Today we will be discussing the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, but before we discuss the spine-chilling tale, we will discuss a haunted hair salon, a possible female cannibal, and a horny ghost. I’m your host, Chris. And I’m Sheryl. Grab some hot cocoa, and let’s see if ice guys really do finish last.
The News:
TRANSCRIPT:
Greetings, probably cursed listeners, and welcome to episode 15 of the Probably Cursed podcast. Today we will be discussing the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, but before we discuss the spine-chilling tale, we will discuss a haunted hair salon, a possible female cannibal, and a horny ghost. I’m your host, Chris. And I’m Sheryl. Grab some hot cocoa, and let’s see if ice guys really do finish last. Nice pun you wrote there.
Thank you. I had to Google it.
Before we started recording, Sheryl was playing with the Spirit Talker app, so we’ll also be accompanied by special ghost guests.
Stella and… Liam.
Stella, Liam, if you’re here with us in the room, make a sign. Hmm. It must have went out.
Well, if Chris is editing this later and he hears strange voices, we’ll know.
Yeah, if you listen to this podcast and you hear strange shrieks and moans in the background, they say hi.
Yeah. Or it’s a horny talk. Can’t tell sometimes.
And before we get into the news stories here, we will announce that we have a new animal familiar amongst us.
We got a little bird. It’s white with reddish eyes. Named Hex.
He’s a friendly little chap. You’ll probably see him on the social media. Yeah. Testing our cursed objects for a cursedness.
Right now, everything is scary except for our other bird. So it’s… It’ll be interesting to see his reaction to cursed things.
So as we do at the start of every episode, we calibrate the Lord Carnarvon Curse-O-Meter. The amazing AI machine that tells us what is cursed, what isn’t, what’s blessed, what’s actually just the real fault of people. We’ll enter in three news stories in the machine here and I will supply it with the first. This comes from Megan Shaw and Thomas George for the Manchester Evening News on October 21st, titled, A Ghost Asked My Girlfriend for a Totally Inappropriate Sex Act.
It was just him.
Sorry. He’s just like whispering and he’s like, oh, it was the ghost. And she’s like, you want me to do what? No, it was the ghost. The ghost wants us to hold hands.
That’s right. Lee Steer and his girlfriend, Sarah Carter, first met during a ghost hunting event organized by Lee and his then wife in 2023. Lee and his ex-wife divorced later that year and by early 2024, Sarah and Lee said their friendship blossomed into a relationship. Lee said, we met up and I was going through a hard time with the divorce. I spoke about it with her and got it all off my chest and we took it from there.
That’s an awkward way to start a relationship, but all right.
Sarah said, I watched him for so long and I could see the breakup happening quite publicly and I thought I’d put myself out there and ask how he was. I suppose we didn’t expect anything to come from it.
I just wanted to show my support. Sarah had always been a believer, having watched shows such as Most Haunted as a Child and Lee helped solidify her beliefs. Lee, meanwhile, has been fascinated by the paranormal since he was 14 when he believes he witnessed objects moving around in his bedroom.
What kind of objects were you talking about? Didn’t say.
Hot wheels. Yeah. The ghosts are just sending them down the ramps and making them do sick air flips. Sarah said, we have a shared interest in the paranormal and because of that, we go to places we normally wouldn’t go.
Now he’s just become irreplaceable and I can’t imagine not being with him. Early in their relationship, one of Sarah’s most memorable supernatural encounters occurred when she stayed at Lee’s house and claims to have seen a meal packet mysteriously flip over. It was a cockroach or a mouse. Could be a frog. Mm-hmm.
She said, we had just returned from an investigation and we were having a microwave meal. I saw the tray it comes in, flip completely 180 degrees and turn upside down. There was no mess. It was just a perfect turn and there was no one else around. Good job. With Lee there, he’s so inquisitive so we tried to replicate it by flipping it at ourselves for hours, but we just couldn’t. I just knew it was something paranormal.
That’s an awkward date, just spending hours trying to flip over a meal packet.
Maybe she’s like, I wanted the Netflix and chill and he’s like, no, we gotta make it flip again. Uh-huh. The couple live in Rotterham, South Yorkshire, and run the Haunted Objects Museum, people after our own heart, which showcases a collection of supernatural items. Together they have had numerous spine-chilling experiences, including a visit to Wath Town Hall or Rotterham, where they sensed a spirit making advances towards Sarah, since this is where we get towards the meat of the title. When we went to a haunted town hall, we heard that the person who died there was not very nice to women, and spirits can be quite crude, Lee added. A recording picked up a voice saying, suck my dot dot dot – you know.
We could all hear it, a creepy, deep voice. It was totally inappropriate. Sarah added, it was weird. Lee had forewarned me that entities can be aggressive towards women. I was just asking him normal questions when it happened.
He said a lot of seedy things, and I felt really uncomfortable. We’ve got this camera with sensors, and it picked up that there was a figure there bending down in miming sexual actions toward me. Sexist ghosts.
