The Unrest Podcast
The Unrest Podcast
Real Life Haunt: Jason
Join us for a spine-tingling journey through Charlotte's haunted past, as we uncover some of the city's darkest secrets and explore the ghostly legends that have been passed down through the ages.
Discover the chilling history of a hotel infamous for its tragic past, including tales of people jumping to their death and other haunting secrets hidden behind its doors.
We'll also explore the mysterious sightings of a woman's spirit that still lingers in another local building. Plus, we'll discuss the importance of preserving Charlotte's past, including an ancient headstone that's in desperate need of restoration.
To donate to the headstone:
Charlie Houck Killed by A Lion – Spooky CLT
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From murderers to money launderers, thieves to thugs – police officers from the...
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Real Life Haunt: Jason
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The unrest, the unrest, the Unrest Podcast, podcast, podcast.
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Welcome to the Unrest podcast.
00:00:19 Speaker 3
I'm Madeline Greene.
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And I'm Kaitlin stansell.
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Hey, if you haven't done so yet, go ahead and hit subscribe so you can get the latest episode on whatever app that you're listening to our podcast on.
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Yes, and this week's real life Hunt takes place in Charlotte. You know, it's not too far from me.
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I've been there quite a few times, but when you think of Charlotte, you know it is a booming city here in North Carolina.
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And sometimes you.
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Don't think of it as super historical, and that's what this real life hunt is going to tell us about.
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Is that Charlotte actually has a lot of history and a lot.
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Of spooky tails. So take.
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I mean, I've always been interested in the paranormal.
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I think it started with being interested in horror movies.
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I I'm the youngest of four boys in my family, so I started watching scary movies, probably younger than I should have.
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And then, you know, the fact that my name is Jason.
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I probably didn't help because then my my idol became Jason Voorhees and that's what my older brother, who actually named me, told me that he named me.
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After so it all worked out and I moved to Charlotte in 2015 and I was working in hospitality at the time. So I was talking to a lot of people.
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That were like coming to town.
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And somehow I got convinced that, like, Charlotte doesn't have history or culture, and that's kind of what people talk about online about it.
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And I was on a ghost tour with my now wife.
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It was one of our first dates.
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And I remember being on the tour and being like, like, what do you mean?
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There's no history or culture like here learning about like, all of this eye opening stuff.
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And I was like, man, I need to tell people about this.
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So I started an Instagram.
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Page called it.
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Spooky CLT and I and I wanted to kind of like be a one stop.
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Shop for everything.
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That is spooky about Charlotte, and at first I thought it was gonna be like a handful of stories that I heard on this tour.
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And as soon as I opened up Pandora's box, I realized, like man, there there really is a lot of weird stuff that happens here.
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So I mean like ghost stories, big ones that are confirmed by local businesses, small ones that people have sent me in like their own personal houses and neighborhoods.
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There's a lot of true crime stories, a lot of like metaphysical.
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Places that are available in Charlotte and just just everything.
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So I started taking it all in and then doing my best to.
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Put it in front of people to try to change that narrative that Charlotte doesn't have any history because, like, if it doesn't have any history, then why am I talking about gold mines underneath the city that are abandoned?
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And if it doesn't have any like culture, then why am I talking about how like Charlotte's history of bootlegging?
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It literally forms NASCAR.
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So all of these things.
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I was just trying to change the narrative about Charlotte a little bit and.
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Then also.
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You know, I've I've lived in Wilmington.
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I've visited Savannah and Asheville and stuff, and those are places that identify themselves as spooky.
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You know, places with haunted history.
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And I never saw Charlotte doing that.
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And I'm like, why not?
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You know, there's all this stuff out here, so if I could put that in front of people, like maybe it could become a haunted destination as well.
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The the big ones that I like to talk about are #1 we have.
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A haunted hotel.
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So if you're here in this and you're from.
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You know, they like close by or the area or even just anywhere.
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And you're like, I want to visit Charlotte.
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I highly recommend staying at the Dunhill Hotel.
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It is on Tryon St.
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which is like the Main St.
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in our city center.
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And it is a building that's almost 100 years old at this point. It was built during the Great Depression or sorry, it it actually opens up right before the Great Depression changed owners a bunch of times.
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But when they were doing renovations in the 80s, they actually found an intact skeleton at a bottom of an elevator.
