The Hinsdale House Haunting

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Speaker 1 Hey, weirdos, I'm Ash, and I'm Elena, and this is Morbid.

Speaker 1 This is Morbid. It's very dreary today.

Speaker 1 It's a very fall, gloomy day and I love it. Oh yeah, it's glue malicious.
Yesterday was even more fall. Yeah, yesterday was like super duper fall.
Fall fall.

Speaker 1 And then the day before that, I was driving around at night and I was like, oh, this it looked like the 90s outside. It looks like 90s fall to me.
I love when it looks like the 90s.

Speaker 1 Yesterday to me looked like the 90s. Yeah, I agree.
And you know what? Even today looks a little bit like the 90s. It does look a little like the 90s.

Speaker 1 I just long for a simpler time. Yeah, I have that word that we looked up

Speaker 1 like probably a couple days ago that I don't remember. But I have it.
That's true. We do.
We have that. We have the nostalgia.
I love that. And I just

Speaker 1 regular nostalgia. I have a lot of goodness for the time that I can't.
What's that word? It started with an A. You're probably yelling it at me.
Yeah. But I don't feel like looking it up right now.

Speaker 1 We're tired.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's been a tiring week. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We always have, you know, something going on. There's always somebody in the hospital.
There's always somebody in the hospital. Everything's fine.
It's always my mom.

Speaker 1 She's okay. She's fine.
She's okay. She had the Ponomi.
Yeah, she had pneumonia, which is not great to get when you're like almost 80. No, it was freaking me out because Ma is Diane Keaton.

Speaker 1 Diane Keaton and Ma are the same person, I think. They are.
Like Like they look so reminding me of each other a lot.

Speaker 1 So when Ma got diagnosed with pneumonia, I was like really beside myself for a minute there. Yeah, she was in the hospital for over a week.
So it's been

Speaker 1 a lot, but things are good now. She's doing better.
She's healthy. Trying to get her on

Speaker 1 the road to recovery. On the up and up.
But I'm going to make her some pastina. You know, yeah.

Speaker 1 Let me tell you. I don't know if we've mentioned this.
I'm sure we have. People want my recipe.
Okay. I'm going to say it again for everybody in the back.
Tell them.

Speaker 1 I fully fully believe that Ash has magical pastina that can cure what ails you. I do.
Thank you. I have this bitch make me this pastina.
I don't even have her do it.

Speaker 1 She just says, you want my pastina? It's I know when she

Speaker 1 requires. I said it to your, one of your kids today in her eyes.
She's like, she isn't feeling well. Her eyes lit up and she was like, she nodded emphatically.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like one of my kids has like, just one of those small little, like, you know, uh, cold and flu sees and viruses.

Speaker 1 Like, she's completely fine i think it was just like dry yeah literally it's probably allergies to be honest but you know everybody needs a little health day yeah uh so she was home and ash told her she would make the pastina and she was like yes like hell yeah and then i go to boss it cured my covid i it was the only thing i would eat after neurovirus like it's a it's it's a delicacy thank you it's a delicacy because i streganona it's true i love that pastina i'm just like a i'm i posted it the other day I don't know if you saw it.

Speaker 1 I think I'm a kitchen witch. I think you are, too.
You know how everybody's like a certain kind of witch? Yeah. I'm a kitchen witch.
I think you are. And I love that pastina alone.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 Well, and I like to do like simmer pots and like that kind of thing, you know? No, I think you are. Thanks.
I'm going to make an apple crisp today too. Oh, hell yeah.

Speaker 1 I got to, let's record this because I got to get bacon. I know.
I want to get bacon too because I got to make, I haven't made my pumpkin loaf this year yet. Can you make one? Please make that today.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I know Ma likes that too, Ma and Peppa.
I will trade you pastina for pumpkin loaf. Oh, yeah, I will do that.
We will trade the pea dishes. And today is the, it's the day before Halloween.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I have been trying to make a super spooky lunch for the girls every single day this week. You've been killing one of the top spooky.
What did you do today? I was running out of ideas, but I...

Speaker 1 I really hit it out of the park today. Let's say what you already did.
So let's see. So on Monday,

Speaker 1 I did an everything bagel, but I made it like a pizza bagel, but but I made it look like mummies. That was cool.
I should post pictures of these because they're real cute.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this bitch is easy to do. This bitch is giving Pinterest mom, but she's the gothiest goth.
I just like to wake up early, so that's when I do it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because, like, I just, I don't know, it's fun. Then you did Frankenstein wraps.
I did Frankenstein wraps, which was just a spinach wrap, and I put hummus, cucumbers, carrot, like matchstick carrots,

Speaker 1 apples,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 like a little bit of uh like spinach in there, yummy. Uh, and I did like garlic hummus because they love that.

Speaker 1 And I just wrapped it up like a burrito, and then I took a food marker that I got on Amazon. You can get them, get them, and I drew Frankenstein on it because it was green.

Speaker 1 I can only imagine all the moms out there listening to this right now, like, Yalena, my fucking kid's not gonna eat matchstick carrots, red peppers, apple slices, and garlic hummus. Let me, before

Speaker 1 I come off, is like, my children will eat that, they will eat that, but let me

Speaker 1 eat anything anything else it's been a like one of my kids is not picky at all

Speaker 1 she will eat anything she will try anything she'll tell you if she doesn't like it but she will always try it and she's pretty open with shit

Speaker 1 my other one 50-50 and sometimes she's gonna try it sometimes she's not sometimes she likes it sometimes she doesn't she's she's the one you don't really know but you have a shot to toss up my youngest nothing is in the pickiest phase i have ever been through and her favorite thing to do right now is to tell you something you make looks something you made looks disgusting.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And she'll try to she'll try to like uh like kind of couch it because she'll be like she'll be like oh it looks disgusting, but maybe it tastes good.
And I'm like, that's an awful thing to say.

Speaker 1 She told me my apple crisp looked and she literally goes, that looks disgusting. And then she loved it.
And then she loved it. And she says it.
She's like, it looks gross, but it tastes really good.

Speaker 1 And she says that about my sweet potato strew salt. Damn, girl.
But yeah, so it's that for some reason,

Speaker 1 that wrap, it happens to have a mix of things that they will all, they all do love cucumbers and carrots. There you go.
And they love a hopper.

Speaker 1 And they love apples. These Mediterranean queens.
I love a Mediterranean food, so I can't get that. I gotta get this in your blood at loving a Mediterranean food.
It's so good.

Speaker 1 It feels good to eat. American bitch.
I also want to eat it. I love fried food and McDonald's.
I like a lot of shit. But I like healthy stuff too.
Yeah. But it's on it.

Speaker 1 So just so you know that I'm not being like, oh, my kids will eat vegetables all the time. No.
They will eat everything. No.
They constantly won't eat things. What did you do? It just happens to work.

Speaker 1 What did you do today? So today I did

Speaker 1 pizza skulls. So I had a skull mold that I got from Michael's.
As one does. And it's like a little silicone mold of like skulls.
And I used crescent rolls as the dough and I put them in there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Very easy. Took me five minutes.
I took Hunt's tomato sauce or no, I put mozzarella cheese in there. Yep.

Speaker 1 Because you just like put them in the skull thing, but leave enough room around it where you can like cover it up. Because it'll like, it'll pop out a little bit.

Speaker 1 So you put the mozzarella cheese in there and then you put a little bit of Hunt's tomato sauce or whatever tomato sauce you like. I just like Hunt's.
Hunts is correct.

Speaker 1 Put a little more of the mozzarella on top and then you just close it up, pinch it around, make sure it's all closed up. And you just bake it in

Speaker 1 350, 20 something minutes in the oven. And then I took like an extra step because we happen to have extra time this morning.
You can just do it like that. It's perfect.

Speaker 1 They like bright, it gets like golden brown. And then when they bite into it, it's like a little crisp.
It's very yummy. And then you get the mozzarella pull.
The mozzarella pull.

