Tag Archives: ghosts

The stalking ghost

Nationality: Greek
Occupation: Art History professor, author, photographer
Residence: Echo Park, Los Angeles
Performance Date: 04/17/12
Primary Language: English

In 2011 my informant published a the book, The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses. The book’s 260 photographs were gathered by Dr. Koudounaris over the course of five years, during which he traveled to 70 different locations around the world, studying, visiting, and photographing charnel houses.

Dr. Koudounaris’ travels took him to the Catacombe dei Cappuccini (the Catacombs of the Capuchin monastery) in Palermo, Italy. Part of his process of learning about the catacombs included talking to the various fruit and flower vendors who sold their goods across from the monastery. Because the fruit and flower vendors are directly across from the monastery, they know everything that went on there and were able to tell him a variety of ghost stories about the monastery.

“The fruit and flower vendors are an incredible source of information. It’s hard to understand if you live in our type of society. Ya know, a street vendor, in societies like this is a source of incredible information. The fruit and flower vendors are across from the monastery and they know everything that goes on in the monastery. And everyone goes—it’s not like they go to super markets, they go to these vendors—so they are an incredible source of information if you really want to know what goes on in societies like that.”

The story is as follows:

“She’s a mummy in the catacombs in Palermo. She tends to develop romantic interests in young male tourists who come to visit. Especially Germans. She’s got this thing—it’s always Germans. Like not Austrians, just Germans. There are over a dozen cases of the ghost of this mummy visiting, and often in the end in very detrimental ways, tourists who have visited the catacombs. If they linger too long in front of her she gets this fixation on them apparently. She’ll appear in their dreams and profess love for them, or appear in their hotel room in this kind of ghostly skeletal form which they of course reject, and then when the reject her she gets vindictive. Especially if they have a girlfriend and she did not know cause then apparently she feels cheated on. If there’s the fräulein involved she doesn’t like it. And so anyways the most notorious of these involved this man from Hamburg in the 1970’s who had visited Palermo with his fiancé and he had stopped to take a photo of her and the skeleton actually fell over onto him so ya know it was very—and I’ve been in these places and I’ve photographed all of these things. I don’t even know how she could fall over because well at least now she seems well held down, but anyways she fell over onto him and he was shaken and left. She appeared that night in a dream and asked him to return and he did not, cause this is the ghost of the skeleton who had just fallen on him. Then the apparition appeared in the shower with him and so he was very upset. She appeared several more times and then when she realized he was there with his fiancé, um, she kind of provoked this catfight with his fiancé. She appeared in the middle of the night—the  ghost did—and grabbed the woman by the hair and threw her down the stairs and broke several of her bones and she wound up in traction and so ya know logically you’d say they should just leave Sicily but they couldn’t because the finance was in traction in the hospital. So they brought a priest to exorcise the hotel room and the hotel room burst into flames and so um, they moved them to Messina and they were safe after that, they just got them out of Palermo and moved them to Messina and she stopped bothering them. But for some time there were signs in the Palermo catacombs advising people not to stop in front of this mummy because she might haunt them but they took the signs down because it was not really helping them in terms of tourist dollars because it was really scaring people and costing them money.”

Of all of the ghost stories my informant told me, this one had occurred the most recently. One may expect for ghost stories to be received with more gravity further back in time, but not so long ago, as my informant said, there were signs in the catacombs warning visitors against the ghost of this particular mummy. The concept of ghosts is something many citizens of Palermo take very seriously, which is most likely a result of Catacombe dei Cappuccini (Catacombs of the Cappuccini) being a town landmark. The catacombs of the Cappuccini monastery are popular enough that they are considered a tourist attraction. Thus, when the sign warning visitors that this mummy might haunt them scared tourists away, it was essential to take it down.

Originally entombment in the catacombs was intended for only deceased friars but it became a status symbol over the centuries for residents to be entombed there. Thus one may theorize that current residents of the town have a stronger connection with the catacombs than they may have had it been limited strictly to the friars.

The Catacombs of the Cappuccini appear on the American paranormal documentary reality series Scariest Places on Earth. 

The pervert ghost

Nationality: Greek
Occupation: Art History professor, author, photographer
Residence: Echo Park, Los Angeles
Performance Date: 04/17/12
Primary Language: English

In 2011 my informant published a the book, The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses. The book’s 260 photographs were gathered by Dr. Koudounaris over the course of five years, during which he traveled to 70 different locations around the world, studying, visiting, and photographing charnel houses.

Dr. Koudounaris’ travels took him to the Catacombe dei Cappuccini (the Catacombs of the Capuchin monastery) in Palermo, Italy. Part of his process of learning about the catacombs included talking to the various fruit and flower vendors who sold their goods across from the monastery. Because the fruit and flower vendors are directly across from the monastery, they know everything that went on there and were able to tell him a variety of ghost stories about the monastery.

“The fruit and flower vendors are an incredible source of information. It’s hard to understand if you live in our type of society. Ya know, a street vendor, in societies like this is a source of incredible information. The fruit and flower vendors are across from the monastery and they know everything that goes on in the monastery. And everyone goes—it’s not like they go to super markets, they go to these vendors—so they are an incredible source of information if you really want to know what goes on in societies like that.”

