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Assorted Conversations
Are you intrigued, inspired and just have to learn more when you find someone who is boldly embracing their dreams? Make plans to join me every other Wednesday as I share stories from everyday people following their passions and pursuing happiness.
Have some laughs, learn about a specific passion and develop an understanding of how and why these guests are turning their dreams into realities, plus possibly get inspired to begin your own journey!
Assorted Conversations
Ep. 43 - Revisiting The Ghost Tour Manager Conversation with Christy Parish
A house can change your mind—or demand that you finally trust it. We sit down with paranormal investigator and tour manager Christy Parrish to trace her path from a silenced childhood sensitive to the steward of one of Massachusetts’ most active and historic homes: the Oliver House in Middleboro.
Christy recounts the Tennessee years that forced her to take her abilities seriously: a violent strike in an empty bathroom, a chilling 911 call traced to her landline, and a barrage of phenomena that drove her to build her own experiments when outside teams walked away. You’ll hear how “ghost mats,” powder-dusted surfaces, and patient EVP sessions led to one of her most startling cases—Peg Leg Eddie—complete with footprints, a confirmed toe bone, and the peace that followed.
Then we step into the Oliver House, a 1760s landmark where Revolutionary War history collides with careful investigation. Christy and a dedicated volunteer crew blend technical rigor and empathy to document at least fifteen resident spirits, including a chambermaid tied to the saga of Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s letters and Benjamin Franklin’s fateful visit. We explore how Loyalist archives, Franklin’s retrieval, and the judge’s ammunition mill shaped the run-up to revolution—and why telling that story matters as much as any EVP.
What makes this conversation different is the model: accessible public tours, pro nights for seasoned investigators, and daytime history walks that fund preservation without sensationalism. Guests learn to use equipment, separate real signals from noise, and engage with respect. Along the way, we share our own visit highlights, from the “house dog” brushing an ankle to a device blurting “bacon… eggs” at the exact closet linked to Franklin’s letters.
If you care about haunted places, Revolutionary history, or how community-powered programs can keep fragile sites alive, this one’s for you. Subscribe, share this episode with a friend who loves ghost stories and archives, and leave a review to help more curious listeners find the show.
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Credits
Music Credit: True Living by Patrick Moore
Royalty free music license purchased at soundotcom.com
Happy Halloween. As we get ready to close out spooky October, I am so happy to be able to share with you an encore episode from our conversation with Paranormal Investigator and Ghost Tour manager, Christy Parrish. It's actually a throwback episode to when there were two co-hosts on Assorted Conversations, and we had a blast talking to Christy. We weren't able to visit the Oliver House, which is the property at the time she was the caretaker of. We weren't able to visit it prior to the interview, but we did make a trip out to meet her and to explore this gorgeous property and highly active property after we had our conversation. So stick around. At the end of the interview, Maureen and I talk about what we experienced at the Oliver House. And Christy Parrish is very involved in the paranormal community. She no longer is affiliated with the Oliver House. However, she's moved on to other properties such as the Mayflower Lodge in Middleboro, Mass, and the Emery Estate in Weymouth, Mass. She also teaches at the Weymouth Teen Center. And she is sharing her knowledge and her investigation techniques with young soon-to-be paranormal investigators. So great stuff from Christy. Jump down to the show notes for links to her newest properties. Take a listen to this week's episode, and I'll see you in two weeks. It is. I am so excited to share it.
SPEAKER_00:I have a question for you, Helen. Have you ever had a paranormal experience?
SPEAKER_02:You know, I don't believe I have. So I don't know if that qualifies as a paranormal experience, but um I have been told there's energies that follow me around. Oh my gosh. How about you?
SPEAKER_00:You know, I've had a couple different ones, but I would say the one that left the biggest impression on me was in a house, I was up in my room reading a book I had borrowed from one of my housemates. And I was dozing off as I was reading the book and could hear footsteps coming into the room and could feel someone looking closely at me. You know that feeling when someone's looking closely at you? Yeah. You just know there's a presence there. I had this wave of sadness come over me. And it was just like this really sad kind of despair. I thought, oh, she's come to get her book. And I woke up and there was no one there. And I called down to her to say, Oh, did you want your book? And she said, What are you talking about? And I described what had happened, and she said, Well, we should probably tell you.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, God.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, there has been um a death in this house. So apparently there was a teenage girl who had committed suicide in the house. And that's what I was experiencing. And she said that she had she had been aware of it and they'd done some research on the house and the family that had been there before. So they were aware of it. But it was one of those things where I never I never felt um afraid as a result. It was just the sadness and it was just so melancholy. And I just kind of spoke to her and said, It's okay. I'll be your friend. And never did I experience anything like that again during the time I lived in the house.
SPEAKER_02:Wow. Wow. It was really strange. That is that's that's eerie, but also, I don't know, peaceful in a way, you know, where where you actually spoke and it never happened again.
SPEAKER_00:Right. I've had other experiences, but that was the one that I think it was because of the emotion of it. Like there was just this real feeling to it. So wow, that was kind of cool.
SPEAKER_02:Not unlike um our guest this week, who uh has been involved with paranormal and paranormal activity and investigation because she was actually involved in what she termed as severe hauntings. But that ignited a gift in her that she had long uh pushed down, and it led her to her current role at the historic Oliver House. So take a listen to this week's conversation, and we will see you on the other side. This week's guest is Christy Parish, who volunteers her time as event coordinator and ghost tour manager for the historic Oliver Estate in Middleboro, Massachusetts. Christy feels a sense of duty not to just preserve the property's historic significance, but also preserving it for the energies that reside there. Welcome, Christy, and thanks for being with us.
