The Grand Hotel Giessbach has housed the Swiss elite for over a century and is said to be haunting the ghost of Horace Edouard Davinet, the architect behind it all.
Above the glacial waters of Lake Brienz, the Grand Hotel Giessbach is a Swiss landmark of timeless elegance. Built in 1874, the hotel’s grand façade and sweeping views of cascading waterfalls have drawn royalty, artists, and weary travelers alike.
Read More: Check out all ghost stories from Switzerland
Horace Edouard Davinet, the renowned 19th-century architect, poured his soul into creating the Giessbach after being commissioned by the Hauser family of hoteliers, from Wädenswil in the Canton of Zurich who wanted to expand on the guesthouse they had there. The Grand Hotel Giessbach was said to be one of his crowning achievement, a luxurious Belle Epoque retreat with stucco-decorated ballrooms and salons meant to harmonize with the surrounding Alpine wilderness. Yet behind its Belle Époque charm lies a spectral secret — the restless spirit of the man who designed it.
The Ghost of the Architect
Horace Edouard Davinet was a Franco-Swiss architect. He was born in 1839 and studied, worked and lived in Bern where he designed buildings for the Swiss elite. Before he died in 1922, he designed several hotels, including the original Rigi Kulm Hotel at the summit of Rigi mountain in Switzerland. Although there is nothing but designing the hotel that connects him to this Grand Hotel Giessbach, this is where they say he haunts.
Read More: Check out all haunted hotels from around the world
Two World Wars plus economic crises with their devastating consequences for the Swiss hotel industry combined with a different understanding of tourism led to the fading of the lustre and glory of the Giessbach. After many years of decline, the Grand Hotel Giessbach closed its doors in 1979 before opening up again with a haunted rumor.
Edouard Davinet: architect and inspector of the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern, 1919, by Wilhelm Paul Friedrich Balmer, Museum of Fine Arts in Bern.
And though Davinet passed away long ago, it seems his devotion to the building has tethered him to its halls. And as the hotel director, Mark von Weissenfluh says: “We firmly believe that our hotel is primarily home to good spirits,”
The Haunting of the Grand Hotel Giessbach
For decades, staff and guests alike have whispered of eerie happenings within the Grand Hotel Giessbach, particularly during the quiet, snow-draped winter months when the rooms sit empty and the wind howls through the valley. Footsteps echo along deserted corridors, doors creak open without cause, and the air turns inexplicably cold in certain parts of the hotel — especially near the grand staircase, said to be Davinet’s favorite feature.
He is said to have gently touched two employees on the shoulder during their nightly rounds, but there are no malicious or negative stories coming from guests and staff about encounters with the house spirit.
The most unsettling encounters, however, involve the large, formal portrait of Davinet that hangs prominently in the hotel’s main hall. Many claim to have seen the eyes in the painting follow them as they pass, while others report a faint, spectral figure resembling the architect himself, standing motionless at the top of the staircase, vanishing the moment one’s gaze meets his.
Though skeptics brush it off as old hotel creaks and overactive imaginations, many believe Horace Edouard Davinet’s spirit continues to walk the halls of Grand Hotel Giessbach, ever watchful, ensuring that his masterpiece stands proud against the passage of time and that no one forgets the man who dreamed it into being.
For those brave enough to stay during a quiet winter’s night, keep an ear open for those ghostly footsteps — and if you pass the portrait in the main hall, you might just catch a flicker of movement in the architect’s unblinking eyes.
Crossing through the Jura Mountains in Switzerland, an urban legend about the ghost of a lady in white is said to have haunted the Belchen Tunnel and was widely known and written about in the 80s. Question is, is she still haunting the tunnel?
After falling to his death trying to escape the debtor’s prison, The Marshalsea Barracks in Dublin, it is said the ghost of Pat Doyle is haunting the remaining walls of the ruins.
Planted to mark the mass grave of plague victims, the Linden Tree in the Aargau valley in Switzerland has become a famous landmark. In the night though, it is said that the ghosts buried underneath it crawls from the ground to haunt as a warning for any oncoming tragedies.
A rebel and freedom fighter for Irish independence is said to haunt his favorite pub, The Brazen Head in Dublin, where it is said he plotted his fight against the English.
The black cat in European folklore is shrouded in mystery and magical lore. From the old parts of Bern, ghost stories of ghostly black cats linger in the shadows, reminding about the old fear the feline specter used to hold over people.
Mirroring the famous Dance Macabre mural that used to hang on the walls near the Predigerkirche in Basel, it is said that plague victims were buried in the patch of grass outside of the church. Legend has it that when the city needs it, the dead will rise from it in a macabre procession, as a warning of an oncoming disaster.
Where history whispers and shadows reign, the Rathaus in Bern is said to be haunted by a myriad of ghosts. Who are the ghosts lingering in the City Hall after dark?
The two adjoining cloisters by Basel Cathedral are said to be haunted by a couple of spectres entombed within the building. In the darkness of Basel’s Double Cloister, it is said you can hear the moaning of a man slowly suffocating and feel the unsuspected slap from a man, as mean in death as he was in life.
A lock keeper from the adjacent lock next The Portobello Bar in Dublin is said to be haunting it. Ever since his mistake cost the lives of someone crossing, he is said to be lingering in the area.
In an old sanatorium in Switzerland the ghost of Hermann is said to have been haunting for ages. But who was he when he was alive, and what was his true name before he died in the remote fortress up in the mountains? And is he still haunting the old halls where he never made his recovery?
After his master died at sea, the faithful dog was by his master’s grave, day in and day out. After dying of hunger and grief it is said that the Newfoundland dog is still seen, slipping between the graves at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
Dead as a young girl, the family of Ruth Ellen Rose believed her to be one of the undead, a vampire rising from her grave every night to feed on her siblings, slowly dying of the same disease she did. To stop this, they decided to dig her body up and carve her heart out.
In the hushed woodlands and misted graveyards of 19th-century New England, terror did not always arrive in the night — sometimes it crept in through the sickroom window, carried on the breath of a wasting cough. One such unfortunate to fall victim to this grim tradition was Ruth Ellen Rose, a 15-year-old girl whose short, tragic life and eerie afterlife have lingered in Rhode Island folklore ever since.
Born in 1859 in Exeter, Rhode Island, Ruth Ellen Rose lived — and died — in the heartland of America’s so-called Vampire Panic. New England, though a landscape of tidy farmsteads and Puritan steeples, harbored a persistent, unshakable fear: that the dead could rise from their graves, not in bodily form, but as a spiritual parasite, draining the life from their surviving kin. Consumption, what we now know as tuberculosis, ravaged families so regularly that superstitions took root like stubborn weeds.
Her Mother was Mary Taylor from the Dixon and Peckham family, but she died in 1866. Her father, William G. Rose was a farmer, mill superintendent, and first president of the Exeter Grange. He was also a lieutenant colonel in the Rhode Island militia. He remarried to Mary Ann Griswold Morrarty. Her former husband had been from the Tillinghast family, and this would likely be one of the things that sealed Ruth’s fate.
Ruth’s illness was slow and torturous and came in waves. By 1874, at just 15, she succumbed to the wasting disease. But death, in the fearful lore of Exeter, was not always an ending.
A Family Cursed by Blood
Not long after Ruth’s death her siblings began to show the telltale signs of consumption. She had a lot of them, and although many of them lived long lives, there were some who died earlier. Like Emma Tillinghast, her step sister who died of consumption, although her death is most often noted to be in 1870 when she was 16. This epidemic also took the lives of their infant little brothers Horace and Edwin. In most documents, Ruth is not even listed in the flock of children so the details of the story sometimes become lost to legends.
William Greene Rose
And rumors swirled. William Rose, Ruth’s father, was not just a grieving parent. Whispers claimed he dabbled in Druid rituals, dark rites passed down from the Old World. At least that is how the stories about him have evolved until today. Local legend still speaks of an ancient stone altar, hidden in the woods of Peace Dale, upon which he was said to perform secret sacrifices to halt the spread of the mysterious illness plaguing his bloodline.
Perhaps it was superstition, or perhaps it was grief twisted into madness, but that same year, William disinterred his daughter’s body. He cut out Ruth’s heart himself and consigned it to the flames in an attempt to stop the curse of the undead. The ash was scattered, a desperate and macabre remedy meant to sever the supernatural link between the dead and the dying.
A Legacy of Unearthed Daughters
Ruth’s tragic end was not without precedent. The tale takes a darker turn when one examines her stepmother’s lineage. Mary, her stepmother, used to be a Tillinghast and this family came with stories of vampires. Stukely Tillinghast, whose own daughter, Sarah Tillinghast, had perished of consumption decades earlier — and was similarly suspected of preying on her family from beyond the grave. The echoes of that old curse seemed to pass through generations like a genetic illness, or perhaps, in the eyes of those fearful villagers, a vampiric inheritance.
Thus, it wasn’t merely disease that haunted these families, but their own shared history, where graves were never truly at rest and tragedy was expected to call twice.
An Unquiet Grave
Today, Ruth Ellen Rose lies in an unmarked grave in South Kingstown Historical Cemetery #11, colloquially known as Rose’s Lot. Or perhaps she’s not there at all, as her grave has never been found. Her father and stepmother’s headstones remain standing, weathered but intact, while Ruth’s resting place is conspicuously absent of any enduring marker. Perhaps it was lost to time — or perhaps deliberately left nameless to deny the restless dead a tether to this world.
George Rose Lot
The land itself retains a peculiar unease. Locals have spoken of strange happenings in the overgrown cemetery — flickering lights, phantom footsteps, and the sound of a distant, rasping cough when no one else is near. Some say that Ruth’s spirit lingers still, denied peace by the violence of her end and the stain of her family’s fear.
Crossing through the Jura Mountains in Switzerland, an urban legend about the ghost of a lady in white is said to have haunted the Belchen Tunnel and was widely known and written about in the 80s. Question is, is she still haunting the tunnel?
After falling to his death trying to escape the debtor’s prison, The Marshalsea Barracks in Dublin, it is said the ghost of Pat Doyle is haunting the remaining walls of the ruins.
Planted to mark the mass grave of plague victims, the Linden Tree in the Aargau valley in Switzerland has become a famous landmark. In the night though, it is said that the ghosts buried underneath it crawls from the ground to haunt as a warning for any oncoming tragedies.
A rebel and freedom fighter for Irish independence is said to haunt his favorite pub, The Brazen Head in Dublin, where it is said he plotted his fight against the English.