Speaker 1 And so today I did, I melted a little butter in a bowl. And then I just put some parmesan cheese and some garlic.

Speaker 1 Made a little garlic butter and I just kind of brushed it on top. You're just the most casual bitch.

Speaker 1 Today you have created a garlic spray. I can tell you this

Speaker 1 took like no time. It really doesn't.
It really did.

Speaker 1 The fanciest things, like, I mean, some fancy things obviously take a lot of time, but like sometimes you'll be like people will be like, oh my God, I can't believe you whipped that up.

Speaker 1 And it's like, no, this is my favorite thing. It genuinely did.
Yeah. It's not.

Speaker 1 And I heard about this one on like TikTok. And all the moms that I saw do it were like, this literally takes five minutes.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like you're just using jar tomato sauce and mozzarella that's already shredded. Here's my secret.
When I make my pasta sauce, my Sunday sauce. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's just Hunt's tomato sauce that I like spice up. Yeah, you put a little, put an onion in there.
Put an onion. I do a bunch of garlic.
Yeah. I put some wine sometimes.

Speaker 1 Wine and tomato sauce is really good. Yeah, you gotta.
But then you have to cook it so much longer. I get so scared.
So it burns off. Yeah.
But yeah, that's, I mean, that's it.

Speaker 1 I have no, I did say I really, I

Speaker 1 really painted myself into a corner. Why? Because I told them I was really going to knock it out of the park with breakfast tomorrow morning for Halloween.

Speaker 1 So I really going to come up with something fancy for that.

Speaker 1 Go on TikTok. Yeah, I'll figure something out.
And then I also kind of used up all my lunches. So I'm like, I got to figure out what to do.
You can make cinnamon buns, dye the frosting black.

Speaker 1 Oh, and then put something as the little legs. Oh, there you go.
And you could put the weird eyeballs on them. And they could be like giant spiders.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because honestly, your best friend during Halloween with kids is to get a little

Speaker 1 jar of those candy eyeballs. Yeah, like just the white shit on everything.

Speaker 1 And they're different sizes. You can put them on everything.
Put them on brownies, put them on cupcakes. I put them on the pizza.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'll post that pizza, the little pizza bagel, because it was real cute. I put

Speaker 1 it together,

Speaker 1 so it looked like a little mummy. I loved it.
It's so much fun. I'm trying to think what else you could do tomorrow.
Oh, you could make breakfast sausages and use crescent dough to make mummies.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, that's a good one. Yeah.
Yeah. And this is the food network now.
I'm also going to set it up.

Speaker 1 That's also my

Speaker 1 little tip to you is anytime you can do it like at night, like set it up at night. The best.
So you can just throw it in the oven or you can like heat it up. That's what I've learned for me.

Speaker 1 Works really well. You got to plan ahead.
Yeah. It's all trial and error.
And that was our food network segment. It is.
So I'll post those pictures. I can't wait for Halloween.
I'm excited.

Speaker 1 Because it was really easy. Yeah.
And it was super cute. Oh, yeah.
And Drew and Ash are going to be Blanche and Sydney for Halloween. The kids have no idea.

Speaker 1 We always try to be something like that the kids will think is funny. Yeah.
Like, what's the point otherwise? Yeah. And we always go trick-or-treating too.
Hell yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, we don't go to the door and everything. Let me be clear.
We partake.

Speaker 1 I'm like, trick-or-treat.

Speaker 1 Imagine my grown-up showing up by your doorstep as a dog. Trick-or-treat.
They'd be like, are you okay? I love it.

Speaker 1 But yeah, we're going to be Blanche and Sid, and I'm excited to see the kids' reactions. And John and I are finally going to be Jack and Sally.
The girls have been wanting us to be Jack and Sally.

Speaker 1 It always makes me want to sing Blink 182 at you. I know it's true.
Live like Jack and Sally. If we want,

Speaker 1 you can always

Speaker 1 find me.

Speaker 1 We have to do it like that. Halloween on Christmas.

Speaker 1 We could go forever. Oh, great.
All right. Well, spooky season isn't over yet, Queens and Kings.
Yeah, because, you know, it's almost over. It's almost like it hurts me deeply to my core.

Speaker 1 Halloween is almost over. Spooky season isn't.
Yeah, spooky season season. I see November isn't a state of mind.
Yeah. November is spooky.
It's very fucking spooky. Yeah, it is.

Speaker 1 But because spooky season is not over yet, we have a haunting for you today. A haunting? We're going to talk about the Hansdale house haunting.
The Hansdale house, you say.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like close to our neck of the woods. It's in New York.
Oh, shit. Upstate? Upstate.
Oh, dang. So we're going to talk about the Hinsdale family, which all starts with Clara and Phil Dandy.

Speaker 1 All right. Dandy.
Did I say we're going to talk about the Hinsdale family?

Speaker 1 I think just the house. Okay, hopefully I just said the house.
Let me say that because they're not the Hinsdale family. It's just the Hinsdale house.
I I think you said the house.

Speaker 1 Okay, well, you can leave that in. And listener, you tell me what I said.

Speaker 1 So when Clara Miller met Phil Dandy in 1954, he was just getting out of the military and he was working at the local grocery store in Buffalo, New York. Phil Dandy.

Speaker 1 I know Phil Dandy sounds so much like

Speaker 1 Phil Dumphy. Thank you.
I kept wanting to say Dundee. Dundee.
The coffee hasn't hit, honey. So Phil had grown up in rural Kentucky.

Speaker 1 And after he got out of the service, he decided to, you know, give Buffalo a try instead of going back to Kentucky, where he probably would have spent the rest of his life working in the coal mines, which wasn't super desirable in his opinion.

Speaker 1 Black lung pop. Yeah.
I think I have the black lung.

Speaker 1 So Clara said she was immediately drawn to Phil's soft southern accent, but she admitted, as a staccato-talking Buffalonian, I was impatient with his slow drawl.

Speaker 1 I don't even know if she sounds like that, but she does in my head. So before long, they were seeing each other most nights a week.
And by July 1955, they were married.

Speaker 1 A year later, she had their first child, Mike, who was followed by Beth in 1957, Laura in 1960, and the baby, Mary, in 1962. So they got a lot of kids.
They got a lot of kids.

Speaker 1 Now, the first year or so of their marriage was very happy, but things started to get rocky as, you know, more kids came into the picture and life challenges arise. I don't do it.
You know, all that.

Speaker 1 So in retrospect, Clara felt like the differences in their upbringings and their personalities were a lot more consequential than she wanted to accept when it was like when they were in the thick of it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it becomes more pronounced. Yeah.
Well, and looking back, you're like, oh, now I can, I can see clearly what happened.

Speaker 1 So she said, I was a devout Roman Catholic. I attended a Catholic grammar school and a Catholic academy, and Phil had no real religion at all, which like, those are big differences, you know?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, yeah. Yeah, they can be.
So Phil's time in the military and living outside of Buffalo,

Speaker 1 he had, I was going to say gave him, and then I just said, I'd like switched my thing. So I said, yeah,

Speaker 1 it gave him like a wider take on the world that Clara didn't have or he didn't feel she had so they just had simple differences yeah Clara said I was a convent educated prude while he was a freewheeling product of an entirely different upbringing our relationship suffered from the clash of cultures and backgrounds oh that's sad which can happen Having kids together definitely helped keep them on the same page though and looking toward the same goals and in 1963 though Clara gave birth to their last child who was unfortunately stillborn oh so that really only led to the tensions in their marriage coming back.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's terrible. Yeah, that's if you're already having problems and then you go through something so traumatic like that.
That's really sad. That's going to be really tough.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's tough no matter what. Yeah.
I can't imagine. I can't even fathom that.
So eventually Clara was like, we've drifted way farther apart than I ever even thought. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So to try to get some good vibes going again, she was like, you know what? Why don't we take a little like family vacation together?

