In the early 1900s the St. Nicholas Croatian
Roman Catholic Church was opened in western Pennsylvania to meet the needs of an influx
of Croatian immigrants. Just a few decades later, many of those immigrants
wouldn’t go near the church. It was said ghosts lurked among the disturbing
murals that had been painted by the world-renowned Croatian artist, Maxo Vanka. This man had experienced first-hand the horrors
of war. He’d seen bloodshed in all its vivid horror. He’d watched men die before his own eyes. When he worked at night he demanded to be
left completely alone with his dark thoughts. It was then while painting the walls and ceiling
of the church, he became aware he was being watched. A strange, hooded figure glided past his scaffold;
the artist heard mumbling as his body was eclipsed by what felt like a rush of freezing
cold air. This is just one of many ghost stories that
have throughout time have both entertained and frightened various groups of Catholics. It’s no campfire tale, either. It’s a very real story of a very real man
who was certain specters came into his life. Let’s stick with his story for now. As this tale goes, he was hired to beautify
the church after it had fallen into a state of disrepair following a fire in 1921. The pastor there, Father Albert Zagar, was
a big fan of Vanka’s work. Vanka himself had accumulated a lot of support
for his painting in Europe, so he was the ideal man to paint what would become one of
the most celebrated murals in the world. Vanka was not a crazy man, but he was certainly
affected by the horrors he’d seen while serving in the Belgian Red Cross during the
First World War. He was a devoted pacifist, but that didn’t
prevent him from seeing fields stained with blood and hearing the primal moans of dying
soldiers. This is reflected in his artwork. He painted scenes in the church that depicted
what he had seen during the war, that and how faith in God was the remedy for such horror. Vanka only ever painted at night when there
was complete silence in the church. He demanded that no one could enter the place,
not even Father Zagar. It was during his first few days of work that
he began to hear strange noises, sounds he had never heard before. At first, he just brushed this off as his
imagination playing tricks on him. Then on the fourth night, he noticed something
about 30 meters away from him, what looked like a robed man moving his arms around. Vanka just thought that somehow Father Zagar
had gotten into the church. The only noise he could hear, however, was
the sound of Zagar’s dog barking wildly. At around two in the morning when Vanka quit
work, he met the Father for tea and snacks. “I saw you inside the church,” said Vanka,
trying not to sound as if he was censuring the Father. “I wasn’t in the church,” was the reply
he heard. A few days later Vanka felt a presence again. He looked down from his scaffold, and what
he saw was a figure dressed in robes with his head covered by a hood. Vanka squinted just to make sure he wasn’t
seeing things, but the figure remained below the scaffold, mumbling to himself and making
gestures with his hands. Again, Vanka wondered if it was the Father. Maybe the old man was playing tricks on him,
he thought. Maybe the Father was just walking around the
church, but didn’t want to disturb him as he painted. You see, Vanka didn’t immediately think
he’d seen a ghost. He wasn’t the kind of person to believe
such a thing. But what had he seen? Vanka went over to the Father’s quarters
where he found him soundly asleep. After he woke him up he asked him if he had
a habit of sleepwalking, because someone was in the church while he was painting. The father just looked at him sternly and
took a big gulp. He told Vanka that for some years people had
claimed to have seen ghosts in the church. He said the community was scared stiff. He said that many of them had argued about
what the ghost was, or who the ghost was. The Father hadn’t seen any ghosts himself,
but many others had. The only reason he didn’t tell Vanka was
that he didn’t want to scare him. He said from now on, he’d sit below the
scaffold while Vanka worked. The next night the two weren’t exactly in
the same state of mind. Vanka was still shaken by what he’d seen,
but the Father just made jokes about the mysterious specter. That smile was soon erased from his face when
he heard the same strange sounds that Vanka was hearing. Almost shaking, the father walked towards
the noise and said loudly, “If you're a ghost, if you're a dead man, go with God. Peace to you. I'll pray for you. Only, please don't bother us.” At that very moment, Vanka looked over to
the fourth pew. There he saw the robed man, only this time
he could make the figure out better. He was old, very old, and had an angular face. Then just like that, he disappeared. The Father hadn’t seen him, but he’d heard
something spooky. He wasn’t quite sure if to believe Vanka
about the figure, though. It was perhaps this skepticism that caused
something to happen that would change the Father’s life forever. Later that night as he was sleeping he was
awakened by strange noises seemingly pervading his bedroom. He felt a cold shudder down his back; he felt
