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Hello, I am Joshua P. Warren, and this is Joshua P. Warren Daily. Well, today is a very special day, and I was reminded of this when I saw a post by my good friend Mr. Vance Pollock, and that is because on this date, May twelfth, twenty eleven, seven years ago today, my museum opened. That's right, now known as the Asheville Mystery Museum. This is the anniversary. And I always wanted to have a museum. When I was a kid, I went to museums all the time. My parents were great. They took me to Washington, D.C., to the Smithsonian. I really love that experience. And I still go to museums all the time. I wish I had more time to go to museums, as a matter of fact. And so it's a real pleasure to have had a museum functioning now for seven years in Asheville, North Carolina. And so what I want to do is tell you a little bit about the backstory regarding the museum, how it came to be, because it really was some serendipity that kicked all this into the works. Um you can imagine over the years I have collected a lot of strange things throughout my investigations, my journeys, my expeditions. I have a lot of odd equipment from various experiments, stuff that's been featured all over television and in many books, and for the longest time uh this all was sort of in my living room. So, you know, my uh wife Lauren was very tolerant of the decor inside our various houses. But um I guess, well, seven years ago in 2011 uh or thereabouts, it might have been I guess it was probably early 2011, I met with Stuart Coleman, who was a developer in downtown Asheville. And it's uh interesting how all that came about because Vance and I had been spending a lot of time downtown investigating the tunnels that are underneath the city. And we had heard that there was a tunnel around the building, which is now the restaurant called Pax Tavern. And it was uh Stuart Coleman, who was an Asheville native, who developed Pax Tavern, and he also was a big fan of local history. And so Vance and I met with Stuart, and uh he he was just a really impressive guy. Uh he had uh a genuine love of the local history, and he could tell stories that went back to generations before he was born. I mean, he knew about things that had happened to his father and his grandfather, and so uh he was a real treasure trove, and so the Vance and Stuart and I all sort of hit it off because we liked digging up, you know, these obscure elements of history, and sure enough, there was an entrance to the tunnels uh in the basement of the Pax Tavern restaurant, but it had been sealed off at some point, so we're still uncertain exactly where that tunnel led. But uh anyway, uh Stuart Coleman had just recently attained that building. Uh it was sort of controversial uh because uh there was there was a magnolia tree nearby that some of the local Lickens thought was would be threatened by construction, and uh it's it certainly was not. That tree is still there and uh sometimes it's featured on some of our our tours, like the tour that Tad McDivitt gives called the Supernatural Tour on Friday nights. But anyway, in talking to Stuart about the property, he was showing us around and uh just behind that building, which was known as the Hayes Hobson Building for decades, I think it was like a hardware store or something like that, um, just behind that, connected roughly to the building, is is a separate building, which uh used to be an old jail, because right there on that street called Marjorie Street behind Pax Tavern is where they used to hang people. They had the gallows there, and they had a variety of buildings there that were used by the Sheriff's Department and the police department, and all all of it's gone now, except for this stone building that is sort of partially embedded into the hill that forms the foundation for City County Plaza. And I have no doubt on a number of occasions throughout the years that this little rock building um has potentially uh come up for some type of demolition, and then engineers have realized, like, wow, if we start tearing this thing out of here, we're gonna have some structural integrity problems uh up above. And so it's that building's been there for a long, long time, and it uh certainly there was no way it was gonna be up to code to use it for you know the restaurant or for most purposes really. And so it was just sitting there empty, and um uh I felt it was a shame there was an empty building there, and Stuart was trying to come up with ideas, you know, something to do to that building to make it useful, and so I uh I was talking to Vance and I said, Hey, how about a museum and tourism center back there, Stuart? And uh he loved it. And so I went to work uh assembling what was at that time called Joshua P. Warren's Asheville Tourism Center and Free Museum. And uh I at that time I I needed uh some benefactors and some resources to help, and uh a lot of my great friends were happy to to become benefactors, people like Patricia DeMint and her husband and uh Linda and Shag Klodowski. Um of course uh once we got everything rolling so that we could put this together, I immediately went to Lauren and she started building models and displays, and we had friends like uh investigator Shelley Wright and uh Kat Wilson, who was a tour guide for me back then, and uh Tad McDivitt, who still does tours. Um all these people came together and and we worked feverishly and we created this very unique place. And so if you would walk inside this building, well, you would see all of these displays, you know, like I say, models and stuff that Lauren had made and um all the wacky things that I purchased. I went out and bought some new things, little you know, special effects and displays. And we