Speaker 1 I think we need some, you know, slow down, reconnect, change the scenery time.

Speaker 1 So by that point, it was 1967 and some friends friends of theirs had actually just bought a small cabin near Allegheny State Park in upstate New York, and they were nice enough to offer it up to the dandies to enjoy whenever they weren't there.

Speaker 1 That's very dandy. Yeah, if we're not there, dandies, go enjoy the dandy cabin.
Hell yeah.

Speaker 1 So, just as Clara hoped, the time spent together on this, you know, quiet, cozy trip, it actually did wonders for her relationship with Phil.

Speaker 1 And in time, it started to feel like their marriage was, you know, spiced back up again, like how it was in the early days. Yeah.

Speaker 1 The kids also seemed to thrive in the more relaxed atmosphere, and you know, it was the mountains up there. So there was a ton for them to do and explore.

Speaker 1 And when it came time to head home to the city, everybody was actually pretty disappointed to be going home and like leaving the, you know, the nature behind.

Speaker 1 So in the three years that followed, the Dandy family pretty much spent all of their vacations in upstate New York.

Speaker 1 And every time they would go, it became clearer and clearer that they were all much happier when they were away. I was going to say, it feels like there's a common denominator here.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So finally in 1970, they decided that even though they both had jobs in Buffalo, it would do the family a world of good to get out of the city.

Speaker 1 And so they were like, let's find a house in the country. We can enjoy a slower pace.
Let's do this. Like we're, we're committing.
That's very selfless of them. It is.
They already had jobs.

Speaker 1 They were already like,

Speaker 1 that's not easy to do. No.
To just pick up and leave. But they saw like that, you know what? This will be so good for our family.
So that's good for the gander. Let's figure it out.

Speaker 1 It's the greater good. Yeah.
So they hired a realtor and they started looking at houses in the western New York area.

Speaker 1 At At the time, like we were just saying, they both had reliable, pretty well-paying jobs in Buffalo.

Speaker 1 But if they moved to a more rural part of the state, one of them was going to have to quit their jobs to stay home with the kids. You can't just like leave your kids in a cabin in the country.

Speaker 1 Why not? Yeah, so many reasons. Okay.

Speaker 1 I'll trust you. Okay.
I'll take your word for that.

Speaker 1 Now, since Clara obviously made less money than Phil because we hate wage gaps,

Speaker 1 that person was going to be Clara. Yeah.
Living on only one income limited their options, obviously, for housing to a degree.

Speaker 1 But to their surprise, once they got far enough outside of the city, housing prices obviously dropped significantly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So ultimately, they determined that they could afford a house price a little under $6,000,

Speaker 1 which today would today would be about $50,000. Holy shit.
And then I wrote in my notes, inflation is really a bitch, huh?

Speaker 1 The bitchiest of bitches. When I read, holy shit.
They could afford a house a little under $6,000. I was like, what the fuck are you going to get?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Today it would be under $50,000.
It's not a thing anymore. But like that was, that was a thing? People used to buy houses for like $3,000 and they'd be like sick ass like cape houses.
Damn.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Life is tough.
Holy shit. I mean, yeah.

Speaker 1 Sure is. So back then, their budget didn't seem like much, but the dandy's realtor had the perfect place in mind in the small town of Hinsdale about an hour outside of Buffalo.

Speaker 1 Clara remembered, when we saw the house, I can't really describe the feeling we had because it was so peaceful and the air was like breathing in champagne. Wow.

Speaker 1 So I was like, I think that would be lovely. What a, what a way to describe that.
I think it's just like saying that the air is crisp, but in the most poetic of ways.

Speaker 1 It is, because my like blunt ass was just like, that's a good way to aspirate.

Speaker 1 I was like, that feels uncomfortable. Don't breathe in the bubbles.
Don't breathe in the champagne. I think she meant like the smell of champagne.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that meant meant poetically, that makes a lot more sense.

Speaker 1 So the house was over 100 years old and it definitely needed some repairs, but it was big enough for their large family.

Speaker 1 It was in their budget. And more importantly, it was exactly the kind of rural environment that they had all envisioned.
Hell yeah.

Speaker 1 Looking back, their son Mike Dandy said he remembered having similar feelings. He said, I was very much into wildlife, so this was just perfect for me.
It was where I wanted to be.

Speaker 1 So everybody's happy.

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Speaker 1 Rules and restrictions may apply. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.
I feel like it's that time of year where you kind of start to reconnect with people you haven't seen in a while.

Speaker 1 I got lunch with a a friend the other day who I hadn't seen in quite some time and it was so nice. As the seasons change, shorter days don't have to weigh you down.

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Speaker 1 The house was situated on eight acres of land with the nearest house about a half a mile away. And it was like a typical 19th century American farmhouse.
It's beautiful if you look it up.

Speaker 1 I was just looking it up. It really is.
Yeah, it's glutch. The top floor had a large bedroom, a bathroom, a large closet.
So that would be Phil and Clara's area of the house.

Speaker 1 And downstairs were the remaining bedrooms, a living room, and a nice large kitchen. The only thing that Phil and Clara hadn't expected was the crawl space underneath the stairs.
Oh.

Speaker 1 Clara had always lived in, you know, modern homes that had attics. So she had never seen a crawl space and she really didn't like it.
Yeah. She said it gave her a funny feeling.

Speaker 1 And the other strange thing was that inside the crawl space, there was a brick fireplace and a chimney that like seemed to go up into the staircase above. So it was like very strange.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Crawlhouses, I think, are very like, obviously, New York isn't New England, but it's like a very New England-ish vibe. Yeah.
You know what I mean? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So the Dandy family moved into the house on July 18th, 1970. And Clara's parents and her younger brother Gordon were there to help.
That morning, Gordon, her brother, got ahead of the moving truck.

Speaker 1 He just had like some small items packed up in his car. And when he got to the house and went inside, he was horrified to find that almost every room in the house was swarming with bees.
Oh,

Speaker 1 just bees. Like, there were so many bees that you couldn't even see out the windows, he said.
Bees on bees on bees. That'd be scary.
That'd be terrifying. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And in the handful of times that they had visited the house between the first time they saw it and moving day, Clara said she couldn't remember seeing a single bee in the area, but now the house was like infested with them.

Speaker 1 I hate that a lot. It's just very random and really gross.

Speaker 1 I don't like that at all.

Speaker 1 And also, on a side note i was looking at the house and i was like what does this house remind me of it reminds me of zeliska axe murder house yeah it's very similar looking i could definitely and it's got a little bit of vibes of hinterkaifek as well yeah yeah just had to put that up fun yeah so not good vibes and bees and bees bad bad vibes and bees yeah

Speaker 1 swarms and swarms

Speaker 1 So according to the exterminator who came later that day, it was actually completely unnatural for bees to even swarm at that time of year. So this was even weirder.

Speaker 1 Like that wouldn't leave you feeling really good at all. No, because it's like if this is because, because when was this? Do you know? Like what time of the year? Yeah, it was July.
July.

Speaker 1 Because I was going to say, like certain times of the year, you would expect to see more bees, but you would not expect to see swarms of bees in the house. That's the thing.
Swarms of them is crazy.

Speaker 1 So he was like, yeah, like this is not typical. But he left and Gordon and Clara's mother spent more than an hour sweeping up piles and piles of dead bees that were now just covering the floor.
Damn.

Speaker 1 Now, in the weeks that followed, there would actually be several more run-ins with the bees, but eventually they managed to evict the hive completely. Dang.
Luckily.

Speaker 1 So after moving a massive insects from inside the house, the move-in got underway and things actually went smoother after that.

Speaker 1 And Clara was like, yeah, I should have known it was too good to be true, especially after the bees. Especially after the bees.
It didn't take long for them to get settled in.

Speaker 1 And even though she had spent her whole entire life in the city up to that point, Clara actually found that she liked being a homemaker in a more rural area.

