Huge, huge thanks to Kathryn Leonardi for her transcription of this episode!
The transcript can be read in full below, or downloaded as a pdf at this link.
Transcript: Ouija Broads Episode 96, The Witches Castle.
Special thanks to Kathryn Leonardi for her transcription work.
Opening theme music (Me and the Man in the Moon) plays and fades in.
LIZ: You are listening to Ouija Broads. This is Liz!
DEVON: This is Devon. You didn’t do a slate, my friend.
LIZ: Oh, I didn’t! Okay. Let’s do one now. 3,2,1… **clap noise**
DEVON: The slate is my favorite part.
LIZ: I’m sorry I left it out, I don’t know-- I think I was just so busy yelling about work that I assumed we had already done it.
DEVON: **laughing**
LIZ: That’s what that’s like.
DEVON: Nope, nope, just you being mad.
LIZ: Mmhmm, just me being mad. All right, what I have for you today is an Oregon story--
DEVON: Okay.
LIZ: -- because I felt like we hadn’t done Oregon in a little bit.
DEVON: I love Oregon.
LIZ: I like to shake it up and I like to do some things that we haven’t done in a while. And then of course, I think that we are doing that and then I look and I’m like, “we just did, like, eight ghosts in a row.”
DEVON: Whatevs, it happens. I think you are very equitable. You always try to make sure that we hit every place that we consider Pacific Northwest as well as all the genres that we cover in a good rotation. I am just like animals animals animals ghost, more animals animals animals another ghost.
LIZ: **laughing** But you’re so good at it.
DEVON: I love those ones.
LIZ: I thought since we have had so much uplifting stuff I could get away with a ghost that was the result of a murder. Do you think we could handle that?
DEVON: I think so. Fuck. Let me get a seatbelt on this chair though.
LIZ: All right, yeah. Shake your shoulders out, take a deep breath, it’s okay-- it happened a long time ago, if that helps.
DEVON: All right. But I’m just worried that I am real close to Oregon and what if the ghost is still there and what if it’s going to get me. It’s getting dark out Liz, and we’re recording this at night.
LIZ: How far can ghosts travel from where they haunt?
DEVON: Well, depends I guess…
LIZ: Yeah, cause if they’re a train ghost, pretty far.
DEVON: Yes. Precisely. So, I am not sure what you are going to tell me. I am just going to buckle in and not look out the dark scary window that’s over here to my left and listen to your sultry voice.
LIZ: It’s so sultry. I just got over one cold and I am starting another cold, and I burned a bunch of twigs today because we had our trees worked on. So really just, hitting all the best things to do for somebody who has an important thing to do with their voice in their life.
DEVON: Mmhmm.
LIZ: Okay. What I wanted to tell you about was the Witch’s Castle at Macleay Park.
DEVON: What the fuck is this?
LIZ: **laughing** I love castle stories. We haven’t done a castle in a while.
DEVON: Yeah. God damn. But it’s got like all the words that I Google search. This should have come up in my search history. How do I not know about this?
LIZ: It may sound more familiar as I get into it. But we will see. So near downtown Portland just to the west-- oh that’s another reason why I wanted to do this one, is because I like trying to do ones where people can actually go there. Sometimes it’s like this place is long gone, or it’s private property, or there’s nothing to see. This, you can straight up go. So if you go to Forest Park, which is a 5000-acre park just west of downtown Portland--
DEVON: Fuck.
LIZ: --it’s extending for 8 miles along the Willamette, it’s the largest urban forest in the United States. So.. it’s reserved. It’s-- Portland can’t expand and take over that. There’s just this gigantic forested park.
DEVON: Take that, gentrification.
LIZ: Take that, this is for deer and raccoons.
DEVON: And some squirrels even though Liz hates them.
LIZ: Well, they’re okay there, just stay out of my dumpster. That goes for everybody.
DEVON: **laughing**
LIZ: Macleay park has 70 miles of trails. Which is pretty impressive to me.
DEVON: Oh my God. Yeah.
LIZ: But this one you don’t have to hike all day. You basically go for a mile on this one trail that is called the Lower Macleay Trail, also known as the Balch Creek Trail. And you will see on a hill, a stone building that is weathered, it has grey stones covered in moss. There’s just spaces where the windows were, it is-- the structure is still there but basically you can like walk through the doorway, you can see through the windows, there’s no roof.
DEVON: Oh cool.
LIZ: There’s an upper level and a lower level.
DEVON: Oh wow.
LIZ: It’s all deteriorated and it is known as the Witch’s Castle. Yeah… so it’s said there are strange occurrences in this area. Of course.
DEVON: Of course there are.
LIZ: So, like, mmm orbs, like you can definitely get some good orb photographs there like you can most places that aren’t paved.
DEVON: **snorts** -- that you can get anywhere, where there’s a slight amount of dust in the air and refractable light.
LIZ: Yeah, mmhmm.
DEVON: I have seen a couple photos of orbs – purported orbs. Where I am like -- oh that almost looks like it has its own luminescence. That, you know, that looks kind of legit. I wouldn’t just say that’s light refracting off dust. But those are few and far between. If you are going to get real orbs, it’s going to be around a place called the Witch’s Castle though, so I buy that.
LIZ: Yes, it has-- it reminds me a little bit of the “Thousand Steps,” in that it has a lot of different things attached to it. It actually has its own steps that lead up and of course it’s in this wet Portland forest, so of course they’re all mossed over and eerie looking too. Some people say you can actually see apparitions that seem to be fighting with each other.
DEVON: Oh!
LIZ: Some people say that it is a site for rituals.
DEVON: Mmm, of course
LIZ: Satanic rituals.
DEVON: Boooo
LIZ: Or, mmm maybe human sacrifice.
DEVON: Boo.
LIZ: Or, the bad kind of witchcraft.
DEVON: Super boo.
LIZ: There’s the story that sometimes people who have come here at night have disappeared--
DEVON: Mmm.
