Thomas Whaley built the first two story brick house in San Diego in 1857, on a lot where, five years earlier, a man named Yankee Jim Robinson had been hanged from a gallows for stealing a rowboat. The rope was too short and the drop did not break his neck. Witnesses said it took him nearly an hour to die, and that the sound of it carried. Whaley had watched the hanging. He bought the land anyway.
The family did not have an easy time in the house. An infant son died there of scarlet fever in 1858. A daughter, Violet, shot herself in the heart in 1885 after a humiliating marriage. The house served for a time as the county courthouse, and a fire gutted Whaley’s store. By the 1950s it was empty and condemned, and the county restored it as a museum.
Staff and visitors have reported the same things for seventy years. Heavy footsteps on the upper floor from a man who is not there. The smell of cigar smoke and perfume in rooms where neither is allowed. A woman in a long dress on the landing. A little girl seen in the dining room. The chandelier in the courtroom swaying with no draft. The windows upstairs, latched from the inside, found open in the morning. And in the archway where the gallows stood, visitors describe a pressure on the throat.
The U.S. Commerce Department once listed it as an officially haunted house, one of two in the country. Whatever that is worth. What do you think?
What do you think about this? In 1800 settlers at Conneaut, Ohio, opened a four acre burial ground in rows and reported skeletons over seven feet, jaws that fit over a man’s face, double rows of teeth. The graves were plowed under within a generation. Tall tale, or a people buried twice?
What do you think about this? The Iron Pillar of Delhi is six tons of forged iron from around 400 AD. It has stood outside through 1,600 years of monsoons and never rusted, thanks to a protective film from phosphorus rich iron nobody made again. Lucky recipe, or knowledge lost on purpose?
What do you think about this? North Sea trawlers pull up mammoth teeth, flint tools and a carved harpoon from 120 feet deep. Until 8,000 years ago that seabed was Doggerland, a forested land the size of Britain, drowned by rising seas and a tsunami. The lost land of every old story?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a Florida family found a polished 22 pound steel ball in burned brush. It hummed when a guitar played, rolled across rooms on its own and changed direction. Navy X rays showed objects inside, origin unknown. Valve ball, or something that landed?
The Way Shower who taught that the kingdom of the Great Spirit is within you.
The Awakened One who taught that the mind is the forerunner of all things.
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