GHOSTS IN THE NEWS
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Gwendalina Malatesta, daughter of the duke of Montebello
There once was a castle at Montebello in the province of Rimini where during the second half of the 14th century a little girl mysteriously disappeared. She is still speculated about today. She was called Gwendalina Malatesta when she was alive in the Middle Ages, but now, she is known to all as the Pale Blue Ghost.
Gwendalina was an albino and had white skin and hair. In the Middle Ages, albinism was a source of suspision and fear. When she was born, everyone feared that the child was destined to become a witch and would suffer an atrocious death! So her parents, in an effort to protect Gwendalina from the harsh sun and the crowds that came to stare at her, never allowed her out of the castle. To give them hope, their doctor suggested that they make a substance from grass to dye the little girl's skin and hair. It worked beautifully and Gwendalina turned pink and rosy. That night her parents slept peacefully for the first time since she was born. The next morning they took her outside the castle to play in the sunshine for the first time. But when the rays of the sun made contact with dye on her skin, Gwendalina turned an astonishing shade of pale blue and it would not wash off. Therefore the people began to call the child "Azurina."
The story of her untimely death has been handed down through the centuries. It began on her fifth birthday, which was the night of the summer solstice—June 21, 1375. There was a large thunderstorm that night that was blowing rain and hail in the unprotected windows of the summer sleeping quarters upstairs. Azurina played downstairs with a ball she had made of pretty rags and string. When the toy rolled down a staircase leading to an ice cellar, Azurina ran after the ball to recover it. Two guards heard her scream and immediately ran to her aid, but no matter how hard they looked, she was no where to be found. The entire castle—and eventually the whole village—were searched with a fine tooth comb for days and days. Azurina had just disappeared, vanished into nothingness!
From that very date, every fifth year, on the night of the summer solstice, Azurina reappears in the castle of Montebello. Many have heard her voice and can feel her presence. Students and experts from the University of Bologna and from RAI carried out an investigation in 1995 and successfully recorded the sounds. Their analysis of the recordings revealed the sound of a ball bouncing, the chiming of bells, and Azurina's clear voice crying, "Mother!" They repeated the experiment on the same night of the year in 2000 and were once again able to record the cry of a child. To this day, hundreds visit the castle of Montebello not only for its historic and artistic treasures but to visit the ghost of Azurina.
Retold from an Italian website by Gael Stirler with the help of the Google translator and FreeTranslations.com
| Blue Anchor Inn & More |
BocaMag Lyn Millner
The sous chef saw her first. He was alone in the kitchen at the Blue Anchor pub chopping vegetables on a Sunday morning when a small movement caught his eye. He looked up and saw a woman in a white veil walking past. He dropped his knife and ran out. Fast.The person telling this story is Lee Harrison, owner of the Blue Anchor pub. That’s how it is with so many ghost stories—someone who didn’t see the ghost relates a story from someone who did.
But the difference now is that we’re investigating. It’s nearly 2 a.m., and I’m at the pub with a group of ghost hunters led by Rob Eichorst, a crime scene investigator for the city of Boynton Beach. Ghost hunting is Rob’s hobby.
We’re waiting for the employees to close up so we can start the hunt. Lee made two pots of strong coffee for the seven of us, including Rob, his wife, Maggie, and members of the group, who wear black T-shirts that say “South Florida Paranormal Research Ghost Trackers.”
But back to our story. There’s a full moon tonight and it’s muggy, but inside the pub, the air conditioning is frigid. The cash register chugs away, tallying the night’s sales. The scent of bathroom cleaner wafts in. Lee continues. “It wasn’t long after we opened up,” Lee says in his Liverpool accent, “that things started happening. At first, we put it down to nothing.” But then, the thick glass shelf that holds the liquor bottles crashed to the floor and shattered. A heavy pot in the kitchen lifted itself off a big hook and “fell on some poor bugger’s head,” Lee says.
He e-mailed the previous owner of the Blue Anchor about it and received an immediate response. “That’s Bertha.”
“Who?” "Don’t worry. She’s friendly.”