The black cat in European folklore is shrouded in mystery and magical lore. From the old parts of Bern, ghost stories of ghostly black cats linger in the shadows, reminding about the old fear the feline specter used to hold over people.
Mirroring the famous Dance Macabre mural that used to hang on the walls near the Predigerkirche in Basel, it is said that plague victims were buried in the patch of grass outside of the church. Legend has it that when the city needs it, the dead will rise from it in a macabre procession, as a warning of an oncoming disaster.
Where history whispers and shadows reign, the Rathaus in Bern is said to be haunted by a myriad of ghosts. Who are the ghosts lingering in the City Hall after dark?
The two adjoining cloisters by Basel Cathedral are said to be haunted by a couple of spectres entombed within the building. In the darkness of Basel’s Double Cloister, it is said you can hear the moaning of a man slowly suffocating and feel the unsuspected slap from a man, as mean in death as he was in life.
A lock keeper from the adjacent lock next The Portobello Bar in Dublin is said to be haunting it. Ever since his mistake cost the lives of someone crossing, he is said to be lingering in the area.
In an old sanatorium in Switzerland the ghost of Hermann is said to have been haunting for ages. But who was he when he was alive, and what was his true name before he died in the remote fortress up in the mountains? And is he still haunting the old halls where he never made his recovery?
After his master died at sea, the faithful dog was by his master’s grave, day in and day out. After dying of hunger and grief it is said that the Newfoundland dog is still seen, slipping between the graves at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
Luring weary travelers to get on their back, the dark night horse Zawudschawu, is said to prowl the swampy moors of Gruyère Moors.
In the shadowy heart of Switzerland’s Gruyère region, where dense mist clings to the rolling moors and ancient forests murmur with forgotten names, an unsettling legend endures — that of the Night Horse Zawudschawu.
Read more: Check out all ghost stories from Switzerland
There are many monsters said to roam the valleys and mountains. In the town, Sitten in Wallis, there is a three-legged steel seen prancing through the streets in the moonlight. Whispered from generation to generation, the tale speaks of a phantom steed with a coat as black as midnight and a wild, pale mane that shines like frost in the moonlight.
A haunting view of Gruyère Moors and Castle Gruyere, shrouded in mist, home to the legend of the Night Horse Zawudschawu.
Zawudschawu of Gruyère Moors
Zawudschawu is no ordinary apparition. It roams the lonely paths and marshy edges of the Saane River, appearing when fog blankets the land and the air hangs heavy with silence, grazing in the night. Sometimes the horse is described as dark, sometimes with a coat like iridescent milk-white and his wild mane as white as the snow.
It chooses its victims carefully: the weary, the lost, and most often, the elderly traveler making their slow, solitary way home beneath the cover of darkness.
The creature’s trick is subtle. It approaches without sound, its hooves barely disturbing the ground, before kneeling with an eerie grace as if offering mercy — an inviting escape from the cold and treacherous moors. Many, believing the spectral horse to be a gift of fortune, have mounted its back, feeling an odd, unnatural warmth radiating from its body in the chill of the night.
But Zawudschawu is a deceiver.
In one of the most infamous tellings, a drunken man crossing the moors late at night found himself face-to-face with the spectral steed. Grateful for the chance to avoid the long, cold walk home, he climbed onto its back. The horse carried him smoothly through the mist, every stride eerily silent, its breath visible like smoke. Just as the lights of his village flickered in the distance, the creature’s demeanor shifted. Without warning, it veered off the path, galloping straight for the black, rushing waters of the Saane. The last thing the man saw was the glint of malevolent amusement in the creature’s eyes before he was hurled into the freezing depths. And the last thing he heard — an inhuman, mocking laughter, fading into the mist.
Lake Of Gruyère: A serene view of the Lake Of Gruyère surrounded by autumn foliage, evoking the mysterious atmosphere of the Gruyère Moors where the night horse drowns his victims.
The Old Tale of Zawudschawu in Modern Switzerland
Is the Zawudschawu always dangerous? There are plenty of stories about the horse having brought weary and tired people back home as well.
To this day, elders in the Gruyère countryside warn against night travel across the moors. They speak of Zawudschawu’s lingering presence, of hoofprints found in morning frost where no horse should be, and of chilling laughter carried on the wind. Some believe the horse was once a cursed soul, others say it’s a forest spirit soured by centuries of human trespass.
Whatever the truth, on foggy nights in Gruyère, wise folk stay close to hearth and home — lest the Night Horse Zawudschawu find them in the dark.
Crossing through the Jura Mountains in Switzerland, an urban legend about the ghost of a lady in white is said to have haunted the Belchen Tunnel and was widely known and written about in the 80s. Question is, is she still haunting the tunnel?
After falling to his death trying to escape the debtor’s prison, The Marshalsea Barracks in Dublin, it is said the ghost of Pat Doyle is haunting the remaining walls of the ruins.
Planted to mark the mass grave of plague victims, the Linden Tree in the Aargau valley in Switzerland has become a famous landmark. In the night though, it is said that the ghosts buried underneath it crawls from the ground to haunt as a warning for any oncoming tragedies.
A rebel and freedom fighter for Irish independence is said to haunt his favorite pub, The Brazen Head in Dublin, where it is said he plotted his fight against the English.
The black cat in European folklore is shrouded in mystery and magical lore. From the old parts of Bern, ghost stories of ghostly black cats linger in the shadows, reminding about the old fear the feline specter used to hold over people.
Mirroring the famous Dance Macabre mural that used to hang on the walls near the Predigerkirche in Basel, it is said that plague victims were buried in the patch of grass outside of the church. Legend has it that when the city needs it, the dead will rise from it in a macabre procession, as a warning of an oncoming disaster.
Where history whispers and shadows reign, the Rathaus in Bern is said to be haunted by a myriad of ghosts. Who are the ghosts lingering in the City Hall after dark?
The two adjoining cloisters by Basel Cathedral are said to be haunted by a couple of spectres entombed within the building. In the darkness of Basel’s Double Cloister, it is said you can hear the moaning of a man slowly suffocating and feel the unsuspected slap from a man, as mean in death as he was in life.
A lock keeper from the adjacent lock next The Portobello Bar in Dublin is said to be haunting it. Ever since his mistake cost the lives of someone crossing, he is said to be lingering in the area.
In an old sanatorium in Switzerland the ghost of Hermann is said to have been haunting for ages. But who was he when he was alive, and what was his true name before he died in the remote fortress up in the mountains? And is he still haunting the old halls where he never made his recovery?
After his master died at sea, the faithful dog was by his master’s grave, day in and day out. After dying of hunger and grief it is said that the Newfoundland dog is still seen, slipping between the graves at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
In the rural and more superstitious parts of Romania, the fear of the undead is not necessarily something of the past. Although mostly done in secret and as a family business, the hunt for vampires or strigois, still happens. Something the family of Petre Toma experienced when he was accused of haunting extended family after death.
In the shadowed villages of southern Romania, ancient beliefs about the restless dead linger alongside the hum of modern life. For while the medieval terror of the strigoi, vampires and morois may seem a distant superstition to outsiders, in certain corners of Dolj County, these spectral fears still pulse through the bloodlines of families whose lives are shaped by old-world rites. And if we are to believe some of the comments of the locals, it’s not necessarily that rarely it happens, it’s just not every case that makes it to the newspapers.
Read More: Check out all ghost stories from Romania
In the tiny village Marotinu de Sus where around 700 people live scattered around in the countryside, locals gather in the village’s only store and bar for a chat, often drinking hard. If you ask them, they will say they have at least one vampire story in their families and that they have been thought to hunt down and kill vampires, or the strigoi since they were children. One of the most notorious modern vampire cases in Europe occurred not in some fog-drenched, Gothic past, but in February of 2004.
A Haunting in Marotinu de Sus
One dark night that December the year before, Petre Toma, a 76 year old villager had driven in a carriage pulled by his horse through the village southwest in the country close to the Bulgarian border. He was drunk and fell off the carriage, scaring the horse that stomped him dead. He was buried in the local cemetery and his family started their morning process. But it would not be in peace.
In death, it seemed, he had not severed his connection to the mortal world and became a moroi, an undead.
Moroi and Strigoi: Strigoi in Romanian mythology are troubled spirits that are said to have risen from the grave. Moroi are often associated with other figures in Romanian folklore, such as strigoi (another type of vampire). In some versions, a moroi is a phantom of a dead person which leaves the grave to draw energy from the living. They are also sometimes referred to in modern stories as the living offspring of two strigoi.
His own sister, Flora Marinescu, started to complain that her daughter-in-law had fallen ill and that it was Petre who was to blame. It was also said that their son and grand daughter became ill. The woman reported terrifying nocturnal visitations: a pale, spectral figure appearing in her room, its face unmistakably that of her deceased uncle.
According to Toma’s neighbour, Mircea Mitrica, she had been shouting: ‘He’s on top of me! He’s eating me! He’s killing me!’ She couldn’t walk and complained about feeling drained, as if something had taken her blood. In Romanian folklore, such occurrences were seen as ominous signs of a strigoi. Fearing this ancient evil had once again returned, Petre’s brother in law and husband to Flora, Gheorghe Marinescu, took decisive — and deeply traditional — action.
The Ritual of the Dead
They could have called for the local Orthodox priest to perform an exorcism, but he would have needed a permit, and they feared it would take too much time. After a couple of nights discussing and drinking, they decided to act themselves. After all, they all knew how to rid themselves of the strigoi according to the old ways.
The first time Gheorghe Marinescu tried to do the ritual, he ended up drinking too much liquid courage and couldn’t use the shovel. But in his mind, it needed to be done. Marinescu gathered a small group of family members, friends and neighbours and tried again. Also in attendance was his neighbour, Mircea Mitrica.
And after steadying their nerves with alcohol, the party made their way to the cemetery under the cover of darkness. They exhumed the body of Petre Toma to look for evidence of him being one of the undead. According to those present, they claimed that the man had what looked like fresh blood around his mouth, for them, clear signs of vampirism.
After confirming their suspicions, they split his ribcage with a pitchfork to remove his heart and staked through the rest of his body for good measure. In some sources they say they sprinkled garlic over it, but this part is rarely mentioned from the sources of those actually in attendance. Many tall tales were added over the years of this mission. The neighbour, Mitrica, claimed that the heart was still pumping when they pulled it out from his chest and that the face of his former neighbour was red and his beard had grown.