The story is as follows:

“In the late 19th century, an old woman who had grown up in Palermo had—she had moved to Campania, and came back from Campania in the late 19th century and she found herself with some vaginal discharge so she went to the office of a gynecologist she had visited when she used to live in Palermo 20 years before. Um—she met a doctor at the office who was not the doctor she had seen 20 years ago, she was told that that doctor had retired but this new doctor had taken over her practice and he could see her and he strapped her into a harness and then attempted to take sexual liberties with the old lady so she uh, she went to the police and she reported the doctor. In the report she said he attempted to eat on my pubic hair like a cow chews the grass. He did not perform the act of cunallingus but he kept eating the hair. I screamed at him to stop—he chewed it like the cow chews cud. Anyways, she broke from the restraints and fled from the doctor’s office and um, ya know this should have been easy for the police to go to the doctor’s office and find the man, but the problem was—the perpetrator she had described had in fact died five years earlier—so it was a bit of a conundrum that she had reported that a ghost was eating her public hair… like a cow chews the cud. Anyways, they went and found his body, which had been mummified in the Palermo catacombs, and they took her down there. His name was Remegious Segumundo, and um cause her description exactly matched this Remegious Segumundo and they asked her if she would be able to identify him and they took her to see the mummy and she shrieked in horror and it confirmed that the mummy was her sexual molester.

The woman was thought to be delusional, but over the next ten years, a series of sexual assaults occurred around the old office building and every time they occurred, the perpetrator was described as exactly matching this appearance of this mummy—um—eventually, I believe this was the 1890’s word eventually got to the widow of the doctor who died and she confirmed for the police that her husband was a pervert. She said that if anyone could stop his misdeeds it was her. So they took her to the Palermo catacombs, to the mummy and she asked to be alone with him—that she had some words for him. No one stayed—they gave them their peace and no one knows what was said between the two because it was a private matter but no sexual assaults were ever reported again involving the mummy. His widow set him straight.”

While often times ghost stories have some sort of moral to them, the events in this one could easily be an account of some random perverted individual, aside from the fact that the perpetrator was not actually alive at the time he conducted his misdeeds. Though the woman was originally thought insane, as my informant explained to me, as similar happenings matching the same description of the perpetrator kept occurring, the police had the wife of the deceased perpetrator visit the catacombs to speak with his mummy. If anything, this story shows us how seriously ghost happenings are taken in Palermo, Italy.

Ghostly revenge

Nationality: Greek
Occupation: Art History professor, author, photographer
Residence: Echo Park, Los Angeles
Performance Date: 04/17/12
Primary Language: English

In 2011 my informant published a the book, The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses. The book’s 260 photographs were gathered by Dr. Koudounaris over the course of five years, during which he traveled to 70 different locations around the world, studying, visiting, and photographing charnel houses.

Dr. Koudounaris’ travels took him to the Catacombe dei Cappuccini (the Catacombs of the Capuchin monastery) in Palermo, Italy. Part of his process of learning about the catacombs included talking to the various fruit and flower vendors who sold their goods across from the monastery. Because the fruit and flower vendors are directly across from the monastery, they know everything that went on there and were able to tell him a variety of ghost stories about the monastery.

“The fruit and flower vendors are an incredible source of information. It’s hard to understand if you live in our type of society. Ya know, a street vendor, in societies like this is a source of incredible information. The fruit and flower vendors are across from the monastery and they know everything that goes on in the monastery. And everyone goes—it’s not like they go to super markets, they go to these vendors—so they are an incredible source of information if you really want to know what goes on in societies like that.”

The story is as follows:

“It’s a very complex story. She was a young girl and had fallen in love with this circus strong man. She was supposed to be married to a guy in Naples. Her family had arranged for her a marriage to this wealthy Neapolitan family but she was—was she 15 or 16?—anyways she was in love with this circus strong man named Garibaldi so she went to her parents and told her, ya know, that she would not marry the guy from Naples because she was going to marry Garibaldi, and Garibaldi was 47 and she was like 15, and that she had already given her virginity to Garibaldi which made her worthless and so her parents disowned her and cast her out. So she went to Garibaldi and Garibaldi, it turned out his only interest in her was sexual which is obviously not a surprise and so he, he was a circus performer and he started this pervert circus and it featured his young bride cause he married her at that time and they had private shows where she would have sex with midgets and animals and so fourth for wealthy clients. Eventually after a couple of weeks of this she wound up dead. They believe she had been penetrated by a horse and suffered severe injuries and her body was dumped in this alley where they found it and, her parents, ya know of course they were mortified but by this time ya know, they took her body but by this time she was dead. And they wanted charges brought against Garibaldi but it was not possible because of course no one would testify because to testify would mean admitting that you were at one of these shows. Anyways, these were wealthy Sicilians, members of the upper class and they weren’t going to say that they paid a 1000 lira to watch a girl have sex with a horse. Ya know, no way. So Garibaldi was going to walk free except that her ghost started pursuing and tormenting him and um, Garibaldi had left Palermo and gone to Siracusa uh, but apparently the ghost followed him to Siracusa. He had gone to a priest and asked the priest if he would help him and try to exorcise the ghost and the priest said that he would only help him if Garibaldi would make a full confession of his own misdeeds regarding the girl and Garibaldi refused. But eventually whatever was happening had gotten so bad that he decided he was going to talk to the priest and confess and he had left—this was still in Seracusa—he had left to go to the church and the priest was late that day and when the priest got there around noon he found Garibaldi’s dead body in the confessional booth. And the theory is that he had gone to the church and gone into the confessional booth but it was not the priest on the other side of the booth but the ghost and she had killed him. And the reason they believe that is because a candelabra was found shoved up his ass and he had died of also these internal hemorrhaging. Her injuries her vaginal whereas his were anal but it’s the same type of thing, so it was believed that perhaps that is how the ghost had enacted her revenge, by sodomizing him to death.”