LIZ: --and have eventually been found wandering on the park trails completely bewildered having lost their minds. I think probably not. But there is a lot of creepy graffiti because it’s pretty heavily vandalized. And I should say “some people say” as in, NorthwesternghostandHauntings.blogspot.com
DEVON: **snorts, laughing**
LIZ (reading): “I got hammered here all the time with my buddies as do many high school kids, it’s not haunted sorry.” **laughing**
DEVON: **laughing**
LIZ (reading): Or there’s this other one I like-- “Dude, I was there Friday night, there were tons of spirits there if you know what I mean. Huge party spot.”
DEVON: Oh my God.
LIZ: **laughing**
DEVON: Oh my God.
LIZ: But then there are other people saying, I have got EVPs there, I have been pushed and touched by an entity, there’s weird stuff that you can pick up even though there is no electricity in the area.
DEVON: Okay.
LIZ: Yeah. Oh, I like this one.
LIZ (reading): “This sounds weird but I think I keep traveling here in my dreams. I finally looked it up and found this building. I have been to Portland but not to this place.” So people are all over the place as to whether it’s a totally normal place where you just go to like smoke weed and spray paint your high school’s mascot on stuff.
DEVON: Yeah.
LIZ: Or whether it’s obviously hugely full of ghosts and bad energy and warring spirits and stuff. But what we always like to do on Ouija Broads is say, “okay, so that’s what people say they’re experiencing - presuming that ghosts are real, what happened on this spot that would make that happen?”
DEVON: Yeah.
LIZ: So. Remember how I said this is Balch Creek Trail.
DEVON: Yes, and what’s it also called, sorry, the park?
LIZ: That’s Forest Park. And then its Lower Macleay Trail.
DEVON: Lower Macleay Trail, thank you. Balch Creek Trail or Lower Macleay Trail.
LIZ: I think, basically, it’s a couple of parks that got merged. So they also just call it Macleay Park.
DEVON: No fucking wonder the spirits are fighting, it’s a turf war.
LIZ: Confusing!
DEVON: So confusing.
LIZ: In the very early days of settlement in Portland, before this was on the border of Portland, it was owned by a man named Danford Balch. This was the 1850s. So Danford came out here on the Oregon Trail with his wife, Mary Jane and they had 9 kids.
DEVON: Holy shit.
LIZ: It was kind of like a Brady Bunch situation. Where it was like some of her kids from her first marriage and some of his kids. I don’t know if they had kids together but they had a lot of kids.
DEVON: Lot of kids, man.
LIZ: Nine is a lot. They had a cabin, as you do in the Oregon Trail days.
DEVON: I hope a big one.
LIZ: Yeah, **laughing** I know, right? Like, the Shining Lodge type like—it’s more of a hotel.
DEVON: **laughing** Oh, man.
LIZ: Just a little cottage.
DEVON: None of this Brady Bunch 3-bedroom bullshit for 9 people, no.
LIZ: **laughing** Well, they moved out there and they had 350 acres of land.
DEVON: All right.
LIZ: Which is hefty, and they were working on, “civilizing it”, right? So the family’s settling in, and they’re doing the settler thing. They’re going to sell some of this timber, they’re going to clear some of this land for crops. And Danford, who sometimes in the record you’ll find as Danforth, because spelling is just whatever you wanted it to be in the 19th century--
DEVON: Yeah you just get the first three letters right and the rest is a grab bag.
LIZ: Yep. In October 1858 they are clearing land, and the 9 kids, the oldest one is 15 and she’s a daughter. So he didn’t have the 7 brides for 7 brothers, like “I’ve got a bunch of young men who I can just, like, distribute to this task, I need to get some outside help.” So there was another family nearby whose name was Stump. Not why Portland is called Stumptown, but apt somehow.
DEVON: I guess. Apropos.
LIZ: Apropos! And so he hires the son from that family, who-- they’re technically in Vancouver Washington, because it’s all a big whatever. Like, I understand why they made the river the division of the state but it’s pretty arbitrary.
DEVON: Yeah.
LIZ: So he gets Mortimer Stump, who I am not sure how old he is, but he’s pretty young.
DEVON: Stop it.
LIZ: Yes, Mortimer is young. **laughing*
DEVON: Oh my God. Danford and Mortimer, I am just not into these names. But please continue. I’ll try to get down with Mortimer and Danford.
LIZ: Yes.
DEVON: I will try and be more charitable here.
LIZ: You can do it. You can envision Danford is like a Pa Ingalls wearing his flannel shirt, clearing the land, head of the household. And Mortimer is the young guy from the next household over who comes over. And so I’m unclear as to whether he was like an older teenager or in his early 20s. But he was of the age--
DEVON: Anything goes when we’re marrying off our oldest daughter.
LIZ: Oooh, you see where we’re going with this.
DEVON: I do, but tell me anyway.
LIZ: Well, so Mortimer moved in with the family because obviously he wasn’t going to commute from Vancouver, that wasn’t super convenient. And he became smitten, as they say, with Anna who is the 15-year-old daughter. And Anna is likewise smitten with him. And Mortimer goes to Danford.
DEVON: **laughing**
LIZ: What?
DEVON: Well, he’s the only man around that isn’t related to her, so of course she is.
LIZ: Right? She’s like, “Wow, you sure look like not my family.”
DEVON: **laughing** Exactly
LIZ: I love the way you’re not my stepfather. that’s cool.
DEVON: I know, right. I love the way you’re not my weird Greg Brady and I am your Marcia and we’re going to have some erotic tension here.
LIZ: **laughing**
DEVON: New genetics, yes, please. Sorry, go ahead, Anna and Mortimer.
LIZ: You are like so far ahead of me that it’s awesome.
DEVON: Ah man.
LIZ: So there’s this reciprocal positive energy and no big barriers. And of course, as we know from the Mercer Belles and so forth, you kind of needed to lock that shit down. It’s not like he could wait like 5 years and come back when Anna was 20, she would have been long gone, like long gone, of marriage or diphtheria. Who knows?