The group put his heart in a plastic bag and put the body back in the grave. According to some sources, they didn’t put it back with care, and left it in a state of filth, earth and decay. They went to a nearby crossroad to start the ritual, where the world of the living and dead meet.
According to Gheorghe Marinescu, his heart squeaked and tried to jump away when it was burned on the bonfire, also something that happens to a strigoi heart according to legend. This was all to perform an age-old vampire ritual believed to protect the living from the vengeful dead.
According to custom, the heart of a strigoi must be burned. Its ashes are then mixed into water and drunk by those afflicted by the revenant’s haunting, believed to break the malevolent bond between the strigoi and its victims.
This is what they did when they went home and lit a second bonfire to make the mixture. They gave the tincture to the sick woman to drink. A local named Anisoara Constantin who lived there at the time commented in an article:‘Well, the sick woman got better again, so they must have done something right,’
According to the party, they all went back to see the woman afflicted with the illness they tried to cure the very next day. She was better and could walk and talk without any pain and invited them all to her house to eat, drink and celebrate her recovery.
The ritual, grisly as it may sound to outsiders, has ancient roots in Eastern European lore. The strigoi were thought to rise from the grave to drain the life force of their relatives, and unless dealt with through fire or staking, would slowly devastate entire families.
Modern Consequences for Ancient Beliefs
The following day, news of the nocturnal disinterment and ritual reached Dolj County police when his daughter complained about the disturbance and desecration of her father’s grave and corpse.
The six who attended the ritual were arrested and charged with “disturbing the peace of the dead.” Despite their protestations that they had only acted in defense of their loved ones, they were each sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and ordered to pay damages to the family of the deceased.
In the end, they did not end up serving their sentence and had to pay a total of 900 Euro in damages to the family. The case drew widespread media attention, becoming a sensation in Romania and abroad, with international headlines decrying it as evidence of vampire hysteria persisting in 21st-century Europe.
A Legacy of Fear and Precaution
The case left a lingering mark on the region, but if we are to believe the comments of some of the locals, it seems that this case didn’t happen in isolation.
‘No one is bothered who did it, it’s their own business. This ritual often takes place, but in secret, within the family. The problem comes when the police get involved.’says 80-year-old Tudor Stoica in an article.
In the nearby village of Amărăştii de Sus, local custom adapted to meet the lingering fear. Now, as a preventive measure, it’s reported that villagers drive a fire-hardened stake through the heart or belly of the recently deceased, especially those thought to have harbored grudges or strange tendencies in life. In the village where Peter Toma was exhumed, they also do something similar with knitting needles or other sharp objects.
Such rites, though rarely reaching world wide headlines, serve as chilling reminders of how the old beliefs still hold power in places where death is regarded with a wary eye and where the border between the living and the dead remains perilously thin. And most likely, this was not the last Strigoi hunt at all.
As his sister and wife of the man accused of disturbing his grave, Flora Marinescu said: “What did we do? If they’re right, he was already dead. If we’re right, we killed a vampire and saved three lives. … Is that so wrong?”
Crossing through the Jura Mountains in Switzerland, an urban legend about the ghost of a lady in white is said to have haunted the Belchen Tunnel and was widely known and written about in the 80s. Question is, is she still haunting the tunnel?
After falling to his death trying to escape the debtor’s prison, The Marshalsea Barracks in Dublin, it is said the ghost of Pat Doyle is haunting the remaining walls of the ruins.
Planted to mark the mass grave of plague victims, the Linden Tree in the Aargau valley in Switzerland has become a famous landmark. In the night though, it is said that the ghosts buried underneath it crawls from the ground to haunt as a warning for any oncoming tragedies.
A rebel and freedom fighter for Irish independence is said to haunt his favorite pub, The Brazen Head in Dublin, where it is said he plotted his fight against the English.
The black cat in European folklore is shrouded in mystery and magical lore. From the old parts of Bern, ghost stories of ghostly black cats linger in the shadows, reminding about the old fear the feline specter used to hold over people.
Mirroring the famous Dance Macabre mural that used to hang on the walls near the Predigerkirche in Basel, it is said that plague victims were buried in the patch of grass outside of the church. Legend has it that when the city needs it, the dead will rise from it in a macabre procession, as a warning of an oncoming disaster.
Where history whispers and shadows reign, the Rathaus in Bern is said to be haunted by a myriad of ghosts. Who are the ghosts lingering in the City Hall after dark?
The two adjoining cloisters by Basel Cathedral are said to be haunted by a couple of spectres entombed within the building. In the darkness of Basel’s Double Cloister, it is said you can hear the moaning of a man slowly suffocating and feel the unsuspected slap from a man, as mean in death as he was in life.
A lock keeper from the adjacent lock next The Portobello Bar in Dublin is said to be haunting it. Ever since his mistake cost the lives of someone crossing, he is said to be lingering in the area.
In an old sanatorium in Switzerland the ghost of Hermann is said to have been haunting for ages. But who was he when he was alive, and what was his true name before he died in the remote fortress up in the mountains? And is he still haunting the old halls where he never made his recovery?
After his master died at sea, the faithful dog was by his master’s grave, day in and day out. After dying of hunger and grief it is said that the Newfoundland dog is still seen, slipping between the graves at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
In the unassuming looking office building Pacific Isle Mortgage, workers have been complaining about a ghost disturbing their work. Running around the hallways and pranking the employees, the ghosts are said to be of the mischievous sort.
In Pearl City, Hawaii, along the busy stretch of Kamehameha Highway, sits the unassuming office building of Pacific Isle Mortgage. Little do people just pass through that this building is one of the most haunted buildings on Oahu island.
Read More: Check out all ghost stories from theUSA
At first glance, this two-story structure at 379 Kamehameha Highway, Suite B, appears to be just another typical business location, where the daily grind of paperwork and phone calls fills the air. However, those who have spent time within its walls know that something far more unsettling lies beneath the surface.
For years, employees working in this building have reported strange and eerie occurrences that defy explanation. It all began innocuously enough—lights flickering, a door inexplicably swinging shut on its own—but the activity soon escalated, leaving those who work here in a constant state of unease.
One of the most unnerving experiences happened to a woman who was working late one evening. As she sat at her desk, diligently reviewing documents, she felt a strange sensation. At first, it was just a light touch, as if a gentle breeze had brushed past her. But then, she distinctly felt someone playing with her hair, gently tugging at the strands as though a playful child were standing behind her. Heart pounding, she spun around in her chair, only to find the room empty, her hair swaying slightly from the invisible touch.
Echoes of Laughter
The building’s spectral inhabitants are not always so subtle. On more than one occasion, the faint sound of children laughing has echoed through the hallways, a chilling contrast to the otherwise quiet and professional atmosphere. Workers have reported hearing the patter of small footsteps running down the corridors, accompanied by gleeful giggles, yet no children are ever seen. These phantom children seem to delight in playing unseen games, their presence felt but never fully understood.
In one particularly unsettling incident, an employee arrived early to work, only to hear the unmistakable sound of children’s laughter emanating from the second floor. Convinced that she was the first to arrive, she cautiously ascended the stairs, her heart racing with each step. But when she reached the top, the laughter abruptly stopped, leaving behind an eerie silence. The office was as it should be—empty and still, save for the lingering sense that she was not alone.
A Building with a Past?
What could be the source of these paranormal disturbances? Some speculate that the building may have been constructed on land with a history, perhaps the site of a forgotten tragedy or a place where spirits were left restless. There really isn’t much to go on regarding the building’s history. The place itself was built in 1970.
Could it be that where the Pacific Isle Mortgage now stands, used to be a sacred heiau from ancient times? Others believe that the spirits may be tied to the objects or people that have passed through the office over the years, their energies lingering long after they have moved on.
Despite the unnerving experiences, the employees of Pacific Isle Mortgage continue their work, albeit with a heightened awareness of the building’s haunted nature. The playful, and sometimes mischievous, spirits have become an unsettling part of the office’s daily life—a reminder that even in the most mundane places, the supernatural may be closer than we think.
So, the next time you pass by 379 Kamehameha Highway, take a moment to consider the unseen occupants who share this space with the living. Perhaps, if you listen closely, you might even hear the distant echoes of laughter, a reminder that the spirits at Pacific Isle Mortgage are always near, watching and waiting.
Crossing through the Jura Mountains in Switzerland, an urban legend about the ghost of a lady in white is said to have haunted the Belchen Tunnel and was widely known and written about in the 80s. Question is, is she still haunting the tunnel?
After falling to his death trying to escape the debtor’s prison, The Marshalsea Barracks in Dublin, it is said the ghost of Pat Doyle is haunting the remaining walls of the ruins.
Planted to mark the mass grave of plague victims, the Linden Tree in the Aargau valley in Switzerland has become a famous landmark. In the night though, it is said that the ghosts buried underneath it crawls from the ground to haunt as a warning for any oncoming tragedies.
A rebel and freedom fighter for Irish independence is said to haunt his favorite pub, The Brazen Head in Dublin, where it is said he plotted his fight against the English.
The black cat in European folklore is shrouded in mystery and magical lore. From the old parts of Bern, ghost stories of ghostly black cats linger in the shadows, reminding about the old fear the feline specter used to hold over people.
Mirroring the famous Dance Macabre mural that used to hang on the walls near the Predigerkirche in Basel, it is said that plague victims were buried in the patch of grass outside of the church. Legend has it that when the city needs it, the dead will rise from it in a macabre procession, as a warning of an oncoming disaster.
Where history whispers and shadows reign, the Rathaus in Bern is said to be haunted by a myriad of ghosts. Who are the ghosts lingering in the City Hall after dark?
The two adjoining cloisters by Basel Cathedral are said to be haunted by a couple of spectres entombed within the building. In the darkness of Basel’s Double Cloister, it is said you can hear the moaning of a man slowly suffocating and feel the unsuspected slap from a man, as mean in death as he was in life.
A lock keeper from the adjacent lock next The Portobello Bar in Dublin is said to be haunting it. Ever since his mistake cost the lives of someone crossing, he is said to be lingering in the area.
In an old sanatorium in Switzerland the ghost of Hermann is said to have been haunting for ages. But who was he when he was alive, and what was his true name before he died in the remote fortress up in the mountains? And is he still haunting the old halls where he never made his recovery?
After his master died at sea, the faithful dog was by his master’s grave, day in and day out. After dying of hunger and grief it is said that the Newfoundland dog is still seen, slipping between the graves at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
Said to suck the life out of her siblings, the young girl, Nancy Young was believed to be a vampire after she died of consumption in Foster, Rhode Island. To stop the curse of the undead, the family exhumed her body to put it on fire.
