Phantasmal Crime

Mining and railroads transformed Denver from a small town on the plains to a regional metropolis. Hotels were a necessity for the influx of business people and tourists. We featured the history and hauntings of the Brown Palace Hotel on the main feed several months ago and the man who designed that hotel, Frank E. Edbrook, also designed the Oxford Hotel. This is the oldest hotel in Denver, Colorado and has been home and witness to decades of history. One piece of that history was a murder that took place in Room 320. That room is now known as the Murder Room and, of course, it seems to be haunted. The population of Denver boomed in the 1870s and soon it was the third largest city in the West. By 1890, 100 different railroads had their hub in Denver and flowed up into the mountains or out into the plains. In 1891, three men decided that the city needed a first-class hotel within walking distance of Union Station. These men were entrepreneur and owner of Vindicator Consolidated Gold Mini...

Anne Boleyn was the second wife of Henry VIII and she probably is the wife that most people are familiar with of his six wives. She was executed, but she was innocent, so this was murder. A schism was created when Henry tried to annul his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. The King had to wait seven years before he could marry Anne, but his love waned just three years into that marriage. He stood by as she was executed. This kind of betrayal and unjust death can lead to hauntings and in the case of Anne Boleyn, it would seem that her spirit is at unrest. The controversy and mystery that surrounds the life and death of Anne Boleyn began at her birth. Trying to pin down her date of birth is impossible. Historians have argued for centuries and eventually they agreed on two separate years: 1501 and 1507. Her father was Thomas Boleyn, who became Earl of Wiltshire and Ormonde and he was a member of the Privy Council. Her mother was Lady Elizabeth Howard who was the ...

Is it possible that some kind of great evil could whisper in the ear of a man and compel him to kill? That is what Matthias Schambacher claimed. The German Schambacher had immigrated to America and eventually opened an inn with his wife in 1851. The couple would use the cover of their inn to murder people and do away with their bodies. Those murders left behind ghosts and Schambacher may have even gotten a final strike from God, when lightning hit his tombstone as he was lowered into the ground. The natural and the supernatural seem to occupy the same place here. The Blue Ridge Mountains are gorgeous with their tree covered peaks and blue-green hue. I've driven the Blue Ridge Parkway and spent time in the Crown Jewel of the range, Asheville. The entire range is just amazing with many peaks, all identified with individual names. One of these peaks is Hawk Mountain, which rises to 1,521 feet. Many take advantage of several of the hiking trails that traverse the 2600 acre Hawk Mo...

There is a town Down Under with a very peculiar annual festival. This event is called The Festival of Fisher's Ghost. And not only is this a week long celebration(?), honor(?), commemoration(?) or whatever one wants to coin it about a ghost, but the Fisher referred to, was murdered. Campbelltown is a big city in New South Wales, Australia. The town was founded by Governor Lachian Macquarie in 1820 and he named it for his wife, Elizabeth Campbell. The Dharawal People were here long before that and they gravitated to the area because of the Georges River. Before Campbelltwon was founded, the area was referred to as the Cowpastures because a herd of wild cattle was discovered here in 1795. Apparently, they had descended from a herd of cattle that escaped their ranch in 1788. Governor Macquarie was described as a craggy old Scot and he apparently had a penchant for appointing ex-convicts to high positions of trust. He was also very generous with land grants and London wasn't happy ...

Sometimes traditional methods of murder investigation fail and law enforcement seeks unconventional ways to solve a crime. One of those unorthodox ways is asking psychics for guidance. And there have been crimes that have been solved with the help of psychics. The Jack the Ripper case was never solved, but a psychic was brought in to try to help. Most people have probably never heard this piece of the mysterious case. But this psychic just may have solved the crime. Nancy Grace hosted a show in 2005 featuring psychic detectives. There were two cases highlighted. The first was about a former paratrooper named Dennis Prado that had gone missing. Police couldn't find him and a Sergeant Fernando Realyvasquez decided to use a psychic detective named Annette Martin to find Prado after the police were unable to find him. Martin gave the Sergeant specific details about the case no one could know, so he handed her a map of a park where they thought he went missing. This park was 2,000 acres...

 In 1953, a horrific kidnapping and murder captured the attention of the nation. The perpetrators were Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Emily Brown Heady and the victim was a sweet and innocent six-year-old boy named Bobby Greenlease. Bonnie and Carl were put to death in the gas chamber at the Missouri State Penitentiary for their crime. And it would seem that although their bodies left the prison, their spirits have not and they continue to haunt the abandoned halls of death row. The 1930s in America was the heyday of kidnapping for ransom with rich families as the target. In Kansas City alone, three high-profile kidnappings occurred that included a city manager, the owner of a drug company and the manager of a garment firm. The most famous 1930 case was the Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping, which involved the son of famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh and his wife Anne had retreated to a 390-acre estate to privatize their lives a bit. Their 20-month-old son, Charles Jr.,...

Prisons are notorious for being haunted. They are places of such strong emotion, that isn't surprising. There are a couple of areas of jails that lend themselves more to haunting activity: solitary confinement and Death Row. Whether one supports the death penalty or not, there is no question that some people commit such heinous crimes that it is hard to imagine, that anything else could be justice other than the death penalty. There are several murderers who have met their final demise at the end of a rope, an electric chair or a needle. Is it possible that their spirits have remained on this side of the veil? Perhaps they are not welcome anywhere else. The concept of an area in a jail specifically set aside for those doomed to face execution is actually a fairly new one. People have awaited death in prison-like setting for centuries, but there wasn't always a "Death Row." The term "death row" didn't become official until the 20th century. However, codif...