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Left. So and then. Now if you were to go drink at their bar, staying in their hotel, talk to the staff, they would tell you about all these different types of paranormal happenings that happen, the main one being there's this room 906 and.
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People have experienced different things, but the main story is that if you stay there, you may see things falling outside by the window.
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And staff will tell you that when the building first opened up in the Great Depression, it was like the tallest building in Uptown.
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So people, would, you know, put all of their money into staying there for the night, request the top floor and then and then leap to the bottom as a way to get out of their financial troubles.
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And it happens so often that it it got a reputation in particularly this room 906.
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Now researching that I found incidents that were more recent in like the 80s and 90s, not so much the the Great Depression.
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But like if you were to go to the hotel right now and look over the like the balcony on the right hand side, you could still see.
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Densed HVAC units from the last person who have done.
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This there's all this crazy stuff that happens.
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There's a the story of like, a woman in white who walks through the bank.
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Sales people have claimed to have been laying in their room and seeing shadows change into like the silhouettes of people on their ceiling.
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And then if you were to talk to your staff every time I go there and get a drink, I'd ask the bartender and I hear something different every time.
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So something weird is definitely happening over there at the Dunhill Hotel.
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So my wife and I, we stayed there after our after our wedding actually did a little staycation, but unfortunately we were celebrating.
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So we got a little too drunk.
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If I were to have seen a ghost, I I would not have remembered it the next morning we we try to go there as often as we can, even just to grab a drink or grab dinner and then just catch up with the staff there and see what.
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The latest.
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Weird stuff to happen is here we're talking.
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In March.
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The day March 13th was the anniversary of the Tryon House apartment fire.
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This old apartment.
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In Uptown once again on Tryon St. just like the Dunhill, it's just a few blocks over and back in the 1940s, it was called the Guthrie Apartments, and on March 13th there was this crazy fire and it had started in the basement boiler room like leaked the gas meters, which then fed into the gas and it caused this.
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The fireball to go up the elevators and just spread throughout the building.
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Super quick to the point where tenants were stuck in their rooms and having to jump outside of their windows to escape and just around nine people.
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So there's this tragic pass of it and it's still operating today.
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The the main thing that I've heard multiple people talk about and it would be interesting to hear if they were staying in the same room, but they would see a a woman at the foot of their bed.
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And one gentleman I was talking to said that he had found these paintings in the apartment building out by the trash, and he brought them into his unit and ever since then, he saw this woman who?
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Would just sit at.
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The foot of his bed and look at this painting on the wall.
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And So what he believed?
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Is that it?
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Was this woman named Rowena?
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And I don't know how he knew that name, but he said she was just the spirit that would hang out in there.
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And she was peaceful and kind of look at.
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You know what he believed was her belongings?
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But when I was looking into this and reading the newspaper articles about.
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The incident in the 19.
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30s There was a clip about a young woman named Rowena.
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Who they had.
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Found dead next to her bed and she was in a praying position.
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He was trapped in her room, didn't see a way out, so she just got on her knees next to her bed.
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And that is where she passed.
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And when I posted.
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That story on Instagram.
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I've had people tell me that they've had similar things happen to them, and even one woman said that her mother, who lived in those apartments, also had a womanly spirit hang out at the foot of her bed and she would throw like a shoe at her to to.
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Make her go.
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Away that that is just like the main spirit.
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And a fun little narrative.
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Other things that happen in there is people have dreams of bleeding walls.
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People have heard what they thought were like the sounds of someone throwing their body against the wall on the other side when it was in their apartment.
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And they knew no one was there.
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Just different types of like poltergeist activity like that the the apartment building has since taken down like this main awning that says trying house apartments.
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I feel like they're trying to rebrand their name because like two years ago we did this news segment that was a short series about local hauntings.
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And that was like the most popular one.
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So I feel like they saw it, and now they're trying to rebrand a little bit heavily associate them with the tormented spirits.
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Personally, I believe that.
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Overall, I I'm not convinced that like any place can be more haunted than another place when we're talking about like spirits, I think it's just like that's that is the world around us that we live.
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Whether or not people have like documents and and talked about it, that's a different story and created these like narratives to share with people.
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But I think overall.
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Anywhere can be haunted, and I think most places are.
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However, that's a funny thing that you asked is that cause.
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Try on is like one of the.
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Oldest roads in Charlotte, and it used to be on a Native American trading path.