This legend is a classic revenge tale. The girl loved Garibaldi and had given herself to him, which as my informant stated made her worthless. Once she had given her virginity to Garibaldi, there was no way for her parents to marry her off to the man they had promised her to. Finding out that Garibaldi wanted nothing from her other than sex and then to be exploited in the way she was ultimately resulting in her death left her as some might call, a vengeful spirit. Certain ghost beliefs say that a person wronged in life cannot go onto the afterlife until their killer has been brought to justice–one may assume that this is the case in this legend.

When I was a ghost

Nationality: Caucasian
Occupation: USC Folklore professor
Residence: Venice, California
Performance Date: 04/22/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Gaelic

The following ghost story was told to my informant by a friend of his. It is the story of when his friend was a ghost.

“I was asking him if he knew any good Irish ghost stories and he said “oh you mean like when I was a ghost” and I said “oh yeah well that sounds interesting, tell me” and so he was in the university and he had just decided to go home one weekend up in Donegal which is a ways away from Dublin, and so he was hitching, hitch hiking across, and he got this ride uh with this uh guy on a motorcycle, but they got into a wreck and he got thrown off the motorcycle and hit his head and went unconscious for a little while. Ya know, he woke up, everything was fine and he didn’t really say anything about it and he hitched the rest of the way home and he showed up at home and his sister ran up to the door and she was all worried and she said “you’re okay, you’re alive!” and he’s like “uh yeah why” and she said “well because uh, ya know I came down earlier and there was this vision of you just standing at the front porch but you, you weren’t talking, you weren’t saying anything, and then you disappeared. And then he figured out when she had seen that was when he had been knocked unconscious.”

In western tradition, this instance would be explained as an out of body experience–one can attribute the difference in definition to the fact that to be a ghost in Western tradition, you have to be dead. However in Irish tradition, the ghost, or “tannasg” can also mean apparition. Thus like the individual in this story, you can exist as a ghost while still being alive.

Ghost House

Nationality: American
Age: 50
Occupation: Writer/ Teacher
Residence: Detroit, Michigan
Performance Date: 4/13/2012
Primary Language: English

Legend

“I didn’t grow up in Detroit. I lived in this small town outside of it.  It was really nice. All those big houses and really rich people.  There was this one family.  Dad was always out working. Two kids. The daughter had married and moved out.  The mom as home all the time and she got really depressed.  I’d met her once and she was very quiet.  I didn’t know it, but she was an alcoholic and eventually she drank herself to death. Her liver failed.  Her son was left alone.  During the summer, the Dad had to work. So he asked a friend of mine if he could look after his son.  My friend agreed, but he didn’t really look after the kid and we had parties in the house.  One day while we were there, we were telling ghost stories and my friend said, ‘I’ve got this weird one to tell you guys’.  A few nights ago, he had been in his room and he fell asleep.  As he was dreaming, he realized that he was outside of his body.  So he decided to walk through the house and when he came into the kitchen, the entire family of the house was in there—including the mother who had died.  My friend went up to her, and her face was bone white. She was dead.  The mother was holding this little baby.  My friend asked her if she wanted to go and she said, ‘I want to go, but somebody has to look after this baby.’  He woke up right after that.  We were all freaked out by the story.

About a year later, I remembered the story and I asked him about it.  He said that when the father got back from his trip, he told him about his dream.  The father had given him this strange look and said, ‘No one knows this, but my daughter had a baby who died of crib death in this house.’”

My informant is catholic and believed that the mother was trapped in the house to pay for her sins of drinking and leaving her son behind.  She had to take care of another child in the afterlife.  He also believed that the baby couldn’t go to heaven because it was so young and it still needed someone to take care of it.  He said that he liked the story because he liked to believe the stories of rich families with hidden pasts in those big houses.  “You never really know where all that money came from” he said.

My informant’s analysis of why the child and mother were in the house really corresponds well with ghost belief in the church.  A mother who sinned is punished, but the child who hadn’t been christen yet is trapped as well.  A baby is not really a member of the community until that moment and thus is in a state where it is vulnerable.