Capital City Ghosts, Part 1

In this episode, we talk with Ernest Dollar, author and Director of the Raleigh City Museum and Pope House, about his book, work and experience with ghost stories in the Triangle. We discuss local history and some of the souls who may still be wandering around Raleigh.

Show Notes

Ernest A. Dollar Jr. is the director of the City of Raleigh Museum, as well as the director of the Pope House in Raleigh. He is also the author of "Heart's Torn of Thunder Trauma and the Civil War's Final Campaign in North Carolina."

• A Durham native, Ernest was born here in the Triangle and has been involved in local history since he was the director of the Orange County Historical Museum in Hillsborough in 2001.
• We discuss Ernest's book and North Carolina's role in the Civil War.
• Ernest discuss the question some have of, "Why have we forgotten the part North Carolina played in the Civil War?"
• The Bennett Place is a state historic site in Durham, just between Durham and Hillsborough where General William Tecumseh Sherman accepted the surrender of Confederate General Joseph Johnston.
• From Raleigh to Morrisville, we start to see ghost stories emerge from the woodwork about a wave of broken, diseased and horrifically mangled men seeking care in our hospitals. Many of them died in Raleigh.
• We talk about Peace College and it's history as a hospital during the Civil War.
• Any historian looks at the lived experience of the people we study—everything from economics, literature, arts and labor—but also the mythology and people's beliefs.
• We discuss the 2022 True Death, True Crime Dark Raleigh Walking Tours.
• We talk about the ghost of the governor's mansion.
• And more! Don't miss this convo!

Creators & Guests

Host

Adam Cave

Marketing manager, writer, content and brand creator, graphic designer, and arts professional

Host

Melissa Wistehuff

Social Media and Community Engagement Manager for Midtown Magazine, freelance writer + social media manager

Producer

Joe Woolworth

Owner of Podcast Cary, the Studio Cary, and Relevant Media Solutions in Cary, NC Your friendly neighborhood creative.

What is Talk of the Triangle?

"Talk of the Triangle" introduces you to the people, places and events worth talking about. We are talking directly to you—our region's educated and successful residents and professionals—about what makes the Triangle one of the country's most exciting and enticing places to live—about what makes the people who work and live here tick. These are the stories we tell.

Hosts Adam Cave and Melissa Wistehuff will discuss the stories you have loved, and introduce you to the stories we have yet to tell. We can’t wait for you to come on this adventure with us!

Talk of the Triangle October 1 Ernest
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This episode brought to you by Preston's dental loft. Hey everybody, this is Melissa with Talk of the Triangle podcast. I am here with my co-host, Adam.

Hey Adam.

Hey, everybody. Good to be back.

today we are talking about ghost and ghost stories and true crime stories. So I guess instead of saying that I am your host, I will say that I am your ghosts with the mostess

I was waiting to see what you would come up

Yes.

and that never crossed my mind, so well done. Well done.

So first we are talking with Ernest dollar.

Ernest is the director of the City of Raleigh Museum, as well as the director of the Pope House in Raleigh. He is also the author of Heart's Torn of Thunder Trauma and the Civil War's Final Campaign in North Carolina. Thank you for coming today, Ernest. We're so excited to talk to you. Thank you

so much.

I'm excited to be here.

Tell us a little bit about yourself to start with and how you came to be the director of City of Raleigh Museum and Pop House, as well as how you came to be interested in this whole genre True crimes, ghost stories, history, everything.

Awesome. Again, Thanks for having me.

I'm a of Durham native. I was born here in the triangle and have been involved in local history since I was the director of the Orange County Historical Museum in Hillsborough in 2001. So I've always been interested in local history and the stories that make us who we are today. So in 2011 the old Raleigh City Museum was getting ready to go under, and so the city stepped in and took over operations, renamed the museum, and that's how I got to Raleigh.

If I remember correctly, the museum was originally a private museum. Is that correct?

right. Yeah, it was a nonprofit.

So tell us a little bit about your book and also about North Carolina's ties to the Civil War.

I don't think that's really discussed very often. Maybe that's just me, , but I feel like North Carolina is. Central part of the whole story. So why did you find that so interesting and interesting enough to write about it and tell us about how things turned into ghostly stories after the Civil War.

Sure. So my first job out of college is working at the Bennett Place, is state of story site in in Durham, which has turned out to be the largest surrender of the American Civil War in our backyard. Growing up, I never knew that. And so I was all excited to talk to people about, Durhams local Civil War history, the triangle, Civil War history, and people would come to the Bennett Place and I was so excited to tell them history in the main question.