Speaker 1 Because remember, she was working before this.

Speaker 1 Within a few days, they met their neighbors and they found that they had a lot in common. They had children around the same age, this, that, and the other thing.

Speaker 1 And Clara, you know, she had some initial reservations about the move, but she was starting to think that they were going to be better off in the country.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, that was very short-lived, that little comfort that she felt.

Speaker 1 The first bizarre incident, aside from the bees, came about a month after the move.

Speaker 1 Clara was still working at the office actually finishing out her last week when she got a frantic call from her son Mike.

Speaker 1 He and his sister Beth had been out in the field behind the house with some neighbor kids when somebody started shooting at them.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 Yeah, somebody started shooting at them. What the fuck? Apparently, as soon as they all heard the shots, they all dropped to the ground and crawled back to the neighbor's house.
What?

Speaker 1 Where they called Clara. According to Mike, none of them could see where the shooting was coming from.
They just knew that it was close.

Speaker 1 And Mike told his mother that just before the shooting, they had seen the car of a man who lived about two miles from them and was known locally as an eccentric.

Speaker 1 And he would chase people who got too close to his property. So he was like, maybe it's that guy.
And like, he was upset with us or something. And he's shooting at us.

Speaker 1 So Clara reported the shooting to the state police, but nothing ever came of her report. That's fucked up.
Yeah, so she was like, wow, maybe I don't love real life.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because it's like, wow, cool that I just reported that somebody shot at my family and nothing happened. Yeah, like my family and my neighbors, like young kids, very

Speaker 1 the hell.

Speaker 1 About a week later, Mike was walking home with his friends Bob and Matt when they spotted what Mike later said was a tall teenage boy in the woods just walking by the road carrying a rifle.

Speaker 1 That's too rural for me. It's so rural.
You know, way too rural. Much too rural.
At first, Mike was like, oh, is that like a farmer, like a local farmer or something?

Speaker 1 And when he pointed him out, the other two boys were like, oh no that's that ghost that lives around here and is like known to walk up and down the road i'm massively obsessed with that because i really like how casually they dropped that lore mixively lore lore like that should always be dropped with not a fuck to be seen.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like that's just that guy. Oh, no.
That ghost. That? That's just, that's a ghost with a gun who just walks up and down.
Like, what the fuck? Obviously. You think that's a corporeal being? No.

Speaker 1 Over there? That's just a fucking ghost and not out here in these rural streets that would put me weirdly at ease that says a lot that everyone's so

Speaker 1 they're just like oh yeah that's just that ghost with a gun i would just think they were fucking with me why do you why do you ask like i'd be like you know what why do i ask like why am i should mind my fucking business is what i should do i would just probably cry i think i just love that yeah the casual lord drop will get me every time well they were very excited they started running to get a better look at hell yes but the ghost always managed to stay about six or eight feet ahead of them.

Speaker 1 But then, when they finally got close enough to touch him, Mike said the mysterious teenager stepped behind an apple tree and disappeared. As everyone should.
Which I am also highly obsessed with.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's how I'm going to be getting out of situations when I'm a ghost. I'm going to step behind an apple tree and you, and I'm gone.

Speaker 1 I'll throw up the deuce at you and then I'll step behind my apple tree. It's always going to be an apple tree, too.
You got to find the nearest one. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You might be running for a little bit, but it's worth it for the apple tree.

Speaker 1 So afterwards, Mike ran home and told Clara about what he'd seen. He's like, mom, there's a fucking ghost.
And he disappeared behind an apple tree. Sick.
And Clara was like, yeah, cool.

Speaker 1 You kids are just so silly. Yeah, that she obviously didn't take it very seriously.
I wouldn't either. Well, I am who I am, so I probably would, but I get why Clara did it.
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 So she might not have taken that story about the gun-toting teenage boy, but it turned out that the other children had also seen the ghosts too, like her other kids, either out on the road or walking along the tree line at the edge of the woods.

Speaker 1 And the neighbor's kids had also seen him on multiple occasions. So everybody's talking about it now.

Speaker 1 Most of them described him as looking like a farmer, but one of the neighbor's kids, Pat, insisted he was a black man. And she didn't mean like, like, his race.

Speaker 1 She meant that his skin was like blackened. Like he was like.
Like burnt.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And she was absolutely terrified of him. That's scary as fuck.
Like the other kids were like, oh yeah, like there's a ghost and like, I think he's a farmer. Like, isn't that so crazy?

Speaker 1 She's like, nah, he's charred. She literally said he's charred.
And like, she was so scared of him that her parents were like, okay, like somebody's awful. I hate that a lot.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That I'm not massively obsessed with that. I hate that.
No, I'm like, I'm the, I'm not even a little bit obsessed with it in the least amount.

Speaker 1 So to Clara, the early experiences could have been written off as kids just being kids and adjusting to moving into a more rural area.

Speaker 1 But a few weeks later, she had her own experience in the woods that she simply could not explain. Oh, no, stay out of the woods.

Speaker 1 I know what the hell they do in the woods, but they just moved there, so they're obsessed with the woods. And they're just in the woods.
Yeah. Like, there's nowhere else to go.
Woods. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So it was an early fall afternoon. Oh, love to see it.
And Clara was just taking the dog out for a walk in the woods behind the house. I can't get mad at you for that.
I would too. I would too.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 She was about a half a mile from the house when she started to hear what she said sounded like chanting, like chanting you might hear in church.

Speaker 1 yeah oh turn around yeah get out of there get home for the life of her she said she couldn't figure out where the sound was coming from and somehow she said it sounded like it was coming from every direction all at once that's because it's none of your business and you should go home when things are coming at you from every direction it is not

Speaker 1 all at once it's pave had no mind mama it's not for you you did not see something you did not need to say something no just get out of there take that dog and run i'm also like what was the dog?

Speaker 1 I know. So later, after she got home, she casually mentioned the sound to Mike.
And moments later, he was like, yeah, cool. Me, Bob, and Matt are going to go investigate that.
Peace out.

Speaker 1 That's awesome. So he just ran out of that.
Another casual lore drop. Yeah, we love the 70s.
Send him into action. Yeah, just go out in the woods, figure out what that was.

Speaker 1 So on most occasions, the boys, like the other two boys, were game for whatever investigation that Mike wanted to undertake. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 But this time when they got to the woods, Bob said he got an intense feeling of dread and he was like, Yeah, I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to ran into the woods.
I'll be here.

Speaker 1 Good for him listening. So the other two were like, Okay, we'll head in without you.
And they just left him standing at the edge of the woods, which is almost worse than going into the woods, I think.

Speaker 1 That charred kid is patrolling the edge of the woods. Exactly.
I'd be more scared of that. Me too.
I don't want to run into a charred kid. Oh.

Speaker 1 So after about 10 or 15 minutes, they had reached the spot where Clara said she heard the chanting and they stopped to see if they could hear anything.

Speaker 1 They stood quietly, they closed their eyes so that they wouldn't be distracted, and they just listened as hard as they could.

Speaker 1 At first, they didn't hear anything, but then out of absolutely nowhere, they heard the loud, sharp sound of a woman screaming her fucking head off.

Speaker 1 That is got to be one of the scariest things to hear out of nowhere. Out of absolutely nowhere.

Speaker 1 And especially when you're like in the woods, you're and you're locked in, like you're 10 toes down in those woods, just trying to hear what's happening. And it's quiet and it's quiet.

Speaker 1 And then you hear,

Speaker 1 oh my god. I would poop my pants.
You're out there trying to figure out what the woods are trying to say and they're just saying ah.

Speaker 1 Like, that's no. Too scary.
No. So they ran the fuck out of there.
Good for them. And went back to the dandy house.
And they were like, Clara, help us. She was like, I don't know what to tell you.

Speaker 1 She's like, fuck that. So since moving to the Hinsdale house, several members of the dandy family had now had really fucking weird, inexplicable experiences.