When people think of America’s “vampire panics,” their minds often drift to the misty graveyards of rural New England — where names like Mercy Brown and Sarah Tillinghast have secured their place in eerie folklore. But lurking in the shadows of this unsettling chapter of history is a lesser-known, yet equally tragic figure: Nancy Young Foster of Rhode Island.
Though her story didn’t make international headlines like Mercy Brown’s, it’s a haunting reminder of the desperate lengths 19th-century families went to when death came knocking — and refused to leave.
Rhode Island: Along the rocky shores of Rhode Island State, a lot of vampire legends took form, driving people to exhume their dead and beloved from their graves to rid themselves of the curse of the undead they believed sucked the life out of their family.
Consumption and a Curse in Foster, Rhode Island
In the 1800s, consumption, now known as tuberculosis, was ravaging families across New England. In an age before germ theory was understood, when one family member after another fell ill with the same wasting sickness, superstition often filled the void left by medical ignorance. In some rural communities, it was believed that a deceased loved one, buried in the local cemetery, was feeding on the life force of the living from beyond the grave.
She was the oldest daughter of Levi and Anna Young, living together on their farm straddling between Rhode Island and Connecticut, just a few miles from where Sarah Tillinghast farm in Exeter was. She was managing the accounting on their land filled with her siblings and an inherited slave called Elija. They had arrived on the farm in 1806 and produced corn and other produce.
Read More: Check out the story about Sarah Tillinghast that share a very similar story
Nancy, a young woman likely in her late teens or early twenties, reportedly succumbed to tuberculosis on the sixth of April, 1827 and buried her in the newly walled off burial ground close to the farm. She was one of the first in her family to be buried in this lot, but soon the number of grave would grow.
After her death, other members of her family began to exhibit the same harrowing symptoms and now it consumed Nancy’s sister, Almira— persistent coughs, bloodied handkerchiefs, sunken eyes, and a ghostly pallor. Fear took hold as she was slowly withering away from something they didn’t know the cause of.
One day, Levi found his daughter in her room, claiming to feel better. She told him about her seeing Nancy in her dreams at night, telling her they soon would be together. Something about this vision made Levi so concerned he went to the elders for advice. They came to the conclusion that it had to be Nancy, returning from her grave in the night to feed the life out of her sister.
According to many legends, it is said that Nancy came back to haunt more than one of her seven siblings, sucking their blood every night she climbed out of her grave. But it seems like Almira was the only one actually sick in this timeframe and not all of them died of consumption before they took drastic measures to stop the disease from spreading.
A Grim Exhumation
Though details of the exact year and names of those involved have grown hazy with time, local lore holds that Nancy’s body was exhumed by her desperate family and neighbors. Convinced that she was the source of their suffering — a vampire preying on them from the grave — they undertook a grisly ritual to sever the connection.
Leading them was Levi and Nathan Lennox, often called Doc according to some of the online sources. Although appearing in more than one online retelling, there really isn’t much documentation to fact check his existence and is probably just an added detail for the legend. He was, according to the stories, not a doctor, but the locals trusted him knowing about strange things and superstitions, like what to do with an undead.
As was customary in such cases, her heart was likely removed and burned, either at the gravesite or in a nearby blacksmith’s forge, a common element in these folk cures. It was believed that by destroying the heart, the vampire’s hold over the family would be broken, and the sickness would be halted. In some versions of the story, they burned the whole body, scattering the ashes.
What happened to the remains they burned though? As custom often stated, it was common to either mix the ashes into a tonic given to the sick to drink. Some sources claim that the fumes of the smoke coming from her remains were inhaled by the family to cure themselves from the family curse of the vampiric infliction.
The details and confirmation to the details surrounding her exhumation and what happened to her remains are still up for debate.
An Obscure, Enduring Legend
Unlike the Mercy Brown case, Nancy Young Foster’s story wasn’t splashed across the newspapers of New England or abroad. Instead, it lingered quietly in local oral history, passed down in hushed tones and fireside tales.
There are some written accounts of it, one from a newspaper in 1936, from the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner in 1892 and most of what we know today is from the works of Michael E. Bell who researched the many cases of exhumation based on the vampire legends, written down in his work Food For the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires.
Now, the legend has taken hold in many variations, and some versions of the legend claim that nothing was done to Nancy, there was no ritual, no staking of the body or burning of the organs. Some say that she is still out there.
But what of Nancy’s siblings? Almira died of tuberculosis the 19th of August in 1828, only 17 year old. Their brother Olney died a couple of years later when he was 29, of what, it doesn’t really say, but it’s likely it was from consumption as well. Many of the Young siblings died young. Huldah died when she was 23 in 1836, Caleb died in 1843 when he was 26 and Hiram in 1854 when he was 35. Two other brothers lived to be older but also succumbed. Only their youngest daughter, Sarah seemed to be the one to escape the illness and lived to an older age.
The Vampire Legacy of Rhode Island
Today, her name surfaces mostly in the footnotes of vampire lore enthusiasts and paranormal historians, but in her time, Nancy’s fate was another somber reminder of how death and superstition wove themselves into the everyday lives of New Englanders.
Foster: The Swamp Meadow Bridge in Foster, Rhode Island. // Source: Basheer Tome/ Wikimedia
Her gravestone is still on her family plot, tipped after all these years and all this ruckus surrounding her burial.
If you ever find yourself wandering the old burial grounds of Foster, Rhode Island, take a moment to listen. In the heavy silence of dusk, with the chill of fog threading through the trees, you might just feel the lingering sorrow of a girl accused of preying on her own blood, buried twice — once in earth, and again beneath the weight of forgotten superstition.
Crossing through the Jura Mountains in Switzerland, an urban legend about the ghost of a lady in white is said to have haunted the Belchen Tunnel and was widely known and written about in the 80s. Question is, is she still haunting the tunnel?
After falling to his death trying to escape the debtor’s prison, The Marshalsea Barracks in Dublin, it is said the ghost of Pat Doyle is haunting the remaining walls of the ruins.
Planted to mark the mass grave of plague victims, the Linden Tree in the Aargau valley in Switzerland has become a famous landmark. In the night though, it is said that the ghosts buried underneath it crawls from the ground to haunt as a warning for any oncoming tragedies.
A rebel and freedom fighter for Irish independence is said to haunt his favorite pub, The Brazen Head in Dublin, where it is said he plotted his fight against the English.
The black cat in European folklore is shrouded in mystery and magical lore. From the old parts of Bern, ghost stories of ghostly black cats linger in the shadows, reminding about the old fear the feline specter used to hold over people.
Mirroring the famous Dance Macabre mural that used to hang on the walls near the Predigerkirche in Basel, it is said that plague victims were buried in the patch of grass outside of the church. Legend has it that when the city needs it, the dead will rise from it in a macabre procession, as a warning of an oncoming disaster.
Where history whispers and shadows reign, the Rathaus in Bern is said to be haunted by a myriad of ghosts. Who are the ghosts lingering in the City Hall after dark?
The two adjoining cloisters by Basel Cathedral are said to be haunted by a couple of spectres entombed within the building. In the darkness of Basel’s Double Cloister, it is said you can hear the moaning of a man slowly suffocating and feel the unsuspected slap from a man, as mean in death as he was in life.
A lock keeper from the adjacent lock next The Portobello Bar in Dublin is said to be haunting it. Ever since his mistake cost the lives of someone crossing, he is said to be lingering in the area.
In an old sanatorium in Switzerland the ghost of Hermann is said to have been haunting for ages. But who was he when he was alive, and what was his true name before he died in the remote fortress up in the mountains? And is he still haunting the old halls where he never made his recovery?
After his master died at sea, the faithful dog was by his master’s grave, day in and day out. After dying of hunger and grief it is said that the Newfoundland dog is still seen, slipping between the graves at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
The Calcasieu Courthouse in Louisiana is said to be haunted by Toni Jo Henry, a notorious figure in local history who was executed there in 1942. Visitors often report unexplained occurrences like strange sounds as well as the smell of burning hair from the way she died.
The Calcasieu Courthouse in Lake Charles, Louisiana, is steeped in history since it was built in 1912. And the old Parish Court House on 1000 Ryan street is also believed to be haunted by the lingering spirit of its most infamous prisoner, Toni Jo Henry. She was the first, and for now, the only female executed by the electric chair in the state.
The Haunted Courthouse: Calcasieu Parish Courthouse in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places. // Source. It is said that the court building is haunted by the murderer, Toni Jo who were put to death by the electric chair: Wikimedia
The Life and Crimes of Toni Jo
In the early 1940s, Toni Jo, a former sex worker, gained national notoriety for her cold-blooded murder of a man named Joseph P. Calloway.
Her real name was Annie Beatrice McQuiston, and she had lived a rough life. After her mother died early on from tuberculosis, she ended up as a prostitute. She started out working in a factory, but after her foreman knew about her mother, fearing her to contaminate other workers,he fired her. When she told her father about what happened, he beat her up and she ended up leaving home in search of a new life.
She fell in love with a man named Claude Henry, or simply Cowboy when she was working in a brothel, and it is said she got clean and wanted a new life in California. He, on the other hand, was a fugitive after killing a cop, awaiting 50 years in jail. She married him, but he was arrested soon after.
Toni Jo wanted to get him out of the Texas jail he was serving time. She teamed up with a homeless man named Arkie and brutally tortured and killed a car salesman named Joseph Calloway who picked them up along the road in Jennings, Louisiana.
They dumped the body in a ditch and went straight to a dive bar the same night. Drunk at a bar they bragged about it and the other people present reported them to the cops at once.
Her charm and beauty couldn’t save her, as it took three grueling trials before a jury finally convicted her of the heinous crime three times. On November 28, 1942, Toni Jo made history as the first and only woman in Louisiana to be executed in the electric chair. And the place it happened was in The Calcasieu Courthouse.
She said in an interview right before her execution to the the American Press’ Eliot Chaze:
“The victim does not return to haunt me. I never think of him. I’ve known all along it would be my life for his. I believe mine is worth as much to me as his was to him. I wonder, though, sometimes, why it’s legal now for another fellow to kill me.”
Outside, thousands of people had gathered. Some to see justice be done as the court had ordered, some supported her, thinking that killing her as well was no justice at all.
