get the same level of citation regardless yeah i'll set my picture i don't even know how we got here but anyway i don't know teapot prohibition here we are the jewett house so after it was the tea house it became a funeral home from the 1930s to the 1990s and you know what that means lots and lots of dead bodies lots and lots of grief yeah so i actually am so excited and i had texted you the other day korean and i was like we should do a haunted real estate episode and like what's on the market right now

1:12:00

what's haunted because as i was researching this episode i found all these really cool articles went about the house when it was on the market recently so oh it was just recently listed for sale and so lucky for us we have a ton of access to an inside look of the house and there were tons of articles explaining the history and the interior design and basically it's great because we can all enjoy it so it's located at 605 south jefferson street in mason michigan the jewett

Real estate discussion

house is nearly 4 000 square foot it's a victorian italiante mansion with a large stone porch and a steeple at the top it's four bedrooms three and a half baths it's a corner lot it has hardwood floor and original crown molding oh the corner lost hardwood floor original crown molding done i know it sounds so good if you want to look up the zillow listing as i explain it to you i do you will

1:13:00

so 605 south jefferson street in michigan okay um the owners throughout the years have taken such good care of it that when it hit the market it was such a rare find it's a historical mansion that has original pieces and is not at risk of caving in on top of you which is great the houses basically all our articles were like houses aren't made like this anymore it's so beautiful and guess well now you're looking but it sold it was first listed for 299 000 in 2017 then taken off the market in january of 2018 and basically eventually sold in may of 2018 for 250k 250 000 why don't we move there i i'm realizing to many people who don't live in the cities that we live in that that still may feel very expensive i know for los angeles which is where you

1:14:00

are and for boston which is where i am

Housing costs

i can't even buy like a bathroom for that amount no no no i've never even seen like a piece of land like i can't even buy like 10 000 square foot piece of land for that yeah the space that i'm in that you can see right now would probably cost that much money oh 1 000 i was looking in boston for condos the other day just out of curiosity and the condos that are like 500 square feet like 474 are are still everything is over 500 000. it's absurd we are living in the wrong places we missed out so i'm gonna quote the lansing state journal a bunch of times because they did a really good job of describing the interior of the home it sits on about half an acre of land and most of the home's oak trim high archways and brass light fixtures are original to the house there are some wood burning fireplaces one hearth is made of italian marble

1:15:00

there is a double door double door entryway that opens to a foyer with impressive and wide grand staircase there is a first floor room with copper ceiling and the second floor ceiling is ornate tin again original to the house yes let me zoom in on this on this uh ceiling frame right now that's just crin and technology again look on instagram i know how to use that so

Architectural details

yes there's a second staircase up to the third floor which at one time housed servants um which apparently was not normal during the time that this house was built so the developer basically had like gone above and beyond and created new types of amenities and homes that didn't exist before at least in this area um there was a 200 square foot insulated three seasons room added to the house

1:16:00

with skylights and plenty of windows so it's basically like this gorgeous sun room there's a four car garage the entire house has so many windows meaning it has tons of natural light and is very bright and airy and crin despite it being haunted and the fact that it's no longer on the market it has central air and a heating system and it's i mean it's beautiful so you guys can look it up on zillow as i said 650 south jefferson street in mason michigan but this is not a real estate podcast this is a ghost story podcast so

Funeral home era

let's get to the ghosts okay the jewett family bought the house in the late 1920s and converted it into a funeral home they raised their children there and served the mason area until 1990. from my research it sounds like there wasn't anything too bizarre occurring during those days um or maybe the family welcomed the

1:17:00

spirits because they were accustomed to the activity you know they were in the business of death so maybe they weren't off-put it by it i don't know i am curious like it does seem like a type of place that would be really haunted by spirits but i guess if it's also like a place of putting someone to rest maybe it's not i don't know well that's another interesting thing too because like a lot happens presumably a lot happens to a body yeah before it gets there and after it's there so this is really just a transition

Haunting perspective

house yeah it's not where the spirit dies it's not where an autopsy is necessarily done to determine cause of death and it's not their final resting spot it's just like a preparation and viewing room so i understand that anywhere there can be spirits and anywhere there can be like an attachment and an association but it's so interesting because like

