Quote:
Originally Posted by Centropolis
london is a big “whole damned place is haunted” type. you dig anywhere and BONES.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mrnyc
^ certainly could be said for cleveland as well!
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And here. It's actually one of our claims to fame that shit gets
weird here. You want ghosts? We have them -- hundreds of them, including some that are seen falling from the roof of an apartment building downtown so often that the county 911 center has a protocol to follow whenever someone calls it in yet again. You want cryptids? We have them -- including a race of malevolent fae against whom the Cherokee had to wage a war. You want an inexplicable "thing" whose night spent terrorizing the city jail in 1908 was documented in official county court documents and reported in the newspaper? We have it -- apparently it spent its time swinging from the ceiling and crawling up and down the walls while grinning at the inmates until a minister in jail for public inebriation persuaded it to go away. You want a secret society that unleashed an interdimensional being? We have that too -- the society was the Silver Shirts, they were pro-Hitler and devoted to helping him take over Europe while they took over America by magical means, and the supposed being they set loose was last seen bounding down Brook Street in Biltmore Village.
The question though, is why would an unassuming and wealthy resort city have so many ghosts? The likely answer is because from the mid 1800's on up through the 1930's this was a health resort for tuberculosis sufferers. A great many people spent a long time in Asheville coughing up the soft white cheese that used to be their lungs, and a lot of them died doing it. Then there were the asylums which followed the tuberculosis sanitaria. Rich people began to regard Asheville as a fine place to discard their troublesome troubled relatives -- including Zelda Fitzgerald who went insane, was incarcerated at Highland Hospital in the Montford neighborhood, and was incinerated there in 1948 when it caught fire. So... add incurable illness and mental illness, and you end up with a lot of death and a lot of souls who went to their deaths troubled.
Then there is the fact that our history here is unnervingly grim. We are and have always been a resort, which led, of course, to the construction of all manner of grand hotels... which were confiscated by the federal government during World War II and used as prisons and hospitals. One, the Kenilworth Inn, was used as a prison, then as a mental hospital, and it remained so well into the 1990's. They were renowned for their use of the lobotomy there. We've been hit by plague, particularly the Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed so many people here that there are entire rows in Riverside Cemetery devoted to flu victims. Our Civil War history was nasty, including at least one incident in which a slave was whipped to death in front of a group of captured Union soldiers as a warning. There was also a massacre of thirteen Union loyalists in which they were lined up by a ditch and shot in the head. A school caught fire in 1917, killing seven children, and in 1906 a man shot his way down Eagle Street and up Biltmore Avenue, screaming that he was the devil and didn't care if he got sent back to hell. He killed five people and a dog before he himself was lynched, shot more than a hundred times, and his body put on display so people could come and see. And lastly, the 1960's were an especially nasty decade because no fewer than three serial killers were active in and near Asheville at one point or another, and in 1967 the worst plane crash in North Carolina history occurred when a jet took off from Asheville Regional Airport and later collided with a small private plane, killing more than eighty people whose bodies and body parts were torn apart and rained down all over the area near where the plane went down.
So... yeah. Add that up and you get ghosts. A whole damned lot of them.