DEVON: Sick typhoid is not just a name.
LIZ: A log fell on her, a lot of things can happen. A bride of Sasquatch, that’s a perennial issue.
DEVON: Oh it is, wow.
LIZ: But Mortimer goes to Danford and says “Hello, I’d like to marry Anna, please.” And Danford says, “Absolutely not, you are my employee.”
DEVON: **gasps** What?
LIZ: So apparently they are out in the middle of nowhere, like they, all these families have come out on the Oregon Trail but apparently Danford, with his weird little Brady Bunch accidental cult compound is like, “no, I am your social superior.” It’s like, how do you figure? Like, we all wear underwear that has two buttons on the back so we can poop out the butt. Where are you coming up with this?
DEVON: Right?! **muffled laughter**
LIZ: How are you my social superior in any sense, my dude. Neither of us have seen sugar in three years. I don’t know where he is coming up with any of this.
DEVON: **through muffled laughter** You and your butt flap britches better get off your high horse.
LIZ: **laughing**
DEVON: Wonderful.
LIZ: So Danford is having none of it. And it’s not just that they’re like oh, okay, this will be awkward for a week. He’s like, “and you’re fired, and you don’t live here anymore.” And you know what is amazing? Is Mortimer didn’t go “oh well, I tried.” He and Anna, of course, elope.
DEVON: Oh ho! Saw that one coming.
LIZ: Right. So on November 4th, Anna and Mortimer move back in with his family. Because his family is not being so weird about this--
DEVON: I am sure his family is happy to have a strapping young lad back on the fucking homestead to fight wolverines and plow fucking land. And now they got themselves a house maid.
LIZ: Yeah. Better than nothing. She’s there.
DEVON: Yeah. Smart, the Stumps. Good job.
LIZ: Let me read you what Danford said about the night he came home and found that Anna had run away to marry Mortimer.
DEVON: Oh my God. Oh my God. Can I, can I guess some of the words?
LIZ: Go for it.
DEVON: Yeah there has to be, if he thinks he’s so fucking good with his little butt flap britches, like you pointed out, like he shits in a hole in the ground, then there’s got to be some kind of use of flowery language. Like he talks about his heart being besieged. Or about the, not, what’s a fancy word for double cross, or for being, you know, maligned by-- Anyway, I just, in my head it is this like, “Winter’s Evening, 7pm, I sit and stare at the flames of mine fire.” And then he talks shit. No, please tell me.
LIZ: **laughing** Okay.
LIZ (reading): “The night I came home and found the girl gone, it struck a pain to my heart. Like a knife cutting me. I ate a little supper and went to bed but did not sleep a wink all night. In the morning, at once after getting up and started for town and it seemed that my stomach would burst from anxiety and grief which were more than I can express.”
DEVON: Oh, God.
LIZ: Which, like, dude. Your 15-year-old stepdaughter got married and moved out. This is a massive overreaction.
DEVON: Right? Right? This is trending into like, you were using her as backup wife in case your second (presumably) wife, maybe died of a snake bite.
LIZ: Thank you. Yeah. So there is at least one historian, Diane Goeres-Gardner, who says, “This sounds like a man describing the loss of his lover not his daughter.”
DEVON: Yo, called it.
LIZ: And I am not trying to make assertions about a dynamic that obviously I have no more information about than what I have told you, but suffice to say he did not take it well.
DEVON: **snorts**
LIZ: He’s not good with it. He had already been drinking heavily for several years before this went down.
DEVON: Oh Lord.
LIZ: So I’m sure that really contributed to Anna’s readiness to get the fuck out of Dodge.
DEVON: Yeah. GTFO is right.
LIZ: Yeah! So, okay… oh, that’s right. They elope to Vancouver on November 4th. And on November 18th they take the ferry-- so there’s a ferry that goes back and forth from Vancouver to Portland at this time. I don’t remember if there still is. I think there’s just a bridge.
DEVON: Now it’s just Bridge of the Gods or whatever that is.
LIZ: I think so. I don’t know. So when they go into Portland to get supplies… they run into Danford.
DEVON: Oh no.
LIZ: Danford is drunk.
DEVON: Yeah.
LIZ: Danford says, “you need to come home with me, Anna.” She says “no, I’m not. I am a married woman now, I live in Vancouver, I am not coming back to our weird cabin on 350 acres of nothing. I’m good. Pass. Hard pass Danforth.” Like…
DEVON: **laughing**
LIZ: And then, here are some more good names for you. Mortimer’s dad is with them, and Mortimer’s dad is named Cuthbert. Cuthbert Stump.
DEVON: **laughing**
LIZ: And what Cuthbert Stump has to say to Danforth—‘cause all of these sound like I am kind of drunk, like **speaks unintelligibly/mumbles all syllables of names mentioned** –Mortimer. Yeah. So they’re having a big fight on the street in front of God and everybody. And here is what Cuthbert thinks will like, soothe the waters of this dynamic. He says, “you’re making a great fuss about your child, she’s an ordinary little bitch. I don’t know what the hell you want with her.”
DEVON: Oooooh
LIZ: **laughing**
DEVON: Cuthbert.
LIZ: Good. Good move Cuthbert, way to de-escalate.
DEVON: Wow, buddy! That’s gasoline on the fire.
LIZ: Not a helpful move.
DEVON: No.
LIZ: Not a helpful move. So, that confrontation was witnessed by a lot of people because they’re right in downtown. They’re in front of one of the few stores that’s in town and is owned by the Sheriff at the time and who is also the former Mayor. Because there’s like seven people who are allowed to do that ‘cause like, only white dudes of a certain age and education. And they’re just like I don’t know, you want to be mayor this year?
DEVON: I mean who was it, Jimmy Carter had to sell his peanut farm. Apparently this guy can be Sheriff and Sears and Roebuck.
LIZ: It was a part time gig. Yeah.