a presence. Again, the Father told the ghost that he would
pray for him, that God was with him, but please could he leave the church. A few nights passed and the noises came back. The ghost was obviously not agreeable to the
Father’s entreaties. When he walked over to the church to tell
Vanka about what he’d heard, he got another surprise. This time the ghost walked down the altar
and over to the eternal flame. That flame had been lit for eight years and
had not gone out once, but as soon as the ghost reached it, it flickered and died. The Father was no longer a skeptic, and so
much for eternal. Vanka kept up with the work but always with
a sense that something evil was in that church with him. The noises and the apparitions became so regular
that he started to stuff bits of cotton in his ears. To prevent him from seeing the ghost out of
the corner of his eyes he made blinkers with old newspapers. Word got around about what the artist was
seeing. Many people said the pacifist in the war had
what they called a “gift of sympathy”. This was why he was able to see the dead. Still today, you can see those quite amazing
but also disturbing murals that Vanka painted in the presence of ghosts. For the next terrifying tale, we must leave
the USA and head over the pond to the city of London, England. It was there in the bitterly cold winter of
1847 that a young woman had a violent run-in with something not of this world. This woman was just 29-years old and she was
incredibly wealthy as well as very attractive. She lived in a palatial mansion that was decorated
with fine and art and furniture made by the best hands in Europe. Also sharing the house was a Lord, a man not
in any way in intimate relations with the woman. One night she was reading a novel in her exquisite
bedroom. It was past midnight, and her eyelids were
starting to droop. When she heard the clock strike one she laid
the book down on her bed table and blew out the candle. After a few minutes as her mind was about
to drift off into the realms of sleep, she witnessed something she couldn’t explain. A bright light filled the room. It was through this light that she noticed
the young Lord appear. He walked over to her as she sat up in bed,
her screams held back by the shock. He grabbed her arm so hard it hurt. In a deep and resounding voice, the man said
to her, “There is a hell!” The pain was so much at that point that she
passed out. About an hour later she was awoken by an intense
pain emanating from her arm. When she lifted up the sleeve on her nightdress,
she almost passed out again when she saw a burn that was so bad she could almost see
the bone in her arm. The next day she discovered something terrifying. The previous night at the same time she had
been attacked, the Lord had become delirious having what looked like a seizure. The servants did their best to help him, but
he died just after the clock struck one. We don’t know the name of this woman’s
family, but we know they were very religious people. The woman it’s said for years wore a golden
band over that burn mark, but the family hardly ever talked about the incident again. Now let’s return to stories with names and
places. The location of the next tale is La Roche
College in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. This place was built in the 1960s for the
Sisters of Divine Providence. It was there where nuns studied, some of whom
would see phantoms in their midst. One of the nuns at the college was blind,
but she knew the layout of the land very well and so wasn’t frightened to wander around. She was well aware that there was a pond not
far from the main building, and since she was blind and couldn’t swim, she made sure
never to stray from the path when in the vicinity of the pond. But as you all know, sometimes fate has an
ugly way of expressing itself, even when it comes to a disabled person who’s devoted
her life to serving God Almighty. One day, as she walked down that familiar
path something caused her to slip. She fell sideways into the pond. While it wasn’t that deep, she may have
got caught in the vines and mud, because the next time she was seen was a few hours later
when her pale body was pulled out to the distress of the other nuns. For decades after, people who studied at the
college claimed to have seen the apparition of the sister taking that fateful walk. In fact, so many people said they had seen
the ghost that in 1996 the college newspaper decided it was time to look into the matter. Not only did some people not believe in the
sightings but many folks thought the whole blind nun story was fiction. It wasn’t. It turned out that on March 22, 1949, a blind
nun named Sister Mercedes Michel had indeed gone out for her daily walk. It was just after 10 am when the other nuns
realized that she hadn’t appeared that morning to start her lunch duties, something she never
failed to do. They soon heard the news. A guy driving past the pond had seen a body. It was Sister Michel. As the story goes, for a few days prior to
her fall she had been incredibly anxious about something although she wouldn’t tell the
other nuns what was on her mind. What was also strange, given her young age,
was that the pathologist said the reason she hadn’t been able to get out of the pond