They wanted to know where were the bathrooms. So I think we as a nation have forgot what happened here in Central North Carolina. So doing so much local history, I wanted to to pull that story out and ask that central question, Why have we forgotten what happened here in our backyard?

And so once they started looking at it, I realized that the end of the war is so chaotic, so traumatic, and just full of pain for a lot of people who experienced it, that I think we as a nation just wanting to forget about it because the south was it defeated. They were sad about losing the war.

Their entire culture had been destroyed, and Union soldiers were excited about victory, but, they were just overwhelmed with grief after Lincoln's assassination. So it's just a whip solve emotions that people are experiencing. And so once I looked at all of this, it's wow, there's a lot of emotional energy swirling around here that no one's really written about.

So I wanted to put all of these together. And say this is what we experienced here and this is the energy that was left. And so once we look at a lot of ghost stories, we tie a lot of these back to the Civil war and all of that, that, that grief and trauma that it inspired.

That's actually quite an interesting Perspective about how a story can be simply too sad to want to share over and over, and therefore it's lost throughout history.

Yeah. And it's traumatic. I For not only for soldiers who had to do the most horrific combat, but also for civilians who finds themselves, in the middle of these major waring armies. And what that, the fear that instilled in, a lot of the women and children and elderly people who were still left around here who were not off fighting.

And then, for African Americans, it is a traumatic time, this transition from slavery to freedom. It's dangerous. So you see a lot of backlash on, on white southerners who saw these people who consider these people commodities and now see them as liabilities. So it's just an amazingly traumatic time where people are trying to figure out what's gonna happen next.

How will the nation reunite and what was the cost, the human emotional cost of war?

So the tie in for you that kind of takes you to this world of ghost stories is really this emotional aspect of the history. It sounds like to me,

Yeah, I think so. When. When I look back at some of the very top 10 Raleigh ghost stories, a lot of them tie back to the Civil War. Either, through soldiers who had fought and brought some of that trauma home with them, or just the trauma that was generated by these armies, these great war armies that collided here in central North Carolina.

So I just think that in the human experience this energy that was generated by these highly emotional. Occurrences and experiences just shaped the people and left its mark on the landscape.

So tell us a little bit more about, you said it was called the Bennett House.

. I do find it fascinating that I have, I don't think I've ever heard about this, and I am from Raleigh. So tell us a little bit more about Bennett house and particularly the ghosts that are there. Are they ghosts that are mostly soldiers that died? Battle while fighting there. Are they angry Ghost, are they Happy Ghost?

What are, and how do you know that they're even there?

The Bennett Place, it's a state historic site in Durham, just between Durham Hillsborough, and it was just a site where the two generals, General EMT Sherman, It was a Union General met to accept the surrender of the Confederate general Joseph Johnston.

So in place doesn't have a lot of that emotional energy, but what we find here in Raleigh is where most of the Union Army was sat and waited during the negotiation. So they there for about two weeks. They camped all around Dorothy Dicks asylum. So some of those interactions between the soldiers and the patients are.

Fascinating.

So not true battles happening in Raleigh. More tension and emotional stress happening in Raleigh.

Yeah, so where we set right now was part of a civil battlefield, so on April 13th, 1865 is the Union Army captures Raleigh and they basically from Raleigh to Morrisville is one long bloody.

Battlefield where a lot of skirmishing took place. But what we see, especially in Raleigh four years, it was a, a confederate capital. You have a lot of manufacturing war goods, but you also have a lot of hospitals. And so that's where we start to see is some of these ghost stories come out of the woodwork about just a wave of broken and diseased and.

Horrifically mangled men sought care, and so a lot of them died in Raleigh. Were buried there. And so I think a lot of them their spirits are still there, I think.

Let's talk about the hospital. I'd like to know more about Peace College and its history as a hospital during the Civil War and also want to know specifically, there both Union and Confederate soldiers in the same hospitals?

Did they have to share hospitals or were they separated somehow?

Yeah. So Peace College was just being built as the war began. In fact Thomas Briggs, who owns Briggs Hardware, the museum is located. Was ordered to rush to try to finish construction of the main building at Peace College, so it could be used as a hospital.

So early in the war you had a lot of of wounded Confederates coming from the battlefields in Virginia and some in Maryland. But in the last months of the war, Raleigh as well as Greensboro High Point. All of these cities along the railroad were just inundated by the mass casualties that were from the battles of Fort Fisher at the beach on the battle of Abo Bentenville, in the southern part of the state Kenston.

