A grieving farmer's seance vow and a healer's vision of buried iron built the world's only school for talking to the dead — and left the town of Whitewater steeped in legends of witches, haunted cemeteries, and things that crawl out of the lake.
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/HauntedWhitewater
READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/WD20260626B-HauntedWhitewater-transcript.txt
FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Whitewater legend says that the bizarre experiments conducted at the Morris Pratt Institute of Spiritualism in Wisconsin, to communicate with the dead, have left the town cursed by witches and haunted by restless spirits. It’s no wonder it has garnered the nickname of “Second Salem.” (Whitewater: The Second Salem) *** The Wild West had many drifters with troubled pasts. One found himself at the heart of one of the most infamous crimes in American history. Ben Kuhl went from horse theft, to stagecoach robbery, to murder – from notoriety to infamy – all in pursuit of elusive riches. Finally arrested and convicted due to a bloody handprint (The Last Stagecoach Robbery) *** Fred West was just a regular boy, or so it seemed. But behind closed doors, in reality, he was becoming evil incarnate. And upon meeting his future wife Rose, it only expanded his predatory predilections. Fred and Rose descended from petty crimes to unspeakable horrors of rape and murder – even of the most young and innocent. From their "House of Horrors" the depths of their depravity was acted out — hidden from site. But as the walls closed in and the truth emerged, the true horror of their crimes was laid bare. (The Evils of Fred And Rose West) *** AND MORE!
CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…
00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:02:20.946 = Show Open
00:04:34.008 = Whitewater: The Second Salem
00:24:07.841 = The Evils of Fred And Rose West ***
00:40:14.638 = The Last Stagecoach Robbery ***
00:53:46.205 = Bygone Gluttons ***
01:06:32.360 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break
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*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“Whitewater: The Second Salem” by Charlie Hintz for Wisconsin Frights: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p9bktup
“Bygone Gluttons” by Ben Gazur for ListVerse: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/2p99hjxj
“The Evils of Fred and Rose West” from Biography: https://www.biography.com/crime/fred-west
“The Last Stagecoach Robbery” from Creative History Stories: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/bdh3h8h5
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)
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Originally aired: April 16, 2024
This episode of Weird Darkness travels from a Wisconsin school built to teach the living how to speak with the dead, through the cellar of one of Britain's most notorious murder houses, to the last stagecoach robbery in American history and a gallery of history's most ravenous eaters.It opens in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where farmer Morris Pratt vowed during an 1880s seance to build a temple to the spirit world if he ever grew rich. A trance medium named Mary Hayes-Chynoweth steered him toward a barren tract on Michigan's Upper Peninsula that turned out to sit atop the Gogebic iron range, and the fortune that followed funded the Morris Pratt Institute, the world's only school dedicated to spiritualism, which locals nicknamed the "Spook Temple." Students studied clairvoyance, levitation, and psychic surgery in a three-story building whose white-painted top floor was closed to non-believers, and even agnostic Chicago attorney Clarence Darrow left it admitting he was mystified. The school later relocated to Milwaukee and still operates, but Whitewater kept its reputation, earning the name "Second Salem" for its tales of the axe-murdering witch Mary Worth in Oak Grove Cemetery, the inward-pointing spikes on the Starin Park water tower, the haunted Witches Triangle formed by its three cemeteries, and a tentacled creature said to have overturned a fishing boat on Whitewater Lake in 1923.From there the episode moves to Gloucester, England, and the crimes of Fred and Rose West, who tortured, raped, and murdered young women and girls across roughly two decades. Fred, born in 1941 and shaped in part by head injuries from a teenage motorcycle crash, killed his pregnant lover Anna McFall in 1967 and removed her fingers and toes, a mutilation he repeated on later victims including his first wife Rena Costello and his own daughter Heather. He and Rose buried nine victims beneath 25 Cromwell Street, the address the press called the "House of Horrors," and added Heather to the back garden. Detective Constable Hazel Savage's investigation finally exposed them; Fred hanged himself in his cell on January 1, 1995, and Rose was convicted of ten murders that November and handed a whole life order.Next the show heads to the snowbound mountains around Jarbidge, Nevada, where on December 5, 1916, drifter Ben Kuhl ambushed the Rogerson-Jarbidge mail stage, shot driver Fred Searcy in the back of the head with a .44 revolver, and made off with a mailbag holding four thousand dollars in cash. A stray dog led searchers to the buried money, and Kuhl's ivory-handled pistol marked him as a suspect, but the conviction turned on a bloody palm print found on an envelope from the coach, the first time such forensic evidence sent a man to prison for murder in the United States. Kuhl drew a death sentence later commuted to life, served nearly twenty-eight years, and died of tuberculosis in San Francisco in 1946 without ever revealing where the loot was hidden.The episode closes with a parade of history's most extreme eaters, from Georgian London's Edward Dando, who downed hundreds of oysters at a sitting and walked out without paying until cholera killed him in prison in 1832, to seventeenth-century Kentishman Nicholas Wood, who ate raw sheep wool and horns included. It runs through Roman emperor Vitellius, who vomited between courses to keep feasting and invented a dish of flamingo tongues and lamprey entrails; the corpulent King George IV, lampooned as the "Prince of Whales"; the geologist William Buckland, who tasted moles, panthers, and a preserved fragment of a king's heart; and Elvis Presley and his pound-of-bacon Fool's Gold Sandwich. It ends with the most disturbing case of all, the eighteenth-century Frenchman Tarrare, whose bottomless hunger drove him to eat stones, live animals, and raw offal, and who was expelled from a hospital after he was suspected of devouring a fourteen-month-old child.
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