Legends 41: Monastic Memories

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Welcome to Lore Legends, a subset of lore episodes that explore the strange tales we whisper in the dark, even if they can't always be proven by the history books.

So, if you're ready, let's begin.

A museum is a sacred space.

You see, buildings don't have to contain a pulpit to be sacrosanct.

In a world that increasingly values bite-sized blurbs over in-depth education, any hallowed hall dedicated to the slow, intentional consumption of knowledge is a place worthy of reverence.

You can feel it's in the air when you walk in, too.

Something about a museum is just still.

as if the entire building knows what treasure it holds and knows that it's worthy of respect.

And in an environment like that, every exhibit label is a divine text.

Every whispered exclamation, a shout of praise.

Every quiet question, a prayer.

On the morning of May 3rd of 1941, the World Museum in Liverpool, England was filled with that same reverent hush.

Visitors wandered through vast halls full of ancient artifacts and animal bones.

Every step they took beneath that vaulted ceiling brought them closer to the altar of knowledge.

Everything was right.

Everything was at peace.

But this would be the museum's last peaceful day for years to come.

That night, German pilots flew over Liverpool.

Their bombs hit a nearby building, and all too quickly the flames from that explosion reached the World Museum.

Within minutes, the entire place was destroyed.

The before and after pictures are hard to look at.

That once sacred space was absolutely devastated.

It can be surprisingly simple to burn down any haven, be it a museum, a church, or a life.

All it takes is a bomb or bad news from a doctor, or the betrayal of a friend.

Outside forces can come in at any moment and shatter the peace.

But when it comes to sacred spaces, the most interesting disruptor by far is something that you'd never expect to be there at all.

Ghosts.

I'm Aaron Manke,

and this is Lore Legends.

There's almost nowhere more peaceful than a monastery.

If you've never had the pleasure of visiting one, then allow me to lay the scene for you.

The long stone hallways are silent.

There are usually birds chirping in the garden, and off in the distance, you can hear the singing coming from inside the chapel.

Everything is at peace.

Anywhere that people who have dedicated their lives to faithful contemplation is a haven in our hectic world.

Nunneries, convents, monasteries, temples, they all seem to exist slightly outside our realm.

But as peaceful as they are, that peace can be broken in an instant.

Because sometimes spirits stick around in the one place that they shouldn't, a church.

Today, the Christian faith doesn't subscribe to a belief in ghosts, but it used to.

Well, sometimes.

You see, spirits in the church have a bit of a complicated history.

There are only a couple of ghost stories from the church's earliest days.

The most famous came from Perpetua, who was executed for her faith in 203 CE.

Before she died, she wrote an account of her life, and this document is believed to be the earliest text written by a Christian woman.

While she was in prison awaiting her fate, she claimed that her brother Dinocrates came to visit her in her dreams.

Perpetua wrote, I beheld Dinocrates coming forth from a dark place, where were many others also, being both hot and thirsty, his raiment foul, his color pale, and the wound on his face which he had when he died, and between him and me was a great gulf so that either might not go to the other.

The early Christian theologians who came after her were skeptical about the existence of ghosts, or at the very least about how common they were.

Saint Augustine believed that ghostly visits were very rare.

He wrote that even if they did exist, and I quote, the dead by their very nature are not able to involve themselves in the affairs of the living.

Fast forward 200 years to the 16th century and Saint Gregory the Great let it be known that he disagreed with Augustine's assessment.

Gregory believed that spirits could linger on after death and that strong relationships with the living might keep them tethered to the mortal plane.

But by the 7th century, monastic chroniclers and scribes started including ghost stories and folktales in their written records.

It seems that they mostly included them for posterity's sake or to teach certain moral lessons.

But no matter how often these stories were added to monastery libraries, there was still one thing stopping the majority of theologians from believing in ghosts.

You see, a fundamental cornerstone of their faith centered around what happened to a soul after it passed on.

It either went to heaven or it went to hell.

There just wasn't any wiggle room in this binary system for souls to slip through the cracks and end up back on earth.

But then, everything changed.

In the 13th century, the church officially adopted the doctrine of purgatory, a sort of waiting room for the dead, where they could spend years or even centuries waiting to be made pure enough to go to heaven.