DEVON: The sheriff-ing.
LIZ: The original gig economy. Well, Oregon’s not even really a state at this point, it’s either about to become a state or it has just been a state. Let me see specifically.
DEVON: Right, I would have said it was… 1859.
LIZ: **speaks to self while you can hear keyboard typing in background** When did Oregon become a.. okay, yeah. Oregon became a state on February 14th, 1859.
DEVON: Oh, BOO YEAH.
LIZ: You fucking nailed that. How did you know that?
DEVON: I don’t know!
LIZ: So Oregon is a couple months out from becoming a state when this happens. And…
DEVON: Well, yeah, it’s ‘cause the Cuthberts, and the Danforths and Morti-pies of the world are all fucking fighting over an ordinary bitch apparently.
LIZ: Yeah, apparently Portland is just four giant lots of land with a cabin each. That’s my best guess. And a—and a shop.
D; And a shop. It’s how we play Risk.
LIZ: I want to put one dude on all of Kamchatka. Hold it down there, Trevor.
DEVON: You’re doing fine, Keith.
LIZ: Hold down Kamchatka for me. So, that whole, “She’s an ordinary bitch,” that kind of ends the discussion for the time being. I don’t know what you can say to that, because it’s such like a-- you’re getting hit from a bunch of directions. Where it’s like, you’re getting mad cause they took her and you want her back, but they’re putting her down, but also they won’t give her back, and you’re like, I don’t know what thing to argue with first. “I.. no, yes, no. Yes, she is, give her back. No, she’s not, fuck you. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to say!”
DEVON: It’s like in Futurama, “She does NOT look good for a truck stop girl!”
LIZ: **laughing**
DEVON: I don’t know how.
LIZ: She’s no ordinary bitch!
DEVON: She’s my extraordinary bitch.
LIZ: I love that album. Okay.
DEVON: **laughing**
LIZ: So Danforth, if you’re Danforth what you do is… you’re waiting for like, for the right thing to say to come to you, so you go home and you drink a lot. And according to some people, your wife also really hypes you up.
DEVON: **laughing**
LIZ: This is a key part of marriage for me, is having somebody who you go home and you’re like “guess what this fucko did?,” and they’re like “what did that fucko do?” and they’re automatically on your side and you’re like “urgggh, I don’t have to be fair and balanced about this, I am in the privacy of my own home and I am just going to tell the version of this story where I did everything right and they did everything wrong and we can all agree that I am awesome and everyone should listen to me. Yeah!” So, I imagine that is the discussion that they have.
DEVON: Mmhmm.
LIZ: Which in fairness, if anybody went home and said, “So I ran into the in-laws and what they have to say about our daughter is that she’s an ordinary little bitch and they don’t know why the hell we want her back.” I feel like there’s a good starting point that’s probably going to keep you busy conversationally for a while.
DEVON: Totally, there is a lot you can say, man.
LIZ: Yeah. So he’s at home. He comes back to town. He comes back to town to catch up with the Stumps. So we have Cuthbert and Mortimer and now Anna… Balch-Stump, I guess. I don’t know if she hyphenated. I don’t know how she saw this.
DEVON: Neither one of those names is good. So I hope she just whacked them both off and just went by Anna.
LIZ: Balch-Stump
DEVON: Nope.
LIZ: And he comes back and he has his double-barreled shot gun.
DEVON: Oooh, one for each of them.
LIZ: Yes. And he catches up with them. They are getting back on the ferry to go home to Vancouver. So they are like, so close to getting literally out of the state where this guy is drunk and belligerent.
DEVON: Yeah.
LIZ: He shoots Mortimer in the head and kills him. Both barrels.
DEVON: Awwww.
LIZ: Basically, takes his head off according to some of the resources that I looked at. Witnesses confirm he was extremely drunk.
DEVON: Good shot.
LIZ: Yeah, well, I mean it was pretty much point blank, is the problem. Oh no wait, I think that’s a term of art. I don’t know what point blank means. It was right there. It was extremely close range because they were all on this ferry. Which I don’t imagine was like one of those big ferries you drive a bunch of cars onto. I am pretty sure it was like some logs that were assembled.
DEVON: It was a Mark Twain kind of ferry. It’s a raft.
LIZ: Mmhmm, it was a raft. So people grab him because it’s not that much of a wild west. They’re like “uhh excuse me, you just decapitated that man. That’s not allowed. You can’t just do that.” They have a rental building that they’re using as a jail.
DEVON: Oh, Lord.
LIZ: Now what’s complicated about this is, because of the whole Kamchatka situation as previously discussed, they didn’t exactly have a smooth running justice system that can process this guy. There is no night court. There is no day court. They have what’s called the Assizes Method. Which is basically, there’s a traveling judge who rides the circuit and when he comes to town he just handles all the cases at once. And then you just have to wait till he comes around again.
DEVON: No way, oh wow. Oh, I am glad we are out of that system.
LIZ: Yeah, yeah. So, they have to keep this guy in jail for a long time.
DEVON: Well, he can sober up.
LIZ: Yeah, there you go. So, it’s November when he shoots Mortimer. They’re like “oh shit, we have to hold onto this guy until spring when the judge comes back.”
DEVON: Nooo, fuck! Yeah.
LIZ: So naturally he escaped.
DEVON: Of course.
LIZ: And where does he go?
DEVON: Of course, they’re in a rental building.
LIZ: Yeah exactly, it’s probably like, “now, do you like promise not to leave?”
DEVON: “I am going to shut this door. We gotta leave it cracked cause the cat likes to come and go.”
LIZ: **laughing**
DEVON: “Ya gonna be here when we come back?”
LIZ: “Where else are you going to go, Danforth?” And of course, I mean, he is like the cat. He goes straight home. That’s all that occurs to him to do. Which I guess, who’s he going to go to? I don’t know if he has any friends. He can’t go to the Stumps, so he goes straight back home. Which, I mean, it helps that he has a 350-acre forest. Like he’s probably going to hide successfully there more then we could in a split-level suburban thing.