So all this, all last months just. Massive numbers of wounded soldiers began to fill up Peace College churches PUE Hospital in Raleigh private homes. So just this wave of mangled men just filled up every place in Raleigh where they could lay down. Peace College was one of them. And so whenever the Union Army occupies the city, they take over the Confederate Hospital.

So we still see some At the very end of the war joint occupation of these sites where both union and Confederate soldiers were being treated

That is a really interesting piece of history because it's sort. Shows this aspect of Raleigh really not being so much the center of fighting, but the center of the results of the fighting. And I think that's something we don't really think about now. Isn't, wasn't there a very early hospital I know you, your director of the Pope House, but there was also an early African American hospital, if I'm not mistaken in, in Eastern Raleigh that I wonder if it was also involved in.

Yeah, that's so the Confederates did establish a huge hospital, PUE hospital, and some of the Haywood families were some of the surgeons that were in charge of the hospital. Yeah, throughout the war, Pue Hospital begins to treat a lot of these soldiers who are pouring in from Virginia and bury them around the hospital.

And ultimately, after the war, these Confederate soldiers are dug up and carried to Oakwood. And that's the genesis of Oakwood Cemetery. A lot of these dead confederates.

Oh my.

There's a great story and it depends. Who you believe if you believe a lot of Southerners in Raleigh, that once the Union Army took over a pedigree hospital and began bearing the union dead the, a lot of old school Raleigh folks would say that the mean Yankees threatened to dig up the Confederate sense, throw them into a ditch unless they took them away.

And so that's how it would started. But I think more truth to that is that whenever the union soldiers are bearing their. And Graves next to the Confederates that people in Raleigh didn't want their dead contaminated by the Yankee bodies. So they dug him up and carried him Oakwood. So yeah, that's the genesis of Oakwood Cemetery. I did

not know that I have a feeling we're gonna learn a lot of new stuff today. Adam

I think we are . I wanna lighten the mood here a little bit cuz obviously the Civil War, it's pretty heavy stuff and I'm not saying I'm not interested. Don't get me wrong here. This is fascinating. But did you have an interest in paranormal activity separate from your interest in history?

Or was it an outgrowth of your interest in sort of academic history? Cuz I think of these things as sometimes being very separate, and possibly a historian might not give a lot of credibility to someone. But obviously the city of Raleigh is very involved in some of this paranormal research.

We're gonna be talking. Guess later that I believe you guys even fund to do research. So this is interesting to me, this connect.

Any historian is, looks at the lived experience of the people we study and it's everything from economics literature, arts, labor, but also the mythology and the beliefs of people. Tell so much about who they were and what they believed. So anytime you, you run across local lore that has been, repeated and has become urban legends, it's nice to say, Hey, this is what this community their beliefs and their mythology Put forth and what they remember about certain things or what they believe a certain area has some connection to it.

So yeah we always love to understand the mythology of the local population. And certainly being the city of Raleigh, we wanna incorporate those in just the fabric of the history of our area. So through the museum we made a conscious effort early on as as October rolls around, everybody gets excited about ghost stories.

So we decided to take a little step to the right. So as historians, we deal in history. So what we decided to do, rather than, let everybody else have the mythology of the ghost stories that we said, Hey, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. So we've decided to do, every year, October, we do a.

True death, true crime walking tour called Dark Raleigh. And so we just extract some of these horrific stories out of the past and turn it into a walking tour. And I'm so glad the city of Raleigh doesn't pay close attention to my search engine on my computer, cuz it's always like prostitutes, murders, suicides, just the plumbing, the depths of humanities.

So yeah it's interesting to look back at all of these true crime stories and two crime stories are so popular now. It's interesting, a different take on sort of the Halloween theme, but based in history. So

tell us about the tour. How is it different than a normal Walking Ghost tour?

What would we expect and when do you guys do this? Is it all throughout the month of October or is it a particular night?

Yeah, we usually do it very close to Halloween. I think this year's like the 27th of 28th of October, and so we've already started working on this year's tour and so my staff, we plow through all of the historical records and like old newspapers are a fertile ground for.

Pulling, finding these incredibly horrible stories to tell. And so we pull them out, we do the research and we basically turn them into monologues and we work with actors to basical. Make them into these, to tell these stories. And so it's a walking tour around downtown and we try to get as close to the scene where these incidents happened.

So it's a great way to see history brought to life, but the talents of a lot of these actors. So it's a morbid tour, but it's so much

fun. Do you find new information each year to add to.

