Real Ghost Chatter

A place where ghost encounters abound - both as fiction and non-fiction storytelling.

Real Ghost Chatter is a news podcast hosted by Mary Ann Poll, with 72 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Mary Ann Poll hosts Real Ghost Chatter, a news show with 72 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #93

  Episode 93: The Esther Cox Haunting: It Marked Her for Death

  Sep 28, 202622 min

  In September 1878, in a shoemaker's cottage on Princess Street in Amherst, Nova Scotia, something began to torment 18-year-old Esther Cox. It started with straw moving inside her mattress and a box that leaped off the floor. Within weeks the town doctor sat beside her bed and watched words appear, scored a foot high into the plaster of her wall: Esther Cox, you are mine to kill. What followed was set down by the people who lived through it, by that doctor, by two ministers and a newspaper editor, and by an actor who moved into the house to expose it as a fraud and kept a journal instead. Mary Ann Poll tells it as it happened, scene by scene, from the first night to the day it stopped. EPISODE NOTES ● Esther Cox is the through-line, followed from a frightening buggy ride in late August 1878 through the first night on September 4, the doctor's visits, the fires, her expulsion from the house, and the weeks Walter Hubbell spent living under the same roof in June 1879. ● Phenomena covered: straw shifting inside the mattress, a box of patchwork leaping a foot into the air, Esther's body swelling until she screamed she would burst, explosions under the bed that shook the floor, bedclothes torn off and flung into the corner, the writing on the wall, pounding that climbed onto the roof and followed Dr. Carritte 200 yards down the street, and a bucket of cold water that boiled in front of a minister. ● Then came the fires: eight to ten burning matches falling out of empty air, Esther's dress rolling itself under the bed and catching fire, a barrel of shavings blazing in the cellar, and a figure only Esther could see, laughing in the parlor corner, threatening to burn the house down if she stayed. ● It followed her to John White's dining saloon, where a stove door tore off its hinges in front of a provincial inspector of fisheries and a clasp knife twice drove itself into her back. ● Walter Hubbell came to put her on stage and expose the trick. Instead the knocks read out his watch number and a coin date he did not know himself, and a paperweight struck the sofa three inches from his head. The entity gave its name, Bob Nickle, a shoemaker, dead and not in heaven. ● The skeptical case is given its due: psychical researcher Walter Prince concluded Esther did it herself in a dissociated state, noting the ghost called Bob appeared a week after Bob McNeal drew his pistol on her. Against that stand the witnesses who were in the house before Hubbell ever arrived, and the 1888 statement signed by Amherst's citizens. ● After an arson conviction and a month in jail, it stopped for good. Esther married, raised two sons, and died in her own bed in Brockton, Massachusetts, on November 8, 1912. Bob Nickle never kept his promise. Approximately 3,030 spoken words. SCRIPTURE Isaiah 43:1 (NIV) — 'But now, this is what the Lord says, he who created you, Jacob, he who formed you, Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.' SOURCES ● Walter Hubbell, The Great Amherst Mystery: A True Narrative of the Supernatural (1879; tenth edition, Brentano's, 1916), including his journal kept in the Teed cottage, the 1888 affidavit, Dr. Carritte's letter, and the statement signed by the citizens of Amherst ● The Amherst Gazette and the Moncton Daily Times, 1878 to 1879, as reprinted in Hubbell ● Hereward Carrington, Personal Experiences in Spiritualism (1913), witness statements taken in 1907 ● Walter F. Prince, 'A Critical Study of The Great Amherst Mystery,' Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, vol. 13 (1919)

