Can a place really be haunted? Today, Ben shares a campfire story about hunting for ghosts and other spooky, paranormal activity people have experienced.
Can a place really be haunted? Today, Ben shares a campfire story about hunting for ghosts and other spooky, paranormal activity people have experienced.
* Share your camp adventures on social media using #AKCAsummer or write to us at listen@akidsco.com. We love, love, love hearing from you.
Follow the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever podcasts are found and check out other podcasts made for kids just like you by visiting akidsco.com. While you’re there, be sure to check out Ben’s book, A Kids Book About Adventure.
Camp Adventure: A Kids Summer Camp Podcast
S2 E10 The Haunted Mansion
[INTRODUCTION]
[bugle plays a welcome]
Louis: Welcome to Camp Adventure.
The camp in your bedroom or living room. The camp that's in the bus or in the car.
Camp Adventure is for everyone, no matter who you are.
This week's theme is “A Haunted Mansion”.
My name is Counselor Louis. And I'm so excited to be here at camp with you.
Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention it's evening time here at camp and we always get a campfire going. And my favorite thing about campfires are campfire stories. And you know who stories are the best? Well, Camp Counselor Ben.
So Camp Counselor Ben, take it away.
[WELCOME]
Ben: All right. Campers Louis, thank you so much. And yes, this is Counselor Ben.
Again, getting ready with you, all of our camp adventure friends for some story time, you guys ready? I'm ready.
We're having ghost stories tonight. So definitely everybody needs a flashlight and a dark room shining from their chin up. Don't we always see that one? Kids sit around campfires for ghost stories?
We're gonna talk about ghosts today. These have been some pretty interesting stories. Haven't they? Well, today's no different. I'm looking forward to it. So grab some popcorn, get your flashlight.
Again. Last week was zombies. This week is gonna be ghosts. You might wanna get two blankets again, cuz this is gonna get a little bit intense.
But we're together. We'll be okay. And tell some ghost stories tonight for Camp Adventure.
Here we go. You ready? All right. Let's do this.
[STORYTIME]
Ben: We're reading from the book titled Strange, But True written by Katherine Hulick and illustrated by Gordy Wright. And tonight's story is titled “The Haunted Mansion.”
The Monte Cristo Homestead was once grand and new. But it has fallen into ruin after decades of neglect. Vandals stripped lead from the roof and broke all the windows. Squatters pulled up the floorboards and burned them in the fireplace.
In 1963, Olive and Reginald Ryan purchase the rundown mansion in Junee, Australia and began to repair it. Late one evening, after a shopping trip to pick up building supplies, they returned home to an astonishing sight. Bright light streams from every door and window. That seems impossible. The house has no electricity. The Ryans think burglars must be inside or maybe squatters returned. They tell their kids to stay in the car. Then, as they approach to investigate, the lights vanish and they find no one inside.
This is only the first of many unnerving experiences for the Ryans and their five children. They regularly hear footsteps walking across an upstairs balcony and sometimes see a woman in white standing there. Olive feels hands resting on her shoulders when no one is there.
Reginald hangs a picture, then finds it fallen on the floor, but unbroken two nights in a row. And in the most disturbing incident of all. One evening, one of their daughters goes to check on her sleeping little brother and sees an elderly man in old-fashioned clothes standing at the end of his bed. She races off screaming to her family about a man in the house, but they find no one. The little brother, Lawrence Ryan, learns about this incident as a teenager then moves out of the main house to a different bedroom. He says, I always felt like someone was watching me in that room. Was that someone a ghost?
Christopher William Crawley, the wealthy and powerful founder of the town of Junee, once lived in the mansion with his wife and children and numerous servants. The family hosted fancy balls and played tennis and golf on the grounds. Crowley died in the home at the age of 69. After a boil on his neck, got infected. After his death, the locals say his wife almost never left the house. She died there at the age of 92.
But the property's creepy history began long before their deaths. According to local lore, a young maid fell from the balcony to her death. She was rumored to be pregnant at the time, and some believed she was killed to cover that fact up. Could she be the source of the footsteps and the female figure on the balcony? Another servant, a stable boy, supposedly suffered lethal burns. When his straw mattress was set on fire.
The Crawley's youngest child, a baby daughter named Magdelina, died in a fall down the stairs. Some think that her nanny may have dropped her on purpose. Could the spirits of all these people still haunt the place where they had died?
Matthew: Ben! BEN!!!
Too many deaths! Oh my goodness, listeners, is this totally creeping you out?
Because let me just tell you that I, Matthew Winner, do not do not DO NOT ever step into spaces that people tell me are haunted. Whether or not ghosts are real, the fear I have of… I don’t know… I guess the fear I have of being scared, of the unknown, of the what-if… that’s all enough to keep me at home with the lights on.
Am I saying I believe in ghosts?
I mean… I don’t not believe in ghosts.
Back to you, Ben.
Ben: If you believe in ghosts, you're not alone. A 2017 poll found that around half of Americans believe that places can be haunted by spirits. Polls in many other countries around the world produce similar results. Belief in ghosts depends on what you think happens after death, the physical body perishes, but what happens to your consciousness? Are you gone forever?
Or do you continue to experience this world or another world in some way? Many people believe in a soul or something similar that survives past death. It's not a huge step from the idea of an afterlife to the belief that spirits may influence the world of the living. However people from different countries tell very different stories about how and why ghosts appear.