1:18:00

if i'm thinking psychologically from a spirit's perspective like say you die in like a unexpected way i imagine the place of death would be a place where your spirit like comes out of your body and it's like very confused and that's like a turmoil tumultuous tumultuous tumultuous yeah experience mentally but then there's the what if like your spirit takes a minute to like come out of your body and you're at the morgue and that's the place where it could be or if you're at the funeral home when you're like having the service and you see your family members grieving over you i imagine that also could trigger a spirit to be active in a way right especially yeah especially if you have all of your family members and friends like if that's where the viewing is

Haunted phenomenon

that's where the funeral is that's where you have the most energy and collection of memories right in one place but i don't know so um in 1990 the funeral home shut down and

1:19:00

the house became a rental property but people and families moved in only to immediately start experiencing haunted phenomenon and it actually made me wonder if like if you own a place that's haunted and knowingly haunted and you're renting it out would you put it into the contract like um hauntings are not a reason to break this contract and it's like in small fine print because no one's really reading it do you have do you have to admit that there are hauntings there is that even required i don't think so but what if someone tries to get out of the contract of the rental agreement because it's haunted so

Rental agreements

but that's when you just you gaslight them and you say ghosts aren't real both situations are pretty bad i guess i could put like a side clause like you can get out if it's a demon but not just regular ghosts yeah uh tenants complained of footsteps on the second floor disembodied voices cigar smoke toys and other objects moving on their own and whistling in the

1:20:00

middle of the night and those were just a couple of the complaints one tenant apparently moved out at 2 a.m due to all of the paranormal activity they were experiencing and the michigan area paranormal society has visited and investigated the jewett house on multiple occasions and every single time they have experienced something otherworldly

Paranormal investigations

they've said that the more that they investigate the home the more they learn and the more the spirits come out to communicate with them and they are getting more comfortable with the group which i just imagine like it's kind of like a cat you know warming up to you yeah now every time this group comes back the spirits are like oh my gosh it's them hello hello hello hello i feel like that makes so much sense though because if you think about places that you can tour and there are tour guides that regularly spend time i feel like the tour guides have the most amount of relationships yeah the spirits get comfortable and realize this isn't just like some

1:21:00

stranger anymore yeah they trust them so most of the paranormal like recorded paranormal activity is all thanks to the michigan area paranormal society they've caught evps and communicated with the spirits of alton jewett art do it and bffl duffy duffy okay new idea murphy yes i feel like we are cetera let's make friendship bracelets that say

Spirits communicating

okay either bff td best friends through death or no b-f-f-e-i-a-l best friends even in the afterlife but okay it's a little wordy feel the feel the feel and it has to be said that way too

1:22:00

we can come up with something better comment below that's my new thing that i'm gonna do comment below people don't do it yet but maybe one day they will [Laughter] um the maps group michigan areas uh paranormal society also heard a little boy named michael in the basement and apparently there was an evp caught that the spirit said they sent me here to stay which is like super sad and ominous so people are like did a kid die in this basement or in my opinion i was like did the jewett family like embalm a child named michael in the basement and his spirit was confused and like saw his body there and this like and he's been transparent his trap there right i don't know it also makes okay i'm going to actually

Ghostly phenomena

take a dark twist taurus

1:23:00

there's a lot of places that have a lot of death that have one particular spirit or creature entity or whatever you want to call it that does bad things or controls the other spirits there in a negative way what if there's something lurking here too that is preventing spirits from crossing over and is keeping them and trapping them in the home with it and so that's how this little boy is sad had to stay because he was blocked from the light i don't know it does seem like the this paranormal society has been doing a lot of work in the house and continues to and so hopefully they're able to figure it out um there's another common haunting of another child it's a six-year-old girl rachel excuse me i guess we are human after all okay uh rachel lingers in the front room

1:24:00

and grabs people's hands and tugs on their clothing no one really knows who she is where she's from it's another mystery many people have seen shadow people peeking around corners and during the christmas holidays so

Rachel the spirit

this makes me think the spirits are good or maybe tenants and residents have said christmas tree ornaments are found all over the floor when they wake up in the mornings which could mean it's a spirit that loves christmas or it could mean that there's like a little grinch ghost or it could mean that there's a ghost cat or it could mean there's a ghost who's like these ornaments are all wrong all wrong doesn't fit my color scheme oh or it's just i mean i don't really know the history of or like when we started decorating tree christmas trees with ornaments cool tradition to learn about yeah so maybe maybe there's a spirit there that's just like what the hell are they doing to these trees and just