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And all the way up up north from like to Pennsylvania or something like that.
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There's, there's two roads in Uptown that collide, and that's where the center of the city is.
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It's trade and Tryon and those are the two, like trading paths.
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And that's why Charlotte became a city is because it was like this trading.
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Web and then people built around that, so it's definitely historic Rd.
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If there was something that happened before there was buildings on it, it would be happening on those two.
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I have always been a a very big skeptic.
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My my wife is more of the sensitive one where it won't be go to these places.
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She'll be the ones that like, see shadow figures and like feel different sensations while they're there personally.
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Like for me I'm always doubting stuff.
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The most recent thing to happen to me.
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So was I was last year, I was on or part of a convention, and I was like on the paranormal side of things.
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So I was speaking in these different.
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Events and one of them was talking about Ouija boards, so we had brought our own personal one to this event was talking about it.
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And overall, my message to people was like, there's nothing like intrinsically evil about wiji boards.
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It's more of you get out of what you put into it.
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So if you're going in there afraid and they're looking for something weird to happen, like it's probably going to happen.
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But if you're going out there and you have, like peaceful spirit and like.
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That's what you're.
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Doing and that's probably what's gonna happen to you.
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That being said, that weekend we had the wiji board up in our bedroom and I didn't notice at the time, but apparently you're not supposed to leave the plan.
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Chat in the box, which I had done and I had done that and things were just like really weird in our home like we were both having, like, really bizarre.
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Dreams for about 3 days in a row.
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Our cats were just going crazy, like, nonstop.
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My wife was smelling weird things like just the vibes were like completely off and the nail in the coffin was one night I was my hand was my hands was hanging over the side of the bed and I felt something touched the back.
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Of my hand.
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And as soon as it happened and I pulled my hand back, our two cats ran.
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Into the room.
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So, like confirming that it was not them because they were not in the room prior, they had just gotten there and instantly we saged to the house, we put the the whiteboard in the attic, took the plant chair out and we had this like the a friend gave us this in quotations and chanted.
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That's supposed to ward off spirits, and we put that on the whiteboard and instantly dreams were back to normal.
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No weird smells.
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Just felt like right again.
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So that is.
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The spookiest thing that has happened to me recently, so I'm currently working on this project.
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You know, when I say I am into spooky things, I do not just mean ghosts and stuff.
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I think that is spooky is like a very wide umbrella that a lot of things fall into.
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One of those things are like cemeteries.
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And historic preservation and stuff in this local cemetery in Charlotte, it's called.
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From what?
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There is a headstone of a gentleman and his name was Charlie Hawk and he was killed by a lion and Charlotte does not have lions.
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Obviously we're, you know, not that part of the world.
00:14:00 Speaker 4
So it was weird to see a headstone of someone that was killed by a lion in Charlotte, Charlotte.
00:14:05 Speaker 4
So I had, like, looked into it.
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And I had made a post about it.
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I found that he was an animal trainer in the circus in town, and he was he had just fed a lion, and that scratched his arm.
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And then the scratch led to an infection that eventually killed him that.
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Week but I had done all this work and eventually I went back to visit his headstone and take some new pictures and it was cracked and broken and on the floor.
00:14:31 Speaker 4
So I reached out to the cemetery said like, hey, what would it look like to fix this?
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And they let me know about this Angel donor program that they had.
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Just come out with where you can donate to specific headstone restorations.
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So I said sign me up.
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I wanted to do this for Charlie.
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You know, I Instagram.
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I have somewhat of a following, so I said maybe I can Crowdsource this so that just started at the beginning of March.
00:14:59 Speaker 4
So I am raising money currently to have this headstone restored because I want Charlie Hawk, who was killed by a lion, to to continue to have a headstone and Charlotte's cemetery and the timing.
00:15:11 Speaker 4
This lines up where the cemetery has an event called voices from the past, where they have like actors and volunteers.
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Represent notable people that were buried in Elmwood.
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I will be.
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Out there and Elmwood acting as Charlie talking to people as him, explaining how I was killed by a lion.
00:15:33 Speaker 4
Like what my life was like and, you know, trying to get some people to donate so I could have this headstone fixed.
00:15:43 Speaker 2
OK, first of all, Jason has so many great stories in this episode.
00:15:48 Speaker 2
I loved every single one of them.
00:15:51 Speaker 2
But first of all, the guy.