had a movie theater in there with popcorn, and you could go into the theater and watch the old uh 3D monster movies with the red and blue 3D glasses. Um of course I had a section where there was a laboratory there with all of my quick equipment set up and in perfectly usable form. We had uh one room that was just nothing but a psychomantium. So the whole room was just a chair with a giant mirror and a dim light, and people could go in there and do psychomantium sessions. I mean, it was a really cool, unique place. Uh, and not all of it was spooky. I mean, we also tackled some of the local uh urban legends. Like, for example, in Asheville, there's always been this story that Walt Disney, uh a young Walt Disney before he was famous, you know, passed through Asheville, got a job working as a draftsman on blueprints, and um doodled some little sketches on some of these um these blueprints and and maps and stuff. And so uh we platts, and I guess that's probably what more of an appropriate word. So uh we went to the courthouse and got at the bottom of that and actually ended up disproving um that legend. There's no way that Walt Disney could have been in Asheville at that time. A lot of things didn't work out, including his age, and uh, in fact, I don't think there's any evidence that Walt Disney ever came to Asheville, North Carolina in his entire life. So there was a lot of interesting local history being featured and explored there. And uh at that time, we tried to keep the the doors open um pretty much as long as we could every single day. And again, it was free. Anybody could walk in there and look around and we would accept donations, and so our our our theory was that you know we'd get people in the door and then uh then maybe they'd want to take a ghost tour, and so we could promote our ghost tours by offering this free space. So it was a very cool moment in Asheville's history to have something that unique set up. And that building was extremely haunted, and it shouldn't be surprising that an old jail building would be haunted, but I want to tell you one of my favorite stories. Um this is a story from that year, it was later um that year. Um let's see. Actually, is that right? Let's see. Well, okay. It was around that time, right around the opening of the museum. Uh it was January the twenty-third. Um a museum staffer, okay, now I'm looking back here at my notes to make sure that I remember all the dates. Okay, so on January twenty-third, uh, Kat Wilson was at that building all by herself. And um Kat actually was okay, it was a s a cold, snowy day, and she called me up. I was at home, and she called me up, and she was really rattled and freaked out, and that was not like her at all. She she didn't get scared of things, she liked spooky, creepy stuff. And she told me that she had to close up shop and get out of the building because she had had a frightening experience. She said that she was walking toward the back of the building in the area where we had a theater, and all of a sudden she turned a corner and she walked right smack dab into a big, tall, dark man, like an apparitional form, because he just disappeared. He f just vanished. And it was such a tangible physical experience for her that uh it it rattled her, I mean, and it freaked her out, and she got out of there. And I said, Well, uh I I guess that definitely means the building's haunted, you know, and and I I said, I understand why you left, and we'll come back and we'll do an investigation and see if we can get to the bottom of it. We'll get a load of this. Maybe about one hour later, I received I I forget if it was a call or an email from Vance. Now, Vance is the museum historian, and Vance was absolutely completely unaware of what had happened to Kat. But Vance said he had made a startling discovery that there was a Buncombe County Sheriff and former chief of police named John Lyarley, who had killed himself in our building, shot himself in the head with his service revolver on that exact date, January twenty-third of nineteen twenty-four, exactly eighty-seven years before the cat's experience. Now, what are the chances of that? That she would see this ghost, and the same day, Vance would happen to discover that it was the anniversary of this guy killing himself in our building. Liarly, according to everything that's been written, I mean newspaper reports, books, he was a guy who was not the nicest dude, okay? He relished participating in hangings and beating people to death with his club. Um they claim that uh he was depressed because his wife had recently died, and that may have led to his suicide. But uh after that, of course, Vance just became an expert on Sheriff John Larley. And in fact, Thomas Wolfe even wrote about Larely in uh his book Look Homeward Angel. Um he wrote about Lyarley as well, let's put it this way, in an unflattering fashion. Okay. Wolf did not like him, and a lot of people claim that Larley kind of bullied everybody around he and his brother. Um so apparently that building was haunted by at very least the ghost of John Larely, in addition to who knows how many other weird ghouls and apparitions. But anyway, I could go on and on telling you stories about that odd little building, and it's still featured sometimes on some of the tours. We have certain tour guides who like to walk by that building and talk about it here and there. But uh anyway, so getting back to the history of the museum, uh it was very sad when Stuart Coleman got sick and died. And uh from my point of view, it happened kind of quickly. And uh after he died, a lot of the dynamics changed over there at Pax Tavern in terms of how they wanted to handle the property and and who was in charge of what, and there were a lot of people