Real Ghost Chatter

Mary Ann Poll
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Society & Culture
  • Biweekly

Real Ghost Chatter is a documentary podcast hosted by Mary Ann Poll — America's Lady of Supernatural Thrillers. Some episodes dig into verified historical hauntings investigated by the Catholic Church and researchers for centuries. Others feature real people sharing their own supernatural encounters firsthand. And some bring the Ravens Cove supernatural thriller series to life in audio form. The supernatural realm is real. And some stories prove it. Stay curious. Stay faithful. And never mistake the darkness for the whole story.

  1. 5d ago

    Episode 98: The Tedworth Haunting: It Hid in the Children's Bed

    EPISODE DESCRIPTION Satan, if the drummer set thee to work, give 3 knocks, and no more. The room went still, and 3 knocks came. In 1662, a magistrate in Tedworth, England, took a drum away from a wandering drummer. For more than a year after that, something in his house drummed on the roof, scratched beneath his children's bed, and panted under them in the dark. EPISODE NOTES ● John Mompesson, a Wiltshire magistrate, is the through-line, followed from the confiscated drum in March 1662 to his letter of November 1672, still refusing to call it a cheat. ● Phenomena covered: pounding that moved from door to door as he chased it with a pistol in each hand; drumming on the roof that rose into the air and faded away; a drum beating out the soldiers' call to break up the guard, night after night, in his mother's room. ● The children's bedstead hammered until it seemed it would fly apart, scratching like iron talons, and the children lifted up in their beds; a servant raised high, bed and all; a burning candle plucked from the manservant's hand; and pincers snipping at the village blacksmith's nose all night long. ● November 5, 1662: a board sliding back and forth to a servant at least 20 times before a roomful of visitors, a stench of sulfur, and a minister's prayer that drove it into the attic until he finished. That night came the three-knocks test. ● Coins raining through the house after Mompesson's mother joked about money, an iron spike in his bed, a bare knife standing upright in hers, the family Bible buried in the ashes, and a voice crying, A witch, a witch. ● The clergyman Joseph Glanvill's own night in January 1663: scratching that counted back to him, panting beneath two little girls that pushed the bed up against his hand, and a voice at his door that said, Nothing with you. ● A great body with two red, glaring eyes at the foot of a servant's bed, the drummer's boast from Gloucester jail, and his witchcraft trial at Salisbury. ● The doubters are given their say, from Christopher Wren to the king's lords, along with Mompesson's vow ten years later. Approximately 2,700 spoken words. SCRIPTURE Psalm 4:8 (NIV) — 'In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety.' SOURCES ● Joseph Glanvill, A Blow at Modern Sadducism (1668) and Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), the relation of the disturbance at Mr. Mompesson's house ● John Mompesson's letters to William Creed (December 1662) and to Joseph Glanvill (November 1672), published in Michael Hunter, 'New Light on the Drummer of Tedworth,' Historical Research 78 (2005) ● Unsigned eyewitness letter, The National Archives (UK), State Papers SP 29/230 f125 ● John Newton, 'Drummer of Tedworth,' Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research ● John Ingram, The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain (1897)

    Episode 98: The Tedworth Haunting: It Hid in the Children's Bed

  2. Oct 26

    Episode 97: The Phelps Mansion Haunting: It Mocked Their Prayers

    On a Saturday morning in March of 1850, a minister in Stratford, Connecticut, climbed his stairs and found a room full of women kneeling in prayer. Not one of them had ever been alive. For almost two years, something in the Reverend Eliakim Phelps's house threw, pounded, screamed, and wrote, and it seemed to take special pleasure in mocking the family's faith. EPISODE NOTES ● Dr. Eliakim Phelps, a 60-year-old minister who had never believed in ghosts, is the through-line, followed from the locked house on March 10, 1850, to the family leaving Elm Street for good in the spring of 1852. ● Phenomena covered: the front door standing open after every door was locked; a nightgown and chemise laid out under a sheet like a corpse; clothes vanishing from a locked trunk; mourning crepe on the door and sheets draped over the mirrors; an umbrella leaping 25 feet; pounding like an axe and screams like nothing human; a solid mahogany table slamming the floor as Anna ran past. ● Eleven or twelve figures built from stuffed dresses, kneeling in prayer before open Bibles, one so like Mrs. Phelps that her little boy whispered, Be still. Ma is saying prayers. ● A brickbat and a fire shovel aimed at 16-year-old Anna, and a ribbon tied around her neck as she slept, tight enough to leave her seriously ill. ● Harry, 11, lifted toward the ceiling, thrown into the cistern, and found hanging from a tree; 71 windowpanes broken; notes signed with the names of the dead and with Beelzebub; and wet ink across the minister's page: Very nice paper and very nice ink for the devil. ● A figure in white returning Harry's late father's silver watch from a locked drawer, a tall shape in a sheet seen by the whole family, and three gentlemen in the parlor who vanished when Anna came near. ● The minister's day-by-day diary torn out and found in the privy, the saved notes set on fire, and the knocks that followed Harry to a boarding school in Pennsylvania before falling silent on December 15, 1851. ● The doubters are given their say, along with what Dr. Phelps and Mr. M, the retired clergyman who came to catch the children, saw for themselves. Approximately 3,080 spoken words. SCRIPTURE Psalm 121:7-8 (NIV) — 'The Lord will keep you from all harm—he will watch over your life; the Lord will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore.' SOURCES ● E. W. Capron, Modern Spiritualism: Its Facts and Fanaticisms (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1855), compiled from Dr. Phelps's own records ● 'Remarkable Spiritual Manifestations in the House of the Rev. E. Phelps, D.D.,' The Spiritualist (London), No. 312, August 16, 1878, and No. 314, August 30, 1878 ● New England Historical Society, 'Stratford Knockings Brought Throngs of Spiritualists to Connecticut'