SPEAKER_03:Thank you so much. And I hope a lot of people listen. So my voice gets out there.
SPEAKER_00:Well, the sound of your voice is beautiful.
SPEAKER_03:I really appreciate y'all uh having me along today to talk about uh some of the things that were very important to me. And hopefully this will resonate with people in the audience and help maybe inspire stuff to go out and do some great things to help preserve history and locations.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00:When you got involved with the Oliver House, you must have had some kind of background. How did you get started in the paranormal?
SPEAKER_03:When I was born, I was born with abilities and uh being in the south and having the ability to have uh voices and to be able to see things when you're a child in the Bible belt can be very difficult. And uh I love my parents, but to talk to them about these things, it got me a whole lot of lot of church and do psychiatric evaluation um to where I had eventually believed that it was wrong to be able to have gifts, and that was kind of like beaten into me. Well, uh my story is kind of a it's a hard one to kind of tell people some of the details because it's it's pretty scary. Uh I actually had um married a gentleman in 2001, and we purchased a home that was built around the 1930s timeframe down in Tennessee. The home was directly across the street from a Confederate cemetery. Uh, I think the gravesites were less than a football field from our front door and angled towards the direction of our house. It always felt odd, but there was something about it that I just absolutely was drawn to. I think being drawn to this house was an awakening for me because the the house and the energies within it knew that I could do these things and they knew that I had these abilities, but I had shut them off for so long that it took force and aggression uh to wake me up. And when we first moved in, um my husband and my stepdaughter began to tell me about the people that they would see in the house and the things that would touch them, and and there was a shadow man at the end of the hallway.
SPEAKER_00:How old was your stepdaughter at the time?
SPEAKER_03:She was only about six years old when we were married. And my husband, you know, he kept saying more things were happening to him than she was. But, you know, I I kind of brushed it off because that's what was kind of pushed my direction growing up, you know, just your imagination or your mind is just busy and it's replaying the day. That's a thing my mom used to tell me a lot. It was very much alive, this house, and it was very dangerous. And it started to really go after my stepdaughter. And oh no. I don't have my own children. Uh, and so when I got married and I had a stepdaughter, I became like the mama bear. I really love this little girl, and I would move heaven and earth to protect her and to watch and hear and see her experience some of these things. Um that started to get under my skin. But still, I had this disbelief because that's what was pushed into me. And I tried to explain it away, much like my mom tried and my dad tried to do with me.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_02:Did did anything happen to you? Or did you experience anything when your stepdaughter was was experiencing these things?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Um, it started with them, uh, my husband and my stepdaughter, but then it turned on me. And I remember uh the moment I love to mow the grass and ride my little lawnmower and and do the yard work. And uh I had come in and I was all sweaty and achy. So I told him that I was gonna draw a bath and I was gonna soak in the tub for a while. The water was just a little too hot. And so when I stepped over into the tub, I sat down very gently in the water. It was so hot. And I remember curling my arms around my knees and just kind of sitting there, just waiting for the water to cool enough to where I could lean the rest of the weight back into the tub. And then I remember feeling this cold breeze to the side of my face, to the exterior of the tub. We had the the iron, uh, beautiful decorative like vents. And when the air conditioner would come on, you would hear it rattle a little bit, and there were some towels that were hanging above that. So I just instead I just did it without thinking, looked over at the vent, and as I turned my head to look over, that's when I felt the back of a hand smack me across my jaw. I mean, it hit me so hard, it spun my head all the way around to the back, and I jumped out of the tub because there is nothing standing there right beside me, but something just hit me that hard. So I jump up out of the tub and I run into the living room and I have not a stitch of clothes on, I'm dripping wet, the front door's open, the windows are open, there's traffic going down the road, and I'm telling him, I was like, something just hit me. He saw how red it was already, and literally my face stayed bruised for like four days across the jaw. Um, and that was tough because I work around a lot of men at my job, the one that pays me. Yeah. And uh they kept thinking that my husband was being abusive to me, but it wasn't. It was the energies within the house. And I think what was happening is they were doing everything they possibly could to get me to wake up and listen to them, and I wasn't doing it. So they had to get aggressive for me to start to pay attention and believe that they're really there. One of the scariest parts of it uh was my husband and I were asleep on a Sunday morning, and my stepdaughter was with her mom that weekend, and I remember waking up and there was like banging on our back door, and there was a cop standing, a couple of cops actually standing there, and they said, Um uh we had a phone call, uh, we believe came from this house. And uh I said, Well, we've been in bed, and he said, Do you have a little girl here? And I was like, No, I have a stepdaughter, but she's with her mom this weekend. There's no children here. And uh he says, Well, is your landline number? And he read the number, and I was like, Yes, it is, that's our phone number. He says, Well, ma'am, do you mind if I just take a look around? And I was like, No, you can come in and take a look. So Taco entered the house and walked the first floor, and then they went upstairs and walked all the bedrooms upstairs and came back down, and they were just on their way out the door, out the back door, and he turned and he looked at the door that led into the basement. And I keep a chain on it because that door kept opening up in the middle of the night. If you ever walked into my house in Tennessee, every swinging door has chains on it because the things move and I don't need them. And so uh I lifted the chain and I opened the door and uh he said, So that's your basement down there. I was like, Yeah. He said, Do you mind just to exhaust all possibilities? I said, No, it's fine. So I flipped on the light at the top of the stairs, and he started to walk down the stairs, and I was behind him. I said, Do you mind if I ask you what the urgency is with this uh girl or this child? And uh he said, Um, well, we received a phone call that she was about to kill her parents, and then we she hung up and we couldn't reach her back. The phone was busy.