1:25:00

shaking them loosening them up bringing the trees back to their natural state yeah maybe i like the idea that there's like a little grinch a little mini grinch yeah spirit running around and not getting too far with the ornaments um a lot of people have experienced waves of nausea in the house um and i wish very badly that we could speak to you because now the house is owned someone a family purchased it in 2018 it's a family they live there they apparently are aware of the hauntings but have asked people to respect their privacy but i don't want to respect their privacy i would like to communicate with them they've asked for respect and i decline maybe they're my new nemesis oh yes or all of the hotels and places that have not wanted

Nausea reports

us to talk about yes the haunting stuff is a long list long list

1:26:00

um what i do love though is that the family that owns the house has been working with the michigan area paranormal society and still allows the group to come investigate the home they have had experiences themselves so i think they're working together with the paranormal society to try to understand the spirits but they still live there they have not listed it so it does seem like they are okay with the spirits or the spirits aren't um evil that we know of okay well that's good that's positive yeah so generally there's just a lot of i mean it sounds like the only grinchy thing to happen is the christmas ornament removal but otherwise it's just some children some like chugging of the clothes and the family members who owned the funeral home right like it's paranormally active but there's nothing menacing happening yeah i agree which best type of haunting yes if you're open to it and feel

1:27:00

comfortable around the spirits and then

Personal experiences

totally but i can also imagine just generally being like i don't want to be touched when i don't expect to be i don't want to i feel like around this in normal life about humans so i imagine a ghost touching me would be like please why [Laughter] have a little tug have you ever been touched before by spirit that's a good question a little tap on the arm or something i don't think so i've only had my hair touched physically touched and then i had that spirit that would tuck me into bed like down my body but that was the that was the fabric getting tucked underneath me right it sounds so weird when you say it but it was really comforting when it was happening i mean that's a comforting action just like being cocooned into your blankets

1:28:00

yeah but otherwise it's just different if like you felt like something was on top of you holding the fabric down because that's scary but a nice little tuck tuck tuck i had in my car one time my hair pulled out to the

Driving stories

side like this and that was as you were driving that was scary because it was like middle of the day and i was driving and it was like and i was like ah stop touching me that was scary because you're trapped what are you going to do you're like when you're driving you're operating a few miles an hour yeah yeah right you can't just freak out it's dangerous that's very difficult respect the drivers please safety please please please wow okay so you know for a topic that could have been that made me think a lot of dark entities we both found places that have pretty heartwarming pasts or yeah or just like

1:29:00

kind spirits within yeah i mean i think that's the misconception right that maybe comes along with the death business of oh must be negative or it must like create negative spirits but if you think about it

Death and spirits

they're in the business of like servicing the spirit and the the human form that they had and and right allowing their like if they're putting the human body to rest it's then insinuating that they're allowing the spirit to move forward into like the new reality of whatever it is so there is it is a very positive yeah spin of life customer service for ghosts it is you're right we're it's human servicing the spirit world oh my gosh and also with the summer service for ghosts customer service for gus this is this is similar to cemeteries like when

1:30:00

we first started the podcast yeah we were always thinking like oh cemeteries they're so haunted they're so creepy because that's the typical thing that people are like cemeteries and they're not they're some of the most peaceful places ever like if you were going to go ghost hunting you're almost better off just walking into a random hotel and seeing a spirit or experiencing something going into a cemetery so yeah this is kind of similar to that you're right yeah well so maybe it's oh the only funeral home that i can know of that's not okay what was the there's like that um there's a horror movie made about it is

Cemeteries

the one in connecticut oh the house of the continent the conjuring the parent house where the parent family was wasn't that at one time i thought it was the hunting of connecticut that house used to be a funeral home i'm getting older it's one that you covered

1:31:00

i did do the haunting of connecticut house but it's making me i'm very confused there's no chance i remember any of the details anything i say right now is going to be a partial truth um was it ah i see this is going to take too long for me to figure out this ned decker house whatever oh the snedeker house yes yes yes yes you're right you're right that sounds totally right yeah it was a connecticut i'm proud of my brain [Laughter] you go brain you have both of the brain cells today or the phone it was a former funeral home where morticians regularly practiced oh gosh necromancy oh i don't remember that from the story maybe i don't remember that but that's well i mean it's wikipedia how much can we trust it i don't know whoa okay i trust wikipedia fully proud