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Killed by the lion.
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I mean, all the all the little things happening after he found his gravestone.
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Like, what a weird coincidence.
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And what a, like, strange way.
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To die.
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I think that's so interesting.
00:16:07 Speaker 3
I yeah, I definitely.
00:16:08 Speaker 3
I think that's what's so cool about old.
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Old and like cemeteries and graveyards and old tombstones is, you know, they put all that information on there.
00:16:18 Speaker 3
I wish they still did that.
00:16:20 Speaker 2
You know, it's like when it's like when someone dies on Facebook.
00:16:24 Speaker 2
I'm like, always searching the comments to see, like what happened because no one.
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Ever. No one.
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Ever says no and it's so funny you say that.
00:16:31 Speaker 3
Is literally today I'm on there.
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A girl that I went to high school.
00:16:36 Speaker 3
We went to high school with her sister, died and it's been like years and every year she puts up something and I'm like, how did she die?
00:16:47 Speaker 3
Like it's driving me crazy because I want to know how she died when it's.
00:16:51
And nothing.
00:16:51 Speaker 2
Not even like a morbid curiosity, it's just like.
00:16:54 Speaker 2
That this would.
00:16:55 Speaker 2
Be nice to know.
00:16:56 Speaker 2
So I can also grieve with you.
00:16:59 Speaker 3
Right.
00:17:00 Speaker 3
And so it's definitely interesting, you know?
00:17:02 Speaker 3
And then to find out that Tombstone was cracked and and it's so cool that he wants to fix that.
00:17:09 Speaker 3
So if any of you want to donate to the cars, I'll put the link in the description so you can help get this lion tamer a new tombstone.
00:17:21 Speaker 3
But other than that, I mean it's just really interesting. You know how I love history. And it seems like Charlotte has a bunch of history and it's just one of those places that you never really, I never have looked into Charlotte's history.
00:17:33 Speaker 3
It's not like a Charleston or a Savannah.
00:17:36 Speaker 3
It's a it's a Charlotte.
00:17:37 Speaker 3
It's a big booming city that you don't really think about.
00:17:41 Speaker 2
Well, and it feels like New City too.
00:17:44 Speaker 2
Not like New York City when, you know, it's been around, like, forever.
00:17:47 Speaker 2
It feels like new city.
00:17:50 Speaker 3
So definitely love those stories.
00:17:52 Speaker 3
And I definitely want to go try out that hotel.
00:17:55 Speaker 2
Yes, we're going to go to.
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Dinner there.
00:17:58 Speaker 3
And see if we get any spooky.
00:18:00 Speaker 2
Vibes and the other thing I was going to mention is the Ouija board.
00:18:03 Speaker 2
OK, that makes total sense because I feel like that little whatever you call it that.
00:18:09 Speaker 2
They use the Ouija board.
00:18:11 Speaker 2
I mean, that's like a portal essentially.
00:18:13 Speaker 2
You like you're leaving open if you leave it in there in the box.
00:18:18 Speaker 3
Ohh yeah, I'm pretty sure we've said this on here before that one time that we played with one at my house, but I wouldn't touch it.
00:18:26 Speaker 2
Madeline, just let everyone else get haunted.
00:18:29 Speaker 2
I'm pretty sure I even asked a.
00:18:30 Speaker 2
Question I don't.
00:18:33 Speaker 2
Whatever happened to that wiji board?
00:18:36 Speaker 3
I have no idea.
00:18:37 Speaker 3
It was my brothers.
00:18:38 Speaker 2
Ohh gosh yeah.
00:18:40 Speaker 3
There's no telling where that wiji board's been.
00:18:44 Speaker 2
That might be interesting wherever you end up finding it.
00:18:47 Speaker 2
Yeah, but if you have a real life hunt that you want to share with us here.
00:18:51 Speaker 2
On the unrest podcast.
00:18:53 Speaker 2
E-mail us all you got to do is send your story to theunrestpodcast@gmail.com or.
00:19:00 Speaker 3
You can check us out on social media. Everything is about social media. We are getting new followers every day, but we want to reach 1000 followers on Instagram and we will do a giveaway to please help us reach that goal. Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, all of the good social media.
00:19:21 Speaker 3
Things that are great for your mental health.
00:19:24 Speaker 2
And until next time on.
00:19:26 Speaker 2
Rest in peace.