DEVON: In my town house I have three levels, thanks very much, Liz.
LIZ: **laughing**
DEVON: I have many closets.
LIZ: Do you have many good hiding places?
DEVON: Well, I did before I gained all this weight. Now I can’t fit under the beds anymore.
LIZ: My whole escape strategy relies on people not knowing I have a second staircase.
DEVON: Wow.
LIZ: I mainly use it to startle house guests. But--
DEVON: Wow. The one in your kitchen that you can pop out of like so much kitchen help.
LIZ: Exactly, yeah, the staircase for the help. Because even though this house is tiny, apparently it needed two staircases.
DEVON: I think that that’s great for fire egress.
LIZ: It’s good for fire egress and it’s going to be great for when we turn this place into our Ouija Broads museum cause that means it will be up to code although I don’t know how the hell we’re going to get it ADA compliant. And it also facilitates a lot of great French farce type situations where you’re trying to tell somebody something as you come up and they’re going down… a lot of door slamming.
DEVON: And jangly music, and—I can see it now.
LIZ: A straight up Frasier episode.
LIZ: **happily** I am having a lot of fun with this episode. I am enjoying this.
DEVON: I can tell, I can tell, you’re enjoyable, my dear.
LIZ: Awww, I love you.
DEVON: I love you.
LIZ: So it’s-- at least one thing says that they think he actually tried to fake his own death because there’s allegedly-- and it wasn’t in the newspapers I have access to but that’s some old-ass newspapers, there’s not a lot that remains-- allegedly at one point, Mary Jane rolls up into town because they have a drowning victim. And she says, “Oh yeah, that is totally my husband.”
LIZ: **as townsfolk** “What?”
DEVON: Haha, come on, Mary Jane.
LIZ: **as townsfolk** “And then who was this dude lurking outside your cabin?”
LIZ: **as Mary Jane** “I don’t know. Do you know him? I don’t know him.”
DEVON: **as Mary Jane** “Never seen him before.”
LIZ: **as Mary Jane** “Weird. It’s almost like we have 8 kids together.”
DEVON: **as Mary Jane** “We had another kid, didn’t you know. Keith. That’s Keith.”
LIZ: So, the police find him 8 months later. So they capture him in the fall. He’s supposed to go to trial in the spring. They grab him in the summer. And it finally goes to trial.
DEVON: Okay.
LIZ: And the trial is of course as much of a mess as you would expect.
DEVON: Oh, what a shitshow
LIZ: I know, there’s nothing else to do. So everybody who wants to see it is rolling up. He, in an exciting twist, is shocked that he is in trouble.
DEVON: For real?
LIZ: And he’s like, “I’m defending my property.”
DEVON: For real?
LIZ: “I do not understand why I am in trouble for defending my property.” He feels that everything he did was completely justified. There’s a lot of witnesses who are around to say, “okay, two things that happened a lot before the crime happened. One is that this dude sat around in bars a lot talking about how he was going to kill Mortimer and the other is that his wife would hang around with him and bug him to do that.”
DEVON: No. **laughing**
LIZ: Which is not a great look for either of them.
DEVON: **laughing** Wow. If you’re going to premeditate, you just keep that in your head. You don’t put it in your journal or your Facebook or tell people at the bar.
LIZ: It’s not like they walked past your window. Like, you had to make an effort to be someplace that people could overhear you in Portland in the 1850s.
DEVON: Right? Right? Right? You had 350 other acres you could have gone to and said whatever the fuck and they never would have known. Come on now, Danford.
LIZ: Yeah, well. Danford says, “I have never seen these people before in my life.” **laughing**
DEVON: **laughing** I mean he probably seen them twice ‘cause you were so fucking drunk you were cross-eyed.
LIZ: He’s got a barrel for each of them.
DEVON: He’s got a barrel for each of them. **laughing**
LIZ: What they do with this-- he becomes-- because he’s dragged it out so long, while he was running around doing whatever in the woods, Oregon became a state. So Danforth goes on the record books as the first person to be executed in the state of Oregon.
DEVON: There you go, Danford.
LIZ: So they hang him by the neck until dead. About 600 people show up.
DEVON: Fuck!
LIZ: Naturally.
DEVON: Natch.
LIZ: But the one that everyone focuses on being there is… Anna.
DEVON: Is it! Oh, oh, I wanted to know this.
LIZ: Completely dry-eyed.
DEVON: Yeah!
LIZ: With her in-laws.
DEVON: Yeah!
LIZ: And they watch him die.
DEVON: Cold.
LIZ: So, October 18th, 1859, ten months to the day after he takes off Mortimer’s head with his double barreled shot gun, Balch is hanged in front of these people who he deprived of their son and husband respectively.
DEVON: Yeah… fuck.
LIZ: There was a reporter there from the Portland Oregonian who was real upset about Anna being there and not crying.
DEVON: **protesting sound**
LIZ: Here’s what he had to say -- I am assuming it was a he, I think I am pretty safe as it’s1858, no 1859-- okay: “The idea of a daughter by her own volition, attending the execution of a father upon a gallows is a disgrace of the intelligence of the age, and to every principal a filial affection manifested or exhibited by every species of the brute creation in the sea and upon the earth.” So apparently mermaids are included in this.
DEVON: Yeah, well.
LIZ: **reading** “The fact is that of a character that we cannot pass unnoticed and must meet with the surprise reprobation and detestation of the whole community.”
DEVON: **laughing**
LIZ: So what the reporter thinks the real takeaway of this is, “man, that Anna. What’s her problem?”
DEVON: How fucking dare she want justice for her husband?
LIZ: Yeah, it’s like what do you mean, why is she not crying? Was it the part where he literally tried to treat her like a piece of property or the part where he exploded her husband’s entire skull next to her?
DEVON: Right? Right?
LIZ: Yeah. Or whatever was going on with that possessive dynamic.