The Haunting of Toni Jo
Since her execution, tales of Toni Jo’s restless spirit have permeated the The Calcasieu Courthouse where the execution took place. Employees and visitors alike have reported feeling an unsettling presence, particularly in the areas where she spent her final days. Some have even claimed to smell the distinct and eerie scent of her perfume or even of burning hair, a grim reminder of her tragic end. There are also stories about hearing the sounds of her footsteps or even her dying screams.
The ghost of Toni Jo Henry is said to be mischievous, often disrupting the daily routines of The Calcasieu Courthouse staff. Locked doors that were previously open, office equipment that malfunctions without explanation, and lights that flicker ominously are just a few of the strange occurrences attributed to her. Some workers have even reported hearing soft whispers and feeling an icy chill when passing through certain hallways.
Perhaps some have even seen her as she looked in her final moment in a simple white dress holding a white ivory crucifix. Her long black hair she got much attention for, cut off.
Face of a Killer: The case got a lot of attention by the media. Both for her terrible crime as well for her good looks. Here is a photo of Toni Jo Henry being held for press photographers by Sheriff Henry W. Reid on February 21, 1940. // Source
Toni Jo’s spirit seems determined to leave her mark on the place where she met her fate, making the Calcasieu Courthouse a focal point for ghost hunters and paranormal enthusiasts. The haunted legend of Toni Jo Henry continues to captivate and terrify those who walk the halls of the courthouse, ensuring that her story—and her presence—remain an indelible part of Lake Charles’ dark history.
Long after the vampire manic swept through New England, a grave of a young girl with a curious epitaph became accused of being the grave of a vampire. Now it is said that Nellie Vaughn is haunting her grave now removed because of vandalism, trying to clear her name.
Deep in the woods of West Greenwich, Rhode Island, where the wind moves with a whisper and moss grows thick on broken stones, was a grave marked with one of the eeriest epitaphs in New England:
“I Am Waiting and Watching For You.”
That chilling inscription, paired with the tragic story of a 19-year-old girl named Nellie Vaughn, has birthed decades of eerie folklore, ghost stories, and whispered warnings. But the truth? It’s not about a bloodthirsty vampire rising from her grave—it’s about a girl caught in the shadow of another legend, and a ghost story that may say more about us than about her.
A Girl in a Grave, a Town with a Legacy
Nellie Louisa Vaughn, also spelled Nellie Louisa Vaughan, died in 1889, just 19 years old, and was laid to rest in the Plain Meeting House Cemetery in West Greenwich. At a glance, her story seems tailor-made for gothic folklore: a young woman, tragically taken in the prime of her life, buried beneath a cryptic and spine-tingling epitaph.
But her death was not accompanied by accusations of vampirism. Decades after her death, there were rumors that no plants would grow on her grave and that the grave itself was looking to sink into the ground. Was something crawling in and out? Was it perhaps something supernatural about her death and her grave?
By the 1970s, she was a well known local legend, her grave vandalised and her story made the newspapers.
The Vampire Panic of New England
To understand how this happened, we have to rewind just a few years and drive a few miles east to Exeter, where a young woman named Mercy Brown died of tuberculosis in 1892—just three years after Nellie. Mercy’s family had already lost several members to the same wasting illness. When her brother Edwin began to fall ill, the townspeople demanded action. They exhumed Mercy’s body and found it, preserved in cold storage, with “fresh” blood in the heart.
The solution? They removed the heart and liver, burned them, and fed the ashes to Edwin in a desperate effort to save him. It didn’t work—but the story exploded. It was reported in newspapers across the country and even overseas. Some say Bram Stoker himself read about it while writing Dracula.
That gruesome tale became the definitive American vampire legend. But what does it have to do with Nellie?
The True Vampire Lore: Gravestone of Mercy L. Brown, a key figure in Rhode Island’s vampire legend, who died on January 17, 1892, at the age of 19.
Mistaken Identity—or Manufactured Mystery?
Fast-forward to the mid-to-late 20th century. A curious thing began to happen: Nellie Vaughn’s grave started attracting attention. Visitors began whispering that she, not Mercy, was Rhode Island’s real vampire. Her grave was vandalized. Her name was spoken on ghost tours. Paranormal thrill-seekers claimed to feel her presence, hear phantom whispers, or see flickers of movement in the trees near her resting place.
Some say that she was buried alive, that she got a stake through her heart and that she was one of the undead from the New England Vampire Epidemic.
But here’s the kicker: there is no historical evidence that Nellie was ever considered a vampire by her contemporaries.
Folklorist Michael Bell, author of Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires investigated what really was going on with the lore. Bell has spent decades researching the vampire panic and says Nellie Vaughn’s legend is pure folkloric conflation—a mash-up of Mercy Brown’s well-documented case, Nellie’s proximity in age and location, and the spine-chilling line carved on her gravestone.
There is a story about a teacher at the local high school in Coventry that told about the Mercy Brown legend in the 1960s. But saying nothing about the specific name or grave, the students stumbled across Nellies’ and said it was this. There have been numerous attempts to track down the teacher, but they have been unsuccessful.
From Human Tragedy to Urban Legend
Nellie Vaughn was a real person, not a creature of the night. She died young, likely of pneumonia or a similar illness on 31 March in 1889—tragic, but not supernatural. She was first buried on her family farm, but in October that year, her mother was given permission to move her remains to the public cemetery.
There is not really much to indicate that her family or anyone believed her to be a vampire in that time, and the legends came after. The earliest documentations for the legend are the newspaper articles from the 70s.
The vandalism of her grave, the repeated breaking of her headstone, and the ghost-hunting theatrics are the unfortunate side effects of myth overtaking memory. In the end they had to remove her tombstone to protect it from the vandals and now, she is hidden in an unmarked grave.
Her story, like many ghost tales, is less about the dead and more about the living: our obsession with mystery, our fear of death, and our irresistible urge to turn sorrow into spectacle.
The Ghost of Nellie Vaughn
After the vampire legends started to stop, the ghost legends took over. People have now reported about hearing her voice close to her gravesite close to the large crypt, saying: I am perfectly pleasant.
There has also been said that a woman wearing Victorian clothes has been seen but vanishes. In most stories she is said to say either, I am perfectly pleasant or I am happy.
Ghost tours mention her name. Paranormal groups claim her spirit haunts the woods. Some say that she came back as a ghost in order to clear her name. Or are we still just profiting on the tombstone of a girl that happened to die during a Vampiric Mass Hysteria?
Nellie Vaughn deserves better than the chains of folklore forged around her grave. She was not exhumed. She was not accused. She was not a vampire. But her story reveals something powerful: how easily we can reanimate the past, and how quickly history can become horror.
Because of the vandalism she suffered, the graveyard had to remove her tombstone in the 90s. Now the grass is growing freely and there is no problem with it sinking into the ground. When the people wandering over it stopped, so did the signs of the legend.
Crossing through the Jura Mountains in Switzerland, an urban legend about the ghost of a lady in white is said to have haunted the Belchen Tunnel and was widely known and written about in the 80s. Question is, is she still haunting the tunnel?
After falling to his death trying to escape the debtor’s prison, The Marshalsea Barracks in Dublin, it is said the ghost of Pat Doyle is haunting the remaining walls of the ruins.
Planted to mark the mass grave of plague victims, the Linden Tree in the Aargau valley in Switzerland has become a famous landmark. In the night though, it is said that the ghosts buried underneath it crawls from the ground to haunt as a warning for any oncoming tragedies.
A rebel and freedom fighter for Irish independence is said to haunt his favorite pub, The Brazen Head in Dublin, where it is said he plotted his fight against the English.
The black cat in European folklore is shrouded in mystery and magical lore. From the old parts of Bern, ghost stories of ghostly black cats linger in the shadows, reminding about the old fear the feline specter used to hold over people.
Mirroring the famous Dance Macabre mural that used to hang on the walls near the Predigerkirche in Basel, it is said that plague victims were buried in the patch of grass outside of the church. Legend has it that when the city needs it, the dead will rise from it in a macabre procession, as a warning of an oncoming disaster.
Where history whispers and shadows reign, the Rathaus in Bern is said to be haunted by a myriad of ghosts. Who are the ghosts lingering in the City Hall after dark?
The two adjoining cloisters by Basel Cathedral are said to be haunted by a couple of spectres entombed within the building. In the darkness of Basel’s Double Cloister, it is said you can hear the moaning of a man slowly suffocating and feel the unsuspected slap from a man, as mean in death as he was in life.
A lock keeper from the adjacent lock next The Portobello Bar in Dublin is said to be haunting it. Ever since his mistake cost the lives of someone crossing, he is said to be lingering in the area.
In an old sanatorium in Switzerland the ghost of Hermann is said to have been haunting for ages. But who was he when he was alive, and what was his true name before he died in the remote fortress up in the mountains? And is he still haunting the old halls where he never made his recovery?
After his master died at sea, the faithful dog was by his master’s grave, day in and day out. After dying of hunger and grief it is said that the Newfoundland dog is still seen, slipping between the graves at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
Pale and with blood shot eyes, a group of mysterious women set their foot on Louisiana ground for the first time. Shipped from France, they were the promised girls for the colonial men to be their wives. Who were the Casket Girls? Just innocent women far away from home, or blood thirsty vampires?
In a city saturated with ghost stories, voodoo queens, and haunted mansions, few legends hold as eerie a grip on New Orleans folklore as that of Les Filles à la Cassette — the Casket Girls. Even today, the colonial mail order brides of Louisiana suffer from inaccurate memories and dark legends and it is difficult to separate fact from fiction..
Their tale, with its whiff of vampirism, colonial intrigue, and the restless dead, is as much a part of the French Quarter’s haunted past as the foggy alleys and crumbling tombs of St. Louis Cemetery. And like all great New Orleans ghost stories, it begins with a boat ride and ends with a coffin.
The Casket Girls: The Les Filles à la Cassette as they were originally called, were a group of women shipped to the colonies in order to marry and grow the colony of New France. They got their name from their little trunks they carried all their belonging in. Years later, the supernatural rumors surrounding these women, doesn’t seem to be letting go.
Daughters of the King or the Women Without a Future
The Casket Girls were a group of mail order brides sent from the old country to New France to populate the colonies, severely lacking European females. It was not the first time the country had sent a shipment of women for this purpose. In the early 18th century, when New Orleans was a young, swampy French colony teeming with soldiers, fortune-seekers, and rogues, women were in short supply. In a move both practical and ominous, the French government arranged for young, virtuous women from convents and orphanages to be shipped to Louisiana to marry settlers and help “civilize” the rough colony.
