Recreational Swimming

"Today let Cristina wow you with a San Diego historically spooky site. Proof that ghosts can both be sad and harmless. Chelsea talks about a famous island that honestly deserves an episode all to itself. Did the indigenous people pull a fast one on historians? Listen find out."

Presented by: Cristina
Category: Ghost, Curse

Content Warning: Suicide

The Whaley family lived before the modern concept of horror films (and most horror films in general). If they hadn't, maybe they would have realized the curse they were setting up for themselves.

Thomas Whaley, the patriarch, spend his life between living in San Diego and living elsewhere. When he was young, he moved to California and spend some time there during the gold rush. While there, he witnessed the public hanging of one Yankee Jim.

He returned to New York briefly and got married to his wife Anna, before the two of them moved back to Sand Diego with their two sons. They build a house on the hill where the executions took place and on the land the cemetery had been. Almost immediately, they hear ghostly footsteps that they come to believe that it was the ghost of Yankee Jim.

In quick succession, one of their sons, Thomas Jr. died of scarlet fever and the had a daughter named Anna Jr. In 1859, A fire in the house's first floor, which served as their store front, prompted the family to move to San Francisco. They would return with three more children in 1868.

In 1882, the two eldest daughters, Violet and Anna Jr. got married in a double wedding. Violet would return early from her honeymoon early weeks later after her husband had left her, only marrying her for her dowry. Because she had to travel unchaperoned, she was shunned by society. She suffered for three years before committing suicide.

The tragedy prompted another move, but when Thomas Sr. and Anna Jr. both passed away, the remain family members returned to the house to turn it into a tourist attraction. Most remained their for the rest of their lives.

The house is recognized as on of the most haunted houses in the U.S. Renovation workers saw shadows and her voice and footsteps. After the house was turned into a museum, employee witnessed locked windows being thrown open. Visitors to the home, including Regis Philbin, have reported seeing the ghosts of the Whaley family, most often Thomas Whaley. Anna Sr. remains as well, protecting the floor where Violet died.

Ghosts outside the family are said to dwell there too. Yankee Jim has been seen on tours, as well as an unidentified woman believed to have been a tenant. A reporter on a tour witnessed dolls in a room close their eyes. When he went back to investigate, he discovered that the eyes were painted on. Ghost parties can sometimes be heard in the house.

Takeaway: Don't move into the spooky house.

Presented by: Chelsea
Category: Historical Mystery

Easter Island is by far most famous for the statues buried there and the lost civilization that build them However, that is not the only mystery to be mined from the island. There is also the bird cult that formed there. This episode is about something else.

The Rongorongo language is most likely a protolanguage that developed either on the island itself or, more likely, from the people who first settled there. If it did in fact develop on Easter Island, it would be one of the few examples of independent language in history.

Rongorongo exists as a series of glyphs carved in a serpentine and sometime mirrored manner. Most of the few surviving examples exist on drifted wood or wood imported in, but some remain on artifacts such as staves and ornaments. Very few of the tablets remain. Many of them were destroyed by or at the behest of European missionaries who convinced the native peoples that their culture was detrimental to their souls. And because only scribes within the community could ever read and write Rongorongo, no one was able to translate it after the elders were captured by the Peruvians.

The language is thought to have been brought over by people from the Indus Valley by way of Australia. Only guesses can be made as to what the remaining tablets say.

Takeaway: Stop burning things.

Trivia

 * First voice of Mal.