And apparently, she likes to travel. The Blue Anchor originally was on Chancery Lane in London. It’s now on Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach. The entire façade is original—stained-glass windows, dark wood doors, large gold letters that spell “Blue Anchor” across a navy background. A woman named Bertha Starkey was stabbed to death there when her jealous seafaring husband found her in the arms of another man. Two of Jack the Ripper’s victims, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows, also are said to have spent their last night alive at the Blue Anchor, drinking with a well-to-do gentleman on Sept. 29, 1888.
The London owners told Lee to ring the pub’s bell every night. That’s what they had done, and it seemed to help keep Bertha away. So he does. “And we always say, ‘Ghostie, ghostie, ghostie,’ Lee says, making his voice spooky and high. The bartender, in his British accent, echoes him, ‘Ghostie, ghostie, ghostie.’ “It doesn’t work,” Lee says. “She still comes.”
Last December, Lee was home in bed at 4 a.m. when his phone rang. The security company was calling to say the pub’s alarm was going off. Lee rushed to the Blue Anchor, entered through the kitchen, swung open the saloon-style doors leading into the pub, and a woman, dressed in black, was walking along the far end of the bar. “I ran around the bar and said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ But when I got to the end of the bar, she was gone.” The police helped him comb the place. They looked everywhere, even in the little storage room. Nothing. “Was she hazy, like an apparition?” I ask. “No!” he says. “I thought it was a person.”
We’re on an all-night ghost hunt. A hunt, not a bust. “If a ghost doesn’t want to leave,” Rob says, “it’s not going to leave.” If the ghost trackers determine that a ghost is malevolent, they’ll certainly let the owner of the building know. But mainly, they look for and try to document ghosts—with infrared photography, temperature sensors, electromagnetic gauges, dowsing rods and audio recorders. Usually, ghosts aren’t seen with the naked eye. They show up in pictures—as orbs, sparkles, smears of light . . .
Or mists. Like one ghost tracker Maria Kennedy captured on film at Hillcrest Cemetery in West Palm Beach in February. It’s a dense, white vapor in the shape of a person who appears to be turning away from the camera. Its left arm is obscured. Or missing. Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower sniper, is buried at Hillcrest with his mother, whom he killed. He grew up in Lake Worth. On Aug. 1, 1966, after slaying his mother and his wife, Whitman, a student, ascended the University of Texas tower in Austin and killed 16 people before police officers gunned him down. As Whitman whirled, spasmed and fell, one of the officers fired at his left arm with a shotgun and nearly severed it. But we’ll get to Hillcrest in a minute.
The ghost who haunts the Riddle House in Yesteryear Village at the South Florida Fairgrounds is thought to have been a city employee who was accused of embezzling. He hanged himself in the attic in the ’20s. It isn’t clear whether he committed the crime, but his current behavior seems to indicate that he feels wronged. He doesn’t like men. It’s rumored that men have been struck by flying objects in the attic; others complain of nausea on the second floor. Yesteryear’s management gave Rob and his colleague, Jeff Reynolds, permission to conduct an investigation, but the attic is off limits to them.
It was still daylight when we stopped there. The house is known as the “Painted Lady” for its bright colors—Flagler yellow, sky blue and green. It was constructed in 1905 by some of the same workers who built Henry Flagler’s hotels.
A maintenance man at Yesteryear claims he saw something in the attic window. He turned his head for a second, looked back and it was gone. “People think they see a mannequin,” Rob says. It’s a sensible assumption. There are a couple of headless, wicker mannequins posed at the windows on the second story.
Inside the house, I have the sense that someone was just here and we missed them. Their photographs sit on a washstand in the entryway—framed sepias of women in long dresses and men with their hats off. In the kitchen, there’s a metal tub set up for an afternoon bath. A towel is draped over the back, and a block of Pears soap sits in a torn wrapper on the arm ledge. Once we scan the house, it’s time to go into the attic. Only the women will go. Jeff and Rob will stay on the second floor with the door cracked so they can hear us. Jeff unlocks the padlock on the attic door, slides it out of the latch and opens the door. He and Rob hand us their equipment. We walk through the door and up the groaning stairs.