who felt that the museum was an odd fit, you know, for what they were trying to do, and they didn't sort of like having something weird right there on the property. And right around that same time I um was making a lot of friends at the Asheville Masonic Temple, where I, of course, eventually became a member. And um it really surprised me. One day I was talking to um one of the guys who at that time was the master of the Mount Herman Lodge, a fellow who's now a good friend named Tyser Lewis. And Tyser said, Well, you know, we have all this space in the basement of this old building that we're not really doing anything with. Why don't you put your museum in the basement? And I said, Really? I mean, that had never even occurred to me. And uh but as soon as he said it, I mean, I could I could envision that being a really cool spot. And so that building that I was in behind Pax Tavern was very small, you know, it was pretty cramped space. The basement of the Asheville Masonic Temple is really big, and that was very exciting. And so I made the transition from the small building behind Pax Tavern over into the Asheville Masonic Temple in the basement, and we just expanded everything and got more stuff, and at that time I changed the name to the Asheville Mystery Museum. And uh when the mystery museum opened up, it was great because we did have the ability to put even you know larger, more elaborate things. And it also was there was a mystique, you know, to be in the basement of a historic Masonic temple. And by the way, the Ashville Masonic Temple is absolutely beautiful. I mean, if you go inside and you see the theater and the lodge room, I mean they are some of the best, certainly in the state of North Carolina, but I would argue in the country. And I've seen some pretty amazing uh Masonic buildings. So um it was just a real honor to be there, and we quickly learned that that building is extremely haunted because for one thing, during the 1918 Spanish influenza, when millions of people died, uh a lot of people died in Asheville, and so that building was turned into a makeshift emergency ward for underprivileged people in the Asheville area. And so um we don't even know how many people died just from that alone. Um we've got the newspaper articles that that prove that this is the case, but we don't know how many people died. Um and that whole area, you know, it it's it's just one of those spots that has a lot of history and uh produces a lot of ghostly phenomena. And it was just a delight because now that we had the museum in this building, um there was a lot more flexibility, you know, t in in certain ways, because we we didn't feel like we were just sort of stuffed away behind some business. I mean, we now had a great presence in a really historic building that already had this aura of mystery around it and looked like a d an old dungeon in the basement. So it was very fitting. Um some people didn't like the fact that because we were in the basement of a Masonic temple, that also restricted access. So before, like I was telling you, the door was open and you could just wander in and out, but we had to change all that when we put it into the Masonic Temple because this is a big four-story building plus the basement, there's a lot going on, you have all kinds of different functions, and you can't just have people wandering in and out of the building. And so at that point, I changed the policy so that the only way to visit the Asheville Mystery Museum is to take one of our haunted Asheville tours. And if you take a walking tour, then the big grand finale, if you take the classic walking tour or the supernatural tour, the big grand finale is at the end you get to go into the museum and see the collection. Now, if you are uh in a situation where you can't do a walking tour, let's say that you're not uh medically capable or there's some other issue, then you can always contact us directly and and request uh a special viewing, so that's an option. But our general policy is you have to go to hauntedashville.com and take either the classic tour or the supernatural tour, and then those will end there. Uh the only other tour we we even offer right now is the Biltmore Village Tour, and that's only on special occasions for large groups, and uh obviously Biltmore Village is a long way from downtown Asheville, so it's not included on that one. But anyway, um so now if you go into the Asheville Mystery Museum, um, and by the way, over over time our location changed. We were on one side of the basement, but the problem with that side of the basement is we didn't have a direct door to the outside, and so over time we've shifted the entire collection to the other side of the basement, and now we have our own little bathroom down there, and we have a direct door that you can go in and out of uh that leads to the creepy alleyway behind the building. And so now we can bring people in and out of the museum without even having to go through the main entrance of the the temple and um maybe interfere with some other function that's going on there because you know they have weddings there all the time, and there are people who film movies there and music videos, and there's all kinds of stuff going on there. So it's we now are in the best possible situation because you go to the creepy alleyway, you walk down the stairs, and you're in the museum. And on the right, you we have our bathroom there, and the whole thing is self-contained. And here are just some of the things you know that you'll find in the museum right now. And there's a long list of them. I mean, I have a an authentic cross, a hand-hewn cross that I brought back from Transylvania that I purchased from the estate of a family in the town of Sigishwara, where