was the fact that she had had a heart attack. To this day, people still occasionally see
her walking along that path, only to fall into that murky water again. Now let’s go back in time and look at a
place that was once called the most haunted house in England. This wasn’t any ordinary house, it was a
rectory, the place where the holy person dwelled when he wasn’t in the church. In 1862, that person was Reverend Henry Dawson
Ellis Bull. He was the reverend of Borley Church in the
south of England, so his house was Borley rectory. What’s interesting is the church goes way
back. Some people say it was built on the top of
a monastery that dated back to 1362. This place had a very dark past indeed, according
to Borley lore. One of the monks there fell in love and had
an intimate relationship with a nun, which was about as big a dereliction of duty as
you could get back in those days. The punishment was harsh, to say the least. The monk was executed and the nun was bricked
up alive and died within the walls, all the time pleading for God to forgive her for her
earthly transgression. Ok, so the first signs that the place might
be haunted go back to 1863 while Reverend Dawson Ellis Bull was in charge. It wasn’t such a big haunting, with folks
just saying they continually heard footsteps in the rectory. When the father was dead and gone his four
daughters took over the house. In the year 1900, all of them saw the same
thing. That was the ghost of a nun running down the
yard. They tried to talk to this nun, but the apparition
just disappeared. This sounds like a tall tale, but people took
their story seriously. Other incidents occurred around that time,
such as people claiming they’d seen headless horsemen riding a carriage around the grounds
of the rectory. Time passed, but the stories didn’t stop. In the early 20th century, Reverend Guy Eric
Smith took over the rectory. One day his wife was cleaning the house when
she came across a puzzling thing: a human skull inside a paper bag in a cupboard. This family knew all about the hauntings,
but obviously didn’t believe in headless horsemen and spectral nuns. They soon did, though, after hearing servants’
bells ring by themselves and other strange noises. They were so taken aback by the strange events
that they contacted the Society for Psychical Research. When a paranormal investigator from that organization
went to the house, he too said he saw and heard strange phenomena, which he put down
to ghosts. The family wanted to leave the rectory. The problem was, since everyone knew about
the hauntings it wasn’t exactly easy to find a replacement. Nonetheless, a replacement came and that was
Reverend Lionel Algernon Foyster and his wife Marianne. Did they see strange things? You bet your life they did. The reverend, like the family before him,
wrote to the Society for Psychical Research. He said servants’ bells kept going off by
themselves. He said windows would suddenly shatter into
small pieces. Worse still, sometimes objects would fly through
the air and writing would just appear out of nowhere on the walls. One of the most frightening incidents was
when his young daughter went into a room and the door just locked behind her, even though
she couldn’t have locked the door herself. Marianne said she was once thrown from her
bed. It wasn’t a good scene at all, but the final
straw was when the young girl seemed to have been possessed by what the reverend called
“something horrible.” Being Catholic and familiar with the art of
exorcism, he went to work on his demon-addled daughter. It was reported that during the exorcism he
was injured quite badly when a fairly large stone just smacked him on the shoulder. Psychic researchers who went to investigate
didn’t deny that weird things had gone down and were going down when they were there,
but some of them believed they were caused by Marianne. On 25 May 1937, after the family had moved
out, an ad appeared in a leading English newspaper. It was asking for volunteers who might go
and live at the house and write down what they saw. 48 people were hired for the job. One of them was Helen Glanville, who was the
mother of one of the volunteers. She threw a séance at the house, which was
the historic equivalent of having a Zoom meeting with ghosts. You might laugh, but plenty of people in the
world today claim they can contact ghosts this way. What Mrs. Glanville discovered is that a French
nun named Marie Lairre had lived close to the rectory in the 17th century. The ghost of the nun told the medium that
she’d been murdered there and then thrown into a well. All that writing on the wall over the years
had been her. It seemed she’d been asking for help. One time she wrote, “Marianne, please help
me get out.” Ok, so did this all happen, or were there
just a lot of crazy people living in that house? The answer for many investigators was that
the ghostly things happening was the work of the families and occasionally some sketchy
researchers, but even to this day there are people that think that place was haunted. Now you need to watch, “New Video Evidence
That Proves Ghosts Are Real.” Or, have a look at, “Most Terrifying Ghost
Stories.”