1:32:00

of myself yes good job good job where it was listener stories listener stories

Haunted funeral home

man it's just amazing to see how many experiences people have within all of these themes and categories that we choose to cover it's like you put in the the search terms in the inbox and like funeral home and i'm like oh whoa that's so many they're shocking people are experiencing things for sure yes yes it is shocking alrighty so i picked a listener story from jessica hi from texas just started listening to you guys and i love love love the podcast so my name is jessica and here are two of my encounters when i was younger my mom was an amazing single mom while she was pregnant with me she did hair and makeup at a funeral home to try to make ends meet one day while at the water fountain she felt as if someone was standing directly behind her but nobody was there she

1:33:00

brushed brushed it off as nothing and went on with her day that night she dreamed that she was at work walking down a long hall this was the long haul with the rooms where they worked on the bodies no less and around the corner a woman was floating wearing a long emerald green ball gown with the most beautiful long red curly hair my mom went to work the next day and told her co-workers about the dream one woman said to her oh that's nadine the office ghost she does that with all of the new people people here

Listener story: Jessica

how fun my mom worked there for a while and i guess she got used to all of the things that would happen mainly when kids were brought in oh she heard screaming with no one there but her and another person in the office someone once saw a glowing golden ring floating over a young boy that had passed footsteps have been heard and much more what's a little strange now is that i've

1:34:00

been told that when i was 14 years old that i had some sort of gift i'm now 28 and recently i had two dreams of this funeral home i told my mom of the long had she ever been there i don't know okay curious we need yeah jessica please follow up with us and let us know yeah um i told my mom about the dream and

Nadine the ghost

dreaming of these long white hallways with the doors on the right side and on the left at the top of the wall there was a rectangular shaped windows then my other dream that i had about this place i was standing in the courtyard the building itself was sort of a u-shape with chapel on the left and the offices in front of me and off to the left i remember looking into these very large arched windows with almost a brown tint to them and a woman was at the top of one of the windows in the green dress staring back at me the same woman the same woman in the dream i squeezed my eyes as tight

1:35:00

as i possibly could and after i opened them she was still there staring at me and then i woke up oh my mom stared at me with shock saying the last time i was there i was maybe two oh here's our answer i shouldn't be able to remember any about anything about what this place looked like but i vividly dreamed it i wonder if it's nadine sending me a sign of some sort and then she wrote another story because i'm super odd when i was a baby i lived in an apartment complex called sugar hill apartments

Sugar Hill apartments

this complex was interesting to say the least my mom could come home just my mom and a baby and find either my diapers knocked all around the ground or pictures that she'd hung up now crooked and no longer on the wall sometimes she once had a picture of me in front of our fireplace for a christmas picture and when it developed it looked like i was sitting in a puddle of blood all of the other pictures were perfect with no issues at some point after

1:36:00

showing friends and such she lost that picture when i was about two my little sister was born eventually we moved into another unit in the same complex this was a one bedroom with a den which my mom used as her bedroom and my sister and i shared the actual bedroom i don't have many memories of that place but one thing i do remember was fairly odd one day while me and my little sister were playing in the living room my mom came out of her room the den from her nap and told us that we were being way too loud she then proceeded to clean up our mess toys and stuff all over the place my sister kept one blanket with her a lot and my mom picked up the blanket crumpled it and tried to throw and tried to throw it and when it landed it went completely flat no wrinkles no folds nothing being so small my sister and i and my mom just went oh mommy mommy did magic do it again and so she did it again three times she did this and the blanket went flat every single time the same weird things from the old unit would

1:37:00

happen and i remember specifically all of this because my mom's face was absolutely terrified we moved out to our first house not long after hope you enjoyed these bye

Magical blanket

jessica um okay well jessica clearly is like spiritually in tune yeah and it is interesting because i'm pretty i think it was in she said in the beginning like her mom started working there when she was pregnant with jessica right so maybe this spirit at the funeral home nadine just took a liking to jessica and her mom and kind of like imprinted herself onto them yeah so the memory in that dream was less of jessica's memory of remembering every single detail about the funeral home but more of nadine sharing it with her you're making and checking in of basically memories acting as portals

1:38:00

what if spirits can haunt and travel through time and doors based on where people have memories of places that isn't that interesting tm we'll write something about it you'll write it i'll write a book you ready dm to a concept that we just made up but might exist that we think is a real thing yeah i don't think i don't think we own any intellectual property there but we said tm so perhaps we do