SPEAKER_02:Oh my god.
SPEAKER_03:As we got to the base of the stairs, as we got to the base of the stairs, uh, we did have a landline that my husband had put down in the basement, and the phone was hanging off the pole and it was going, it was beeping. And so the officer went over and he he picked the phone up and he kind of looked at me, and I was like, I don't know what to tell you right now, except I really hope that you find this girl before it's too late. And it scared me. It's scaring me now.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, there are so many other things. I mean, it the experiences that I had there in itself would probably be one of the scariest movies you've ever seen in your entire life. We literally had our feet grabbed and got drug out of bed. We would walk into people that we couldn't see. Um, we had doors that sounded like people were trying to break into our house, but when the cops came, the the doors were kicked from the inside out, not from the outside in. So it just goes on and on. Um so what drove me to do this paranormal uh that I do is the fact that I reached out to people, teams in the area, multiple teams, to come to my house and try to get some answers to try to figure out what they can cover, what we were going through. And I had uh ladies that were full-blown psychic mediums that would walk in and she says, I don't know how you stay here.
SPEAKER_02:I I no disrespect or to minimize anything you were going through, but I think the for sale sign would have been up very quick if if I even experienced one of those things.
SPEAKER_03:Yikes. And I don't know what was driving me to stay, other than the fact that I wasn't gonna let anybody bully me or push me out of somewhere that I loved. The problem was is that each team would never come back. They would have all these experiences where they would have equipment that would shut off. One lady said to them in the dining room, we were all in the dining room, she had all kinds of cameras and recorders. And she said to them out loud, she says, Do you not know that you're dead? And at that time, every you heard click, click, click, click, click, click, everything shut down. And all the video recordings, when they went back to review, it fizzled out right there before the camera shut off. Right after she said that, you could hear the sizzling, and it was on every single camera and every single room that they had set up. It just shut down.
SPEAKER_00:I feel like if you can create that kind of change in an environment, your energy must must feel like you're alive.
SPEAKER_03:I think, I think you're exactly right with what you're saying, you know, and this is kind of uh where I went into research mode. This is where the true researcher started. Is I was I can't get help here in my own household with my own family to feel safe. I said, I have to figure this out. If nobody else is gonna figure this out, I'm going to have to do it. So I went to libraries and I would just sit and read every single thing that I can possibly read about, you know, people's uh experiences with the paranormal. You don't want to look like a crazy person. Right. When you start talking about it. Because, and that's the really the toughest part. And I feel for a lot of families that go through hauntings is they feel like they can't really say anything because the way society judges them. Right. And that can be almost as damaging as the activity that's going on that they have to deal with or try to figure out how to resolve or live with in some way. Right, because they're ostracized for it. Exactly. It was in learning about that within the walls of my own house that I thought, here's kind of something I think people miss the boat on a lot. They want to just like get angry out into the atmosphere. But rather than do that, why don't we just take a step back and just try to talk to whatever's in your environment, just like you're a person, just like we're talking right here, have a conversation. Let them get to know you as being not a threat. And maybe someone that can get their voices heard if there's information or things that they need you to know, be that open, open vessel to be able to do that. They can't talk through you, but they can talk to you, and you have to make that clear. Uh, being assertive and being having affirmation in dealing with this was my saving grace in that house.
SPEAKER_02:What did you find out about the energies or spirits in in your house?
SPEAKER_03:You were ready for this. I don't know. I don't think I was ready for what you just shared. Well, I will have no fingernails left. So, what I learned was at any given time I had anywhere between 40 to 50 energies that walked through my house in a good time. And there was essentially uh in my stepdaughter's bedroom upstairs a closet. And we had figured out by setting up cameras and laser grids and equipment, we were able to measure uh seismic change and everything in that area. When a portal to the house would open, it would sound like broken glass or a door slamming, and then we would actually, with the laser grid, see the forms of the people that were walking out of that door into my house. They would come and go as they pleased when they wanted. So literally, there was one that I kept hearing, and it made a particular sound uh when it was walking around. It's like you heard a step, but you heard like a click kind of sound on the floor above you. And that's what really got me on this kick of trying to design new experiments and new documentation tools. And they're not pretty, but there's some logic that goes in behind it. What I really wanted to do was be able to go into places in my house in particular and walk away with their footprints or their handprints. And then I wanted to lift that print and I wanted to cross-reference it uh to someone or get like a a mark on the bottom of their shoe from their time, and maybe I could trace that back to how old they are. And so I took what I call the ghost mat, and I also brought a friend from Rhode Island who enjoys this stuff, and I said, Well, you need to come to my house. Right. I got an experience for you. And she was like, I can't wait. We were there uh one night, and these uh devices that I had built, they have these uh sensory alarms on them. So I dust the surface of the mat, and during the night we're asleep, and she nudges me and she says, Christy, she says, You need to wake up, listen. And I was, I was listening, and I heard some movement upstairs, and then we heard the alarm go off on the mat upstairs, and it went off and it went off and it went off and it went off, and like it was multiple steps that was on this mat. So I said, Okay, so first off, we're not going up there.
SPEAKER_00:You know what? Here's what I appreciate. You heard the sound and you did not go there. Which is not like any other like horror movie I've ever seen where they always go there. You're my new hero.