It was not only to get the men a wife, but a white and European wife, because, as Commissary Jean-Baptiste Dubois Duclos said: “[i]f no French women come to Louisiana, the colony would become a colony of mulastres” (people of mixed race).
The Governor of Louisiana hoped for something like the Filles du Roi of Quebec in New France and Jamestown, that had young gentlewomen volunteering to go to colonies to marry the men in exchange for a dowry by the king. These were seen as proper brides and a welcome addition to creating a new world in the colonies. At first at least, and they too would later be remembered as prostitutes by many. Although much needed, the much needed brides are remembered through a thin veil of misogyny and sexism.
The Pelican Girls Comes to Louisiana
When the southern part of North America started to form as a colony, they needed brides for the frontier men here as well. The first shipments to the French colony in Biloxi in Mississippi on the Pelican in 1704. This was the capital of the French owned North America called La Louisiane. Coming on a boat known as Pelican, the woman was later known as: The Pelican Girls. The women there had been chosen for their virtue and piety.
The King’s Daughters: The Arrival of the French Girls at Quebec, 1667.This is the type of group they were hoping to get with The Casket Girls.
Their voyage over the Atlantic held them chained together in the ship’s hold and some never made it across and died of yellow fever. After six months at sea where they stopped at Havana for supplies, twenty three women with their nun chaperones arrived. The women were accompanied by three gray nuns called soeurs grises from the charity hospital La Salpêtrière in Paris.
The women, seeing the harsh conditions and lack of comfort felt tricked and tried to leave. Dirty shacks as houses, deer skin over the windows as curtains and men that were never home. Many of them returned to France, some were denied and forced to marry. In the end, no one wanted to come to Louisiana. They rebelled and refused to cooperate in what was known as the Petticoat Rebellion.
Comfort Women: Engraved by Pierre Dupin ( 1690-1751 ) after Antoine Watteau, this Departure for the Islands represents the deportation of the “comfort women” to America, to whom the legend ironically invites in these terms: “Come on, we must leave without being asked, Darlings,…”
After the women started to demand a decent living, the French men changed their perspective on them, thinking the women difficult because of their demands. They thought about sending a different set of women. For the next shipments to the colonies, the government went to darker places to pick out the brides.
A Strange Cargo from France
Then there was the Casket Girls, and there is little documentation that they ever did exist, at least as to how they are remembered in legend.
258 women were shipped from France to Louisiana between 1719 to 1721. 80 of them came over on La Baleine in 1721 to Mobile bay in Alabama. 29 of them were orphanages, 35 were from poor houses and 194 were convicted criminals from La Force prison. French officials called them “women without futures.” Some of the womens families had even sent them there themselves to be rid of them.
Cassette: 17th century chest, similar to what the Casket Girls must have been carrying. // Source: Courtesy of the Canadian Museum of History.
These young women, the youngest a 12 year old former sex worker in Paris, arrived from France carrying small rectangles that were rather coffin-shaped luggage trunks called cassettes, meant to hold their modest belongings — linens, and clothes, caps, chemise, stockings. Over time, the word cassette became casquette and was translated from French to casket.
Mail order Brides: In 1713 a group of 12 women arrived. They were described as ugly and poor with no linen, clothes or beauty vallet The Casket Girls. Rumours circulated that the captain had raped all of them during their voyage. Only three of them married, and that the future mail order bride should be more beautiful than pretty. Image depicting Women coming to Quebec in 1667, in order to be married to the French Canadian farmers. Jean Talon, intendant of New France, and François de Montmorency-Laval, bishop of Quebec, are waiting for the arrival of the women.
To the lonely, desperate colonists, these girls seemed heaven-sent at first, but then, fear and suspicion crept up on them. As the shipment started to give them other than the “virtuous” like the Pelican Girls, the treatment of them also worsened. To the officials in Louisiana, they were appalled by the backstory of the women they had been sent.
Many complained about their behavior and some men even refused to marry them, although most of The Casket Girls were married within six months of stepping off the ships. Some of the women were also forced to marry. To the more superstitious locals, they seemed to bring with them something… unnatural.
The Casket Girls have later in legends been described as looking more dead than alive when they stepped off the boat. Pale from the lack of sunlight and emancipated after the long months at sea. In the harsh sun, their skin burned quickly and blistered.
The Vampire Rumors Take Root
Soon after the arrival of the Casket Girls, strange happenings reportedly plagued the colony. Having been picked out from prisons, there was certainly an uptick in crime and prostitution from the little female population.
Illness swept through the settlements, livestock died under mysterious circumstances, and tales of bloodless corpses began to make the rounds. Was it the humid and harsh environment of Louisiana, or something darker? Legend spoke of bodies found with their throat ripped open and drained of blood.
The Vampires at the Old Ursuline Convent
The most persistent version of the story of The Casket Girls claims that the cassettes were taken to the Ursuline Convent in the French Quarter of New Orleans, still an outpost of the colony. The building is still on Chartres Street and is the oldest in the Mississippi Valley. On the first floor, there was an orphanage with classrooms and an infirmary, and the nuns lived on the second floor. On the third floor there was an attic and a couple of living quarters for those in need.
Ursuline Nuns: Sister Marie-de-Jesus, “Arrival of the Ursulines and the Sisters of Charity in New France,” Painted in 1928. Photo from the Virtual Museum of Canada.This nun order was the first nun order to set their foot and work on the New France colony.
The Ursuline Order came from Rouen in France, to the marshy frontier of New Orleans, or Nouvelle Orleans as it was then. They were said to chaperone a shipment of The Casket Girls when they arrived, but the order has denied their involvement with the mail order brides.
In 1728, a group of Casket Girls arrived from France. They were taken to the convent for safekeeping until they could find suitable husbands to them, but soon, rumors started to form. Strange sounds were heard at night — rustlings, scratching, and sighs that no mortal throat could make.
The Sealed Attic Mystery
Perhaps the creepiest element of the legend involves the convent’s attic The Casket Girls were said to have been placed in. Some of the nuns were suspicious of the casket-like trunks they traveled in (here the lore has enlarged the trunks). Their suspicion grew when the strange deaths kept happening around the convent. When the nun checked them, the coffins were empty. Some say that the Casket Girls smuggled the vampires to the crescent city of New Orleans in the trunks or that they themselves were the vampires, sleeping in their coffins when the sun was out.
Local lore insists that after unnerving occurrences and when the nuns discovered that the brides were actually vampires, the nuns moved the cassettes — and possibly something else — to the third-floor attic and sealed the shutters tight with silver nails blessed by the Pope himself to keep them trapped. 800 of these nails to be exact. How the Pope heard about this and sent them from the Vatican is never mentioned though.
More Than Vampires Haunting the Convent: In addition to stories about the Casket Girls, there are also stories about ghosts of soldiers from the War of 1812 haunting the former convent as it was used as a hospital then. Ghost children from the time as an orphanage are heard laughing and playing in the garden. Later, bones from children were dug up on the property. // Source
To this day, it’s said the shutters on the attic’s windows remain closed and secured, even through the fiercest hurricanes. Some claim that attempts to open them have been met with bad luck, death, or worse. Occasionally claim to see pale faces or flickering figures at the darkened windows, said to be the spirit of The Casket Girls or perhaps the starved vampires they turned out to be.
And when tourists pass by the convent at night, many report a lingering sense of being watched — or of catching fleeting movement from the sealed windows above or hearing their footsteps from the third floor, following them through the building.
The Undead Legacy of the Casket Girls
In the legends, the caskets are often told to fit the girls themselves, being shipped in lockdown. In truth, these trunks they were named after were small so that the women could carry them themselves. The legend of the Ursuline Convent mostly talks about them arriving in 1728, however, historical records claim that only Ursuline nuns came over to New Orleans that year and that the Casket Girls came as mentioned earlier. New Orleans wasn’t founded as a city until 1718-1721. Some even argue that there were no Casket Girls in New Orleans at all.
In addition, the convent building we see today wasn’t even finished until 1752-1753. So where did the legends come from? Is it simply something made up in the 20th century after the meaning of the words transformed over time? There are, after all, no sources found for the casket girls being vampires until then.
Some speculate that them being vampires, were something that came from the Anne Rice novels about vampires in New Orleans.
But the legend is far from dead. There is also a persistent rumor that a group of ghost hunters did some investigation to the legend in the 70s. They turned up dead the next morning, and all the footage they got from their investigation was destroyed and the evidence for the lingering casket girls having anything to do with it, erased.
New Orleans, a city forever teetering between life and death, has a knack for breathing unholy life into its own legends. Whether born from coincidence, homesick imaginations, or darker forces, the tale of the Casket Girls has never truly been laid to rest.
Crossing through the Jura Mountains in Switzerland, an urban legend about the ghost of a lady in white is said to have haunted the Belchen Tunnel and was widely known and written about in the 80s. Question is, is she still haunting the tunnel?
After falling to his death trying to escape the debtor’s prison, The Marshalsea Barracks in Dublin, it is said the ghost of Pat Doyle is haunting the remaining walls of the ruins.
Planted to mark the mass grave of plague victims, the Linden Tree in the Aargau valley in Switzerland has become a famous landmark. In the night though, it is said that the ghosts buried underneath it crawls from the ground to haunt as a warning for any oncoming tragedies.
A rebel and freedom fighter for Irish independence is said to haunt his favorite pub, The Brazen Head in Dublin, where it is said he plotted his fight against the English.
The black cat in European folklore is shrouded in mystery and magical lore. From the old parts of Bern, ghost stories of ghostly black cats linger in the shadows, reminding about the old fear the feline specter used to hold over people.
Mirroring the famous Dance Macabre mural that used to hang on the walls near the Predigerkirche in Basel, it is said that plague victims were buried in the patch of grass outside of the church. Legend has it that when the city needs it, the dead will rise from it in a macabre procession, as a warning of an oncoming disaster.
Where history whispers and shadows reign, the Rathaus in Bern is said to be haunted by a myriad of ghosts. Who are the ghosts lingering in the City Hall after dark?
The two adjoining cloisters by Basel Cathedral are said to be haunted by a couple of spectres entombed within the building. In the darkness of Basel’s Double Cloister, it is said you can hear the moaning of a man slowly suffocating and feel the unsuspected slap from a man, as mean in death as he was in life.
