Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:05] Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Weird World Adventures, the podcast. I'm your host, Mallory, and I'm here to show you just how weird this world of ours really is. I'm excited to say that season two of Weird World Adventures will be dropping any day here, so please stay tuned for that update. Follow us on Amazon prime to see the drop and also on Roku. But there's going to be 12 new episodes. I'm so excited. It's gone through quality control and out for distribution. Yay.
[00:00:33] Also, make sure to visit mallorysadventures.com if you haven't M A L O R I e s adventures.com where we cover tons of fun and interesting and weird and bizarre topics on travel, folklore, cultural anthropology.
[00:00:49] This episode we're going to talk about the folklore behind America's abandoned places. Yay.
[00:00:56] We're going to talk about three specifically abandoned places that are pretty famous that kind of developed their own folklore.
[00:01:04] There's something magnetic about abandoned buildings and towns, right? These empty shells of human activity slowly became reclaimed by nature. They just draw us in. We photograph them, explore them, tell stories about them. I love exploring abandoned places. It's one of my favorite things to do.
[00:01:22] I don't know, there's just something about them. But here's what fascinates me as a folklore enthusiast.
[00:01:30] Almost as soon as a place is abandoned, the legends start. Ghost stories, curses, warnings. Within just a few years, and sometimes even a few months, an abandoned place suddenly develops this whole mythology behind it. Why do we do that? Why can't we just let an empty building be an empty building?
[00:01:49] Why do we need to populate it with ghosts and demons and tragic backstories?
[00:01:53] Well, today we're going to explore three of America's most legendary abandoned places, like I said, and unpack the folklore that's grown up around them.
[00:02:02] Well, we'll look at what's real, what's invented, and what that invention kind of tells us about ourselves.
[00:02:10] The first one, we've talked about it a little bit here already because it's in Season two of Weird World Adventures is Centralia, Pennsylvania.
[00:02:19] If you've ever seen photos of Centralia, you know the vibe. It's cracked roads with steam rising up through the cracks. Graffiti covered Highway 61 that's been closed for decades and has kind of been pushed off because they don't want people on it anymore. Empty streets where a town of over a thousand people used to live. It looks like something from a post apocalyptic movie, truly.
[00:02:43] And the reason it's abandoned is genuinely apocalyptic. The ground beneath Centralia has been on fire since 1962. I know we've covered this. We're going to cover it again. Here are the facts. Centralia was a coal mining town. In May of 1962, the town council hired workers to clean up the town landfill, which happened to be located in an old strip mine pit. The workers started a controlled fire to burn and reduce the garbage, a common practice at the time. But the fire spread into the coal seams beneath the town. And once the town coal started burning, the whole area started burning underground. It's almost impossible to stop it. The fire is still burning today, which is crazy to think about.
[00:03:28] And it's estimated to have fuel to burn for another 250 years.
[00:03:34] So the ground can reach temperatures over 900 degrees. Thick Fahrenheit in some spots. Carbon monoxide seeps up through the cracks. Houses have collapsed into sinkholes. And by 1990, the government finally condemned the properties and bought most. Bought out most of the residents. Those are the facts. Now let's talk about the folklore.
[00:03:54] So, as I've said, Centralia has become a legendary place online.
[00:04:00] It did inspire the film franchise for Silent Hill, that video game that everybody loves. The video game was not inspired by Silent Hill, but the film series was.
[00:04:11] So a lot of people call this the real Silent Hill.
[00:04:15] Ghost stories proliferate. People claim to see apparitions of miners who died in the tunnels. They report hearing voices calling out from the smoke. Some say the town is cursed, that the fire is supernatural punishment for some past sin.
[00:04:30] And here's what I find very interesting about this. Very few of these legends actually connect to Centralia's real history.
[00:04:38] Almost no one telling the stories about it mentioned that multiple miners did actually die in various accidents in Centralia's mines over the decades. The town was open. That's kind of just what happens with mines. There are real tragedies in Centralia's past that could fuel these ghost stories. Instead, the legends have taken hold, and they're vague and apocalyptic. Centralia has become a symbol, a cautionary tale about environmental disaster, about government failure, and about the hubris of thinking we can control nature.
[00:05:10] The real Centralia is a tragedy of environmental negligence and bureaucratic failure. The legendary Centralia is a horror movie set. And the gap between those two versions tells us more about what we want from abandoned places than what they're actually about.