Speaker 1 And they had mostly brushed it off to that point. Mike's story about hearing the scream in the woods was different though.

Speaker 1 At that point, they wanted to see and they started to realize that something was off.

Speaker 1 And, And, you know, Clara was like, is it like the house or is it the entire area that we move to?

Speaker 1 Now, the swarm of bees on moving day turned out to be just the first of many problems with the house itself. During their first winter, the main pipes leading into the house froze and broke,

Speaker 1 which was obviously super expensive to repair and very annoying because while they were getting fixed, they had to carry water from a well to the house.

Speaker 1 Which also, if you think your house is haunted, and honey, the land is also haunted, and you got to go down to to a well. Oh, that's fucked up.
I'm not going to a well in the middle of a haunt. No.

Speaker 1 What are you asking of me? Honey, the land. Honey, the well.
Honey, the well. Honey, Samara.
Yeah. Uh-uh.
Exactly. Honey, no.

Speaker 1 Uh-uh. So, after that, it seemed like things were just going wrong every other day.

Speaker 1 Within a two-month period, the kids' four pet birds, a dog, and two guinea pigs were found dead in Mary's bedroom from unknown causes. Oh.
Which, like, I'd be looking at Mary. Yeah, what the?

Speaker 1 Like, what's up with our kid here? I'd be real worried about Mary, first of all. And also, second, I would want to square up with whatever entity

Speaker 1 did that. I don't even know if this entity has hands, but it's got to figure out some way to square up.

Speaker 1 Four birds, a dog, and two guinea pigs. Guinea pigs.
Guinea pigs. Guinea pigs.
Paul Guinea pigs. Guinea pigs.
Not the guinea pigs. The guinea pigs.
Clutching my pearls.

Speaker 1 So that's the other thing. Things were constantly going missing, including small sums of money and jewelry from Clara's lockbox, lockbox, which was locked.

Speaker 1 Oh, dies, because that's a good detail, Donald. I know.

Speaker 1 Holy shit. Yeah, so she said she started to feel like they weren't wanted in the house.
Like she just got this distinct view. What gave you that idea? I don't know.
Was it when they killed your pets?

Speaker 1 Was it when they killed literally every pet you've ever had? Every living thing that isn't a human in that house. And stole all your money? Yeah.

Speaker 1 But because it seemed like a lot of the unfortunate mishaps had reasonable explanations, maybe the more bizarre occurrences didn't stand out at first.

Speaker 1 But like they were getting more and more bizarre as time went on. Yeah, that many animals end up dead in one of my kids' rooms.

Speaker 1 I'm calling someone. It's going to stand out.
I'm probably going to call a psychologist first. Yeah, it's going to be top, top of mind.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, well, no, that's someone you have to write down to remember. No, you'll remember that for sure.

Speaker 1 And there was things even in the beginning that they were, like after all these bizarre experiences had happened, they were looking back and being like, was that also like a weird feeling?

Speaker 1 Oh, of course. Like, what was that? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So there was the time a few months after they moved in where Clara and Phil came home to find that even though all the doors had been locked while they were gone, it looked like somebody had broken into the house and thrown the family's clothes all around.

Speaker 1 Oh, like the entire family. Oh, I hate that.
Mary's record player had also been smashed, but money and valuables were all untouched and in plain sight. So it wasn't like somebody had robbed them.

Speaker 1 Yeah. They just like ransacked the house.
They came in and threw clothes around. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Then there was the time in early 1971 when Clara and Mike were home alone and something outside was emitting such a strong light through the windows that it like lit up the entire house. What?

Speaker 1 And they both were like, what? A few nights later, Mike said he was woken up from sleep when a board game on the shelf above his bed fell on his head while he was sleeping. Oh, shit.

Speaker 1 He was like, that was weird. Rude.
It didn't seem like that unusual, but when he looked at the shelf, everything that was stacked on top of the board game was still in place.

Speaker 1 So it had literally like slid out slid out from the bottom of a stack of other things and fell on his head.

Speaker 1 and everything else had stayed up there yeah yeah that's weird it's like when you like pull the tablecloth out and everything stays on the table

Speaker 1 stays on

Speaker 1 so that was weird and he said there was absolutely no way i could come up with an explanation for that no i wouldn't be able to and then of course there were the frequent sightings of the farmer on the road and all the strange noises both in and outside of the house yeah On one afternoon in 1971, Phil took the kids into town to do some shopping, and he just left Clara at home to relax and enjoy some quiet time.

Speaker 1 You mamas know you need that. In the haunted house.
In the haunted house, I know. Well, that was before they really realized how haunted it was.

Speaker 1 She said it was a warm day, so she opened up all the windows on the first floor to, you know, clear the house out. And she was just settling on the couch to read a book.

Speaker 1 And she started to hear all the windows slamming back shut. Oh, fuck that.

Speaker 1 But then, when she went around and checked all the windows, they were all still open.

Speaker 1 I hate that. Yeah.
I hate that a lot. Like, first of all, I'm trying to relax.

Speaker 1 I'm just sitting down with a book. I'm like, all my kids are gone.
Like, money out of my house. And then I need some fresh air, even though it's for dead people.

Speaker 1 And you're like pretending to close my windows and you make me get up and look. And then they're not even fucking.

Speaker 1 Like, that's some fucked up shit. Come on, man.
I don't like that. Come on.
I don't like that teasing. So now that they were looking back at all of this, they were like, okay.

Speaker 1 There's definitely a pattern of like

Speaker 1 there's an escalating pattern here. For sure.
So it was only when the inexplicable things started to enter the home that Clara and sort of Phil started to take things more seriously.

Speaker 1 Clara definitely took things more seriously than Phil did.

Speaker 1 One evening in July of 1973, so they'd been there for like a few years at this point, Beth, one of their older daughters, had some friends sleepover and they were all sleeping in sleeping bags in the living room.

Speaker 1 By that time, Mike was already sleeping most nights on the couch because he found the atmosphere in his own bedroom disturbing, quote unquote.

Speaker 1 And a little before, so he was down there and the girls are down there and a little before midnight after they wound down and were trying to sleep they all heard heavy footsteps walking around the kitchen like somebody was angrily pacing in the kitchen so mike was like okay it's probably just one of the dogs maybe angrily pacing around the kitchen yeah as dogs do so beth got up to check and there was no one in the kitchen human or canine Imagine if it was just a dog on two, on like two legs, angrily pacing.

Speaker 1 He's just pills.

Speaker 1 That's, I hate that. I hate it.

Speaker 1 That also used to happen in our house. That's really scary when that happens.
But we would hear them coming up the stairs, which would be even scarier. And it was like heavy boots.

Speaker 1 And then you'd look out in the hallway and there would be literally no one there. But you could feel it.
Yep.

Speaker 1 So after two years of increasingly aggressive encounters with things that they couldn't explain in and around the house, Clara was like, yeah, I have nothing left to explain.

Speaker 1 Like, I'm trying to explain this all away, but I don't have it all. Yeah, it's only so long you can explain it away.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So a few days after the sleepover, she was speaking with their local priest, Father Bob, of course. Father Bob.
And she was telling him about the activity.

Speaker 1 And he suggested that she get into contact with, Are You Ready?

Speaker 1 Father Alphonsus Al Trebled.

Speaker 1 Honestly, yes.

Speaker 1 Alphonsus. If your name is Alphonsus,

Speaker 1 what the fuck are you doing going by Al? Yeah. Missed opportunity, my guy.
You go by Alphonsus. I would shove my hand into everybody's face and say, hey, it's me.

Speaker 1 Alphonsus. I would never shut up about who I was.
And also, if your name is Alphonsus, what is the full name? Alphonsus Al Trabold. Yeah.