SPEAKER_03:I told her, I said, you know what, let's just give them their space. We're just gonna keep relaxing, let them do what they're gonna do. Maybe they'll use it more times. So in the morning, the first thing when we woke up, she was like, Let's go check those mats. I heard the other one go off as well. We opened the door to go upstairs, and I have these really dark painted walls. Right there on the wall are these white powder handprints climbing up the wall to go upstairs. And she says, Do you see this? And I was like, Yes. I said, Take, let's let's take some pictures and let's document this. And she says, Christy, look at that's a man's hand right there. Because we held our hands up next to it. It was a lot larger, but it was a human hand. And so she says, Let's go up there where we heard the other one. So we we kind of creep up the stairs. It was probably the funniest thing anybody could ever like we should have like uh Pink Panther music. Did I dunno dunno as we were going up those stairs and um we we make it to the room. Uh, I put the mat right there in the doorway of my stepdaughter's bedroom where the portal is. Right there on that mat was one footprint and a square. And I looked at it and I said, uh I said, This energy only has one foot. Oh this is a peg. And she says, and it's all over. It's a barefoot and it's a peg, and it's multiple places on this mat. So we snapped all kinds of pictures, and I was like, this is incredible. So let's go find out who this is. We start uh asking questions, and we got the name Edward. So I asked, I said, Edward, do you only have one foot? And he said, Yes. So I start calling him Peg Leg Eddie.
SPEAKER_02:How did you get the name Edward? And how did you hear him?
SPEAKER_03:We recorded it on a digital audio recorder. When we played back, we asked the questions, we play it back, and there it is in the voice.
SPEAKER_00:Were you able to do research to find out who he was?
SPEAKER_03:Uh well, I kind of figured he was associated with uh the Civil War. Right. Um kind of it just felt that way. It makes sense. And the graveyard's right across the street, but um, I just asked the question. I use uh dousing rods. I don't know if Bonnie ever told you about that. I use them a lot to get confirmation, yes or no answers and things like that. So I grabbed my rods and I just asked him. I said, Eddie, I was like, if if you're bound here because maybe you're missing your other foot, can you let me know? And he goes, Yes, like that, really strong. And I said, Okay, are you here because your foot is on my on my land? Yes, really strong. And I was like, Okay. I said, Would you like me to find it? Yes, really strong. So I asked for him to point to the direction that I should travel, and he pointed me to the back of the house. So we went out the back door, down the stairs and into the backyard, and I just told him, I said, when we get to you use these to lead me where I need to go, and then I will look for your foot. So he led me around to an old tree to the back of it, and when I got there, I could see the anxiousness with the rods, and then they just cross really hard. So I do a technique where I back up and come at it backwards and go different directions and see if it still leads me to the exact same place. Right. And and I also do what I call touch the tips, where the tips of the rods will touch three times, and that's really hard for anybody to try to manipulate. The spirits can do it, but it went ting, ting, ting and touched right when I got to where it needed to be. So I put a stick in the ground right there, and I marked the ground. I said, now we should dig. And my friend's eyes at the time. She's like, uh Yeah. Not so much about this. I said, Well, if you're not comfortable with this, that's fine. So we left it for that moment. But I came back to it with another friend who really didn't know as much. And I was like, just be here as moral support.
SPEAKER_00:We're digging for treasure.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:P.S. Helen, that's what you need to use on me.
SPEAKER_03:She said, What's the stick for? And I was like, I think, I don't know. There's something probably buried here, but I'm not sure what. I was lying out my teeth on this. Um, and as I started to dig about five to six inches under the ground, I hit something. I brought it up and it was like this creamy white color. And it looked like it had these little holes in it, almost like, you know, when you break a bone, there's the marrow portion. And I thought, that looks like it goes on a foot. And uh my friend said, What is that? And I said, I don't know. It might be bone, it might be a rock. And she says, Well, you know, if you take it and you touch it to your tongue and it sticks, it's bone. And I was like, Oh.
SPEAKER_00:This is why you bring the friend who knows what you're there for so she doesn't suggest such a thing.
SPEAKER_02:Did you hand it to her? Here you try it. No.
SPEAKER_03:No. Uh I actually I said, let's let's take it in the house and let's clean it up and take a better look at it. So I did and I studied it. And then I called a friend of mine uh in Rhode Island who's a nurse, and I was like, I think I might have a piece of bone here, but how do I know? He said, Well, if you stick it to your tongue, it'll stick. So he said, just barely stick it to your tongue. And I had cleaned it up at this point, and I did.
SPEAKER_02:And it did you did it stick?
unknown:It did.
SPEAKER_00:Oh my gosh, the things we will do for science.
SPEAKER_03:I know, but it I was like, I was convinced at that point that Peg Leg Eddie had legitimately led me to where his foot was, and um, I didn't have to dig up the whole thing in order to tell the story of it. I needed just to say it out loud to him and say, I found it. Here's a piece. I showed it to him, held it up in the house, and I still have that piece of bone to this day. The little it was a piece of the toe that I had dug up and I had a uh the Uh foot anatomy, so I could marry up. It was part of the big toe. After I dug up Peg leg Eddie's toe bone and he found peace, then I had to go to work on a lot of the other energies in the house.
SPEAKER_02:How many years after this? And how deep were you into the paranormal investigating when you discovered the Oliver State?