Vlad the Impaler was actually born. That is a rare thing, and I've also got some rubble from Poinari, which was Vlad the Impaler's actual prime castle in Transylvania. I have UFO crash debris from Puerto Rico. I have uh an alleged chupacabra skull from Puerto Rico. I've got Civil War artifacts, I have a genuine crystal skull, I have again a lot of this lab equipment featured on many TV programs like the uh vacuum chamber that we used in our Brown Mountain Lights research that's been featured on the Discovery Channel and Travel Channel and um has actually that the work we did with that plasma chamber earned us the cover of a science journal in 2004. So there's a lot of stuff down there that you may have seen on TV shows like Ghost Adventures. Uh I have uh a Fedora worn by my late great friend Jim Mars, the uh author and journalist and conspiracy theorist. Famous for always having his fedoras on. And last time I saw Jim before he passed away, which was last year, I got one of his fedoras. I was in his house and he took me into his closet and we got a fedora out and he signed it and he gave me a picture of him wearing it when he was at the Chichenitsu Pyramid. And uh so that's there. I have antique Masonic masks. I have interactive optical illusion displays related to ghosts and how we experience phantoms. We have the world's only life-size model of the newbie phantom, which if you've never seen the newbie phantom, it's a creepy, creepy thing, and it's about seven to eight feet tall. It was captured in a photograph in 1963, as well as the world's only life-size model of the Duke. And the Duke was this corpse of a con man who died in Asheville in the early 1900s, and for years, at least once or twice a year, was paraded through the streets. Uh literally, a corpse, paraded through the streets, and uh jeered at and laughed at and celebrated in a very, very bizarre uh series of incidents. Uh, you learn about that. Uh Lauren actually created the uh life-size models of the Duke and the newbie phantom. Um I'm very proud that we have the only intact portions from the old Buncom County Jail. Um the old Buncom County jail was on the top levels of the Buncombe County Courthouse. And uh several years ago, they decided to renovate that building, and they already had a new jail, and so they just took a giant crane and they went in and they cut the entire old jail into the smallest pieces possible and just shoveled them out of there and scrapped them. And uh Vance and I actually went over and talked to the the company in charge, and fortunately, uh they were um they were sympathetic toward hi historians, and uh we made a deal for them to keep some of the actual sections like bars and a bunk and a visitation window and a table. I mean some of the stuff from the old jail intact just for us, and so you won't find that anywhere else. Uh and it and talk about heavy, and that that was no easy task to get that stuff and to first put it in the old muse uh old museum and then move it over to the new museum. Um so that's there. Uh but of course the the centerpiece for me will always be Art Bell's alien statue named Carville. And I won't go into that story because I've told it on this podcast already once or twice. But uh Art Bell's alien statue is even more precious now that art is no longer with us. And um you know, when it comes to somebody like Art Bell, it's hard to imagine something that would go in a museum that would sort of capture what he did because he was a radio host. So it's like, what do you do? You put a maybe a microphone in or something like that. Yeah. But no, this is the only thing that I can think of that really captures the essence of uh what Art Bell was up to. And Mobius recently discovered this wonderful picture showing Art sitting in his studio with Carvel right there in the shot behind him. It's a great, great image. I posted it on uh Facebook. So again, if you are in the area of Asheville, North Carolina, um I hope that you will take the haunted Asheville Ghost Tours. It's that time of year when the weather is getting nice enough. And uh we have won TripAdvisor certificates of excellence for the past years in a row. Uh we have fantastic reviews on TripAdvisor and everywhere else. Um we have the best uh tour guides in Asheville. I I guarantee you that. And um if you go to hauntedasheville.com, you can make your reservation there and come and uh I I designed this tour so that even if you are an Asheville native like I am, you still will be surprised. That's my goal, is to to show you things that you uh never have seen or are to give you information that you've never heard about this town that you thought you knew. And uh that's why everybody loves it, and we have people who come back every year uh because it's so much fun, and we are always updating it with new discoveries and new research. So, that's pretty cool uh that this is the anniversary, apparently, of the day we opened it, our big ribbon cutting. And that's Asheville on the East Coast. Now, here I am doing this huge event in Vegas in the West. We're taking America by storm, right? Truly coast to coast, almost, almost coast to coast. There is no no coast in Nevada, but it's close, it's very close. So speaking of which, I'm gonna get back to work here because gosh, the big event starts in four days. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go to youwillmanifest.com. You will manifest.com. I'm gonna blow people's minds here in Las Vegas in four days. So that's it for now. Uh hope you all have a great weekend. Happy Mother's Day to all you moms out there, happy Mother's Day to my mom Peggy. And uh hey, thank you for listening. Thank you for your support, thank you for staying curious, and I will talk to you again soon.