Yeah, every year we pick news stories. Okay. And there's so much that, Raleigh has hidden in its dark corners that we're able to find and pull out.

And, every year surprises me at just the weird, random, horrible stories that we can find. But, there are people love it. And so we sells out every year. And I remember the first year we had a. Female true crime writing group by a whole bunch of tickets. And I was like, Wow that's a thing.

But people loved it. So there is a thirst and there's a real interest in looking back in the past and how, what crimes are committed and how we dealt with those crimes and, what do they tell us about those people in the past and how they treated these folks and treated each.

I think right now the country is fascinated and completely captivated with true crime, and I think there's been a resurgence with it with the South Carolina case, the Murdoch murder case.

So do you think that there's anything reminiscent. Of that here in the Raleigh area, that type of true crime story that you can think of?

There are some that they've stood the test of time. I think. There's, we. We don't have a lot of serial killers. I can tell you that.

I was gonna ask that if we had any serial killers in North Carolina.

No. And, when we would chose this,

I did not wanna Google that . That's my job, my surge engine. We have to be very sensitive about this because, there's nothing worse than coming to a tour like this and seeing your family history ah, played out. So we try to find a lot of older stories and we.

Focused on 19th century and early 20th century stories. And so far, thankfully we've not had any descendants of some of these folks come out in to see their family history put on parade. We do a lot of people who had overcome with mental problems committed suicide. We focused a lot on Raleigh's Red Light District last year, and a lot of, some of the stories of those young ladies there, and they're on timely demises.

And so this year, I think we're, I don't wanna spoil too much, but it's a lot of disagreements with people not surviving those disagreements

That is the most

vague enough.

polite way I've ever heard anyone talk about murder. Oh my goodness,

it's not truly murder if it's just a disagreement. Adam. Yeah.

I guess you're right. Legally, maybe it's, maybe there's a difference a different definition. Now I understand why you're going back in time so much I didn't quite understand cuz obviously crime continues and true continues.

But do you think. That's maybe one of the reasons why the kind of ghost thing jumps in so quickly is as soon as you go back to these kind of way earlier periods, it's very hard for people not to start to, imagination takes them there, whether there's evidence or not. It becomes something they attach.

I guess, another, if she was horribly murdered, she must be here haunting this place kind of thing. It's just our, the way we were, we're designed.

Yeah. I think a lot of people in the past are sophistication or are are changing. Perspectives on religion and myths and spirits and how we understand the world is very different than our Victorian ancestors. So I think a lot of people attributed. To ghostly sightings and ghostly events and unexplainable things attached to places where really horrible things happened.

And so this is just how people, I think, put one plus one together to get two to understand, hey, if this is happening here, it must be related to this event that happened there. So I think a lot of those the stories are created to understand. I do explain things that a lot of. Can't explain.

When we think about ghost, we generally think about stories that did happen a long time ago, potentially centuries ago.

Do you know of perhaps, for lack of better word who the youngest ghost is in town? Like the most recent story that created a

ghost? That's a good question. The youngest ghost. That's a weird way to think about it, but yeah,

I've, I'll see that. I like to think in a weird

way, earnest. So one of the ones that I was researching to get ready for this was the ghost of the governor's mansion.

Ah,

yes. I did wanna know about this.

Yeah. Governor Daniel f he died in 1891, just after being in the government mansion for about four or five. . And so 1890s the late, the last ghost that we can really finger is ah, this is some event or has been repeated through Raleigh history.

They can say, ah this place has something going on. It's supposed to be the spirit of this person,

so what does his ghost do? How was he, how was his presence felt inside the mansion?

Sure. To go back by Daniel Fon, to bring it back full circle, he served in the Civil War, was a lieutenant colonel, was actually captured in the fighting at Roanoke Island.

And in saw that trauma, so by the time he was elected governor he had been a a widower. And brought his children into the covers mansion. Now, F was not a skinny guy, He was a very portly fellow, so he had a special bay bed made for him to fit. And whenever his kids crawled into bed with him, he made room for them as well.

So it seemed that he, the spirit of good. Governor Fow had such a connection to this bed that later on when Governor Bob Scott in the late 1960s took the bed out because it was, he was too tall for it. That's when they started noticing a lot of, knocking in the walls and a lot of events and noises they could not explain.

And they attributed to Daniel f wanting his bed back. So like Governor Scott moved his bed back in and supposedly the noises diss.