SPEAKER_03:The Oliver State came on my radar about five years ago. So I was about 15 years into it. The Oliver House was a happy little accident. I go to this convention at Salem Conn and listen to the lectures, and it's a lunch break. And I'm sitting at the bar and I'm having my favorite food when I'm out, uh chicken nuggets. And uh and this lady pulls up a chair at the bar beside me and starts chatting with me. And she was like, So are you into ghosts and stuff? And I was like, Yeah, uh uh you could say that. And uh we just strike up a conversation, and she was telling me that she has an opportunity at this place and she's looking for people to help her with it. Uh, she wants to start public ghost tours in this home from 1769. I was like, it's that old, really. She said, Yeah, it's a pretty big house. And there's actually been people that's gone in and investigated it once, and they recorded voices and had touching and paranormal experiences. So um I think it would be a good place to kind of dip toes in the water and try to start ghost tours. So we exchanged information. About a week later, she calls me and um she says, Are you available to come to Middleboro, Massachusetts, and meet me at the Oliver House? And I was like, sure. She says, put on your work boots, long sleeve shirt, bring some work gloves. We're gonna pull weeds today. Oh my gosh, she is classic. From the moment that I actually turned into that driveway and I could barely see the house, I felt like I was home somehow. It was just that instinctive feeling that you're exactly in the right place where you need to be right now. I just felt like I had this underlying sense of duty. And it was through the years being there, and I've never lost that since the very first day, that I somehow need to protect this place and I need to pour my heart and soul into it and bring it back from bare bones to be alive again.
SPEAKER_02:That's so cool. What about the property or the the folks that lived there do you feel protective of?
SPEAKER_03:All of them. Everything about them. We have documented at least 15 different mainstay spirits that are there all the time. And they're they're through from revolutionary times inside the house to all the way up until like 2013.
SPEAKER_02:Are there specific examples of uh a person being drawn there to speak to or to have a connection with a specific energy that's there?
SPEAKER_03:Yes, and no. Um, I I don't know if it's specific to uh an energy in particular, because there's so many of them. But I do feel like um, and if I can get a shout out to the volunteers uh a little bit, I would really appreciate that because while we're talking about my involvement with it, I can't do this all alone. Uh, no matter where I'm at, there's always other people dedicating their time and their knowledge and their research as well to the project. Um, my uh assistant manager for the ghost tours is Chris Andrade. She can see them, she can visually walk through and see the images of people like the chambermaids. She actually was the first one to actually see in full uh apparition form the chambermaid that was intricate to the story, and from there we just start learning more and more and more because there was the comfort level uh with her. She possesses a very empathetic side to everything, she's just a sweet person, uh sweet soul. Uh, also we have uh a technical guy. His name is uh Paul Heber Jr. Now he's our camera camera guy, but he also likes to tinker with electronics and build new devices. So uh my nerd side kind of enjoys that part of the creativity that he brings to the house when we bounce ideas off of each other. Um, he seems to be um pretty tight with one of the energies that I've noticed in the house uh from around the 1940s timeframe. His name is Harry or Henry Champion Jones. He was an owner and used the house as a vacation property. We have new volunteers that have stepped on board lately. Uh, Steve Bowden, uh Christina Willer, who is a fantastic sensitive person. I got her to come out of her shell because I could tell she was hiding in there and she just needed a place to be able to open up and just blossom. And I thought, hmm, why not throw her in a haunted house? That would be great. If anything will ever bring your senses alive, that'll be it. Uh, Christina, she likes to work with stones as a healing, like crystals and things like that. So she'll she'll actually use those when she's in the house, and it seems like it responds. The house really loves that. The fact that people bring it gifts and things like that, and I think they look at the stones like that. Um, we have Elizabeth Ginsburg, who I stole from Tourism. They can have her whenever they need her, and uh her friend, uh Alicia. Uh, they come every time I need any help. They're always there, they're just minutes from the door. Alex Mitchell is the newest and uh man by the name of Dean, but I don't know Dean's last name. And then we've had a uh husband and wife team that's been with us for a long time, too. Lynn and uh Peggy Hunt, uh, husband and wife team. He used to be the fire chief uh for the Bridgewater area. And uh so wow. I love when Lynn and Peggy come. They have a grandbaby, so the grandbaby takes a lot of their times now, you know. I can just see grandma and grandpa pictures all the time. And I'm like, what about the days when you used to take pictures with ghosts? Don't forget that. We've all sort of been brought there separate from each other, but for very specific reasons. And we've saw that if the house is pleased with you and the people that are there feel comfortable with you and you respect them and they respect you, you're gonna stay. However, if you do something that they can sense within you is is not good for the house as as a whole, you will not be there that long. And we don't have to do anything or say anything. The house will take care of you.
SPEAKER_02:Wow.
SPEAKER_00:I'm feeling like they could take over my old HR career and do it really well.
SPEAKER_03:They probably, yes. They make their ways. There's signs, there's always signs when there's someone who has a wrong intent. Right. We know what those signs are. So once we see it the first time, we know it's just a matter of two or three weeks, and that's it. That person will never come back, we'll never hear from them again. They won't die, nothing bad will happen to them. They just won't be here.
SPEAKER_02:Right. What is the history of the house?