[00:05:27] And of course, it showcases our love for finding a real place to attribute to tales we love, like Silent Hill. The video games, you know, and the movie, of course. Being inspired by it. We want to put a real place associated with the stories that we tell and love, so we can visit it ourselves and say that we've been there, which I just find fascinating.
[00:05:52] The next place we're going to talk about is eastern state penitentiary.
[00:05:57] This is a place where real history is actually way darker than most of the legends. Eastern state operated as a prison from 1829 to 1971. It was revolutionary in its design. It pioneered the concept of solitary confinement as rehabilitation.
[00:06:15] The idea was that the prisoners isolated in individual's cells with only a bible and their thoughts would reflect on their crimes and become, you know, penitent. Hence penitentiary.
[00:06:28] The reality was psychological torture and a mass, mass, mass, mass scale. Here it was not good. Prisoners were kept in complete isolation for years. They wore hoods when they were moved so they couldn't see the other prisoners or be seen. They couldn't speak to guards. They ate alone, worked alone, exercised alone in individual yards. And. And many actually went insane.
[00:06:53] Al capone was actually incarcerated here. And it's funny because if you see his cell, he definitely had specialized treatment for being a big name.
[00:07:03] His was. His cell was the only one that was just lavished out with really nice furniture, Though he was still isolated. Willie sutton, the famous bank robber, was also held here. The building itself is in a. Like a gothic fortress, Imposing and intentionally intimidating. And now it's a museum and historic site, and it's marketed as one of America's most haunted places. The ghost stories about eastern state are extensive. People report seeing shadowy figures. They hear footsteps and whispers. Cell block 12 is supposedly the most haunted, with reports of disembodied laughter and faces appearing in cell doorways.
[00:07:43] Ghost hunters shows have been filmed here multiple times. Like the ghost hunters were there Always claiming to capture evidence of paranormal activity.
[00:07:52] But here's what's fascinating. When you actually talk to the historians who run eastern state, they'll tell you that almost all the most haunted locations Are actually areas that were built or heavily renovated in the 1930s and beyond, long after the most brutal period of isolation and punishment.
[00:08:12] The truly horrific history happened in the oldest cell blocks, where the silence system was strictly enforced. But those aren't the places that most people claim to see ghosts or where ghost hunters focus on.
[00:08:25] Instead, the legends have gravitated more towards visually dramatic spots. The cells that look the best on camera, the blocks that have the most decay and peeling paint, the places that we think have the most drastic ambience Are the ones where we say, yes, this is where it's haunted.
[00:08:44] There's also this interesting detail. Many of the ghost sightings involve descriptions of prisoners in striped uniforms, but Eastern State never used striped uniforms. That's a Hollywood invention, a vision shorthand for prisoners that we all absorb from cartoons and movies.
[00:09:01] So people are seeing what they expect to see. They based on cultural imagery, not based on the actual history of the place.
[00:09:09] And what I appreciate about Eastern State is that the museum itself doesn't really lean into the ghost stories as much. They offer Halloween haunted house events, ghost huntings for fundraising, but their regular tours focus on the history, the social reform movement that created this place and the real people who suffered here. The evolution of American criminal justice.
[00:09:32] The ghosts in this way are kind of a distraction from the actual horror, which is that well intentioned people designed a system that broke human minds in the name of saving souls. The folklore here serves a different function than it did at Centralia. It makes history more palatable, more entertaining. It's easier to hunt for ghosts than to sit with the uncomfortable reality of this horrible psychological torture carried out in the name of justice.
[00:10:02] Then we're going to talk about next Waverly Hills Sanitarium. I'm sure you guys, if you've ever watched ghost hunters just like Eastern State, you know Waverly Hills. So for our final stop, we're heading to Louisville, Kentucky to talk about Waverly Hills. A place where the legend and the history are so intertwined that it's almost impossible to separate them. Waverly hills opened in 1910 as a tuberculosis hospital.
[00:10:28] TB was the leading cause of death in America at that time, and Kentucky had one of the highest infection rates in the country.
[00:10:36] Waverly Hills was built to isolate and treat TB patients using the best methods available at the time, which was fresh air, sunlight, and rest. At its peak in the 1940s, it housed over 400 patients.