DEVON: Right?
LIZ: Which, not a good look. Not a great look.
DEVON: I’m sorry. Captain Incest went and pulled a Lee Harvey Oswald on this poor woman, like 150 years before Lee Harvey Oswald was a thing and she’s supposed to cry when he dies?
LIZ: Yeah, she’s supposed to be like, “well, what’s really sad is that this guy that I met when I was 13 and then murdered my husband 2 years later, it’s just such a bummer the way that he’s going to die.”
DEVON: “Yeah, this sucks.”
LIZ: **as Anna** “I am just really torn up about this.”
LIZ: I don’t know, was it the reporter’s first day? Like, they just got there and all they know is they’re like sitting there with their little pad of paper like “who’s this guy?”
LIZ: **as other person** “Oh he’s getting hanged for murder.”
LIZ: **as reporter** “And who’s she over there?”
LIZ: **as other person** “Oh that’s his daughter.”
LIZ: ** as reporter** “Oh, she’s not even sad. Oh shit, deadline! Okay.”
DEVON: **as reporter** “Let’s just print it!”
LIZ: **laughing**
DEVON: No. he sounds like Oregon’s first incel. Congratulations, reporter.
LIZ: Yeah, that’s the incident. And as usual there’s like a concrete incident which is fairly well attested in historical record. There’s all the stories on the other end. And then there’s like everything that happens in between. Mary Jane, for whatever reason, when her will was read when she passed away--
DEVON: Wait, who’s Mary Jane?
LIZ: The mother.
DEVON: The mother, sorry.
LIZ: When the mother passes away, she leaves her property to none of the children.
DEVON: Yo, bitch move MJ.
LIZ: She ends up not leaving it to any of the kids. There’s some people who want to go back and say, oh, she’s the witch.
DEVON: Ohh.
LIZ: I have never seen anything that convinces me that Danforth tried this, but some people say that he claimed that she bewitched him to kill Mortimer.
DEVON: Okay.
LIZ: That doesn’t concur at all to me with the defense that he actually took.
DEVON: Right, right. It sounds like he was totally like “yeah, I did it cause I wanted to.”
LIZ: Yeah.
DEVON: That’s enough!
LIZ: That’s allowed. “Gentlemen of the jury, would you like to not have this option if your 15-year-old stepdaughter that you’re creepily involved with happened to marry somebody?”
DEVON: **laughing**
LIZ: Where does it end?
DEVON: Where does it end?
**both laughing**
LIZ: So it passes through a bunch of people’s hands and in 1897, it ends up with this guy named Donald Macleay, who’s got a chunk of the former Balch property. And he’s pissed off because they’re charging him taxes on it. And he literally is like, okay, this is a hillside with a bunch of trees. I cannot get money out of it, but I have to pay money for it. I don’t care for that. Portland, you have it. And that’s how they got Macleay park.
DEVON: **laughing**
LIZ: It’s kind of a spite park.
DEVON: It is a spite park. I kind of like the pettiness of it. I don’t want to pay taxes on it. Here city, you pay taxes.
LIZ: Yeah, you do it.
DEVON: Or you use taxes to take care of it, you know what I mean.
LIZ: You throw this away.
DEVON: You throw this away is right.
LIZ: He actually had an interesting requirement. Let me see if I can find this here… Well, one of the things that he asked when he donated the property is that it be accessible to wheelchairs. Which is, you know, it’s what, eighteen, um… ninety-seven or so? So it’s a hot 100 years before the ADA, so I found that intriguing because of the whole day job thing. And it becomes a part of the Portland Parks system, other properties in that area get donated, so it kind of gets combined into Forest Park. Now, significantly, they lived in a log cabin.
DEVON: Yeah, yeah.
LIZ: The Witch’s Castle is a stone building. So how do we get a stone building there?
DEVON: Thank you.
LIZ: Well, I will tell you.
DEVON: It’s all the stones they picked up off the trails that were in the way of wheelchairs.
LIZ: Ooooooh.
DEVON: And they put them into a castle, I don’t know why. I have ran out. I just-- all I can think of is like, this is awesome, I am super glad with how progressive he is… Museum people, you can’t take a gift for—this is why you have collection policies that don’t allow you to take a gift that have restrictions on them. Because you’re looking at this park going, how the fuck do we get wheelchairs in here? It is 1900 my friend, these are not cool, new 4-wheel ATV wheelchairs.
LIZ: No-ho-ho.
DEVON: These are those old wicker porch chairs that somebody put spindly little ass wheels on. The fuck do we do?
LIZ: Good question. So I have read two versions of when that structure came into play, but let me see first… I don’t like to give you too many puzzles. But imagine… let’s put ourselves in the Spokane setting. Let’s say that were in a park, were in Manito, we’re in Lincoln Park. What are the buildings that are built in those parks?
DEVON: Ohhh! They’re—yeah! They’re bathrooms.
LIZ: Nailed it! The Witch’s Castle is a bathroom.
DEVON: Fuck! **laughing** A two story bathroom? We are living high and mighty from the days of butt-flap pants-shitting in the woods on stumps, my friend.
LIZ: Ah, progress marches on.
DEVON: This is a commode with an abode. Holy shit.
LIZ: **laughing until she starts coughing**
DEVON: A can with a plan!
LIZ: (away from mic as she recovers) You can’t do that to me, I’m going to die.
LIZ: Okay, so I am unclear from these resources whether it was built in the 30s or the 50s, but somewhere in that window they built a rangers’ station - kind of just a, y’know, “let’s keep our shit in here,” not literally-- but also it was mainly a bathroom.
DEVON: **laughing**
LIZ: And in 1962 there was a big storm and it was heavily damaged. And they didn’t bother to repair it. So, from 1962 until now, it becomes the party hang out, it gets mossy, it gets graffiti, and it becomes known, somehow -- probably high school students I’m gonna guess -- as the Witches Castle. So I love that, because I am fairly sure everyone who decided it was spooky worked backward from it looking spooky.