SPEAKER_03:The house was built uh construction in 1767 started. It was actually a wedding present for Dr. Peter Oliver Jr. and his young bride to be Sally Hutchinson, who was the daughter of then governor of Massachusetts Bay, Thomas Hutchinson. As history has taught us, there was um a band of rebels in the city in Boston that later became known as the Sons of Liberty. Now, the family, the Olivers and the Hutchinson, they were staunch loyalists, loyal to King George. The house is important because there was a gentleman by the name of Dr. Benjamin Franklin that was invited there in 1773. And he was actually the ambassador before the royal court over in England for this country. So the loyalists in the areas looked to him to be their ally. And while all of the hostilities was brewing under the surface and becoming overwhelming, they thought that he was also going to be able to go to these people in the city of Boston and other areas and persuade them to kind of let's calm this down just a little bit and let's bend back to the way it should be, which is loyalist rule. During a lot of the turmoil, there was a a series of letters that Sally's father, Thomas Hutchinson, wrote, and Peter's uncle, Andrew Oliver, who was the he was the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts Bay, Andrew was, and um, he was also uh very loved for what he did. He was the tax collector. So uh as you can imagine, this is where a lot of this started. Uh, when he would go to collect taxes from Sam Adams, Sam wouldn't pay them, and then warrants were issued, and arrests tried to be made, and there was it just got really, really messy. So Thomas wrote back and forth to the king, and so did Andrew, with their plans on how they're gonna squash all this animosity that was going on. And I've read through some of these letters, and I can see where the people in Boston would be upset with some of the words and some of the ways that they phrased things. But Thomas kept his 20 letters that were sent to him, but when the heat got too much in Boston, he looked to his daughter's new house, known as the Oliver House, as another place he could take those letters and he could hide them away to where they wouldn't be found. So he visited his daughter Sally and tucked those letters in a closet upstairs. So here's where it gets interesting. Benjamin Franklin came there in 1773, and during this big lavish party, the judge, Judge Oliver, writes in his journal about Dr. Benjamin Franklin staying at Oliver Hall, which is the huge, massive mansion, beautiful place. But when it came time to do private business, they couldn't do private business there with all the guests in the house. There were too many ears. So Judge Oliver, Thomas Hutchinson, Andrew Oliver, and Dr. Benjamin Franklin went over to the small house for an afternoon to talk about their plan. And while Ben was in that house inside the business room, he acquired that 20 packets of letters that were hidden in Sally's closet upstairs. So did Benjamin Franklin go upstairs and rummage around in Sally Hutchinson's closet in that afternoon? I don't think so. And we and we know that he didn't stay there because that's in the judge's journal, you know what he has written. So it leads us down the path of asking the spirits of the Oliver House what really happened. And what they have revealed to us is there was a chambermaid that was putting things away in Sally's closet. She found those 20 packets of letters. Now she could not read this chambermaid, but she was roommates with another chambermaid from the opposite side of the house that could. And there was a situation that had happened, and I won't get into too much detail, but it involved Dr. Peter Oliver Jr. And he hurt somebody that was true and dear to her, possibly hanging him in the tree behind the barn on that side of the house for seven days for this girl to walk by the window and see out back as an example. Oh jeez.
SPEAKER_02:Wow.
SPEAKER_03:So what do we have now? We have motive, and this was a way for her to get back at Dr. Peter Oliver Jr. She loves Sally and the children, but this just she could not forgive. Ultimately, these letters uh brought down this entire family when they were read aloud at Faniu Hall by Sam Adams. It was very shortly after that that the American Revolution, the first shots were fired, and the kicker and what makes this house so important in the Middleborough area as a whole to the American Revolution, even the ruins of Oliver Mill, is because the judge came there in 1744 to manufacture household goods, sheets of metal that they were slit into uh small thin strips, and the other thing that he made was ammunition, musket balls, three-inch cannonballs, and then the guns to be able to fire them. So this is why he was so wealthy. And when the Sons of Liberty confiscated um on September 1774 the Oliver House, they sold all the Tory goods uh to get the money to be able to buy the Tory made ammunition that the judge had made at Oliver Mill. And on 1775, in Lexington, when the first shot was fired that was heard around the world, it was actually using Tory made ammunition against the British. They took over all the armaments? Yes. If you're a launch, a staunch loyalist and there's British soldiers and they're being attacked by the very ammunition that you made. Isn't that just a kick in the teeth? And so maybe that is part of some of my uh sense of duty there, is because I do believe that things that are taken from people, uh, sometimes uh uh they get another chance at life. And this time we have the ability to be able to talk about the loyalists who were there and represent them so people understand what it was like for them by what they teach us uh within the walls of that house.
SPEAKER_00:The thing that also impresses me about Oliver House and reading about it is that the house was purchased and owned by the town.
SPEAKER_03:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:And this is a struggle for a lot of towns. Uh I have seen this happen in my town and been involved in it, where the town owns a property. It doesn't have any tax revenue on it, but it costs to maintain it if you're going to keep especially a historical property you want to try and keep up. Um so I was so impressed that this was an avenue for you to be able to create an income that could help to maintain and even restore the property.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Um, and that was a tough one to try to figure out, you know, because you want to create a safe haven for the energies there, uh, to be able to bring different people in all the time. Because there's gonna be, you've got one energy field that's there, and then you're introducing new energies constantly, and you don't know how that is all gonna work out. You know, while it's friendly, things could turn if you're not careful. But more so, you have to go in to this location and explain to the people within it that we're talking to each week that we're doing all these things because we're trying to save your house. And we want to make sure that you are never forgotten and this house stands strong. And so for this, we need your help and we need your patience and your understanding. And I also need you to give me the lottery numbers so that I can buy them.
SPEAKER_00:Listen, if you're gonna do anything to help me keep this house afloat, the lottery numbers would be good.