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  Episode #92

  Episode 92: The Smurl Haunting

  Sep 21, 202617 min

  EPISODE DESCRIPTION In 1973, Jack and Janet Smurl moved into half of a double-block house on Chase Street in West Pittston, Pennsylvania. Jack's parents took the other half. For 13 years both households reported the same things through the same wall: knocking, voices calling in the family's own tones from empty rooms, a faceless black shape that walked through the wall and came out the other side. Three attempted exorcisms failed, and Janet said the reason was simple, that the thing crossed to whichever half the priest was not in. Mary Ann Poll tells the Smurls' account the way they told it, gives the doubters their full say, and follows the story to the prayers the family said ended it. EPISODE NOTES ● Built on the shared wall. Jack's mother Mary heard the knocking on her side, heard a man and a woman fighting on a night Jack and Janet were not in the room, and watched the faceless shape come out her side after Janet watched it walk into the wall. ● Phenomena covered: objects vanishing and returning, stains rising through fresh paint, knocking from inside a switched-off television, family voices calling from empty rooms, screams and pig grunts and hoofbeats, cold rooms, an unplugged radio at full volume, the stench of smoke and rotten meat, the 75-pound German shepherd slammed into a wall, Dawn attacked in the shower at 17, Shannon thrown down a flight of stairs at 8, the bed shaking, Janet pinned to the mattress, and Jack dragged off his knees while praying the rosary. ● Their neighbor Debbie Watson reported screams from the house when no one was inside it, and scratching at an upstairs window screen. ● The skeptical case is given in full: Paul Kurtz of CSICOP called it a hoax and pointed to the mine shafts under the street, the sewer odor, and the book deal that followed within months. Jack's 1983 brain surgery was raised publicly, and the family declined psychiatric testing. ● The Church stayed in the middle. Chancellor Gerald Mullally said they believed the family but did not know what it was, and a diocesan priest spent two nights in the house in October 1986 with nothing happening. ● Four days before Halloween 1986 the Smurls said the demons were gone, credited to their own parish and their own prayers rather than the three failed exorcisms. They left Chase Street in 1988, and later residents on both sides reported nothing. Jack died in 2017, Janet in 2026. Approximately 2,414 spoken words. SCRIPTURE Psalm 91:1, 2, 5 (NIV) — 'Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, he is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust. You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day.' SOURCES ● Steve Corbett, Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, August 19, 1986 ● Associated Press and United Press International wire coverage, August 1986 ● Robert Curran, The Tribune (Scranton), October 27, 1986 ● Paul Kurtz, 'A Case Study of the West Pittston Haunted House,' The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 1987 ● Robert Curran with the Smurls and Ed and Lorraine Warren, The Haunted: One Family's Nightmare (St. Martin's Press, 1988)

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  Episode #78

  Episode 91: The Groton Possession: Her Lips Never Moved

  Sep 14, 202622 min

  EPISODE DESCRIPTION In the winter of 1671, 20 years before the trials at Salem, a 16-year-old servant girl in the frontier town of Groton, Massachusetts, fell into violent fits, accused two neighbors of witchcraft, confessed to signing her name in the devil's book, and then took most of it back. Her employer, a 31-year-old minister named Samuel Willard, wrote it all down as it happened, day by day, suspecting a fraud the whole time. Then a voice spoke out of her while her lips never moved. Mary Ann Poll tells the story of Elizabeth Knapp, the minister who refused to decide what he had seen, and how his refusal saved lives. EPISODE NOTES ● Built almost entirely from a single primary source: Samuel Willard's own manuscript account, kept among Cotton Mather's papers. Willard never published it under his name, and it remains the only firsthand record of the case. ● The episode's central image, and the source of the subtitle, is Willard's test on December 17, 1671: when a low, rough voice spoke out of Elizabeth, he brought a light to her face, watched for the letters that require the lips (B, M, and P), and recorded that the voice used them freely while her lips never moved and her tongue stayed against the roof of her mouth. ● Documented phenomena covered: fits that took three to six people to hold; her tongue drawn up so hard it could not be pried loose; barking and bleating; a black dog with eyes in its back; a mark in the chimney clay where she said a witch went up; the voice calling Willard a rogue, claiming to be stronger than God, and returning during prayer to crow like a rooster. ● Elizabeth accused two neighbor women, and a touch test on the first came back positive. Groton did not act on it. Both women were cleared and never accused again. Twenty years later at Salem, the same kind of evidence hanged 19 people. Willard, by then a prominent Boston minister, argued that the devil could wear an innocent person's face, and was himself named by an accuser during the trials. ● Willard checked Elizabeth's confession against his own memory: the wood chips that appeared by the hearth, the strange look on the stairs when she said the devil had sent her to kill him with a billhook. He wrote that the two kept fitting, and still concluded that he did not know. ● Two details about Elizabeth's life outside Willard's account, her mother's earlier breakdown and jailing and her later marriage to Samuel Scripture, come from historian John Demos's research and are presented in the episode as his conclusions, since genealogists dispute the identification. ● Mary Ann's closing reflection gives the natural explanation its due (an unhappy servant girl, a physician who blamed her blood, a mother with a documented breakdown) and then turns on what she cannot explain away: a skeptical minister who went looking for a fraud and wrote down what stopped him. SCRIPTURE 2 Corinthians 11:14 (NIV) — 'And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.' SOURCES ● Samuel Willard, 'A Brief Account of a Strange and Unusual Providence of God Befallen to Elizabeth Knapp of Groton' (manuscript, 1671 to 1672); full transcription in David D. Hall, ed., Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History, 1638 to 1693, second edition (Northeastern University Press, 1999) ● John Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford University Press, 1982), for the Knapp family records and Elizabeth's marriage and later life ● Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, for the published summary of the case