In the attic, now used as storage, a faded American flag hangs from the rafters. Beneath it are Halloween decorations—a dummy in a black gown is slumped over a mannequin with bloody legs—and a Christmas tree with presents wrapped in simple brown paper and twine. “You have a lot of cool stuff up here,” Debra Nowland says to the ghost. She speaks in a soothing tone you’d use with a child or pet. And her radio squelches. She glares at her belt. “Jeff, that better be you,” she says. Silence. “Debra,” Jeff calls up the stairs. “That wasn’t me.” We are transfixed. Looking at Debra’s radio. “Can I ask you some yes or no questions?” Debra says. We wait for the radio to squawk. “Give me three squelches for yes and two for no.”
We wait. I sit on the attic floor beside an antique toilet chair—a wooden chair withthe seat cut out and a pot underneath. The late afternoon sun streams through the attic window. Dust motes float past. I count the stars on the American flag. 48.
And after I don’t know how long, we give up and go downstairs. That’s how ghost hunting is. “Like fishing,” Jeff says.
When we drive in to Hillcrest cemetery, our headlights sweep across the gentle slopes and flash on something—a pair of amber eyes, 50 yards away and close to the ground. Jeff stops and cuts the lights. It’s a red fox, head lifted, ears erect. It stares at us and we at it. For a moment, there is total stillness. Then we roll forward slowly and the fox takes off, fluid-like, across the cemetery lawn. Some cultures link the red fox to resurrection. Others consider it magical because it’s nocturnal and awake during “the between times” of dusk and dawn. This is when, according to folk legend, the space between this world and the fairy world is closest. The fox can show the way between the two.
Jeff plants his tripod on a grassy patch of earth and aims his video camera at me and Debra. The two of us are talking girl-talk when Jeff says, “Ladies. Y’all just blurred out.” Jeff’s camera is on auto-focus, which means that if something moves between us and the camera, it will attempt to focus on the closer object. “You have company,” Jeff says.
“I know,” Debra says. “Oh, damn,” he says. “My battery just went dead. And I had 98 minutes left on it.” Debra shakes her head. “Batteries are ghost treats,” she tells me. “They suck them dry.” Jeff pulls fresh batteries out of a charger and sticks them in the camera.
We see Rob about 100 feet away—at least, I hope it’s Rob—lighting up a huge banyan at the edge of the cemetery. He appears to be scanning the tree with a flashlight. A pickup truck rolls up and parks several yards away. The same truck was here when we came in, but it was parked somewhere else. “That stuff worries me,” Jeff says under his breath. “Are they hunting ghosts, or are they doing a drug deal, or … ” He trails off.
His batteries go dead again. “Guys, my batteries keep getting eat up.” A little later, Debra’s digital camera cuts off.
I wonder aloud why ghosts don’t hang out at Circuit City, and Jeff says, “We don’t know that they don’t.”
A few minutes later, his batteries fail again. That’s four sets. Jeff goes off to smoke a cigarette. You aren’t supposed to smoke during a hunt, according to the protocols of the International Ghost Hunters Society, but Jeff goes a good distance away, disappearing into the darkness.
Rob shows us an orb he captured on his digital camera by the banyan. It shines like a spot beam, perfectly circular. Immediately before taking the shot, Rob’s temperature gauge recorded a sudden 20-degree fluctuation. After he got the orb, he ran his flashlight up and down the tree to look for a reflector strip or anything that might explain the light. Nothing. “And I didn’t notice until later,” Rob says, “but there was a fresh grave right there. You could see the sod laid perfectly in there.”
The Andrews House, near Federal Highway in Boynton Beach, is haunted by someone Rob thinks he knew, when the ghost was still a man. As a little kid, Rob remembers a tall, gaunt man who rode around Boynton Beach on a tricycle. He always wore a straw hat and a scarf over his face, tied just beneath the eyes and falling past his neck. It was Lee Andrews, the city’s first pharmacist, who had a terrible case of skin cancer. People say he lost an ear and part of his nose and jaw. “Supposedly, people have seen an apparition with no face,” Rob says. “It’s a good story, with the history [of Lee Andrews]. But I haven’t seen it.”