SPEAKER_03:They they have told me uh some secrets, and if these secrets do pan out, and I do find the things that they've told me to look for. The property should be taken care of for all time. The important thing as far as revenue is you have a venue that isn't it's amazing and it's exciting, and you want to have a program that draws people in, not just for the investigators and their personalities, but also you want to put people in the adventure. So, what we do is we actually bring all the equipment for people to try out. One thing I stress to the volunteers is whatever you buy, if you want brand hair and put it out and teach people how this works, what gives real answers and what gives false positives, you know, let them feel this in their hands. They see it on TV and they think they can do it, but let's understand how it really works and let's feel what it's like to walk through with something, uh, a piece of equipment. And um, so guests really enjoy that, but also we wanted to make it affordable. You don't want to price it so expensive that nobody can afford to come there, but you also need to price it in such a way that um people are interested in the house actually is having money that's going into the revolving fund to take care of the electricity, the security systems, the yard, lawn work. I mean, we've paid for so much uh for the house through the years. The first four years I was there, we had raised over$64,000 to support that property. And that's just doing Saturday nights six hours a night when nobody else wanted to use the property.
SPEAKER_00:Right. That is amazing. Well, I I mean that's a huge success story and more than what would have been um achieved in taxes if it were owned by just a private citizen.
SPEAKER_03:Right. But you know, I I have seen another thing start to blossom, and this makes me so happy. While I do love paranormal and ghosts, um, I said, let me try to do some historical daytime tours. Let's just see if there's an interest. If people will pay me that, that's direct revenue. I get to tell the story a couple of times a day, and I would started to do two-hour tours of the entire house. I gave them the full story. All the details, all the personalities, the things that we read in journals. I had them cry, I had them laugh, and before they all left, they was like, I love this place. I didn't tell them, I didn't tell them about ghosts. Take as many pictures as you want. Feel feel welcome to sit on the furniture. We want you to feel at home. We're gonna let you put your hand on the history as we go through this. We're gonna let you connect to it. But today we are talking the facts, and that is it. The ghost stuff, we can talk some other time on another tour.
SPEAKER_02:Are there different types of tours that you offer to say the novice paranormal folks like Maureen and I, all the way up to, I know some of some of the the well-known paranormal investigators as well as some of the the popular TV shows have shot and and and and research there as well.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, yes, and that's important no matter where you go. Any location you have is to give uh like different layers, tiers of experiences for people. Right. For, you know, we do what we call a two and a half hour public ghost tour, and that is just what it is. We're going to show you some of the documented evidence, we're gonna let you hear the voices, we're gonna show you some video footage that was shot that you might not see on the internet, um, give you some special tidbits here and there, and then we're gonna walk you through and tell you about some of the experiences from room to room as long, as well as we're gonna talk a little bit of the history on the tour. And then we're gonna let you uh carry some of the equipment around with you as we go the last leg of it and let you kind of free-flow the last part of it and explore it on your own. Then we have uh what we call pro nights. Uh, this was an idea that I had uh about giving people the opportunity that might be a little bit more seasoned or have a little bit more experience. Maybe they're not a part of a big team where they can afford to rent the location. I thought, okay, so we're gonna let folks come in and uh explore for six hours and we're gonna divide up like a professional investigation, just like they were on a team. And we're gonna try new things. We're going to um, they can bring their own equipment and use it there. They don't have to use ours. Uh we'll give them some water so they don't dehydrate, and maybe I'll throw them, I'll throw them a cookie occasionally so they they stay fed. But um no chicken nuggets. Hey, when I'm in that house, don't you touch any chicken that's in my vicinity? That's my chicken. Um, but no, it's it's really uh I think that the pronights, especially for people who like to go to different locations and do this uh on an ongoing basis, I see what we call repeat offenders. That's what we call them. Our pronates go up, and I see the same people trying to buy the tickets. They jump on so they can be a part of the next one because each one we do something new and different. I make sure that there's something new introduced every uh prone tour, a new experiment, or maybe I have special guest investigators that have different styles and equipment just to keep everything interesting. It's always, always, always about learning.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_03:We need to keep bringing something new all the time and open our mind and expand our knowledge. And so I keep it fresh. I keep it real. In fact, I started writing a book uh a while ago called Layers.
SPEAKER_02:This was amazing. Um, keep us informed on the progress of layers. We'd love to have you back when that book comes out.
SPEAKER_03:Well, if you think you're spooked out now, just yeah, right. Right.
SPEAKER_00:Always read during daylight.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I've resigned myself to the fact that I'm gonna sleep with the lights on when I read that book. So, Christy, thank you so much for your time. This has been fantastic.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, well, I appreciate y'all having me uh with y'all today.
SPEAKER_00:It it has been. And I can't wait for us to be able to go on a tour, Helen, because we're going.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, we definitely are going.
SPEAKER_03:For sure. Oh, yeah. I'll give it to you for sure. I mean, when y'all are ready, just call me up. Let's do this. Let's walk, let's walk this land and see what it has.
SPEAKER_00:So, Helen, yeah. That was an exciting interview. What did you think of that?
SPEAKER_02:It was it, I think it was less of an interview and more of a story time with Christy. And then what happened?
SPEAKER_00:Oh my gosh. I didn't know if I wanted to hear more or I was too afraid to hear more.