There was a third option now, and it determined that souls in purgatory could become ghosts.

If they died with unfinished business or without the holy sacraments of confession, then they could haunt the living until they got what they needed.

Then their souls could finally move on to heaven, unburdened by worldly troubles.

This vague idea of some kind of purgatory had existed for years before the Catholic Church finally accepted it as truth, and so ghost stories occasionally popped up before it was an official doctrine.

For example, the Benedictine monk Alfric wrote about the ghost of Saint Swithin in the 990s, 400 years before the church took a stance on purgatory.

In the story, the long-dead Swithin was upset that he had been forgotten by his community.

He appeared to a local blacksmith and told him to ask the bishop to move his bones inside Winchester Cathedral, where more people would see them.

The bishop though was too afraid to agree and Swithin had to materialize in front of him three separate times to convince him to help out.

In the end the blacksmith could not convince the bishop to move Swithin's bones.

So the saint decided to take matters into his own hands.

He started appearing to everyone telling them to bring their sick loved ones and pray over his grave.

When they prayed, he healed them.

Soon, so many people were miraculously healed that the king took notice and he had Swithen's bones moved into the church.

It was a win-win.

Saint Swithin got what he wanted and the community experienced a mass miracle.

And to this day, he is the patron saint of Winchester Cathedral.

This odd ghost acceptance didn't last forever though.

By the time the Renaissance came about, ghosts were interpreted not as souls from purgatory, but demons trying to lead people astray from God's teachings.

And ever since, the church's stance on spirits has become more static.

In spite of these changes, though, one thing remained constant.

ghost stories continued to claim that the dead were interfering in human affairs, and many of those ghosts came from within the church itself.

Because every now and then, the peaceful silence of a monastic community needs to get a little shaken up.

It was 10 o'clock o'clock in the morning, and Sister Mercedes-Michael still hadn't come back from her walk.

Her absence was noticeable.

Sister Michael was a cafeteria worker at Pennsylvania's Providence Heights Alpha School, and it was getting dangerously close to lunchtime.

But the day continued on, and she never made it to the school kitchens.

Sister Michael's disappearance is one that has haunted the school's students for decades, and I mean that quite literally.

Her demise has become a campus ghost story.

The Sisters of Divine Providence established an order in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania back in 1876.

Then in 1926, the nuns opened the Alpha School on their 40-acre campus, dedicating themselves to educating the youth of rural Pennsylvania.

Today, the students there still tell the story of Sister Michael.

The most popular version of the legend claims that a blind nun went for a late-night walk across the campus.

Somehow, though, she slipped and fell into a pond, and she never emerged from the water.

Ever since her drowning, students at both the Alpha School and the later established La Roche University have reported seeing a ghostly nun wandering across campus, repeating her doomed walk every evening on a perpetual loop.

The story became so popular that in 1966, a reporter for the La Roche University student newspaper investigated the origins of the legend and soon enough, she dug up what really happened.

You see, poor Sister Mercedes-Michael wasn't just a story.

She had been a real woman, and her death had been real as well.

On March 22nd of 1949, a truck driver saw something floating in a pond.

He pulled over to investigate and, to his horror, saw that the floating object was a person, and not just any person, but a nun.

He retrieved the body from the water and carried her to the convent.

Sister Michael really had been blind and had fallen into a pond.

But those are really the only things that the ghost story got right.

She hadn't slipped and drowned.

An autopsy revealed that she had suffered a heart attack during which she had probably fallen into the water.

She had also not been out walking late at night.

She had simply taken an early morning stroll.

But of course, a nighttime death sounds much spookier than one at 6 a.m.

As to whether Sister Michael actually interrupts the ongoings at the Divine Sisters of Providence campus, well, I'll leave that for the students to answer.

She is far from the only nun, though, to be turned into a ghostly story.

Popular imagination seems to be completely enamored with this horrific idea that someone someone so good and peaceful could become an agent of chaos in the afterlife.

This juxtaposition is understandably appealing, but rarely true.

And sometimes the nuns didn't even have to die anytime near when the stories claim they did, for their names to become immortalized as unhappy spirits.

A fantastic example of this can be seen at the Holy Trinity Church, Micklegate, in York, England.

It's a church that has served the York community for nearly a thousand years.