DEVON: **laughing** Yeah.
LIZ: So the entire story of murder, potential incest, a daughter watching her father hanged from the neck until dead with dry eyes-- fucking nothing to do with this. It’s just a spooky-ass former shit house. And that’s good enough for us.
DEVON: **laughing**
LIZ: I love this story.
DEVON: It’s my favorite quote in the world. Oh my God.
LIZ: I mean, alternately, if I am going to put on my other, more open-minded hat. Potentially, this building… attracted the spirits who are always in conflict and at war, even though neither of them died there, because all this bad stuff happened and also a building was built on it that happened to look spooky, but it’s legitimately haunted because bad shit went down. I mean that’s another way it could happen.
DEVON: Sure. **laughing** Sure, Liz, that’s another way that can happen.
LIZ: Sure. I am just trying to be fair.
BOTH: **more laughing**
DEVON: Someone said, “dookey” but they heard “spooky” and it just became this terrible game of telephone. In which teenagers were like, “fucking witch lived there!” And you’ve got one of them going “nah man, I heard on this podcast it used to be an outhouse.” “No bro, no it couldn’t be that.”
LIZ: And that’s when you’re like, “How do I recover… uhh satanic, Satanist, Satanists did spells there, look there’s still blood!” “I think that may be spray paint.” “No dude. That’s definitely blood”
DEVON: Fucking sacrifice.
LIZ: I was really excited-- I had known about this story for a while. So most of my resource here is Weird Oregon. But then I also have some other links that I will actually try to put up. I am actually trying to put the show notes back together, because I am trying to transfer them from Wordpress and it’s hard… I have a lot happening.
DEVON: You have a lot happening.
LIZ: But Weird Oregon was the main source for this. And I love this because it has many components that I like. It has an actual historical thing, of the first man to be executed in the State of Oregon.
Devon: Mm-hmm.
Liz: But then it also has a magical haunted toilet.
DEVON: **laughing**
LIZ: And you don’t usually get both of those in one story.
DEVON: No, no…
LIZ: And it’s only a mile walk apparently. So, I super want to go next time we’re in Portland. I want to see this thing.
DEVON: **still laughing**
LIZ: It also makes me want to like, just start building stuff in parks. Like, it’s like, seeding a coral reef. You know how sometimes they deliberately sink a yacht or whatever cause they’re like “yes and then all those little corals will grow on it.” That’s what you get when you abandon a property in a forest park. You come back in 50 years and there’s going to be so much ghost on that.
DEVON: So much ghost all up on that.
LIZ: They love it. It’s their habitat.
DEVON: They’re drawn to it. Oh, oh, can you and I please build a little structure in Lincoln Park. And then, let’s just wait. Let’s just, how many people can we get that haven’t listened to this episode that contact us and are like, did you know about this?
LIZ: Yeah, well, all I’ll say is Lydia is kind of outgrowing her playhouse. So I feel like, if she ever loses interest in it. And we put in a solid day, get some sandpaper, rough it up. Carve some spooky things in it. We can put that in the back of a Ford and find some good place to put that.
DEVON: Farragut Park Lookout! I don’t think it’s considering littering when we’re doing it for a podcast.
LIZ: Yeah. It’s both art and science.
DEVON: Uh yeah, it is an installation, hello.
LIZ: It’s also conservation. It’s not littering when you put a bird house on a tree.
DEVON: Right, we’re seeding the fucking coral reef with our shitter.
LIZ: (whispering) We’re not lawyers. Don’t do these things. **laughing**
DEVON: **laughing** No. Do do them. Absolutely do them. And my defense will be the same as Danforth’s basically, which is like, “yeah, it was a good idea.”
LIZ: **laughing**
DEVON: Duh.
LIZ: Yeah, or the combined thing of what he actually did and what people thought later. Which is, “I didn’t do it, if I did do it, I had a good reason and if I didn’t have a good reason, a witch made me do it.” Tell me what situation you can’t walk out of with those defenses. I mean.
DEVON: I mean! Oh, I’m putting that on a cake for you one day.
LIZ: Yeah, I want a cake, and maybe like a, I want to put it on um-- like a motivation quote, like a beautiful picture of a sunrise over a mountain. “I didn’t do it, if I did do it, I had a good reason, and if I didn’t have a good reason, a witch made me do it.”
DEVON: I would buy that poster. Coming soon to our store.
LIZ: So that’s the story of The Witches Castle in McLeay park and also Forest Park. A park within a park.
DEVON: It’s a park within a park. And it’s a toilet within a castle.
LIZ: Yeah. There you go. I don’t think there’s actually literally any toilets left. But also if you have a bunch of drunk toilets. Or shit--
DEVON: A bunch of drunk toilets.
LIZ: A bunch of drunk toilets.
DEVON: Tell me more.
LIZ: If you have a bunch of drunk teenagers anywhere, everything is a toilet, so…
DEVON: Fucking gross.
LIZ: Close enough.
DEVON: What a wonderful story.
LIZ: I want to go see it someday. I… want people to join us on social media. I want them to come to Facebook, twitter, Instagram. Look for the Ouija Broads. Come to ouijabroads.com. Just yesterday, when I am recording this, I put up the Ouija Broads guide to Badass Women of the Northwest.
Devon: Boom!
LIZ: Because it’s Women’s History Month and I was like, yes, it’s time. We got your Stagecoach Mary, we got your Eagle Lady, we got your Ada Blackjack, we got your Mercer’s Belles. And of course, we got your Nelly Cashman.
DEVON: Damn right, you do.
LIZ: Yeah! Let me see, what else do we want to tell them about? Patreon.
DEVON: iTunes.
LIZ: If you go to Patreon.com/ouijabroads-- sorry I am just going to talk over you? And carry on?
DEVON: Do it, edit me out.