Spirits in time

yeah so maybe i don't know it is interesting though it kind of reminds me of the movie looper where they can teleport into photos wherever you're looking at a photo you can just like yeah into there and it would be interesting exists in memories you would need though the like recorder of memories and then you can replay it and then people can go into them yeah

1:39:00

it just makes you if hauntings could happen this way it would be very stressful to try to forget about something for fear of being haunted like like let's say we went to see robert the doll or something and we're like oh we don't want robert the doll to haunt us and so then yeah i feel like you would just think even more about the place that you're trying to forget because you're paranoid about that place yeah it's it's interesting because i think the other thing would be really difficult difficult about that is then do you start to question your reality if ghosts can come into memories in your dreams does it then change or make you question what the reality of that memory actually is oh that's true because they're rewriting the memory i've been having that and this has been happening to me a lot lately and i don't know if i've talked about on the podcast because i don't

1:40:00

know my brain is like really whack i've been having a really hard time distinguishing between reality and dreams

Reality vs dreams

like it's because of cern you're probably living two different lives every single time i'm having like a there was a in my mind it was a memory and nick and i were at dinner with the with two of our friends and nick turned to me and asked a question and we like had a conversation about something with our friends that then in my normal life i was thinking about it i was like did that actually happen and so i asked nick and he goes that never happened i was like but it feels so real yeah i know exactly what you're talking about and it makes no sense why you would dream it too because it's like why would i dream this this is like such a normal basic sort of mundane dream yeah just having a regular conversation

1:41:00

like that's happening to me all the time uh yes i totally get where you're coming from because that happens to me often too and it's really hard to distinguish between what has been said and what happened because sometimes you're you tell someone something that you actually need to tell them and you like they acknowledge it and then in apparently like this normal waking life it didn't you're you're now yeah you're behind on your tasks or information or whatever it really is are there any doctors out there who could tell me if i need to go get a brain scan i don't i think it's just living different lives when we sleep we are in another life yeah oh okay hey i have a listener story from a listener who asked us to give them a cool name if we read the story on the podcast

Listener story: Charlie

so what should we give can i okay geraldine do like your old dean okay

1:42:00

why no you do it what did you want well i was gonna say like my dream name that i wish i was given when i was a child is charlie so i was gonna call our listener charlie okay do that charlie okay but then if i don't like what happened to charlie then i'll give the name geraldine then it's charizard then then it's a pokemon then we go into nicknames of charlie and pokemon yes great okay hello corinne sabrina and leia in no particular order i adore you all equally i think i may have emailed a while ago but i'm not positive a brief synopsis in case i didn't is that i have never seen anything supernatural but others experience things around me often a new fun thing that has been happening is people seeing something standing beside me that isn't there oh i say something because i have been told there is a dark aura around me or mass beside me however a girl recently said that she

1:43:00

saw her dead relative next to me so it may be a ghost but it also may not i should mention that i am a funeral director and see dead physical bodies and their surviving families daily i never see ghosts or anything like that

Darkness following

but i'll tell you about those experiences around me now one day a woman brought her daughter to the funeral home to make arrangements for her father the little girl kept smiling at me and i thought she was just shy and being cute so i would smile back but then she tapped on her mom's shoulder and pointed to me and said papa is smiling at us her mom said something about me not being papa and the girl corrected her and said no papa's standing next to her me being the her i just smiled and said that's sweet and we all kind of chuckled it was great recently i was attending a service when an elderly woman told me that she had been watching a darkness trail behind me whenever i moved around the chapel

1:44:00

i've always suspected that i had a darkness following me because of my troubles with depression and anxiety i assured the elderly woman that i was okay and i hope that i didn't disrupt the funeral service for her i'm still not sure exactly what is around me or if it's me that's putting off the bad vibe my grandma was a practicing witch of some sort but i never knew her as she passed away when i was very young i always thought that she would be a guardian for me but i get the feeling that she was not really motherly to her children so maybe she's the darkness that follows me i am not very spiritual but i try to be and i frequent metaphysical shops in my

Railroad spikes

free time another curious thing that has happened four times is when i visit a new shop the owner comes to me and suggests that i look into railroad spikes nails for protection why so now i own a collection of railroad spikes and nails that's so interesting i've never heard