The Benedictine monastery was founded all the way back in the 11th century and the church was built in the 12th.

And that church was also once part of a larger complex belonging to the St.

Clement's Nunnery.

All that to say, there were a significant number of clergy within its walls.

That would change though in 1536.

Henry VIII was on the throne, you know, the guy who was famous for his six wives.

Well, in order to divorce his first wife and marry so many subsequent women, he had to break from the Catholic Church.

And so he established his own Anglican church, the Church of England.

Then, for good measure, he dissolved all of England's Catholic monasteries and convents.

Holy Trinity Micklegate was one of the many orders dissolved under Henry's anti-Catholic rampage.

Soldiers were sent to sack and plunder the convent's riches.

They emptied out the complex, and then it was partially torn down, leaving the nuns essentially homeless.

But legend claims that one nun stood up to the soldiers.

The abbess confronted them when they entered, declaring that they could ransack the church over her dead body.

Then she told them that if they killed her and continued their mission, she would haunt them from beyond the grave until the convent was rebuilt.

The soldiers, though, didn't take her word seriously, and while laughing, they murdered the abbess where she stood.

It took a few hundred years for her spirit to follow through on the promise she made before she died.

But by the 19th century, people started reporting sightings of a ghostly nun wandering around Holy Trinity Micklegate.

One 1896 witness said that she looked like, and I quote, a shortish woman with something white folded over her, covering even her head and her face.

Another called her a hooded figure with, and I quote, a form transparent, but yet thick with light.

The robe was long and trailed.

Most people never encountered her directly, though.

Instead, 19th and 20th century witnesses saw her walking past the church through the sanctuary's stained glass window.

If they had run into her though, I'd imagine that they would learn that she was not the abbess they thought she was, because the abbess of the story did not die when the monastery was dissolved.

That's right, the entire tale about her death was a lie.

The final abbess of Holy Trinity Micklegate was named Isabel Ward and Henry VIII's soldiers did not cut her down.

Instead, she was allowed to live out the rest of her life in a little house, enjoying a quiet retirement.

If there truly is a restless ghost at Holy Trinity, it is not her.

And look, I know how compelling it can be to dream up tragic tales at caste clergy in the starring roles.

After all, it makes for a great story when we can give someone so pure such a devastating fate.

But it's also important to separate fact from fiction when you romanticize their lives and their deaths.

We shouldn't twist them into something they weren't, not even in the afterlife.

But if you do know of any ghosts haunting your local church, try to go beyond the urban legends and uncover the real story behind the spirit, because the truth just might shock you.

He never expected to be harassed by a ghost.

After all, he was just a humble painter.

Born in Croatia in 1889, Maxo Venka's artistic talents showed promise from a very young age.

He attended the Royal Academy in Brussels and by the age of 25, he won the prestigious Medal of King Albert for his art.

But no matter how high he rose in the creative world, he never forgot his roots.

Venka was Croatian through and through, and he cared more about interacting with the poor laborers of his nation than embracing high society.

And because of that, he was well loved by the Croatian villages that he frequented.

In fact, some villagers began to believe that he was a saint after a flock of butterflies congregated in his beard.

Touched by God or not, this actually seems to be a theme in Venka's life.

His classmates at art school actually called him INRI after the letters that are carved into crucifixes.

Apparently, Venka's bearded appearance resembled that of Christ.

Funnily enough, Venka would one day find himself to be the central figure in a church, just not as the son of God.

But first, he would have to travel to America.

You see, when he was a young man, Venka survived the First World War, and he had no desire to live through another.

So, in 1934, when things started looking a bit too dicey, Venka, his wife, and their young daughter fled to America.

And the family settled in New York.

But he was an artist who needed to make ends meet, and sometimes he had to travel to sell his work, which is why in 1935, he took an art job in Pittsburgh.

And that's where he met Father Albert Zagar.

Father Zagar was the priest of the St.

Nicholas Church, which had been established so that Croatian immigrants could worship in their own language.

Forced to leave everything that they had ever known behind, these people found a special kind of home within this church community that they could never have had otherwise.

St.

Nicholas was a pillar of the local Pittsburgh Croatian community, and Father Zagar was at the center of it all.

Once the artist and priest met, the two men got on like a house on fire.

