52: Into the Dark: Sleepaway Camp Horror

52: Into the Dark: Sleepaway Camp Horror

CONTENT WARNING This episode contains discussion of the murder of three children (Camp Scott, Oklahoma, 1977), documented sexual abuse at summer camps, predatory behaviour toward minors, and the legend of Elias White, which involves the hanging of an enslaved man. Please take care if any of these topics are difficult for you. Every sleepaway camp has a monster. Not the same monster — each one builds its own, passed down from counselor to camper, summer after summer, until no one quite remembers where the story started. Only that it’s true. Only that it happened here. In this episode of Let’s Talk Spooky, we’re going to camp — all of them at once. We’re meeting the monsters that haunt the American sleepaway camp tradition: Hatchet Annie, the wronged camper who came back with an axe. The Banana Man, the predatory counselor who never quite left. The Man from the Farm, the ordinary man from next door who walked into the woods one night and decided to stay. Elias White, the enslaved man whose hanging made an entire forest forbidden. And the cluster of drowned children, grieving ghosts, and hermits on islands that haunt every dock, swamp, and cabin in the country. CONNECT letstalkspooky.ca [http://letstalkspooky.ca] · letstalkspookypodcast@gmail.com [letstalkspookypodcast@gmail.com] Instagram: @letstalkspookypodcast · TikTok: @letstalkspookypod If you enjoyed this episode, a rating or review wherever you listen takes 30 seconds and helps new listeners find the show. Stay Curious. Stay Spooky. SOURCES Folklore & Scholarship • USC Digital Folklore Archives (folklore.usc.edu [http://folklore.usc.edu]) — Hatchet Annie, the Banana Man (informant KM, 2022); Mary Brown / Troy Camp (Taylor, 2015); The Hermit, Maine all-boys camp (BM, 2023); Elias White, Bass Lake CA; Camp Seven Hills, western NY (2019) • Bill Ellis — “The Camp Mock-Ordeal: Theater as Life,” Journal of American Folklore, 1981 • Jay Mechling — “The Magic of the Boy Scout Campfire,” Journal of American Folklore, 1980 Camp Scott (1977) • Victims: Lori Lee Farmer (8), Michele Heather Guse (9), Doris Denise Milner (10) — June 13, 1977, Mayes County, OK • Suspect Gene Leroy Hart acquitted March 1979; died June 1979, age 35 — case officially unsolved • 2019 DNA testing: inconclusive but pointed toward Hart; eliminated other suspects. Real-World Underpinning • CBS News (2018) — 500+ documented cases of sexual abuse at U.S. camps over 55 years • Jon Conte, University of Washington — structural risk factors at camps • Regulatory gap: 8 U.S. states have no overnight camp licensing; 18 states have no mandatory staff background checks

51: Dead Calm

Content note: This episode contains discussion of racial violence, lynching, and the racially motivated expulsion of an entire Black community in 1912 Georgia. It also includes detailed accounts of multiple drowning deaths and body recovery. Additionally, this episode covers the colonial erasure of Indigenous spiritual tradition. Listener discretion is advised. In July 2023, three men died at Lake Lanier in Georgia in a single weekend. Lake Lanier is one of the most visited recreational lakes in the United States. It is also one of the deadliest — and once you understand what is sitting beneath its surface, the death toll stops feeling like a coincidence. This week, we visit two dangerous lakes and hear their haunting tales. LAKE LANIER Georgia Department of Natural Resources — annual drowning reports (primary source for all death statistics) Forsyth County Sheriff's Office — official press release, Thomas Milner death, July 2023 Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W.W. Norton, 2016) — primary source for 1912 Forsyth County racial history CNN — interview with rescue diver Buck Buchanan, 2020 Adventures in Cemetery Hopping — Alta Vista Cemetery, Delia Parker Young / Susie Roberts grave documentation OKANAGAN LAKE BC Coroners Service — annual provincial drowning reports (primary source for all death statistics) Elder Marlene Squakin (Yamxwa) — N'ha-a-itk tradition, documented via Summerland Museum / Castanet.net [http://Castanet.net], March 2024 Summerland Museum — working with Syilx knowledge keepers on N'ha-a-itk cultural framing BC Wildlife Act, 1989 — Ogopogo protected status Have a story, a local legend, or a documented case you'd love to hear covered on Let's Talk Spooky? Send it in. We want to hear from you. letstalkspookypodcast@gmail.com [letstalkspookypodcast@gmail.com] www.letstalkspooky.ca [http://www.letstalkspooky.ca] Instagram: @letstalkspookypodcast TikTok: @letstalkspookypod