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  Episode #90

  Episode 90: The Haunting of Clarke Mansion

  Sep 7, 202618 min

  In April 1874, a doorbell rang after midnight at a nine-room mansion in Oakland, California, and no one was standing at the door. Over the three nights that followed, a Treasury officer who publicly mocked the whole idea of spirits watched his own furniture move, his front door come off its hinges, and a crowd of 500 people fill the street outside his home. Mary Ann Poll tells the story of Thomas Clarke, the investigation that called him a fool, and the fight he spent the rest of his life waging. EPISODE NOTES ● Thomas Clarke was 51, an officer with the United States Treasury Department, and a public skeptic. He told one newspaper that no one in his household believed in Spiritualism, and another that the whole affair had been a lively joke, before the third night changed his position permanently. ● The named witnesses are unusually respectable for a case of this kind: the Reverend Doctor Eells of Oakland's First Presbyterian Church, Assistant United States Treasurer William Sherman, Hawaiian Consul H.W. Severance, and San Francisco attorney Colonel J.B. Howard among them. Newspapers of the day made a point of describing them as first-class people in every way. ● Doctor Joseph Le Conte, co-founder of both the University of California and the Sierra Club, personally led the investigating committee. They interviewed 20 firsthand witnesses and produced a 360-page report concluding the events were not supernatural and suggesting a boarder had staged them. Clarke had agreed in advance to let the committee decide on release, then refused to allow the report to be published. ● Clarke answered with a 20-page pamphlet attacking the investigation and a 50-page firsthand account of what he insisted he had seen. Beginning in 1877 he published pamphlets he said were dictated to him from the spirit world through a San Francisco medium. ● His daughter Helen carried the fight forward after his death in 1884, still writing letters defending the account in 1891 and giving a full account to researcher James Hyslop in 1905. That material was published in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1913, with an inconclusive verdict. After that, the Clarke family disappears from the public record entirely. ● The mansion was demolished in the early 1970s for Interstate 980. In 1997 a reporter canvassed three surviving Victorian houses near the old address and found three residents, none of whom had heard of Thomas Clarke, each reporting phenomena of their own. SCRIPTURE 1 Corinthians 4:5 (NIV) — 'Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart.' SOURCES ● Daily Alta California, April 26 to 27, 1874 ● Oakland Daily Transcript, April 28, 1874 Sacramento Daily Union, April 29, 1874 ● Thomas B. Clarke, The Oakland Ghost and Ancient Phenomena, With a Review of the Oakland Committee (1877) ● Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research (1913) ● San Francisco Chronicle / SFGate, 'The Real Story Behind Oakland's Haunted Mansion,' October 31, 1997

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  Episode #85

  Episode 89: Whispers Estate, Something Named Itself

  Aug 31, 202619 min

  A man bought a Victorian home in Mitchell, Indiana for its price and its character, and spent the following months learning exactly what else came with it. This is the story of Van Renier, the house he refused to walk away from, and a table that answered a question no one expected it to answer. EPISODE NOTES ● Owner Van Renier has publicly stated the house holds a confirmed record of six deaths, not counting any patients who may have died during Dr. John Gibbons's twenty-six years of medical practice there. ● The Rachel legend has at least three competing versions: a Christmas 1912 fire, a carriage accident that killed her parents before her adoption, and a darker possibility raised in Richard Estep's own research that she may have been killed by her father. No record confirms a girl named Rachel ever lived in the house under any version. ● A documented infant named Elizabeth died in the master bedroom of unrecorded causes; guests report the scent of baby powder and the sound of a baby crying in that same room. ● The May 4, 2014 investigation by the Ghost Research Society, led by Dale Kaczmarek with the Champaign-Urbana Paranormal Society, is a named, dated centerpiece of the episode: a ghost box correctly answered 'Gibbons' and 'Mabel' unprompted; investigators Marge Sucha and Michael Wright each developed unexplained marks minutes apart, and investigator Stan Suho openly reported his own footage turned up nothing. ● The cold open is built from a real guest's own written account of a table-tipping session that answered 'yes' when asked if it was a demon, then reacted aggressively when the group said they'd stop talking to it. The episode makes it explicit that this event and the shadow entity 'Big Black' have never been formally connected. ● Includes Mary Ann's own theological belief that child apparitions may be demonic entities using a child's likeness as a disguise, since she does not believe God leaves children's souls earthbound. SCRIPTURE 1 John 4:1 (NIV) — 'Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.' SOURCES ● Van Renier's own account, as reported by WAVE 3 News (2014) and in the documentary When the Walls Talk (2017) ● Ghost Research Society investigation report, ghostresearch.org, May 4, 2014 ● Richard Estep, Whispers in the Darkness: The Haunting of Whispers Estate ● Ghost Stalkers television episode, October 2014 ● A guest's own published account of a table-tipping session at Whispers Estate

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