    Episode 97: The Phelps Mansion Haunting: It Mocked Their Prayers

  3. Oct 19

    Episode 96: The Dagg Ghost, It Called Itself the Devil

    EPISODE DESCRIPTION Out of the dark of an empty woodshed came an old man's growl, and the newspaperman standing beside an 11-year-old orphan girl heard every word. I am the Devil, it said. I'll have you in my clutches. In the autumn of 1889, on a small farm in Clarendon Township, Quebec, something set fires, threw stones, and cut a child's hair. Then it began to talk, for hours, in front of a crowd of more than 50 people. Before it was done, it would call itself an angel. EPISODE NOTES ● Dinah McLean, an 11-year-old Scottish orphan taken in by George and Susan Dagg, is the through-line, followed from the first thefts on September 15, 1889, to her disappearance from the record in January 1891. ● Phenomena covered: money vanishing from a drawer and filth smeared across the kitchen floor while the hired boy sat in jail; eight windowpanes broken by stones no one saw thrown, one while George's father watched from behind a stump; eight fires in a single day; jugs, basins, and a butter tub flying through the rooms; a stone that struck little Mary and didn't hurt her. ● Dinah's braid nearly cut through and the little boy's hair hacked off in chunks; the big black thing pulling off the bedclothes, the whip, the squeal, and the note that read, You gave me fifteen cuts. ● A bull-headed man on hooves who asked little Mary to come to Hell with him, a huge black dog with red eyes, and a minister's Bible that vanished from his hands and turned up in the oven. ● Percy Woodcock, a painter and newspaperman from Brockville, Ontario, spent five hours with the voice in the woodshed. It kept talking while Dinah held a mouthful of water, threw his pencil across the shed, and struck the girl when it grew angry. ● Before the crowd, the voice mocked the Reverend Bell, recited Scripture along with him, and demanded to know by what authority he called it evil. Then it claimed to be an angel from Heaven and sang hymns until the women wept. ● On November 17, 1889, 17 men signed a statement of what they had seen and heard. The next morning, the children said they saw a man in white with a crown of stars rise into the sky. ● The doubters are given their say: many believed Dinah was a ventriloquist. In January 1891, a man came for Dinah with a letter signed in George Dagg's name, and she was never heard from again. ● The voice's obscenities are described, never quoted. Approximately 2,445 spoken words. SCRIPTURE 2 Corinthians 11:14 (NIV) — 'And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.' SOURCES ● Signed statement of November 17, 1889, prepared by Percy Woodcock and signed by 17 witnesses, among them John, George, and William Dagg, Arthur Smart, Robert Peever, and George Hodgins ● Brockville Daily Times, November 13, 1889, as reprinted in the Medium and Daybreak (London), December 13, 1889 ● The Ottawa Journal, November 29, 1889; The New York Herald, January 12, 1890; The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 13, 1890; The Times (Philadelphia), January 14, 1891 ● The Ottawa Citizen, 1957, recollections of Charlie Harris and Thomas Dagg ● R. S. Lambert, Exploring the Supernatural: The Weird in Canadian Folklore (1955) ● The Ghost That Talked, National Film Board of Canada (1957) ● Charles Fort, Wild Talents (1932), chapter 6