Speaker 1 If your name is that, you said I honor me a priest. that can perform some kind of exorcism and get rid of demons in a house.
You better be. You better be.
You better be. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Not only was he a priest, but he was also an assistant professor of theology at St. Bonaventure University.
Yeah. Obsessed.
So throughout 1973, Father,

Speaker 1 he goes by Father Al, but I got a call on Father Alphonsus. Father Alphonsus had given several lectures on the paranormal and had invited other experts to speak.

Speaker 1 So if anybody could help Clara, it was probably him. So she called and she left a message for Father Alphonsus.

Speaker 1 And in the meantime, Father Bob blessed the house, which made everybody feel a little bit better. Yeah.
Two days later, Clara finally got her Alphonsus call.

Speaker 1 The two of them spoke briefly, and Father Alphonsus suggested that they were probably experiencing a poltergeist.

Speaker 1 Okay. Which kind of sucks.
I don't know. You don't know if it sucks or you don't know.
No, I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't know if that's a poltergeist.

Speaker 1 So far, nothing really sounds poltergeist. Doesn't he do poltergeist?

Speaker 1 I also think this was the 70s and like they didn't have a lot of

Speaker 1 research on that stuff. I guess like the clothing everywhere and stuff is kind of poltergeist-y.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But I don't know. I wouldn't have immediately said poltergeist on this one.
Well, he said they had two adolescent children in the house, and their heightened energy might be causing the problems.

Speaker 1 Poltergeist do feed off of that. They do love the whole puberty thing.
It's weird. I hate that part of it.

Speaker 1 Such a weird connection. It is.
It makes sense when you think about it, but it's like.

Speaker 1 Oh my god. Oh my god.

Speaker 1 Holy shit.

Speaker 1 I wish you could feel how hard my heart is beating right now. Oh my god.
I actually just started crying. Fuck.
Woo.

Speaker 1 All right. So now that we've recovered from that, let's find my place.
So, like, yeah, adolescence, puberty, weird poltergeist feeding off of that.

Speaker 1 By then, Clara had done some research, and the suggestion of a poltergeist also didn't make sense to her. She said, I felt like there was more to it than that.

Speaker 1 From what I've read, poltergeist had no motive, no mind behind it.

Speaker 1 And this seems to have motive yeah which is true i agree but given how stressed clara sounded and the fact that she wasn't reassured by his advice father alphonsas said you know what i'll come out tomorrow that's like really alphonsus it's so alphonsus of him yeah so it took father alphonsas much longer to get to the house than he expected because he got lost along the way lost in the woods you know who among us alphonsus so by the time he arrived there really wasn't as much time like that for him to explore before he had to leave to get back to the church again, which kind of sucked.

Speaker 1 So So, Clara and the kids spent about 20 minutes explaining everything they experienced. And to their surprise, Father Alphonsus did not seem phased at all.

Speaker 1 And he also didn't seem to doubt anything that they were telling him. What a good guy.

Speaker 1 So, after hearing them out, Father Alphonsus got a tour of the house and the immediate property by Mike and Clara's brothers, Gordon and Craig.

Speaker 1 They didn't see or hear anything unusual on the tour, but in each room, Father Al said a prayer and he said one in the yard too.

Speaker 1 And then he performed a blessing before he headed back out for the night. He was like, good luck with that.
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Speaker 1 Who knows if it was the blessing or just the simple fact that somebody had listened to them without judging them, but Father Al's visit did have a calming effect on the house and the family, it seemed.

Speaker 1 Mike said, it bonded us in a way because we were more together for support.

Speaker 1 And, which is nice like yeah you're you know everybody realizes like something's going on i like it now not only did he validate their experiences but father alphonsus also explained that they weren't defenseless against whatever they were dealing with and there were people who researched the scientific basis of experiences like theirs who might be able to help them get rid of whatever it was that was causing all their trouble So for the first time since moving in, Clara was like, okay, maybe this nice country life is possible without all these disturbances.

Speaker 1 Without the ghosts. Maybe we can move on from this.

Speaker 1 For a few days after Father Al's blessing, like I said, things felt better in the house, but it didn't last very long. No, it never does.
No.

Speaker 1 One night, less than a week after the first visit from the priest, Phil was away on a business trip, and everybody else in the house was asleep when Clara was woken up by the sound of somebody walking around on the first floor.

Speaker 1 She thought it was one of the kids, so she looked over the banister at the top of the stairs, and she saw what looked like a teenage girl walking down the hall on the first floor toward Beth's bedroom.

Speaker 1 Because remember, all the kids' bedrooms are on the first floor oh so she was like oh okay must be Beth like maybe she went to the bathroom she's going back to her room so she turned and started to walk back to her own bedroom but then she realized that the girl she saw was wearing a flannel nightgown and she knew for a fact that Beth had not worn that to bed so she was like what and then she was like Also, she had shorter hair than Beth now that I'm thinking of it.

Speaker 1 Like, who the fuck is this girl? Oh, that made my hair stand on end.

Speaker 1 So she ran downstairs, tore open Beth's bedroom door, and when she got inside, Beth was just fast asleep and there was nobody else there.

Speaker 1 Oh, that fucks me up. I would light the house on fire.
That fucks me up. And leave.
Yeah. No, I don't want anything to do with that.
Like, who is that?

Speaker 1 And just be, like being half asleep and just like seeing that and being like, oh, okay, that's just one of my kids. And then just being like.

Speaker 1 Wait a second. Well, no, that did not look like my child.
Like, I would lose it. When that happens and you realize, like, okay, like, that's not one of my kids.

Speaker 1 And I just saw that person, like, I saw their form. Where are they now? That's the thing.
Like, are they still in the house hiding? And what the fuck?

Speaker 1 Yeah, like, it's like with the Sally house, it's like, yeah, you probably part of her was like, is that an intruder or is that a ghost? Like, I don't know. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 So the experience of seeing the unfamiliar girl in the house was pretty fucking unnerving. Yeah.
But Clara tried to put it out of her mind because she was like, no, the blessing worked.

Speaker 1 I'm going to have my nice country life on this. God damn it.
But the next day, she heard a scream from Beth's bedroom.

Speaker 1 And when she ran in to find out what happened, Beth told her mom that she was just sitting at her vanity when she saw a teenage girl behind her reflected in her mirror.

Speaker 1 And she said, when she turned to look, the girl vanished. She was gone.
Oh, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 And Clara said, I thought, wait a minute, I'd been taught that this worked, that a priest could come in and say a blessing. It did not work.
It did not. She's like, what? This is supposed to work.

Speaker 1 Because remember, she grew up religious, like super religious. So she's like, I went to the priest for help.

Speaker 1 the priest came and he did his thing it's supposed to work yeah i mean he he can do that yeah um ghosts have other the ghosts can can say fuck off like they you know the power of christ doesn't always compel them it's not always compelling unfortunately yeah so that night clara called father alphonsus she said 911 alphonsus alphonsas and he said on my way she said the blessing didn't work they were still experiencing the frightening phenomena so he was like okay i'll come back with an a paranormal expert like we're gonna we're gonna get in the big guns.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So a few nights later, while Mike was staying with friends and the other kids were in bed, Clara and Phil, who was back from his business trip, they were just watching TV and they heard a loud thud just outside the living room window.

Speaker 1 So Phil grabbed a flashlight and they both went out to see what the fuck was outside.

Speaker 1 After looking around and finding nothing, they were like, okay, it was probably like an animal going through the trash. It's rural out here.
It's rural out here. It's rural out here.

Speaker 1 So they turned, they went back inside.

Speaker 1 And as they rounded the house in the direction of the front door, Clara casually looked up at Beth's bedroom window and saw the same girl that she had seen a few nights earlier just looking out at them.

Speaker 1 I, this is, okay, this and the farmer, the charred farmer kid. You gotta go.
That would send me into orbit. You gotta go.
I don't know. Please stop being in my space.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's, we've crossed a line here. So they ran back inside because she pointed up and Phil also saw it and he was like, what the fuck? So they ran back inside to check on Beth.

