Tag Archives: the Catacombs of the Capuchins

The panty thieving 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:

“This one—they call him the postman because he is a wandering ghost. El Postino. He’s not really a postman. All the people down there were high class. He continually returns to people’s homes like a postman and um… El Postino, it’s funny because a friend of mine is actually related to him. His last name is Spinoza and a friend of mine named Jean Spinoza is related to this mummy. He had apparently—this ghost had been sneaking into this beautiful girl’s house in the 20th century and stealing her underpants. He kept coming into her home making sexual advances to her and when she refused him, her underpants started to disappear so she told the monastery about this—that she believed he was a panty thief. Anyway, the public became very outraged as the story grew, that this girl’s underpants were disappearing and that this ghost kept coming to her house so the monastery was forced to allow inspectors to come in and check the premises and apparently behind the mummy in his niche they found some women’s underpants which—ya know the monastery insisted that someone had planted them there, but it seemed by accounts that the mummy had been stealing the underpants. So she was able to get a court injunction prohibiting the mummy, or the ghost more precisely from entering her home. Um… but he violated it because more of her underpants disappeared so the court demanded that the monastery rectify the situation, which… what are they going to do? How can they monitor this ghost? So they went to his mummy and threatened him with burial unless the woman’s underpants stopped disappearing and that apparently did it. He stopped harassing the woman after that.”

When El Postino was ordered by a court injunction to stop stealing the woman’s underwear, it is no surprise that his actions did not cease as any repercussions for violating a court injunction do not apply to the dead. What does apply to El Postino however is the belief of the Capuchin order that the body must be preserved for the coming resurrection. Thus it may be inferred that it was because of this belief that El Postino stopped stealing underwear only when threatened with a burial that may not preserve his body in the same way that his current entombment has.

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.