And so it's unsurprising that when Father Zagar decided to add murals to the church's interior a couple of years later, he called on Venka to do the job.

And Venka, eager to donate his time to his fellow countrymen, readily accepted.

In 1937, Venka painted 11 murals within the span of two months.

The subject matter of each painting revolved around immigrant laborers, and based on what we know about him, I think it's safe to say that this was a passion project for him.

He promised to get the job done in two months, which, passion project or no, was an overly ambitious commitment.

To make the deadline, he pushed himself harder than he probably should have.

Venka started pulling 14 to 16 hour days, painting into the early hours of the morning every single day.

Several of the murals were on the ceiling too, so Venka worked many of those long hours while balancing on top of scaffolding.

And after everyone went to bed, he worked through the night, his only light coming from the small lamp that he kept on the scaffolding with him.

It wasn't an ideal setup for sure, but Venka was fine with it.

He could really focus once he was alone and the dark sanctuary was quiet and peaceful at night.

Until it wasn't.

Only a few days after he started painting, the organ suddenly bellowed, shattering the calm evening.

It startled Venka, but he brushed it off.

Something could have just fallen onto the keys, after all.

Four days later, though, Venka's late night was once again interrupted, this time by a hooded figure.

The man, clad all in black, was walking down between the pew aisles, gesturing with his hands.

Venka assumed that it was just Father Zagar, and he returned back to work.

A few days after that, Venka saw the figure again.

This time he could hear hear the man mumbling to himself.

And as he drew closer to Venka, the painter felt a chill wash over him.

Doing his best to ignore it, he turned back to his work.

And when he looked up again, the hooded figure was gone.

Venka eventually went to confront Father Zagar about these moments, but the priest insisted that it had not been him.

In fact, he said, it was probably a ghost.

Father Zagar didn't know how the story had come about.

All he knew was that for about 15 years, people had reported seeing a spirit in the church, and no one knew where it came from.

Naturally, Venka wasn't terribly excited to hear that he might have been chosen as the focus of a new haunting, and not because he was afraid of ghosts.

No, he was simply afraid that if the ghost startled him too badly, he might fall off his scaffolding and seriously injure himself.

The priest agreed to help with the situation.

The following night, Father Zagar joined Venka in the church, and as Venka painted, the father began taunting the ghost, calling out, come on, ghost, show yourself.

In response, the men heard knocking sounds coming from the back of the room.

The ghostly knocks soon began to move around the church.

And the whole time, Father Zagar followed the noise saying, If you are a dead man, go with God, peace to you.

I shall pray for you.

Only please, don't bother us.

And then suddenly, a figure materialized in the fourth pew.

He had the face of an old man, and his skin had an odd blue tinge to it.

There was a sad, wistful look on his face, but but neither man got the chance to examine him more closely.

After just a few seconds, he vanished.

The ghost didn't stay gone for long though.

Just a few nights later, the figure came back, and this time it was on a mission.

You see, hanging above the altar was a sanctuary lamp.

It was lit by an eternal flame and was tended to by the nuns from the convent next door.

By 1937, it had already been burning for eight years straight, and it was meant to burn for many more to come.

Except on the night the ghost returned, all of that changed.

The figure reappeared while Venka was working, Father Zagar there to keep him company.

Both men watched as the hooded figure moved about the sanctuary until finally it made its way to the lamp above the altar.

Without opening the glass that protected it, the ghost took aim and blew firmly on the flame within.

In an instant, it had gone dark.

As the eternal flame winked out of existence, so too did the vision of the mysterious figure.

And Maxovenka never saw him again.

There are certain spaces in our world that we expect to be absent of conflict.

We cling to them as a place of refuge or reassurance or peace.

It's something humans have been doing for a very long time, and there's no sign of that notion fading away.

Just think back on the news coverage that blanketed the world when Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire a few years ago.

Yes, some of the fear and grief was due to such an ancient structure being touched by destruction, but another side of it all was the invasion of tranquility by something chaotic.

Max Ovenke didn't experience anything that tragic in his church that night, but in the moment I imagine it was no less frightening.

And sure, he could easily write off the whole event as a hallucination resulting from too many paint fumes and too too little sleep.

But even if you believe in ghosts, the story presents a lot of questions.