LIZ: You can get old episodes, in fact I would recommend that everybody, if you’re ever like, “man, I am so bummed that they went to an every other week schedule.” Hop on OuijaBroads.com, go to the button that says episodes, and then I want you to scroll all the way down, so you’re going to go through all the-- at this time, God, what are we at, 93, 94 episodes?
DEVON: 96
LIZ: Dang. Okay, you’re going to go all the way down. And once you go past our very first episodes, you’re going to find a section that says, “Guest Spots, Lost Episodes and More” So what you will find when you go to that is the other shows that we have been on and other stuff. So, let me tell you a little bit about it. So what I was listening to the other day that was making me very happy was when we went on a show that is all about friendship, called Best Forevers. Our episode is called “Cosmically Correct” because that is how we feel about our friendship. That’s very fun. If you’ve ever been like, how did they meet and why are they so weird together? I don’t know if this will help, but maybe it will give you more data points. There’s Devon, this is the most recent one, Devon ghosting-- **laughing**
DEVON: Yes, I was. Boooooooo.
LIZ: **laughing** Oh, that was an accident.
DEVON: Oh woman. It is 8:30 and you are not that drunk. Are you having a stroke?
LIZ: I had one cider. Devon guesting on “Insanely Haunted” talking about the Ghost Adventures episode of the Lizzie Borden house. Very wonderful.
DEVON: Thank you. Yeah, shout out to Max and Cassie. They’re fucking rad.
LIZ: Shout out! Okay, I went on Historical Hotties back a while ago, Fall 2017, man that feels like a long time ago.
DEVON: Yeah. That was our first guesting. Wasn’t it?
LIZ: Yeah it was, we were like, really new.
DEVON: Babies
LIZ: Babies. They were doing a category of the Old West. So we talked about who was the Historical Hottie. They have a very structured thing. They rate them on different categories and you have gotta pick a number. And it’s very organized, and it basically reminds me of a less aggressive version of “Fuck, Marry, Kill,” where it like gives you the framework to make a really passionate case for what you argue about, but you don’t have to say you’re going to kill anybody. And I love that part.
DEVON: I do appreciate that. It’s just the order in which I would mate with you.
LIZ: There you go. I stood up for Josie Earp, so Wyatt’s wife. The Sisters Nelson presented Annie Oakley the sharpshooter and John Ware who was a legend of Calgary as a black cowboy. So some really interesting stuff to dig into there.
DEVON: Yeah it is.
LIZ: I don’t know if I put all this in there, but I feel like I have never really gone through all of it on the show.
DEVON: No, I think it’s great. It’s really good. Talk about Nostalgia Magazine, unless you want me to bring it up.
LIZ: I will get to that. We’ve got more episodes to get through.
DEVON: God damn, do we?
LIZ: I just titled this one, “Liz Has a Day Job?” Someone reached out and I went and talked about some of the stuff that I do looking into health policy and people with disabilities. Talking about health insurance, talking about Medicaid work requirements. Because of the nature of the gig, the Medicaid work requirement stuff is fairly out of date at this point. But you can hear me talk about that on Healthcare Dialogue from Spokane Public Radio KYRS. And then of course, if you want to get in on the Patreon, we have these séances, and I have never really talked about what-all they are. Now there is one that I have to find, because I know we did an episode where I told you about the nurse who killed the hit man and like two other women who destroyed their attackers. And it’s not on this list, so I have to find it, hopefully I will find it by the time people actually see this, or hear this. Séance number one we talked about intuitive readings that we’d had and talked about-- what I put here that we talked about was lucid dreaming, bullshit situations, lizard ownership, sad flowers, charismatic megafauna and wind. So I feel like I need to re-listen to that because it sounds like a Stefan bit on SNL. They have Lizard Ownership and Sad Flowers.
DEVON: It sounds like everything we talk about every episode. You could apply that to all of them.
LIZ: Yes. Then we Séance number two -- or whatever number depending on where this nurse kills hitman one goes -- I focused on the Spokane Street Hotel murders. Interesting. Séance number 3, I named after a quote that I think is in my top 5 Devon quotes of all time, which is “We Can Ford That Shit.” **laughing**
DEVON: Well, I thought we could.
LIZ: That’s when we played the Oregon Trail. I listened to that one the other day and it made me happy. Séance number 4 is when we just kind of churned through a bunch of topics that we wanted to talk about, the faceless roamer, Mel’s hole and Seattle’s Umbrella Man and then we did one just the other day about depictions of the Northwest that we like, which cryptid we’d be and our zodiac signs.
DEVON: Yo.
LIZ: So just if you’re ever like wow I really want to listen to an episode but I have listened to all of these too recently, go to ouijabroads.com backslash episodes-- forward slash? I don’t know which slash that is…slash. Slash them episodes. And get in on some of this stuff. If you’re looking more for written word stuff, ouijabroads.com is also good for that. I’ve written up a couple of cases including F. Lewis Clark and the Fircrest Phone Hack, I Prefer Lemons, that thing-- and you should really be subscribing to Nostalgia magazine where I am writing up some weird history. Do you want to get in on that some time? You’re welcome to.
DEVON: Oh my God, I would love to. Is that an option? I am so much better at writing shit than writing it then remembering it to tell you in an episode.
LIZ: Yes, let’s do that for the next one. Let’s pick something good and weird for Spokane. And that’s the first-- my Mom doesn’t listen to the show, but she did get Nostalgia magazine and put it up on the fridge. So now, I’vee really made it.
DEVON: That’s so sweet. You have got the fridge Buddy.
LIZ: I got the fridge. Yeah.
DEVON: That’s the front page of the family.
LIZ: **laughing** That is the front page of the family! Aw. All right. So those are places that you can go to get more of what we’re doing. But we will be back in a couple weeks to tell you more stuff. And you know what want you to do.
DEVON: You do know!
LIZ: We want you to live weird--
DEVON: --to die weird--
LIZ: We want you to stay weird. And thank you for listening.
DEVON: Thank you for listening.
Closing theme music (Me and the Man in the Moon) plays and fades out.