A lock keeper from the adjacent lock next The Portobello Bar in Dublin is said to be haunting it. Ever since his mistake cost the lives of someone crossing, he is said to be lingering in the area.
In an old sanatorium in Switzerland the ghost of Hermann is said to have been haunting for ages. But who was he when he was alive, and what was his true name before he died in the remote fortress up in the mountains? And is he still haunting the old halls where he never made his recovery?
After his master died at sea, the faithful dog was by his master’s grave, day in and day out. After dying of hunger and grief it is said that the Newfoundland dog is still seen, slipping between the graves at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
For years, the old Joller House that used to be in Stans was plagued by a poltergeist-like haunting that drove an entire family out of the city? What really happened within the walls where the knocking and scratching of the walls seemed to come from the other side?
Tucked away in the Swiss town of Stans, in the canton of Nidwalden, once stood an ordinary-looking residence with an extraordinary, and deeply unsettling, secret. Known today as the Joller House poltergeist, this case remains one of Switzerland’s earliest documented hauntings and one of its most mysterious ones.
Read More: Check out all ghost stories from Switzerland
For a brief, terrifying period in the mid-19th century, the Joller House was the scene of violent, unexplained phenomena that left an entire community shaken and drove an entire family out. What happened in this house said to be haunted by a poltergeist?
The Haunted Joller House: Although it was torn down in 2010, the ghost story of the Joller House still linger in Stans. // Source: Nidwalden State Archives, StANW OD 1-9/4
The Joller Family Backstory
The central figure in this grim account was Melchior Joller (1818-1865), a seemingly respected lawyer and Nidwalden official and state archivist, known for his rationality and standing in the local government pushing for a liberal politic. He was a son of Jokob Joller, a farmer and Catholic churchwarden.
Melchior Joller in his younger years.
Although he is remembered as a stand up person in society, he wasn’t the most successful. He had served a single three-year term as a backbencher in the National Suisse and had run for office in Nidwalden, but was never elected. His liberal newspaper got him in trouble with the Catholic clergy. He also wrote a pamphlet Darstellung selbsterlebter mystischer Erscheinungen (Narrative of personally experienced strange phenomena) where he detailed strange things happening in his house.
In November 1842, he married Karoline Wenz and they had seven children together. The house in question was Joller’s childhood home, built by his grandmother, and he had lived there all of his life except for his years at university, and co-owned it with a sister or sisters. In 1845, he took over the house and farm that his grandmother had built. And his grandmother was no other than Veronika Gut.
Veronika Gut and her Lasting Presence in Stans
Melchior Joller has been remembered for the ghost story happening in his home, but his grandmother was remembered for her life. She was born in 1757 in Stans and was a fierce supporter for the Nidwalden resistance and Swiss cause against the French Helvetic Republic. In 1798 she was already a widow with six children, living on a farm in Spichermatt in Stans. When the conflict escalated to an invasion, she donated 600 guilders to the war chest.
Veronika Gut: Remembered as a powerful woman. Here from Landschaftstheater Ballenberg: Veronika Gut – Uprising in Nidwalden, an open-air theater from 2017.
After the invasion she was arrested and tried as a rebel and fined. She was also sentenced to stand in front of the local church every Sunday with a note saying: “Liar and Disturber of Peace.” She was ordered to wear a black cape for a year, a humiliating thing as respectable women wore white. But she wore it with so much pride that she was told to remove it.
The previous house had been burned down when the French invaded in September 1798. Her 17 year old son, Leonz Joller died in battle as well. In her new house in Nägeligasse in Stans, she established a patriotic party in 1813 after Napoleon lost and held secret meetings in the evenings. Although she remarried to Melchior Odermatt, she was always known by her maiden name.
The Style of House: Photo taken by Jakob Hunziker traveled extensively in Switzerland between 1883 and 1895. This house, looking very similar to the Joller house was in Wolfenschiessen.
Her life was filled with opinions, personal tragedies and political resistance. According to some rumors, it was also said that her spirit lingered in the house she built, and that she would come back in her afterlife with as much force that she had when alive.
The Haunting Starts in the Joller House
In 1860, Joller then 42, his wife, and their children lived in a seemingly pleasant home in Stans he had inherited from his parents, close to Lake Lucerne, unaware of the terror that would soon unfold. They had four sons, Robert (1843), Eduard (1851), Oskar (1853) and Alfred (1858) and their three daughters Emaline (1845), Melanie (1848) and Henrika (1850).
Family Photo: The Joller Family who lived in the Joller House and claimed they were plagued by a poltergeist for years.
They also lived with their servants who according to Joller, were the first to notice strange things happening in the Joller House. Sleeping on the third floor in the attic, she started to hear a knocking on her bed head during the night in fall in 1860. She told Joller about it, thinking it meant someone in the house was about to die.
Joller told to shut up about these things and forgot about it until another experience a few weeks later. A knocking noise also woke up Karoline and their second daughter, Melanie, who shared a bedroom when Joller was away from home on a business trip. According to them, it was as if the knocking was trying to communicate with them and they became frightened. Then a year passed and they thought nothing of it anymore.
In June 1861, nine year old Oscar was nowhere to be found when they called for supper, and they searched for him, finding him unconscious in a room on the third floor they used to store logs. When he woke up, he claimed to have heard three knocks and went to check it out. A door flung open and a formless white shape entered and he passed out.
The following days, the boys sleeping in the bedroom on the second floor above the living room, started complaining about knocking noises. It seemed to come from the floor above them. When they told their father, he even heard something sounding like scratching on the walls, but thought it had to be a cat or a rat making the sound. In his memoir Joller also adds the detail that he had heard this noise many times before in his study, perhaps for the past two years.
That autumn, a maid said she had seen grey shapes appearing and that someone was coming up the stairs at night, walking right past her and into a living room when she was cleaning shoes on the stairs. She had also several times heard her name being called out by no one. Once she also heard something she described as “profoundly disturbing sobs.”
The maid’s stories angered Joller and Karoline told her to not talk about these things to the children, thinking she was too superstitious. 11 year old Henrika even claimed to have seen a small child shortly after when she was doing schoolwork. This frightened her so much she refused to enter the living room.
Joller decided to fire the housemaid that had claimed to see and hear the strange things that October. In his writings he claims it was because they would be able to manage the household themselves, but who knows. Was he angry about her talking about seeing ghosts to his children? Did he try to get her to quit the job because of financial problems? He instead hired a 13 year old girl to replace her, and for a time, it seemed that this had solved the problem except from the odd scratching on the walls and mysterious knocking sounds here and there throughout the house.
The Haunted Summer at the Joller House
Again it came a winter of silence, but the summer of 1862, the paranormal activity hit full force. On 15 of August, Joller went to Lucerne with his wife and Robert at seven in the morning. They left the house and the rest of the children with the 14 year old Melanie and the 13 year old servant girl.
Henrika started to hear a rapping noise and told Melanie and the servant girl. They went to investigate. Oscar and Edward also came trying to coax the spirit to give them a sign. But the children became afraid and fled the house, sitting outside on the front steps.
When they went back in at lunchtime, hungry and rattled, every single cupboard and door had opened when they were outside. They shut them all, bolting what they could. But as soon as they had closed them, they sprung open, including the bolted ones.
A sound of heavy footsteps were heard and the children fled out the house again. As the servant girl looked behind her, she claimed she saw the shape that looked something like a hung sheet in the corner coming towards her before disappearing when she called out with their food they ate outside under a hazel tree. .
The children reached the barn where some laborers were working. They took turns running back to the house to see what was going on, and according to them, a lot was going on. The sound of moving furniture, a voice saying “even if no one is around”, in a sad and groaning voice. A voice singing to a single-tone string was playing Camille’s prayer in Zampa, from the Ferdinand Herold opera from the upstairs living room.
Frightened, they all gathered under a tree when an old woman passed by and asked if this was where Veronika Gut had lived. The children confirmed, and the woman, claiming she had known her when she was alive started to tell them about the tragic story that happened generations ago.
The Story of the Drowned Girls
Three years after the house had burned down, Veronika had heard a mysterious voice, telling her to flee with her family because the French had invaded again in 1801. The French had not actually invaded, but she decided to run away to Engelberg with her children.
Joller’s father was with them initially, but for some reason, they split up and he went to another place with a guide. At Wolfenschiessen there was a narrow footbridge of the Engelberger Aa river the daughters Agatha, Franziska, Josefa and Anna had to cross. Veronika crossed first, then her eldest daughter of 19 followed, then the rest. The bridge collapsed and although Veronika managed to jump to firm ground, all of her daughters fell into the river and drowned.
According to the old woman, she had been the one ringing the bell in St Joder’s chapel after the tragedy. That night they had seen a man dressed in white, carrying a lamp and coming to the chapel, the sign that the bell was about to toll. But when her brother had gone to check, he hadn’t seen anyone and it wasn’t until the morning that they heard about the terrible news.
The Drowned Girls: Engelberger Aa, near Wolfenschiessen, Switzerland were Veronika Gut’s daughters perished. // Source
The old woman continued on her way, and the children had to get back into the house for their next meal. When the maid was preparing for supper in the kitchen, a light was seen coming down the chimney in the evening. The maid explained the sight as an object of little blue flames, exploding inside of the chimney and dowsing the fire with water. This was the final straw and ran off to the annex where the mother found them crying and frightened to death.
When Joller came back home from Lucerne and heard the stories the frightened children told him, he didn’t believe a single word and the children lost faith in him and decided to not tell him anything else, as they thought that he wouldn’t believe them anyway. This would however change when he experienced the so-called haunting himself. Later he had also heard from a relative in Germany that their whole family had experienced something similar the same day.
Joller Starts to Believe Something is Going on
On August 19, he started to hear the rapping noise of the wall, taunting, almost mimicking the noises he made. This made him promise his family he would investigate the matter. The next day he saw the door between the bedroom and kitchen bend before his eyes as the sound of knocking and banging came back. When he raised the catch on the door, it flung open and he saw a dark and almost shapeless form moving from the door to the chimney and disappeared.
The next day he saw what he described as a force as “powerful as a wooden mallet might make when swung with all the strength of a powerful arm.” The doors were slammed and opened with this force, in the kitchen, bottles and other glassware were ringing as being hit by metal. The sounds coming from different parts of the house made it look like it had to be four, maybe five people. His wife and son claimed to have seen a figure and he himself saw something dark shooting from the door to the side of the chimney before disappearing.