50: The Patient Ones

What's the oldest fear in the human record? Not vampires. Not werewolves. Not anything that hunts in the dark. It's the person sitting across from you at dinner—the one who poured your drink. In this episode, we're diving into one of history's most chilling archetypes — the woman poisoner. From the prison cells of ancient Rome to a TikTok trend that exploded in 2024, the legend of the woman who knows what grows in the dark has never really gone away. Four women. Four centuries. One very uncomfortable truth about trust, proximity, and the people who feed us. Content Warnings: This episode contains discussion of: poison and poisoning, domestic violence, child death (including infant death), execution, and serial homicide. Please take care of yourself. Sources & Further Reading Locusta * Tacitus, Annals (Books 12 & 13) — the original ancient source * Suetonius, Life of Nero — describes Locusta's estate and students * Cassius Dio, Roman History — corroborating accounts * "Locusta of Gaul: Rome's Imperial Poisoner" — Crime Reads (crimereads.com [http://crimereads.com]) * "Aqua Tofana: Slow-Poisoning and Husband-Killing in 17th Century Italy" — Mike Dash History (mikedashhistory.com [http://mikedashhistory.com]) * Giulia Tofana — Wikipedia (start here, then follow the citations) * "What Is MATGA?" — Fast Company (fastcompany.com [http://fastcompany.com]) * MATGA movement coverage — Newsweek, November 2024 * Mary Ann Cotton — Britannica (britannica.com [http://britannica.com]) * "The Dark Angel of Durham" — Weird Darkness * "The Story of Nannie Doss, the Giggling Granny" — All That's Interesting (allthatsinteresting.com [http://allthatsinteresting.com]) * Nannie Doss — Wikipedia * Nancy "Nannie Doss" Hazle — Encyclopedia of Alabama

49: Folklore's Most Dangerous Women: Creatures of lore

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2499741/fan_mail/new] Episode Description A campfire walk through some of the most feared women in world folklore, from a four-hundred-year-old spider waiting in a Japanese mountain house, to a wailing figure outside an Irish window at midnight. We travel through Slavic rivers and summer wheat fields, down dark roads in South Asia, into Colombian mangroves and the deep Brazilian Amazon, and onto the forest trails of Indigenous North America. What you start to notice, when you put these women side by side, is that almost every one of them was wronged first. Mothers who lost children. Brides who were murdered. Women buried wrong. They came back anyway. They came back hungry. And every culture on earth seems to have remembered them, independently, in its own language, in its own forest, on its own river, at its own time of day. Light a candle. Lock the door. Don’t answer if someone calls your name from past the streetlights. Sources meterial • Lady Anne Fanshawe, Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe (composed 1676, first published 1829). The earliest detailed first-person Banshee account in print. • Karel Jaromír Erben, Polednice (“The Noon Witch”), 1853. Czech folklore ballad foundational to Polednice in modern memory. • Edo-period ynkai collections, including the Taihei Hyaku Monogatari and the Tonoigusa, for Jorngumo in her earliest written form. • W. B. Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888). Foundational survey of Irish supernatural tradition, including Banshee accounts. • Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1887). Nineteenth-century compilation of Irish folklore. • Lady Augusta Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920). Documented Banshee sightings from West Ireland oral tradition. • Tupi-Guarani oral tradition, recorded by sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries in Brazil, for the earliest written references to Caipora. • Slavic folklore scholarship on the Rusalka and Polednice traditions, including ethnographic work from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across Russia, Ukraine, Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland. • Indigenous storytellers, writers, and scholars for the deeper teachings of Deer Woman. See contemporary Indigenous-led folklore podcasts, anthologies, and community-published resources. Content Note This episode discusses themes of murder, death in childbirth, violence against women and children, drowning, and historical injustice. It is intended for adult listeners. Stay Curious. Stay Spooky.