So the noises are still nonexistent today. The bed is still there

today. That's a great question. You wanna go find out? I do wanna go find. I go find out too. Cause you know, it's always fun to see.

Prove these you

governors you Cooper will let us in to see if the bed is still there. Do we not know? I don't

know. I this's one of these things is we try to base a lot of these myths in reality, I would love to find out if the bed is still there. I'm gonna be shocked if it was, but

now. One of the questions that I'm, I would like to ask is, since you are in this role as a museum director, my guess is that you are in touch with museum directors of other towns and cities across the south, or certainly across North Carolina. Is what you're doing with True Crime and this kind of connection to Ghost Stories is this something, a theme that's being Embraced by other directors and other museums.

And cuz I can think of a lot of cities, for instance, that have more older buildings than Raleigh. I Raleigh has a lot of new construction and we, we have some wonderful older buildings, but we also lost a lot of those, as things got torn down and rebuilt other cities like Asheville and I think of Hillsborough where you were, maybe there's some old structures in those sounds.

I'm just curious if.

There's a real debate among public historians. It's like, how do you teach history? And then all of a sudden these myths come into play Some museums embrace that and run their ghost tours and make a lot of money, which museums always need to keep operating.

But then on the other side it's Hey, these are just stories and they're not based in reality. And Ghost Tour still fuzzy out there. So a lot of museums. Don't embrace that. We have a lot of discussions in the City of Raleigh Museum about how to handle, talking about ghost and a lot of historic sites get a little uneasy when patrons run up.

It's is it on it? Is it on it? And you're like maybe, no. So it is each museum in it has their own decisions to make about trying to figure out how do they talk about ghost and do they promote this ghost idea of ghost. So

Obviously I'm gonna run out at some point here and do one of these true crime tours of yours, but if I was visiting anywhere else in North Carolina, anywhere any other museums you'd recommend that are doing something really cool like this that you'd send us in that direction?

Hillsborough they do a ghost tour every year. And Hillsborough, if you've never been. It's just a creepy town. It's so old, and, I just love to joke that, oh, we this haunted house must be on top of an Indian burial ground. Hillsborough is on top of an Indian burial ground.

So so many centuries of history there that it just, I think, is just soaked into every crevice on Hillsborough. So that's a great place to really just walk around and soak up this centuries of history and all that entails. Yeah. Take a drive to the Western triangle.

There we go. My mother worked in that library years ago, that public library in Hillsborough,

Oh, where the museum

that being a cool old building.

Yes. And a creepy old building as well. Because between the museum where you're talking about, and the Presbyterian church, it's only about 10 feet because the old library used to be part of the the sessions house for the Presbyterian church. And so when you go down into the basement of the museum and you're going to the bathroom, you were literally like feet away from buried people through the wall.

Wow. And I could swear one time I heard some scratching noises, but, oh no. That could've been me working too late. That's either

a ghost or a rat, and either way I'm out. Nope, not staying there.

Raleigh has been seeing a lot of changes, particularly in downtown Raleigh re in recent years. A lot of buildings being torn down, Old homes being torn down are renovated.

What happens to the ghost if there's a ghost in that building? Do you have any thoughts about that? Do the ghost stay? Stay through the renovation process in the new building, or do they still haunt that area? That's what would you

think? That's a great question. Yeah. It's been long since long time since I got my degree in Ghost, so I forgot most of what, but I've learned about how that works.

But I don't know. If ghosts are a thing that, that energy expended in life somehow stayed with a place. So one of the ghost stories that I found that nobody knows about comes from the newspaper from like 1905. And it was a house that was built where the Museum of Natural Science is.

So I'm curious to go and talk to those folks at the museum and say, Hey, do you guys have any weird stuff happen? Because I've got evidence of a ghost being at the house that was here before the museum was built. So I'm just curious to prove that. To say, Hey, are you guys seeing any weird

stuff?

What is the story behind that? Do you know what

happened? Yeah, so it was a, it was like a felony named j h Alfred and he had been, he was a printer and he was killed by one of his business partners and lived at the house with the Natural Science Museum was. And so the house was sold and a new fella moved in and he spent one night in there.

He is Can't do it. . So much weird stuff going on, noises and instantly sold a house. Yeah. I'm curious to follow that up and to see if people who lived in that house subsequently had any unique experiences or, is there some, is that ghost still on that site or did it go away with a house?

So

that would see, that could answer my question about, , about if go stay or if they are demolished with the demolishing of the building. .