He called on his older sister to ask about if she had ever experienced something similar growing up in the house. She claimed she had never heard anything about it. A priest came by and gave the house a blessing and advised him to not let anyone else know about what was happening there. When the priest left, the whole house started up violently all evening.
The gossip about what happened in the Joller house started to spread to the neighbors, claiming that they too could hear all the ruckus. They stopped outside on the road to listen for the noises. The press started writing about it, and Joller felt they were also attacking his character.
Then, on 23 August Joller, his wife and a servant were all touched on the head in a first-floor bedroom. It was like a hand, and when Joller and Caroline grabbed the hand it felt warm and small, like a child’s. By now they had police guards helping them, as they were starting to fear they might get hurt.
On the 16 of September, Joller saw an apple, jumping around and down the stairs, along the corridor and into the kitchen. When picked up and put on the kitchen table, it jumped off and headed for the corridor. It was thrown out of the window by one of the servants, but flew back to the kitchen table before continuing jumping around the house on its own.
On the 6 of October, five different people claimed to have seen a figure on four different occasions. It was described as a woman, bowing her head with a melancholic air about her. Melanie claimed it was the same figure she had encountered and seen on the 10 September.
A Tragic Aftermath
The strain of the haunting proved too much for Joller. Later that month the final straw was drawn for the Joller family. They packed up and left the Joller House forever and moved to Zurich where they rented. No one really knows what happened that made the family decide that enough was enough.
It is also worth noting that he had to appear in court three times on fraud charges together with Robert and they left a huge debt back in Stans. Some speculate that moving his family to Zurich and then to Rome was a financial move to get away from the debt.
In any case, the stress got to him, and contemporary sources claim that his hair turned white almost overnight in Zurich and had a “a peculiar dreamy look about his eyes” according to paranormal societies across Europe who picked up the case.
According to Joller who sold the Joller House to the Lussi family. The house was closed down until spring in 1863, and as far as he knew, nothing out of the ordinary had happened in the house.
A man named Emilio Servadio contacted Emaline in 1938 and interviewed her about the story, and she said that the poltergeist didn’t follow them to their new home. Her father died in 1865 in Rome where he had been hoping to see the pope, exiled and in poverty after he had been ridiculed by family and friends and lost his positions in Switzerland. He was only 47.
Left to Decay: For decades, the Joller house was left empty, gathering dust and legends before being torn down. // Source: Nidwalden State Archives
Explanations and Theories
As with many poltergeist cases, contemporary explanations struggled to make sense of the phenomena. Some suspected that one of the Joller children might be unconsciously causing the disturbances, a theory common to 19th-century poltergeist lore, which often linked such hauntings to pubescent or emotionally distressed young people.
Joller himself maintained that the disturbances were neither tricks nor delusions. His attempts to logically document and combat the events only added to the eerie credibility of the case.
Another theory about who was behind it all was Robert. He came under suspicion, particularly after he was seen talking to an actor in the street in Lucerne, and so did the servant girl. But things happened when neither was present. And for the motive? His family lost close to everything. For what reason would he have done it?
Another theory is Joller himself, driven by financial problems, started the poltergeist rumor himself to drive the price for the house he was about to lose down. A prank that went too far. The problem with this theory though, would he really have tormented his family and household to this extent? Also, to drive down the house price would also backfire when he had to sell it. Fact was, the family ended up suffering tragically from the whole ordeal.
The Spirit of Veronika Gut
But what about the tragedy of Veronika Gut? Could her spirit have something to do with the haunting as many posed as an explanation? Already having lost her eldest son when he was fighting the French, it was a huge family tragedy. Joller himself gave no notion in his sources that he believed this was the story behind the haunting.
There were however several theories that it was earthbound spirits that wanted attention from the family living in the house, and Veronika was one of the main suspects haunting the Joller House. According to this theory, she was in fact a militant nationalist and Joller’s liberal politics was the cause of her haunting and wanting to bring him on a more righteous path in her opinion.
There is also the theory about the haunting being because of how close in age Joller’s daughters started to be to Veronika’s daughters, and that this is what released the haunting.
This seems to be the holding theory of the family itself as well. When a documentary crew went to Rome to meet Riccardo Joller, Melchior’s great-grandson, he showed a spirit drawing og Veronika they had made.
Then there were the secret manuscripts allegedly existing and explaining the whole thing. An editor from Zurich told about her father and how he had talked with some of the great grandchildren of Joller. Apparently, Nicolao Joller, who was Alfred’s grandson, was in possession of a secret manuscript, detailing the exact reason of why the events of the Joller house had taken place. On the cover of the manuscript it read in the local Roman dialect: “for the family only.” But the actual contents of the manuscript were never published publicly, and there is no actual proof that it even exists.
The Suspicion of Teenage Daughters
One part of poltergeist’s hauntings, is the presence of teenage girls, in their early prepubescent. We see it from the Veronika case in Spain or the Enfield poltergeist in England from more modern times to the case of the Fox sisters in America starting the spiritual movement.
Exactly why do so many poltergeist stories have young girls in the midst of it? Some point to sexual exploitation or other dysfunctional dynamics within the household that would solve itself when they left Stans and started their independent lives outside of the family home. This theory is that the supposed poltergeist haunting is some sort of cry for help and is about unsolved trauma that the girls twist into a spiritual haunting to cope with their lives.
The fact is that we simply don’t know what really happened those years inside of the Joller house.
Legacy of the Joller Poltergeist
Today, little remains to mark the site where terror once held sway. The Joller House in Stans was demolished on February 23 in 2010 and a high rise shopping center was built in its place opposite the Länderpark.
Demolition of the Joller House: The haunted house on Veronika-Gut-Weg in Stans was demolished on February 23, 2010./Source: Corinne Glanzmann
Whether the product of unresolved grief, repressed secrets, or something far older and more malevolent, the story of the Joller House poltergeist endures as one of Switzerland’s most unsettling ghostly mysteries — a chilling reminder that even in idyllic mountain towns, darkness can take hold.
Crossing through the Jura Mountains in Switzerland, an urban legend about the ghost of a lady in white is said to have haunted the Belchen Tunnel and was widely known and written about in the 80s. Question is, is she still haunting the tunnel?
After falling to his death trying to escape the debtor’s prison, The Marshalsea Barracks in Dublin, it is said the ghost of Pat Doyle is haunting the remaining walls of the ruins.
Planted to mark the mass grave of plague victims, the Linden Tree in the Aargau valley in Switzerland has become a famous landmark. In the night though, it is said that the ghosts buried underneath it crawls from the ground to haunt as a warning for any oncoming tragedies.
A rebel and freedom fighter for Irish independence is said to haunt his favorite pub, The Brazen Head in Dublin, where it is said he plotted his fight against the English.
The black cat in European folklore is shrouded in mystery and magical lore. From the old parts of Bern, ghost stories of ghostly black cats linger in the shadows, reminding about the old fear the feline specter used to hold over people.
Mirroring the famous Dance Macabre mural that used to hang on the walls near the Predigerkirche in Basel, it is said that plague victims were buried in the patch of grass outside of the church. Legend has it that when the city needs it, the dead will rise from it in a macabre procession, as a warning of an oncoming disaster.
Where history whispers and shadows reign, the Rathaus in Bern is said to be haunted by a myriad of ghosts. Who are the ghosts lingering in the City Hall after dark?
The two adjoining cloisters by Basel Cathedral are said to be haunted by a couple of spectres entombed within the building. In the darkness of Basel’s Double Cloister, it is said you can hear the moaning of a man slowly suffocating and feel the unsuspected slap from a man, as mean in death as he was in life.
A lock keeper from the adjacent lock next The Portobello Bar in Dublin is said to be haunting it. Ever since his mistake cost the lives of someone crossing, he is said to be lingering in the area.
In an old sanatorium in Switzerland the ghost of Hermann is said to have been haunting for ages. But who was he when he was alive, and what was his true name before he died in the remote fortress up in the mountains? And is he still haunting the old halls where he never made his recovery?
After his master died at sea, the faithful dog was by his master’s grave, day in and day out. After dying of hunger and grief it is said that the Newfoundland dog is still seen, slipping between the graves at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
An online magazine about the paranormal, haunted and macabre. We collect the ghost stories from all around the world as well as review horror and gothic media.
Crossing through the Jura Mountains in Switzerland, an urban legend about the ghost of a lady in white is said to have haunted the Belchen Tunnel and was widely known and written about in the 80s. Question is, is she still haunting the tunnel?
After falling to his death trying to escape the debtor’s prison, The Marshalsea Barracks in Dublin, it is said the ghost of Pat Doyle is haunting the remaining walls of the ruins.
Planted to mark the mass grave of plague victims, the Linden Tree in the Aargau valley in Switzerland has become a famous landmark. In the night though, it is said that the ghosts buried underneath it crawls from the ground to haunt as a warning for any oncoming tragedies.
A rebel and freedom fighter for Irish independence is said to haunt his favorite pub, The Brazen Head in Dublin, where it is said he plotted his fight against the English.
The black cat in European folklore is shrouded in mystery and magical lore. From the old parts of Bern, ghost stories of ghostly black cats linger in the shadows, reminding about the old fear the feline specter used to hold over people.
Right outside Basel in Switzerland, the haunted former Rectory in Münchenstein is said to be haunted by one of its former priests.
Mirroring the famous Dance Macabre mural that used to hang on the walls near the Predigerkirche in Basel, it is said that plague victims were buried in the patch of grass outside of the church. Legend has it that when the city needs it, the dead will rise from it in a macabre procession, as a warning of an oncoming disaster.
Where history whispers and shadows reign, the Rathaus in Bern is said to be haunted by a myriad of ghosts. Who are the ghosts lingering in the City Hall after dark?
The two adjoining cloisters by Basel Cathedral are said to be haunted by a couple of spectres entombed within the building. In the darkness of Basel’s Double Cloister, it is said you can hear the moaning of a man slowly suffocating and feel the unsuspected slap from a man, as mean in death as he was in life.
A lock keeper from the adjacent lock next The Portobello Bar in Dublin is said to be haunting it. Ever since his mistake cost the lives of someone crossing, he is said to be lingering in the area.
In an old sanatorium in Switzerland the ghost of Hermann is said to have been haunting for ages. But who was he when he was alive, and what was his true name before he died in the remote fortress up in the mountains? And is he still haunting the old halls where he never made his recovery?
After his master died at sea, the faithful dog was by his master’s grave, day in and day out. After dying of hunger and grief it is said that the Newfoundland dog is still seen, slipping between the graves at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