    Episode 96: The Dagg Ghost, It Called Itself the Devil

  4. Oct 12

    Episode 95: Ghostly Impressions: Jayne Lisbeth's True Story

    In 1977, Jayne Lisbeth died on an operating table and found herself floating against the ceiling of the surgery room. Below her, the doctor was screaming, Get her back! Get her back! This is Jayne's true story. Find Jayne's books on her Amazon author page: amazon.com/author/jaynelisbethpainterlywriter, or at jaynelisbeth.com. EPISODE NOTES ● A guest episode: the true account of author Jayne Lisbeth, who has made gravestone rubbings for more than 50 years, shared in her own words from her written piece 'Ghostly Impressions.' ● Jayne's near-death experience during an emergency cesarean in 1977, when she watched her surgical team from the ceiling and chose to come back. ● The root cellar door in a 200-year-old farmhouse in South Woodstock, Vermont, that only Mama could open, until, after her death, it opened on its own. ● The woman in the brown calico dress who appeared behind Jayne as she made a gravestone rubbing on Cape Blanco, Oregon, and the photograph Jayne found on the Hughes House kitchen mantel the next day. ● The night Jayne's mother died in 1997, when her sister-in-law Lynn heard a call Jayne never spoke aloud. SCRIPTURE Psalm 116:15 (NIV) — 'Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful servants.' SOURCES ● Jayne Lisbeth, 'Ghostly Impressions,' edited by Evan Swensen, Publication Consultants, Anchorage, Alaska (publicationconsultants.com) ● Leland Roth, Patrick and Jane Hughes House, a project of the Oregon Historical Society (ohs.org) ● Photos courtesy of Jayne Lisbeth and Tim Gibbons

    Episode 95: Ghostly Impressions: Jayne Lisbeth's True Story

  5. Oct 5

    Episode 94: The Haunting of 30 East Drive: It Waited on the Stairs

    On a holiday weekend in August 1966, something began to stir inside the Pritchard family's home at 30 East Drive in Pontefract, England. Water pooled across the floors with no leak to explain it. Green foam bubbled out of the taps. Joe Pritchard, a practical man, looked for a mechanical cause and found none, and soon police constables, water board men, a reporter, and town officials stood in his house watching it too. Then the house went quiet. In 1968 it came back, and this time it came for his daughter Diane. Mary Ann Poll follows Joe from his first skeptical inspection to the night he sat watch on the staircase, and to the faith that saw his family through. EPISODE NOTES ● Joe Pritchard is the through-line, followed from his mechanical skepticism in August 1966 through his own hands-on inspections, the arrival of police, press, and civic witnesses, the attacks on Diane in 1968, his vigil on the staircase, and the gradual quiet of the house by 1970. ● Phenomena covered: water spreading across the floors, green foam rising from the taps, an unnatural cold, tea mugs and household objects moving on their own, a grandfather clock and an oak sideboard thrown about, crucifixes in the house, and a Singer sewing machine that splintered against the bottom of the banister. ● The worst came in 1968, when Diane was dragged up the staircase and left with marks on her throat. The episode recounts it as the record does, without gore. ● Witnesses named in the episode include Joe and Jean Pritchard, their children Phillip and Diane, Jean's mother Sarah Scholes, neighbors Rene Kelly and Mrs. Mountain, responding constables, water board technicians, reporter Dave Lunn, and the Town Mayor. ● The figure the family came to call the Black Monk gives the episode its subtitle: a hooded shape that waited on the stairs. ● More than 65 percent of the episode is documented phenomena and direct witness encounters. Approximately 2,610 spoken words. SCRIPTURE 2 Timothy 1:7 (NKJV) — 'For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.' SOURCES ● Colin Wilson, Poltergeist! A Study in Destructive Haunting (1981) ● Pontefract & Castleford Express, contemporary reports, 1966 to 1969, including accounts from reporter Dave Lunn ● Witness statements from responding police constables, municipal water board technicians, and visiting civic officials ● Tom Cuniff's historical and psychical documentation of the Chequerfield Estate occurrences