The Andrews House is the most Scooby-Doo-esque place we go all night. It’s a clapboard house by the railroad tracks, strangled by giant tropical plants. All around it, flaming tiki torches throw herky-jerky shadows everywhere. It’s the oldest house in Boynton Beach, built in 1901. The owner, Bob, is waiting for us outside in his BMW. He doesn’t go into the house at night alone. Bob is a strapping man in a Gipsy Kings T-shirt. You wouldn’t think he’d spook easily.
Two young boys have walked down the street with their parents and are staring at the upstairs window. “Sometimes,” Bob explains, “you see something in that window. And the bed moves. Or you’ll knock the toys down in the children’s room, and they go back up. For the longest time, I thought somebody was playing a joke,” Bob says. “It’s a weird place. But come see for yourself.” And he takes us inside.
Downstairs, there’s a portrait of a man whose eyes follow you as you walk from spot to spot. In the kitchen, pots, knives and handsaws hang from nails in the beams. The air conditioning is on full blast, and the air wheezes through ornate metal grates in the floor. Bob walks up to an antique musical turntable and nudges it with his finger. “This starts up on its own sometimes when you walk by.” It tinkles out a few notes, spinning slowly.
We’ve been in the house under two minutes when Jeff says, “It’s haunted.” “How do you know?” I ask. “I just know.”
They don’t find any evidence tonight. But they’ll be back.
The Gulf Stream Hotel in Lake Worth is ghost-friendly. Management openly advertises its resident spirit—a little girl who fell down an elevator shaft in 1923. She isn’t mean, but she’s mischievous, sometimes playing on the elevator and taking guests to the wrong floor. Gulf Stream allows the investigation, provided we don’t disturb the guests.
But as Jeff and Rob set up two video cameras in the hall, a door opens, and a man pokes his head out. He wears horn-rimmed glasses and pajamas, and looks like he’s from a Gary Larson cartoon. He’s about to tell us to pipe down. But then he sees the cameras. “Are y’all shooting a movie?” “No, sir,” Jeff says. “We’re just doing some research.” “Research?” the man asks. “What kind of research?” “We’re a paranormal investigation team,” Jeff reluctantly says. “We’re looking for ghosts.” “What? There’s ghosts here?” “We’re just looking,” Jeff says. “I didn’t say we were going to find any.” The man is silent for several seconds, and then he shuts his door. Five minutes later, he’s back. I’m standing near the door when it opens. “Pssst. Are there really ghosts in this hotel?” he asks me in a hoarse whisper.
I shrug. “Have you seen any ghosts?” he asks. “Me?” I say. “No. Unless—You’re not a ghost, are you?”
He looks past me, down the hall at the others, and seems to decide something. He shuts his door and that’s the last we see of him.
At the Blue Anchor, there’s a fox head mounted on the wall above the bar. It’s baring its teeth, charging through the wall, frozen. Someone has placed a pair of glasses on its snout and a cigarette in its mouth. “The bloody bar staff,” Lee says.
The investigation is beginning. There’s no clear signal, but everyone starts getting up and unpacking equipment. One of the group members, Maria, pulls a bottle of Afrin from her purse and surreptitiously squirts it into her nostrils. “You’re addicted to that stuff,” Rob’s wife, Maggie, says. “That’s not good.” “Nah. It can’t hurt you,” Maria says. She has a husky voice. It does sound like she might have a sinus problem. “You’ll see,” Maggie says. “When they have to cut off your nose.” I have this horrible thought that one day, when Maria is a ghost, Rob will say, “People see a face without a nose.”
The ghost hunters continue their work, taking pictures as if they’re at a birthday party, but there aren’t any guests.
Or are there?
Do a little ghost hunting from your computer! Check out these ghost cams set up at haunted sites around the world.
NEW! 150 year old building located in south western lower Michigan. Site also features photos by The Michigan Ghost Society who did an investigation there in March 2005.
Abandoned Hospital Cam - Has Audio available, too!
Ghostcam - Llancaiach Fawr Manor
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