03: REMASTERED: Ghostly Exposure: Postmortem & Spirit Photography

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2499741/fan_mail/new] A grieving widow develops a roll of film and finds her dead mother in the back seat. A WWI airman steps into a squadron portrait two days after his funeral. A Boston photographer swears he can capture the dead — and P. T. Barnum takes the stand to prove him wrong. Tonight, the photographs that came back heavier than they went in.  Before the smartphone, before the camera roll — before there was a way to carry your dead in your pocket — people wanted to keep the faces of the ones they loved. Some of them tried very hard. Some of them, it seems, succeeded a little too well. In this remastered episode, we’re climbing back into the strange, tender, deeply uncanny history of postmortem and spirit photography — from Victorian iron posing stands and painted-on eyes, to William Mumler’s scandalous Boston studio, to the back seat of a quiet Ipswich car on a Tuesday afternoon in 1959. Featuring the Mabel Chinnery photograph, the ghost of Freddy Jackson, the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, the haunted faces in the wake of the S.S. Watertown, Mary Todd Lincoln’s most famous portrait, and three modern firsthand-style accounts that have been quietly circulating online — the kind of photograph you delete six times, and it keeps coming back. Postmortem Photography & Victorian Death Culture • Stanley, Liz, and Sue Wise. “The Domestication of Death: The Sequestration Thesis and Domestic Figuration.” Sociology, vol. 45, no. 6, 2011, pp. 947–62. JSTOR. (jstor.org/stable/42857592) • Slate Magazine: “The Eerie History of Spirit Photography and Child Mortality in the 19th Century.” October 2017. (slate.com/human-interest/2017/10/spirit-photography-and-child-mortality-in-the-19th-century.html) • Victorian Visual Culture blog: “Photos of the Dead.” December 2020. (victorianvisualculture.blog/2020/12/14/photos-of-the-dead/) William Mumler & Spirit Photography • Cao, Maggie M. “Spirit Photographs and the Civil War.” American Art, vol. 31, no. 2. • Kaplan, Louis. The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. • Court records of The People v. William H. Mumler, New York, 1869. Freddy Jackson • Goddard, Sir Victor. Flight Towards Reality. London: Turnstone Books, 1975. • The Black Vault Case Files: “The Ghost of Freddy Jackson.” (theblackvault.com/casefiles/the-ghost-of-freddy-jackson/) Mabel Chinnery • Sunday Pictorial, April 19, 1959 — original publication and expert analysis. • Anomalies database (Garth Haslam): “1959, March 22 — Mabel Chinnery’s Strange Photograph.” (anomalyinfo.com/Stories/1959-mabel-chinnerys-strange-photograph) The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall • Country Life magazine, December 1936 — original publication of the photograph by Captain Hubert Provand and Indre Shira. • BBC News: coverage of Raynham Hall and the Brown Lady. (bbc.com/news/uk-england-36389581) S.S. Watertown • Service News, Cities Service Company company newsletter, 1924–1925 — primary publication of the photographs and crew accounts. • Hervey, Hal. “Ghosts of the Watertown.” True Strange Stories, 1929. • Foster, Michael Dylan. The Book of Ynkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. University of California Press, 2015 — for context on shinrei shashin in Japanese popular tradition. • Behrend, Heike, et al., eds. Spirits in Politics: Uncertainties of Power and Healing in African Societies. Campus Verlag, 2015 — for a broader cross-cultural context on photography and the spirit world. • Instagram: @letstalkspookypodcast • Email: letstalkspookypodcast@gmail.com • Subscribe/follow wherever you listen, and please leave a review — it helps more spooky souls find the firelight.