Now one story I can tell you that kinda speaks to that is going back to Hillsborough again for the Presbyterian Church, and one of the stories I had always heard is that people would see a figure walking around the church, but they only saw him from the torso. Where they had moved the levels of the floors. And so he, this spirit must have been walking on a previous floored level and we could only see him sticking up from the chest up as he's walking around. Today. Are we

sure he wasn't just cut in half and that's how he died? That's what I would guess. So one thing you touched on a little bit ago was Raleigh's Red Light District.

I don't know anything about this. It's probably because I'm pure of heart and soul. , can you tell us about the Red Light District and why why there are so many stories of Ghost and things that come out of this?

Getting back to our true crime stories that, if you guys are, where Transfer Food Hall is.

Next time you're eating there, just keep in mind that was the very heart of Raleigh's Red Light District at the turn of the century. Oh, interesting. We've mapped all the brothels that were around that East Dvy Street location and just, the newspapers are full of some of these just sad stories of these women who, or worked in these areas or.

Or men who arrived in Raleigh jumped off the train on and took a wagon down to the East D street, never to be seen again. . And, some of the stories we've done on our previous dark Raleigh tours, just heart wrenching about, these women who fall in love with these men and just have get involved in these just relationships that turn into suicides and murders and it's just you.

Hard stories of people who lived in this industry in Raleigh. And what time period are we talking about? So we're probably looking at from 1900. 1920. Oh,

okay. That's actually more recent than I was thinking you'd

say. Yep. And East Raleigh has, there's a place we're trying to find called Vinegar Hill, which was truly the late 19th century red light district over Raleigh.

Why do we not know where that is?

It's a little fuzzy. Trying to get some, who, who is going to be writing about their trip to Vinegar Hill? Dear Mother went to Vinegar Hill today, had a blast. . So it's, it's a nefarious area of town, so it's ill defined. And even the origins, Why Vinegar Hill?

Why does that mean? Yeah, why vinegar?

I don't know. I don't even wanna know that.

I think that sounds fantastic.

Yeah it's hard to somehow pull some of these more nefarious and darker stories out of the historical records, cuz not everybody's like bragging about going there or working there.

So tell us more about the building where your museum is. Briggs, is it Briggs Building? Briggs Hardware building. Yeah. Tell us about the history of

this building. So Thomas Briggs and his family were well known as SA blind builders hardware, basically just a construction firm. And after the Civil War, they really. Put together their mercantile business and established their store where our location is now on Fable Street. And so they really singlehandedly, almost helped rebuild the city after the Civil War.

So almost every screw nail board in building of Oakwood came out of the Briggs hardware. So in 1874 when the business is really booming, they build the building we're in now. Beautiful. Considered one of Raleigh's first skyscrapers, and so it's a four story building, one of the most iconic buildings on Fayetteville. They had their hardware store there until the early 1990s when they moved off to Atlantic Avenue. The building was sold and the old Raleigh City Museum moved in, renovated the building, and has been, have been there ever since. And the Briggs family went out of business just two months short of their hundred and 50th birth.

So they are a long family and the building so much of Raleigh can trace their DNA back to that building. So it was a, Catholic mass was held there, the beginning of the Natural Science Museum. It was a National Guard Armory at one time. And so many people can trace their genealogy back to it.

And so for our dark rally tours, I always start talking about, we start the tour about the suicide that took place in the Briggs building.

It's interesting. That you talk about the iconic nature of that building. In our current issue of Midtown Magazine, we ran a an art competition, an art contest for students, and the winning piece was an image of Briggs Hardware building. There's a great painting of it in the magazine right now,

It's a St.

a lot of artists.

won the contest and it really is, it's very beautiful. It,

It is, and I'm sure they're not the first artist to think that building was worth taking a look at.

oh it's gorgeous. It's tall ceilings and press 10 roof and perhaps the most. Unique feature of it is right through the entire center of the building, is this beautiful skylight, it was built before electricity. So how do you get light in the middle of your store? And so it's just a gorgeous building and creepy.

So

tell us about the suicide that. Supposedly happened there, or is it supposed, Do we know for a fact? It happened there? It's a fact. And I, so they didn't write about the Red Light District, but they did write about suicides and Briggs

hardware. Yeah. And it's a, it's an interesting story and it takes place during the Depression.

And I think there was a young man who had a brand new family and got a job, which were very hard to come by during an depression driving for a laundry company. So as he's delivering laundry, one day he wrecks his truck. So he says, Oh no, the not this my, I'm gonna lose my job, my livelihood, my family.