[00:10:51] The death toll was staggering.
[00:10:54] Estimates suggest that over 6,000 people have died at Waverly Hills during its time as a TB hospital.
[00:11:01] The most commonly cited number is 63,000, but historians believe that it's wildly exaggerated, though the real number is certainly in the thousands.
[00:11:13] The hospital closed in 1961 when antibiotics made TB treatment simpler. The building was repurposed as a geriatric facility, which also closed in the 1980s.
[00:11:25] Since then, it's been owned by various parties and has become legendary as one of the most haunted places in America.
[00:11:32] And look, I'm trying to be a skeptic here, but even I find Waverly Hills very unsettling. It's, it's. It's creepy the architecture is imposing. This massive Gothic Revival building looming on a hill. The body chute, a tunnel used to transport deceased patients to waiting hearses at the bottom of the hill. It's genuinely cre. Even in daylight. But let's talk about how the legends developed. The most famous ghost story is about room 502, where two nurses allegedly committed suicide. One by hanging in 1928 and another from jumping off the roof in 1932. These deaths are cited in every ghost hunting show that ever features Waverly. The problem is there's no historical documentation for either death.
[00:12:23] No newspaper reports, no death certificates, no records at all.
[00:12:28] The current owners, who have done extensive research, have not found evidence of these suicides that they ever actually happened.
[00:12:35] But the story persists because it follows a formula we recognize. Tragic deaths in a room or above a room. Lingering spirits, a specific location you can visit and feel the energy in.
[00:12:50] Here's what we know did happen.
[00:12:53] Many people died horribly at Waverly Hills. They died slowly and painfully away from their families, coughing up blood, struggling to breathe.
[00:13:03] Young people died there. That's the real horror. We also know that tuberculosis treatment evolved. And some of the treatments used at Waverly were brutal by today's standards. Experimental surgeries, artificial procedures where they'd collapse a lung to rest it, they remove ribs. None of that requires supernatural explanation to be horrifying.
[00:13:29] So why.
[00:13:31] Why are we having these elaborate ghost stories? Who invented the nurse suicides and the shadowy figures in the EVP recordings? I think it's because the real story, thousands of people dying slowly from infectious disease in an era before effective treatment. It's too big, too overwhelming. It's hard to process that level of suffering.
[00:13:53] But a ghost story, I mean, we can handle ghost stories that has a beginning, a middle and an end. It has specific characters, specific locations, specific phenomena that we can investigate. The folklore makes the tragedy consumable. It gives us permission to be entertained by a place of immense suffering. Because we're not there for the history. We're there for three.
[00:14:16] That's kind of what folklore gives us, especially when it's related around horror.
[00:14:23] So what connects Centralia, Eastern State, and Waverly Hills? They're all places where something went wrong.
[00:14:32] Where humans, Humans failed, their plans failed, or human suffering occurred on a scale too large to fully comprehend. And in each case, folklore stepped in to make meaning. From the ruins at Centralia, the legend transformed environmental disaster into a supernatural horror. At Eastern State, they make systematic cruelty into a ghost story. At Waverly Hills, they turn mass death from disease into specific narratable tales and hauntings. This is what folklore does with abandoned places. It fills the silence. It populates the emptiness. It transforms tragedy into a story, a story that has a nice structure that we like. We like to follow, that we can follow.
[00:15:18] And maybe we need that. Maybe we need the ghost stories to cope with the real horrors of existence. And maybe the ghost stories let us off the hook, allowing us to visit places of genuine tragedy as tourists seeking thrills rather than witnessing difficult history.
[00:15:36] I don't have the answers to those questions, but what I do know is that every abandoned place has two. Two stories.
[00:15:43] History story, the history and the folklore story, the folklore. And both are worth understanding.
[00:15:51] So if you'd like to learn more about these places, we have covered them before on MallorySadventures.com and yeah, be sure to tune in next week where we have another fun podcast for you about folklore.
[00:16:07] And make sure to go to Amazon prime to watch Weird World Adventures, our fun weird travel show. Season two will be launching any day now. Please stay tuned for that update. I will be posting it everywhere. We have 12 new episodes for you traveling all around the world looking into folklore and strange places. Thank you so much for tuning in today, guys. I'm your host, Mallory, and until next time, stay here.