1:45:00

of that before and for four different owners to say that to charlie i know what does it mean what is it for what does what does it do we'll have to ask i know i immediately think like oh the classic like vampires coming for charlie and so they get to use it but that's not the same as a wooden spike and also that's just not totally right for vampires anyway but oh this is really interesting okay charlie says i keep one in my car due to my bad luck with accidents and since i put it in my car i haven't had one since she said i've been in four accidents in two years none were my fault and all were total losses for my car i highly

Car accidents

recommend recommend railroad spikes maybe i need to do that yeah and i'm going to go if the fact that the the cars were totaled thank goodness charlie's okay yeah seriously i'm gonna keep on keeping on till the day i don't and that is perfectly fine

1:46:00

it's so funny because i feel like our listeners say the funniest things and we should just have a series of shirts like the one that's like listen to tgo g to drown out the [ __ ] and then this keep on keeping on until the day i don't like that isn't delirious i know we just need like a running excel list of all these things too so funny um i think your podcast is so fun and i wish i could experience some of the nice encounters you guys talk about i don't mind if you want to read my story on your podcast however please don't share my name because i don't want my friends that listen to know that i know about the ghost love you charlie just playing the denial card yeah oh my god although i imagine it would be kind of hard to explain when people are like why do you keep so many railroad spikes in your car and in your home and in your pockets and jacket

1:47:00

maybe they're hidden so no one will know yeah or maybe oh i bet you could have one fashioned into a ring don't you think and then you could just wear it that's a cool idea yeah

Spirit conduit

i'm sure you look really cool too yeah and then there's your protection it's on you all all the time always i'm going to do that it's so interesting to look at what this means what do railroad spikes yeah do we all follow up with charlie too and ask okay i'm so curious it's really fascinating how charlie can can feel and sense that there is something following her but that her being also brings about other spirits even though she can't see them and maybe it's her role as a funeral director i don't know but the fact that people at the funeral home and during services can see their loved ones around her right it's like she's a conduit it also made me wonder because if

1:48:00

because she was saying there was something other people have seen like something dark next to her and not saying that the dark equals evil in this scenario but i'm almost wondering if it's more of like a what if there's some sort of creature or spirit that we don't understand what it is but it's it's there to like help people and

Dark angel theory

heal people basically like an angel where it like appears dark and scary but it shows people the reflection of what they need to see which at the time is and where she works for a lot of people is their past loved one it's like a reflection pool of a spirit to help so it's a portal what if it's a portal that spirits can come up she is a walking portal yes apparently oh i wanna i wanna meet charlie i wanna see what i see yeah what what do you see when you're with charlie yes and it also sounds like a lot of

1:49:00

people that might not ordinarily see spirits experience stuff when in charge yeah well maybe we'll get lucky enough to meet charlie one day and yeah and keep

Podcast outro

on until we until we don't with charlie all of us together we will keep on keeping on until we don't until we don't and um until you don't please send us your ghost stories your encounters with the other worldly the supernatural the aliens the cryptids whatever it may be email them to us at two girls one ghost podcast gmail.com and also come join us live on spotify live every tuesday for campfire stories at 5 p.m pacific 8 p.m eastern and you can share your stories verbally with us and chat with all the cool ghosty pals the phantoms on um spotify live exactly we also have

1:50:00

uh social media so you can follow us on all the social media platforms there's facebook group there's discord we have youtube tick tock instagram all that jazz for interview on itunes uh shop our march do the things join the pyramid scheme get lost in the triangle baby get lost yeah yeah there was like one tentacley one we liked i don't remember this feels like a cow udder i want to like grab your finger and milk it milk in the triangle wait that's weird okay do you want to milk sabrina in the triangle join our only fans for just 10.99 a month do you want to watch corinne milk me in the triangle it smells very like alien it's gotten weird you said it i know

1:51:00

what's wrong you know sometimes i'm like like i feel like i'm the type of person where i overthink everything so like when i say things it's because i thought about saying it like for 10 minutes but then sometimes i get too comfortable where i forget to like process the thoughts and then i just let them come out that's a little intrusive i say things like that yeah no but that's i like that that was good i liked it and if anyone stayed till the end they get that little golden nugget all right well oh thank you oh aiden manning eric foster and the entire team at fire digital for dealing with us thank you and editing this podcast thank you uh and we hope to see you on the side but if we don't we will see you see you on the other side