    Episode 94: The Haunting of 30 East Drive: It Waited on the Stairs

  6. Sep 28

    Episode 93: The Esther Cox Haunting: It Marked Her for Death

    In September 1878, in a shoemaker's cottage on Princess Street in Amherst, Nova Scotia, something began to torment 18-year-old Esther Cox. It started with straw moving inside her mattress and a box that leaped off the floor. Within weeks the town doctor sat beside her bed and watched words appear, scored a foot high into the plaster of her wall: Esther Cox, you are mine to kill. What followed was set down by the people who lived through it, by that doctor, by two ministers and a newspaper editor, and by an actor who moved into the house to expose it as a fraud and kept a journal instead. Mary Ann Poll tells it as it happened, scene by scene, from the first night to the day it stopped. EPISODE NOTES ● Esther Cox is the through-line, followed from a frightening buggy ride in late August 1878 through the first night on September 4, the doctor's visits, the fires, her expulsion from the house, and the weeks Walter Hubbell spent living under the same roof in June 1879. ● Phenomena covered: straw shifting inside the mattress, a box of patchwork leaping a foot into the air, Esther's body swelling until she screamed she would burst, explosions under the bed that shook the floor, bedclothes torn off and flung into the corner, the writing on the wall, pounding that climbed onto the roof and followed Dr. Carritte 200 yards down the street, and a bucket of cold water that boiled in front of a minister. ● Then came the fires: eight to ten burning matches falling out of empty air, Esther's dress rolling itself under the bed and catching fire, a barrel of shavings blazing in the cellar, and a figure only Esther could see, laughing in the parlor corner, threatening to burn the house down if she stayed. ● It followed her to John White's dining saloon, where a stove door tore off its hinges in front of a provincial inspector of fisheries and a clasp knife twice drove itself into her back. ● Walter Hubbell came to put her on stage and expose the trick. Instead the knocks read out his watch number and a coin date he did not know himself, and a paperweight struck the sofa three inches from his head. The entity gave its name, Bob Nickle, a shoemaker, dead and not in heaven. ● The skeptical case is given its due: psychical researcher Walter Prince concluded Esther did it herself in a dissociated state, noting the ghost called Bob appeared a week after Bob McNeal drew his pistol on her. Against that stand the witnesses who were in the house before Hubbell ever arrived, and the 1888 statement signed by Amherst's citizens. ● After an arson conviction and a month in jail, it stopped for good. Esther married, raised two sons, and died in her own bed in Brockton, Massachusetts, on November 8, 1912. Bob Nickle never kept his promise. Approximately 3,030 spoken words. SCRIPTURE Isaiah 43:1 (NIV) — 'But now, this is what the Lord says, he who created you, Jacob, he who formed you, Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.' SOURCES ● Walter Hubbell, The Great Amherst Mystery: A True Narrative of the Supernatural (1879; tenth edition, Brentano's, 1916), including his journal kept in the Teed cottage, the 1888 affidavit, Dr. Carritte's letter, and the statement signed by the citizens of Amherst ● The Amherst Gazette and the Moncton Daily Times, 1878 to 1879, as reprinted in Hubbell ● Hereward Carrington, Personal Experiences in Spiritualism (1913), witness statements taken in 1907 ● Walter F. Prince, 'A Critical Study of The Great Amherst Mystery,' Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, vol. 13 (1919)

    Episode 93: The Esther Cox Haunting: It Marked Her for Death

  7. Sep 21

    Episode 92: The Smurl Haunting

    EPISODE DESCRIPTION In 1973, Jack and Janet Smurl moved into half of a double-block house on Chase Street in West Pittston, Pennsylvania. Jack's parents took the other half. For 13 years both households reported the same things through the same wall: knocking, voices calling in the family's own tones from empty rooms, a faceless black shape that walked through the wall and came out the other side. Three attempted exorcisms failed, and Janet said the reason was simple, that the thing crossed to whichever half the priest was not in. Mary Ann Poll tells the Smurls' account the way they told it, gives the doubters their full say, and follows the story to the prayers the family said ended it. EPISODE NOTES ● Built on the shared wall. Jack's mother Mary heard the knocking on her side, heard a man and a woman fighting on a night Jack and Janet were not in the room, and watched the faceless shape come out her side after Janet watched it walk into the wall. ● Phenomena covered: objects vanishing and returning, stains rising through fresh paint, knocking from inside a switched-off television, family voices calling from empty rooms, screams and pig grunts and hoofbeats, cold rooms, an unplugged radio at full volume, the stench of smoke and rotten meat, the 75-pound German shepherd slammed into a wall, Dawn attacked in the shower at 17, Shannon thrown down a flight of stairs at 8, the bed shaking, Janet pinned to the mattress, and Jack dragged off his knees while praying the rosary. ● Their neighbor Debbie Watson reported screams from the house when no one was inside it, and scratching at an upstairs window screen. ● The skeptical case is given in full: Paul Kurtz of CSICOP called it a hoax and pointed to the mine shafts under the street, the sewer odor, and the book deal that followed within months. Jack's 1983 brain surgery was raised publicly, and the family declined psychiatric testing. ● The Church stayed in the middle. Chancellor Gerald Mullally said they believed the family but did not know what it was, and a diocesan priest spent two nights in the house in October 1986 with nothing happening. ● Four days before Halloween 1986 the Smurls said the demons were gone, credited to their own parish and their own prayers rather than the three failed exorcisms. They left Chase Street in 1988, and later residents on both sides reported nothing. Jack died in 2017, Janet in 2026. Approximately 2,414 spoken words. SCRIPTURE Psalm 91:1, 2, 5 (NIV) — 'Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, he is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust. You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day.' SOURCES ● Steve Corbett, Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, August 19, 1986 ● Associated Press and United Press International wire coverage, August 1986 ● Robert Curran, The Tribune (Scranton), October 27, 1986 ● Paul Kurtz, 'A Case Study of the West Pittston Haunted House,' The Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 1987 ● Robert Curran with the Smurls and Ed and Lorraine Warren, The Haunted: One Family's Nightmare (St. Martin's Press, 1988)