So with the benevolence of the laundry company that gave him another truck. And of course, you know what happened to that truck? He wrecked the truck again. Oh. So after that, he walks in the Briggs hardware, goes up to the counter, and he asked the clerk to buy a rifle and a box of bullets. He puts on his $5 bill, the clerk puts the rifle on, the bullets on the counter, and the clerk turns around to get his change.

And so he loads the rifle and kills himself in the Briggs building. Oh, wow. And so the, it's a sad story, but the funniest part of it was when they interviewed the clerk said that the gentleman didn't even wait for his change.

maybe that's why he's still there. .

Yeah, we the, we don't see a lot of spirit activity in the Briggs building.

The elevators close and open by themselves all the time, so we always think Mr. Briggs for opening the door for us when we need it. But yeah, we don't see a lot of stuff we can't explain going on in, in the building. So

what do you think is the strangest local crime story you have heard?

The strange, strangest, most unique

the one that I've actually done this monologue before I found the story research that did the monologue and, hanging out in an alley. On Fayetteville Street on a Friday night for five hours dressed in historic clothing is fascinating endeavor in itself.

I learned a lot about strange aliens by talking to a lot of people I encountered, but that's another story. And the story is pretty horrific, and it's the story of Walter Bingham. And he came from a very illustrious Orange County family. And who were, I called him some of the meanest people in Orange County.

And Walter Bingham had he had gone deaf early in his life due to a railroad accident he was playing around in injured himself. And so he was at the deaf, dumb and blind school here in Raleigh where he fell in love with Lizzy Turton. Now Lizzy was also deaf and she was teaching at the. As this relationship developed Walter became very obsessed with her and very jealous when she began traveling with another doctor from the school to promote deaf education.

In December of 1886 Walter picks her up and they go shopping a Fable Street, and then they go for a ride and they're never seen. And so people say, ah, the newly weeds have gone eloped and escaped, but it's only after a couple days when they don't find evidence of either of them that people start looking around.

And so she is finally found right outside Morrisville, and it's a horrible scene when they find her, that she's got a pistol shot inside of her head and her throat is cut. And the. Crows had finally found her and began to peck away at the most soft tissue. They could find her eyes, but she was laid out on a bed of leaves and she had a wedding ring on her finger.

And so the hunt goes out for Walter Bingham. And so it's just this man hunt and all these stories pop up of where he is. And so if you go to Wilmington today, where she's from, on her headstone that her parents wanted the world. History to know that she was murdered by Walter Bingham in 1886. So all that's on her headstone.

So was he ever found? No. He just disappears. Oh, wow. He just disappears. And so his ghost is definitely somewhere. Yeah. But it's a story of handicapped on handicapped crime. So these this strangest death, these two deaf people who ended up in this horrific crime. Wow.

I heard that you have said that Durham.

It's the freakiest town in the triangle. Why do you say

that? Durham, my hometown. . Durham for so many years had been the blue collar town of the triangle. Chapel Hill had the university, Raleigh had its government, and both of them were founded before the Civil War. So Durham is truly a city of the New South, so it really explodes onto tobacco industry after the war.

So you have all of these nevo reach coming in. You have freed African Americans coming into Durham. So it's just this different organic origin stories than it's Sisters of Chapel Hill and Raleigh. It became such a blue collar town that you see a lot of things happen there that don't happen a lot in Chapel Hill and Raleigh.

For instance, a lot of the blues music, a lot of African Americans moving in to play for the tobacco market. So Durham has such a deep music history and Chapel Hill Raleigh don't really have a lot of that, that in, it's in its dna. So for so long, Durham's been didn't have a lot of growth.

But nowadays Durham is like the new it place in the triangle. It's everything's New restaurants, new buildings. Deepak

has gone a long way in helping that, I believe. ,

American Tobacco was the really genesis, so we're in bulls, so it's just a, it's just an interesting town and to have seen its highs and lows of living there.

It's just a place where it's the last place in the triangle where, everything is new and fresh and everything is just being built in crazy rapid pace. That's why I can't get, it's funky.

It sounds each town has got its own thing, its own flavor, its own little yeah, uniqueness. And I'm sure we could probably have this conversation with people from almost anywhere in the south or certainly anywhere in North Carolina. And we would find, they would tell us all sorts of unique stories about their town.

So a lot of people now talk about Dorothy Dick. It's been revitalized. We have concerts out there, the Sunflower Field dog parts. It's just really a beautiful place to go and spend a day. However, it has a lot of history. So can you tell us a little bit about the Dorothy Dick's history and the ghost that might be involved there?