In ancient Mesopotamia people believed that sickness was a punishment inflicted by ,the spirits of the dead. In Mexico and parts of Central America, everyone knows the legend of La Llorona, the weeping woman. In one version of the story, she drowned her own children and now haunts riverbanks calling and crying for them. In China and parts of Southeast Asia today, many people ask the spirits of their ancestors for blessings. During the Hungry Ghost Festival people in this region, burn paper or incense and leave out gifts and food, tea, and sweets. They believe that these offerings will please the ghosts and help prevent bad luck. Ghost stories can be fascinating and scary and memorable, but they are just stories. Only physical evidence could show that ghosts are real. People who call themselves ghost hunters or paranormal investigators search for this evidence.
Some claim to have found it.
Louis: And I’m back. This is a very interesting topic. What do you think? Are ghosts or spirits real?
I have my own thoughts.
Well, while you think about that, let's take a quick break and we'll be right back.
[BREAK]
Louis: Alright and we're back. So did you think about it? Do you have an answer? If you don't have an answer, that's completely fine.
All right. Well, enough talking from me. Camp Counselor Ben? Take it away!
[STORYTIME CONTINUED]
Ben: If a haunted location isn't really home to wandering spirits of the dead, then why do so many people have strange experiences at a place like the Monte Christo Homestead? What makes a house haunted. Scientists have proposed some intriguing theories. Some blame infrasound. These sounds are too low to hear, but the body feels they're vibrations.In some people, these vibrations may cause feelings of uneasiness or fear. Others have studied how electromagnetic fields affect the brain in people with a certain form of epilepsy. Part of the brain, called the temporal lobe, malfunctions causing visions that are often religious in nature. Some scientists have studied whether electromagnetic fields might trigger this same effect in people without epilepsy. The fields may come from natural sources, such as minor earthquakes or tremors, or they might come from power lines, cell phones, appliances, or other devices.
However experimentation has shed doubt on these theories. In 2004 psychologist Christopher French, and his colleagues at Goldsmiths University of London attempted to create a haunted room. They set up and hid devices that would generate electromagnetic fields and infrasound. One by one, 79 volunteers entered the room, a cool, dimly lit, empty white circular space and stayed there for 50 minutes. The researchers told the volunteers that they might have some unusual sensations and asked them to record any such experiences.
Some volunteers got bombarded with electromagnetic fields and infrasound. Others with one or the other and a control group with nothing. But it did not matter which group a volunteer was in. People in the control group were just as likely to report weird sensations as the people in the other groups. What was going on here?
After everyone left the room, they all completed a personality test. Suggestible people, those who easily accept what others tell them to do or believe tend to get high scores on a certain part of the test. Everyone who reported strange experiences also got high scores on this part of the test. So they seem to have experienced strange things in the room, not because of energy fields or vibrations, but because the researchers told them they would. In other words, people experienced strange things in a haunted house because they're expecting strange things to happen.
Alternately, someone who experiences strange things may turn to ghosts as a fitting explanation. This is similar to what happens in many alien and UFO experiences. The things people see are created in the brain and do not always represent reality. A hallucination, a vivid dream, or even a trick of the light may seem like a real encounter with a ghost.
Matthew: I gotta say… trick of the light or not… being scared still makes me scared.
The fact that something, whether it’s a ghost or it’s experimenters playing with the mood and atmosphere, makes me scared and triggers my imagination.
Yeah… that’s all it really takes.
Sorry for cutting in, Ben. Being a little scared makes me talk a lot.
Ben: So what about the Monte Christo Homestead? Today, Lawrence Ryan leads ghost tours there, but we may never know what really happened in the haunted mansion. Some of the tragic deaths may not actually have occurred or may not have been murders. It's often impossible to go back and find out the truth about events that happened many, many years ago. Even if murders did occur, these stories likely only serve to make visitors more uneasy and primed for unusual experiences.
Joe Nickell is a detective who spent his entire career looking for realistic explanations for events that seem paranormal. “It does not matter what you and I believe,” he says. “It matters what we have evidence for.” He has investigated many reportedly haunted places. In one of his first cases, he discovered that the footsteps people heard on the haunted staircase came from a very real iron staircase located in the building next door. Similarly, the strange light inside the Monte Christo Homestead could have come from people in the house, just as the Ryans first suspected. If squatters were in the house, they likely knew they weren't supposed to be there and fled when they saw the car. Just because the Ryans never figured out a real world source of the light, the footsteps, the figure on the balcony or the man in the bedroom or other strange events does not mean that there wasn't one.
Lawrence Ryan is inclined to believe in ghosts after his experience growing up at the Monte Christo homestead, but he doesn't push anything on his guests. “If you come to our place, you can make up your own mind,” he says.
The end.
Louis: And just like that, Camp Counselor Ben has done it again with a great story.
Now, Camp Counselor Matthew said something earlier. He said, “whether it's a trick of light or not, being scared also makes me scared”. And I completely agree, because I was definitely scared.
Other than that, today has been super duper fantastic. And I want to kick it over to Camp Counselor Matthew so he can say a few words.
[CLOSING CREDITS]
Matthew: Thank you, Louis! And thank you Ben for sharing that story with us. As the campfire’s dying down, I’ve just got a few reminders and bits of information to share.
A reminder to all campers to share your camp adventures on social media using #AKCAsummer or write to us at listen@akidsco.com. We love, love, love hearing from you.
Camp Adventure is written by Ben Tertin with help from the A Kids Podcast About team.
Permission to use excerpts from Strange But True, written by Kathryn Hulick and illustrated by Gordy Wright, was granted by the publisher Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, an imprint of The Quarto Group.
The show is edited and produced by Matthew Winner.
Audio production is by Chad Michael Snavely and the team at Sound On Studios. Our executive producer is Jelani Memory. And this show was brought to you by A Kids Podcast About.
Follow the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever podcasts are found and check out other podcasts made for kids just like you by visiting akidsco.com. While you’re there, be sure to check out Ben’s book, A Kids Book About Adventure.
See you back at camp next week for another adventure!