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