    Episode 92: The Smurl Haunting

  8. Sep 14

    Episode 91: The Groton Possession: Her Lips Never Moved

    EPISODE DESCRIPTION In the winter of 1671, 20 years before the trials at Salem, a 16-year-old servant girl in the frontier town of Groton, Massachusetts, fell into violent fits, accused two neighbors of witchcraft, confessed to signing her name in the devil's book, and then took most of it back. Her employer, a 31-year-old minister named Samuel Willard, wrote it all down as it happened, day by day, suspecting a fraud the whole time. Then a voice spoke out of her while her lips never moved. Mary Ann Poll tells the story of Elizabeth Knapp, the minister who refused to decide what he had seen, and how his refusal saved lives. EPISODE NOTES ● Built almost entirely from a single primary source: Samuel Willard's own manuscript account, kept among Cotton Mather's papers. Willard never published it under his name, and it remains the only firsthand record of the case. ● The episode's central image, and the source of the subtitle, is Willard's test on December 17, 1671: when a low, rough voice spoke out of Elizabeth, he brought a light to her face, watched for the letters that require the lips (B, M, and P), and recorded that the voice used them freely while her lips never moved and her tongue stayed against the roof of her mouth. ● Documented phenomena covered: fits that took three to six people to hold; her tongue drawn up so hard it could not be pried loose; barking and bleating; a black dog with eyes in its back; a mark in the chimney clay where she said a witch went up; the voice calling Willard a rogue, claiming to be stronger than God, and returning during prayer to crow like a rooster. ● Elizabeth accused two neighbor women, and a touch test on the first came back positive. Groton did not act on it. Both women were cleared and never accused again. Twenty years later at Salem, the same kind of evidence hanged 19 people. Willard, by then a prominent Boston minister, argued that the devil could wear an innocent person's face, and was himself named by an accuser during the trials. ● Willard checked Elizabeth's confession against his own memory: the wood chips that appeared by the hearth, the strange look on the stairs when she said the devil had sent her to kill him with a billhook. He wrote that the two kept fitting, and still concluded that he did not know. ● Two details about Elizabeth's life outside Willard's account, her mother's earlier breakdown and jailing and her later marriage to Samuel Scripture, come from historian John Demos's research and are presented in the episode as his conclusions, since genealogists dispute the identification. ● Mary Ann's closing reflection gives the natural explanation its due (an unhappy servant girl, a physician who blamed her blood, a mother with a documented breakdown) and then turns on what she cannot explain away: a skeptical minister who went looking for a fraud and wrote down what stopped him. SCRIPTURE 2 Corinthians 11:14 (NIV) — 'And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.' SOURCES ● Samuel Willard, 'A Brief Account of a Strange and Unusual Providence of God Befallen to Elizabeth Knapp of Groton' (manuscript, 1671 to 1672); full transcription in David D. Hall, ed., Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Documentary History, 1638 to 1693, second edition (Northeastern University Press, 1999) ● John Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford University Press, 1982), for the Knapp family records and Elizabeth's marriage and later life ● Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, for the published summary of the case

    Episode 91: The Groton Possession: Her Lips Never Moved
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About

Real Ghost Chatter is a documentary podcast hosted by Mary Ann Poll — America's Lady of Supernatural Thrillers. Some episodes dig into verified historical hauntings investigated by the Catholic Church and researchers for centuries. Others feature real people sharing their own supernatural encounters firsthand. And some bring the Ravens Cove supernatural thriller series to life in audio form. The supernatural realm is real. And some stories prove it. Stay curious. Stay faithful. And never mistake the darkness for the whole story.

Information

  • Creator
    Mary Ann Poll
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    99
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Mary Ann Poll
  • Show Website
    Real Ghost Chatter

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