Why would the spirit aim for the lamp?

And why then, at that moment, after 15 years of harmlessly wandering around the church?

We may never know the answers to those questions, but we do know that the people who worship there were used to overcoming hardship.

They were an immigrant community who had been forced to leave everything behind and start afresh.

They had learned to be strong in the face of danger, to be brave when the odds look bad.

Yes, a lamp can be relit, whether or not it was designed to be eternal.

But the flame of hope?

That's a lot harder for evil to blow out.

Legends grow up from the most unusual and unexpected places.

With that in mind, I hope today's collection of hauntings within peaceful places helped you see a new side to folklore.

Disturbing the peace isn't something the living has exclusive rights to.

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The monks had strayed from their vows.

Of course, this didn't apply to all the monks in the entire world, just those who resided at the convent of Saint Joseph.

It had been established for the Catholic Order of the Barefoot Carmelites in Barcelona back in 1586, and it stood proudly there for 249 years.

But that was a long time to maintain a life of piety.

Over the years, according to the legend, the monks had grown lax in their devotion.

After all, the barefoot Carmelites were supposed to prioritize prayer, contemplation, and simplicity.

Unfortunately for them, Barcelona was a colorful place, and their convent stood on one of the main streets.

The city was full of worldly distractions, and gradually, the monks gave in to them.

They say that their strict routines just didn't appeal to them anymore.

Over time, the monks stopped acknowledging holy days and even stopped praying to their patron saint, Our Lady of Carmen.

One young man at St.

Joseph though was still just as dedicated to his divine calling as the others in his order should have been.

Appalled by the unholy pursuits of his brothers, he went to the prior in 1835 to report their behavior.

The prior though didn't care, so the young monk was left to worry about his brothers' souls alone.

He wouldn't fret for long though.

On the night of July 15th, the eve of Our Lady of Carmen in fact, the monks of St.

Joseph all received a message.

They were all awakened in the middle of the night to an eerie sound, which only got louder as they left their beds and approached the church.

And when they opened the doors, they were greeted by a terrifying sight.

It was a choir of skeletal monks.

The dead filled the sanctuary, singing what has been described as unholy hymns that sounded like music not of this earth.

Some stories say that they looked like walking cadavers in various states of decay.

Others, though, claim that they were just skeletons with no flesh left on their bones, and these revenants were singing to the living monks, some say as a warning, others as a curse.

None of the monks though were brave enough to interrupt the bone-chilling concert.

They just stood there, frightened beyond belief, as the choir wrapped up its show.

And then, cautiously, the living monks lit candles and led the ghostly choir to the cemetery.

where their caskets were all wide open waiting for them.

And one by one, the dead monks stepped back into their graves.

And then the night was, once again, silent.

Now there are two versions of what happened next.

One story says that when the monks returned to the church later to investigate, they found the cold, dead body of the young monk who had reported them to the prior.

Another version though claims that he didn't actually die, that he was instead the only survivor of the upcoming bloodbath.

Because whether the ghostly choir was a warning or a curse, the outcome was the same.

Ten days later, on July 25th of 1835, every single monk at the convent of St.

Joseph was slaughtered.

You see, anti-clerical riots had been sweeping the nation for months at this point.

Furious at the Catholic Church's religious orders for their role in suppressing certain political movements, the people of Spain exploded in 1834.

For the next year, they ransacked churches, monasteries, and nunneries, killing any clergy they encountered, including the monks of St.

Joseph.

The only alleged survivor was that single devout monk, but his name was not part of the official records.

Rather than standing as solid proof, he exists now as just a legend, and perhaps as a lesson in piety and devotion.

The convent of St.

Joseph was never rebuilt.

Instead, the land was absorbed into a nearby market known today as La Bocheria, one that dates back to the 13th century.

After the riots, though, the city decided to bring that market inside the city walls, and it was moved right on top of the sites where the convent had been.

And you can still visit La Boca Ria today, although, if you do, go in July.

Legend claims that every year on July 15th and July 25th, you can hear the echoes of that skeletal choir singing once again.

And maybe, if you close your eyes and focus on their voices, you'll find peace in a place that was once destroyed.

This episode of Lord Legends was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by Alex Robinson and research by Jamie Vargas.

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