SPEAKER_02:Right, right. I I mean, I am just I am blown away at how she was led to the Oliver House. Going back to when she was a child and and you know, being um very sensitive or having the gift to tap into the different energies around her was completely um squelched. And as an adult, um, she became more in touch with it. And once she did, she kind of took off inventing different types of equipment and getting more and more involved and doing all the experimentation um and exploration that she did. And it's it's just so funny and so fitting to me that she has wound up at the Oliver House and she is now sharing the stories of all the families that lived in that house.
SPEAKER_00:Oh my gosh. And not only that, but my wishes and dreams came true, Helen, and we got to go to the Oliver House. We did. It was such a great experience. I loved every minute of it from the historical aspects, the architecture. What a gracious home for the 1700s. It was beautiful. Yes, I loved it. And Christy's knowledge of like all of the occupants of that house over the years was just amazing.
SPEAKER_02:It was, it was mind-blowing. She was so generous with her time. And we need to shout out Bonnie Sanderson Cribbins, um, who also joined us for that half day adventure learning all about the Oliver House.
SPEAKER_00:Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_02:One of what, well, one of the one of the pieces of equipment Bonnie brought, you actually were able to hold throughout the house. Talk a little bit about that.
SPEAKER_00:That piece of equipment, which just it was like a Geiger counter for energies, so you would see it blink on as energies were near you. And I wasn't really paying close attention to it. And as is normal for me, the things that are most attracted to me are the pets and the children. So I had the strangest experience as Christy was explaining about one of the pets, a dog that's in the house, of feeling as though I had electric static brush up against my ankle. And I was like, huh, that's unusual. And as I look down at the reader, the reader was blinking red. So she's like, Oh yeah, that's the dog. Like the dog is here near you. So that was so cool. And then the little children. Oh, and and you just hold that piece of equipment and you could tell about how tall the entity had been in life. It was so cool. You had a piece of equipment that was tons of fun as well.
SPEAKER_02:I almost like threw it across the room or dropped it on a couple of occasions, but I actually had the piece of equipment that would pick out words that the energies were trying to communicate that it wasn't audible to the human ear. But this piece of equipment would register it and the equipment would say the word. And as I was holding it, some energy wanted to correct Bonnie. She said, Oh, I can't remember if it was nine or 10. And the machinery spoke and said, Nine. That was one of the times I almost threw it across the room. I was like, Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Oh my gosh. And it registered specific words to um, she was explaining where Benjamin Franklin's secret letters were found. And they were found in a closet upstairs. And Christy jokingly refers to the closet as the bacon and eggs room because there is a hand, there's hand stamped wallpaper that lines the inside of this closet. And she's made a joke about it looks like bacon and eggs. And when she mentioned Benjamin Franklin's letters, the piece of equipment spoke and said bacon and then eggs. And she hadn't even mentioned that. So I said, Well, apparently somebody's hungry. They want breakfast. And she said, What's it registering? And I said, bacon and eggs. She said, Oh, it's because I mentioned the letters. And then she explained it to us. And again, I almost dropped the piece of equipment, but we spent the better part of a Sunday afternoon touring the house with Christy, getting to play around with some of the equipment and learning, I'm sure, just some of the stories that the Oliver households.
SPEAKER_00:It was just, it was so amazing. And and they have other events there. They had people doing photography there for a calendar. So it it's such a versatile piece of property that they do so much with, and that they've got the Halloween events, but then Christmas events coming up too. I right. You know, like you sit there and you go, sign me up for it all. I want to be there.
SPEAKER_02:It is a gorgeous property, a very historic property. Um, in Christy's opinion, a very pivotal property to the Revolutionary War. This was just a great time. And um, Christy, we cannot. Thank you enough for your generosity of time and sharing all those stories with us. If you're interested in learning more about the Oliver House, jump down to our show notes. We've got links to the Oliver House website, their social media platforms. And regardless of the time of year, Maureen and I highly encourage a visit there to see the sites and learn more about this specific property. We also want to give everybody a reminder, since Maureen, you brought up the holiday events that the Oliver House is holding. You've got a couple more days to submit your funny holiday memories, funny holiday traditions, the worst gift you ever received, and the best gift you ever received. We're looking to have some of our listeners become part of our holiday episode coming up on Christmas week. So jump down to the show notes. We have a link to our online form so you can share as much or as little as you'd like in any of those four categories. Maureen and I will look through, we'll read as many as we can, and we're gonna reach out to some of our favorite submissions to see if you would like to record with us and be an audio part of our holiday episode. So that's a reminder for the upcoming holiday. And then we have a super cool announcement on Halloween night from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern time. Christy Parrish will be sharing her paranormal stories live on our Facebook community page. So you're gonna want to make plans to join us for that if you enjoyed this episode.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Light the candles and get ready for the spooky stories, kids.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. We'll also have some Oliver House giveaways to share with folks who join us on Halloween night for ghost stories or paranormal stories with Christy. We will be spinning our wheel of winners to choose the winners of several giveaways that Maureen and I are donating, as well as Christy, because she is going to be making a couple incredibly generous donations. So if you are into paranormal and have an interest in visiting the Oliver House, you are going to want to make sure your name gets entered in our Wheel of Winners so that when we spin, you've got a shot at some of these giveaways.
SPEAKER_00:I can't wait to see everybody.
SPEAKER_02:I know. That's it for this week. Maureen, any parting words?
SPEAKER_00:Happy Halloween, everyone.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, happy Halloween. And we can't wait to do spooky October next year. If you've liked what you've heard, please subscribe and share with your friends and family.
SPEAKER_00:Rate and review us wherever you download your podcast.
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SPEAKER_02:Thanks for joining us, and until next week, be bold, be blind, and pursue your passions.