Speaker 1 And when they got to her room, they found her sitting at her vanity, completely unresponsive and just straight up disassociating. What the fuck? It took a few minutes to snap her back into reality.

Speaker 1 And when she did, she said, Yeah, I saw her too. But she struggled to describe the girl, saying all she remembered were her big dark eyes and her filthy hair.
Oh!

Speaker 1 Oh!

Speaker 1 Why is her hair so filthy? Why is her hair dirty? It's full of secrets. Oh my god.

Speaker 1 I hate that. It's full of darkness.
Oh, that's so much worse than her perfectly clean hair. Like, I...

Speaker 1 Perfectly clean hair is the best. I, oh.

Speaker 1 Why is her hair dirty? It's washed in. Why is it filthy? Filthy.
Filthy. I don't know why that fucks me up so much.
Because you picture just like a greasy,

Speaker 1 stringy...

Speaker 1 I hate it. Oh.
I can still feel my heart beating from when the alarm went off, and that was like 42 minutes ago. I'm scared right now.
I'm in fight or flight right now.

Speaker 1 Telling these stories gets me into a scored place. It apparently gets gets both of us in there.
I know. Damn.

Speaker 1 So as they stood in Beth's bedroom just trying to comfort her, they all started to hear scratching and thumping noises coming from the room above them. Oh, goddamn.

Speaker 1 And then all the lights in the house went off like somebody had cut the power. Come off.

Speaker 1 Like, that's horror movie shit. What the fuck? So the lights came back on a few moments later, and the scratching sounds had moved from the upstairs and were now coming from the crawl space.

Speaker 1 Oh, that fucking crawl space. We got to learn about that crawl space.
You knew the crawl space was coming back. That crawl space.
You knew the crawl space was coming back. There's some shit

Speaker 1 down there. Clara, Phil, and Beth reluctantly approached the crawl space.
And after a few moments, Phil gathered the courage to open the door. Phil.

Speaker 1 Just inside the door, there were loose bricks from the fireplace stacked in small piles.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 1 They'd been in there before. Oh.
And that hadn't been there. Oh.
And then they opened the door and, like, somewhat Blair Witch style, there's just small piles of bricks.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 1 Ew. Period.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 And Clara said, I can't fight this thing. Whatever it is, it's too strong.
She just succumbed to the beast in that moment. Just succumb.

Speaker 1 I would. She said, we all succumb at some point.
She was like, okay, stack the bricks, I suppose.

Speaker 1 Okay, look at me from my...

Speaker 1 Come to my window.

Speaker 1 That's what she said. She was like, whatever.
Eventually you got to just go, Melissa Etheridge.

Speaker 1 Start singing. You just gotta.
It's all you can do.

Speaker 1 So the next night, Father Alfonso said, I'm back. And he said, here I am.
And this time he was in the company of a well-known psychic medium, Alex Tanos. So not Sylvia Brown.
No, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 He introduced everybody and Clara started to explain the history of the house, but was immediately cut off by Alex,

Speaker 1 who told her he actually didn't want to know anything about the house before walking through each room, which I respect. He was like,

Speaker 1 this is before he could be looking this up on like

Speaker 1 interwebs. There was no interweb.
He could go look it up like elsewhere, obviously, but it would take a little more effort. It would.

Speaker 1 So Father Alphonsus took Alex throughout the house, letting him get an impression of each room before returning to the family in the living room.

Speaker 1 When he walked into the living room, he just casually dropped, Did you know you had a mass murder here?

Speaker 1 Again, a casual lore drop. I love it.
I love it.

Speaker 1 I would sit down, tea would materialize, and I'd be like, tell me everything. Tell me.

Speaker 1 Did you know you had a mass murder here? Do I look like I know I had a mad mass murder here? Did you be calling you if we didn't know that? Babe, you're here with a priest. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Do you think I know that there was a mass murder here? I say, no, the fuck, I did not.

Speaker 1 Whoever knows that there was a mass murder. Boomstam.
So Clara said she was stunned and she just said, uh, no. No, I don't.
According to Alex Tanos, there were seven spirits in the house. Whoa.

Speaker 1 Some much stronger than others. He said there was a man who had been stabbed to death on the property.
Dang. A woman who was hanged by the pond out back.
A woman who was drowned.

Speaker 1 A man who had been beaten to death. Holy shit.
A young girl of around eight years old who had also been beaten to death.

Speaker 1 Which is awful. Oh my God.
And then two other spirits who he said he just couldn't really get a read on. Like he couldn't figure out who they were or why they were there, but they were there.

Speaker 1 And one he described as an elderly woman whose death was recent. And Clara wondered if that was maybe the previous resident of the house who had died in the house at age 90.
Holy shit.

Speaker 1 So he was like kind of onto something. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So he explained that over 100 years ago, before the house had even been built there, there was a general store and an inn on the property. And it was a regular stop along a popular stagecoach route.

Speaker 1 Okay. So he said the original owner knew nothing about the murders, but he believed somebody else used the space to find victims that they would rob and kill, like on the stagecoach stop.

Speaker 1 And he said they would sometimes hide their bodies in the crawl space under the stairs until he was able to bury them. This is very bloody benders.
It is. Like coded.

Speaker 1 It is super. You're so right with that.
So when Father Al showed Medium Alex there the crawl space, he said he quote saw bodies piled up like stacks of firewood.

Speaker 1 What the fuck? Which it's like, is that why they're stacking bricks? Oh, like they just like to stack. These love to stack.
They love piles. Doesn't matter what it is.
Bodies are bricks.

Speaker 1 Makes no diff. That was it.
Were they trying to show, like, this is what I do? I stack. This is my thing.
This is. And I can stack you.
This is kind of my thing. I'm a stacker.

Speaker 1 I'm kind of known for this. I stay stacking.
He stays stacking. That was fucked up.

Speaker 1 So he managed to identify a lot of the spirits in the house, but he was, Alex was visibly drained by the end of the night and he said he needed to rest before he could go any further.

Speaker 1 I don't blame him. So he dipped and he told them he'd be back soon to let them know how or if they even should proceed with anything.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 In the meantime, Claire and Phil started to consider the options if he wasn't able to get rid of the ghosts in the house.

Speaker 1 The strange occurrences and annoyances that they experienced when they first moved in were one thing, but now in recent months, the ghosts had actually gone after specific family members in ways that were very scary and unsettling.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But the problem was, like it is with so many other cases like this, they were living on a single income and they sunk all their money into this house because not only had they like, you know, purchased the house, there was all these things that had gone wrong with it that had cost a lot of money

Speaker 1 over the past three years. So they didn't really have the money to move.
Yeah, it's not that easy. So like, what the fuck do we do?

Speaker 1 So a few days after Alex visited the house, the mood and the air in the house felt better to Clara than it had in some time. And and she was again optimistic about the future.

Speaker 1 But then, one afternoon in late October 1973, that all changed with a visit from a state trooper.

Speaker 1 That morning, Phil and Clara woke up early. They had gotten on, you know, with some chores around the house.

Speaker 1 Mike had stayed with a friend the night before, and he said he would be home early the next morning to help with the chores.

Speaker 1 So his parents were really annoyed when late morning rolled around and he still hadn't returned.

Speaker 1 A few minutes after Clara came back from a trip into town, there was a knock at the door, and when she answered it, there was a New York State trooper standing there. Oh, shit.

Speaker 1 So he explained that Mike had actually been in a car accident about a mile down the road. And he'd been taken to the local hospital.

Speaker 1 And the doctors explained when they got there that Mike's injuries were pretty severe. And they actually wanted to transport him to Buffalo once he was stable enough to move.
Oh, shit.

Speaker 1 So as they drove to Orlene Hospital or Olene Hospital a few miles away, Clara and Phil passed Mike's car and they literally saw it like leaning against a tree on the side of of the road. Oh my god.

Speaker 1 That must have been horrific. Yeah.
As far as Clara could tell, it really didn't look too badly damaged, though. So she was like, okay, like maybe, maybe he's not in that bad of shape.