Different stories and the cemetery that's there. Can you get into that a little bit with

us? Oh, sure. We really got into the history of Dorothy Dicks several years ago when we did an exhibit on the park. The city had bought it in 2015. So we wanted to do our role to say, Hey let's talk about the history of this new shining park on the hill.

That Raleigh wants to make this area. So we wanna talk about the patient experience, the employees that work there, and the future plans for the park. And so once we started getting to that, it's just a incredible story about the patients who were there and all the different Treatments that they underwent at a time where we really didn't know about how to treat mental illness.

So some of them were quite sad, but what really blew us away that before it was a hospital for a century and a half, it was plantation. So we really got into understanding who was on this plantation and the family who ran it and who was enslaved there. And that is an incredible story that we were able to trace some of those enslaved people from the 1790s to living.

In New York today, we would bring them down and show them their family history. That opened up a huge can of worms. But, on the park itself, it's got many of the buildings, original buildings that were there from the 19th century, but it's got the cemetery where a lot of those unclaimed people who are abandoned were just buried on the park.

Mostly patients or people from the

plantation? Most all patients, I think. Okay. And we were shocked to find how many. Native Americans were buried there who sought treatment in the 1920s. Oh wow. Okay. So that was something that surprised us. And the plantation house is just right off the park, boundaries on the backside, the Spring Hill Plantation house.

And so that's that's another interesting history on it. And as we talked about before the Civil War found the park that. For about two weeks at the end of the war, about 15,000 soldiers camped all around the asylum and really left in their letters and diaries how they interacted with these patients who were in the hospital.

And it's just a fascinating to, to see how these men almost made fun of the patients, even befriended them in some ways. But how many of these men, ultimately in the coming years, would end up in asylums themselves? Yeah it's the, We've just cracked the lid on Dorothy Dick's history, but it's out there in, in so many depths and so many levels and so many places that we're just scratching the service.

How do

we find out more about the Dorothy Dick's

history? So every April I lead a sy walking tour. But I think my next just general history walking tour is gonna be on October 8th of this year. Okay. And so I would just go in the Dick Park Dick's Park website and in just kind of tool around for their upcoming events.

But yeah, on October 8th is gonna be the next walk.

So Dorothy Dicks is really interesting enough for it to have its own focused

tour. It is. And one of the great things that being as a city employee, we got the super secret behind the scenes tour of all the buildings and. Your imagination could run wild about what an abandoned asylum looks like.

You'd be pretty close. Oh, it's just, had all of the patient's names and their medicines they were taking on dry erase board still there and it's, it looked as if they had just walked out. And so we saw a lot of the patient graffiti and we heard some of the stories about some of the maintenance people who interacted with the patients.

And it just goes to show you just. How mental health can change behaviors so much, and it's just fascinating that it's so far out of what we, how we consider being normal, quote unquote normal, but how mental health has changed people. And some of those stories are just

fascinating. And the ethical treatment of people who are suffering as well.

Yes. How that's, gone through evolution as.

Oh, for sure. And some of those early treatments are, we would consider fairly gastly today about how we thought we could cure these people, hydrotherapy, electro shock, just all of these ways that we thought we were helping folks back in the day.

I'm quite blown away. I'm a Raleigh native. My family has been here for generations and I never knew how many those stories we have here until I began researching this. You think about Charleston or even Beauford at the coast with pirate stories, but I've just never heard a lot about Raleigh Ghost stories, so this is really interesting to me.

Can you tell us how to find out more about your museum and about the dark Raleigh? Tour.

Sure. Our tour is, would probably be advertised on the friends of the city of Raleigh Museum. They are, they're, it's basically a fundraiser for them, so I would check out their website and just be, go ahead and pencil in your calendar for that last weekend in October.

That's when we always do our tours. And so the museum is open from Tuesday through Sunday nine to 4:00 PM right on payable street, and the Pope House is open from nine to four on the weekends.

Okay, great. Thank you so much for being here today, Ernest. I can't wait to see you on, I am definitely gonna te yeah, I am definitely gonna take you up on the tour.

I'm very excited about that.

This has been really excellent to talk with you today and yeah, we look forward to seeing how your research brings out all these new stories each year in the years to come.

It's quite unbelievable some of the things you told us today. Had to squeeze that one more thing in

I'm gonna pretend I didn't hear that one. I'm gonna pretend I didn't hear that one. Yeah,

There's a lot of ghost puns out there, guys. I'm here all day.