Speaker 1 Like maybe they're making too big a deal out of this. But unfortunately, when they got to the hospital, she realized things were a lot more serious.

Speaker 1 Mike had suffered a head injury and he was also bleeding internally from a torn spleen. Holy shit.

Speaker 1 Which is crazy when you think about the fact that they saw the car and they were like, oh, it's probably not that bad. But like, I mean, that's

Speaker 1 awful.

Speaker 1 So they said they needed to operate as soon as they could to reduce the swelling and that after they were done with the operation, he was going to have to be placed in a medical-induced coma to let his brain heal.

Speaker 1 Oh my God. Like things were, this was pretty dire.
So they gave their permission, obviously, and Mike was put under.

Speaker 1 So while they waited for him to come out of surgery, they were approached by another state trooper who wanted to know if either of them knew where Mike had been coming from and who was in the car with him.

Speaker 1 And they explained, like, he was probably on his way home and he must have been alone.

Speaker 1 And that caught the trooper off guard because, according to the paramedics who brought Mike to the hospital, he kept saying there was somebody else in the car with him right before the crash.

Speaker 1 But they searched the area and they didn't find anybody.

Speaker 1 And like nobody had all, nobody had come to the hospital with injuries from a car crash, like that.

Speaker 1 So the trooper and paramedics were like, oh, you know, I mean, he has head trauma. Like, it's probably some kind of injury that he thinks somebody was with him.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But to Clara, she took it as proof that whatever had been attacking them in the house had now managed to get Mike in the car. Holy shit.
So it took several weeks before he came out of a coma.

Speaker 1 And when he did, he was suffering from temporary blindness.

Speaker 1 Which is awful. Holy shit.
He's really going through it. He is.

Speaker 1 So eventually they were able to bring him home and obviously they wanted him to rest and recuperate.

Speaker 1 But as soon as he was well enough, they said they were going to contact Father Alphonsus to do something about the haunting once and for all.

Speaker 1 So by the time Mike was starting to feel like himself again, you know, had recovered mostly, it was early 1974.

Speaker 1 And the paranormal experiences had taken such a toll on the kids that Beth had actually started to see a specialist for stress-induced ulcers. Oh my God.
Things were so bad she was getting ulcers.

Speaker 1 Holy shit. And to make matters worse, Bob Curran, a writer for the Buffalo News, had written a series of articles on Father Al and his work with the paranormal that ran in late February.

Speaker 1 And the article didn't name the dandy family specifically or provide like super easy identifiable details, but a lot of the locals were savvy enough to know that they like they could point out some of the details and they figured out that it was the Hinsdale house.

Speaker 1 Oh shit. So now they're being like attacked by the press, which is the last thing they need.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Father Al had told the outlet, I visit there a couple times a week and they're always glad to see me because nothing ever happens when I'm there. Oh shit.

Speaker 1 So the article. It's kind of like a read to me.
I know, right?

Speaker 1 The articles in the news kicked off a growing interest in the house, and with permission from the family, Father Al came to the house with Bob Curran and Bob's son, the reporter.

Speaker 1 Nobody experienced any ghostly happenings at that point in the house during the visit, but Bob's interviews with Father Al gave people a unique window to look into about just how taxing this whole thing had become and how defeated everybody was feeling.

Speaker 1 He told Curran, I had hopes of helping the family, but there were so many problems.

Speaker 1 Then I was disappointed when Alex Tanos, the renowned psychic, reversed his course after making some definitive statements about seven murders being committed here.

Speaker 1 I know the pressure on psychics, but I had hoped he'd help more than he did. So it sounds like he just never went back.
Wow. Which is

Speaker 1 pretty. Tells you something.
Yeah, like he was exhausted. Yeah.
So Father Al was referring to the last time that Alex had been to the house.

Speaker 1 He tried to clear some of the ghosts, but by the end of the visit, he said he was so exhausted and he had to leave. And then later on, he called them and was like, yeah, I can't come back again.

Speaker 1 Like, there's nothing I can do for you. Holy shit.

Speaker 1 So they all hoped that the efforts of Father Al, Alex Tanos, and some of the other experts who had come in would finally get rid of the spirits haunting the house or at least make it livable.

Speaker 1 But just a few weeks later, the activity started to ramp up again. And Clara and Phil were like, we're out of ideas.
We're completely defeated here. Yeah.

Speaker 1 By that time, Mike had recovered and he had joined the Navy. So he was out of the house.
Beth had married her high school boyfriend, so she was out of the house.

Speaker 1 And now they really didn't need this big place anymore. Yeah.

Speaker 1 so that August they put the house on the market listing it at just $20,000 wow which remember they bought it for like 50 I think it would have been today's 50 exactly so by the time they listed the house the news about the haunting had been spread far and wide in all the articles so there was no point in trying to hide it from anybody you might as well lean in at that point well and they did they actually even started getting calls from out-of-state news outlets who were interested in buying the house oh shit so by the end of october clara and phil moved out and without the the kids or the ghosts to distract them, it seemed the problems in their marriage had returned.

Speaker 1 And this time it didn't seem like there was going to be room for a resolution. So they ended up separating and they did eventually get a divorce.

Speaker 1 And the years since the Dandy family moved out of the Hinsdale house, interest in the house and the story of the haunting has remained. People are super interested in this house.

Speaker 1 Subsequent owners throughout the years have reported seeing super unusual things, hearing things, hearing the screams that Clara heard. Like this house is very much still active.

Speaker 1 In 2011, it went up for sale and it was listed as one of the nation's top 10 haunted houses. Holy shit.

Speaker 1 And in an article about the sale, the property agent told a reporter, I'm in hopes that somebody who really respects and believes the paranormal will buy it and remodel it.

Speaker 1 But in the end, the house was purchased and turned into a haunted attraction that is still active to this day. I kind of want to go.
We will be going there. Yeah.
It's not that far.

Speaker 1 No, it's really not. We could go.
It's like, yeah. Let's do it.
Let's go.

Speaker 1 Let's, let's grab Sabrina and and corinne and go and we're going but that means we have to go in the woods too because honey the land honey the land

Speaker 1 honestly

Speaker 1 we gotta do it i love that the psychic was like yeah all this happened here and like i would love to come back and help you but i can't it's too exhausting too much that's big for a psychic and he was like yeah renowned too he's very highly respected he said honey the house he said honey the tired yeah he said absolutely not damn yeah for me it's really the charred teenager and then the silver-haired girl.

Speaker 1 The filthy-haired girl. The filthy-haired girl takes the cake.
She's getting me. Yeah.
She's in the house. She's just walking around in her fucking flannel nightgown.
And she's just looking at people.

Speaker 1 Something about that. Some about a flannel nightgown and filthy hair.
I'm like, not only do you have filthy hair, but you're probably hot.

Speaker 1 And maybe that's why your hair is so filthy because you're so sweaty. A sweaty Betty.
Like, I can feel how hot you are. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And that makes me feel sick.
It makes me feel yellow.

Speaker 1 And I don't like that you're just like looking in my mirror while I'm looking at my mirror. No, I hate that.
That would freak me the fuck out. No, I don't like it at all.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's a fascinating and terrifying story. It's a spooky one.
And I love that it really had no resolution whatsoever. None.
My favorite thing is when there's a haunt and there's no resolution.

Speaker 1 And they're just like, yeah, I don't know. It's still haunted.
Like Alphonse couldn't do anything. Alex couldn't really do anything.
I was like, I just didn't slow down. It was just like.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 The ghost said, I'm here to stay, bitch. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's crazy. Yeah.
And we're going to go there. Damn, we're going there.
So we hope you keep listening for when we do go there. Yeah, and we hope you keep it weird.

Speaker 1 But is it weird that you're a ghost with filthy hair? Wash your hair in the afternoon. Yeah.
God damn. God damn.

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