How do they know it wasn’t like a ghost of a 13-year-old or a 12-year-old? It feels like the sort of thing kids on the playground would say. And miming sexual acts? Come on.
It was totally a 14-year-old. At the museum, they report seeing objects move regularly and hearing voices. They believe this is linked to newly acquired haunted artifacts such as a window frame from the Amityville Horror House in Amityville, New York. Infamous for a 1974 family murder and paranormal claims.
Whoa, wait, where do we get stuff like that? I don’t know.
Maybe if they tear down the Conjuring House, we should buy one of their windows. Yeah. We’ve got relics from Alistair Crowley’s house. He was a very famous occultist, and since his Conjuring lamp appeared in the museum, we’ve noticed activity ramping up with cameras moving, Lee said.
On several occasions, their CCTV cameras have moved on their own, prompting Lee to install additional cameras to monitor the other cameras. There’s a very dark, horrible energy, and things have started happening all over the house, Sarah said. One evening, the door was locked, and it sounded like someone was trying to open it, but no one was outside.
It was terrifying. Things like this still make me jump, but Lee is more inquisitive and wants to investigate it. Looking to the future, the couple hope to grow their social media presence. For Halloween, they plan to open a Dybbuk box live on TikTok, which they believe could have a spirit inside, and on Bonfire Night, they have invited followers to send in unwanted haunted items, which they will burn to see if there are any supernatural reactions.
We have a fire pit. We need to do that.
Actually, we just need to add them to our collection. So don’t burn your precious possessions. Your precious haunted possessions. That just contributes to global warming. We are the greener, more environmentally conscious haunted museum.
Yeah, we want your items for our collection. Send it to us. We promise we won’t sell anything that people send in to us on the probably cursed store. It’s just going to be in our haunted museum.
For you to visit later if you ever want to see them again. Which, if you’re getting rid of them to us, you probably don’t. The first story is entered to the curseometer. Sarah will enter the second.
This story is called Bloody Spell Casting Woman, arrested by cops who find cooked human body parts in her home. This is from October 11th by Greg Graziosi for The Independent. A Kentucky woman was arrested after police found dismembered body parts, partially cooked in her home. The Grisim discovery was made by a construction worker who had been hired to work on Trudy Fields’ home when he found a dismembered body part in the backyard. At first he thought the remains were fields’ and called the Kentucky State Police. Officers arrived and found a woman’s body on a bloodstained mattress as well as a second bloodstained mattress dragged toward the back of the house. Sounds like a horror movie. Yeah. I, first of all, I don’t know how she didn’t think she was going to get caught. What’s she going to do with those mattresses?
Yeah, you know, maybe you put them in the back alley and then someone will take them for themselves.
They’ll just think something else happened and won’t even bad an eye at all the blood.
They’ll be like, free mattress already. Yeah.
Police attempted to speak with a woman inside the house, but she allegedly refused to acknowledge them or allow them entry, forcing the police to get search warrants. She just like put her fingers in her ears and go, la la la la, I can’t hear you.
No one’s home.
Upon entry, KSP, Special Response Team, found Fields 32 alone in the house. They gave her multiple commands to leave her home, but Fields refused, eventually causing the police to forcibly remove her from the home. Once Fields was in custody, they saw she had blood on her face, her hands and her clothing.
When investigating the home, parts from the body outside were discovered stuffed into a folded up mattress, as well as in a stainless steel pot containing body parts that appear to have been cooked in an oven. Troopers noted that the pot was still hot to the touch. I feel like that would be a terrible day at your job that you have to check and see if the pot is still hot.
Do you rock paper scissors with your partner to see who gets open up the pot?
I think at that point you just go, let’s call forensics and you don’t touch anything.
We don’t know what’s in the pot, goodbye.
Police have not publicly identified the body. The construction worker who discovered the body told troopers that Fields had been on the property during one of his previous visits and was seen casting spells on them while being confrontational. Did she contact them to work on her home? Why is she cursing the people that are building her house? I don’t know.
Power to her, but… Maybe she was just worried they weren’t going to do a good job. You know some contractors who just kind of do every corner cutting available? Yeah. Maybe she’s like, I’m going to cast a spell on you if you don’t do a good job.
Maybe she saw them do something she didn’t like and she’s like, immediately you are all cursed. We just heard a random knock from our kitchen. And a weird pitter patter across our floor. Where’s Freddie? He’s sleeping. Chris is checking under the table.
That’s weird. Yeah? Alright, so that is the second story. I will supply the third story for the Curse-O-Meter to complete calibration. And for this one, surely you might want to be ready on the sound board. Which sound? It’s kind of silly, so…
I’m going to hold the phone so I can see.
So this new story is from October 24th by JT for 100.3 Jack FM.
Because that’s legit news.
Owners of a haunted salon in Grapevine claim ghosts are closing doors and turning off lights. The Doris House is a historical site in Grapevine as the second home ever built there in 1885. Today, its second floor serves as a salon owned and operated by Lauren and her mother Sherry, who say the house is haunted. Lauren says 100% a ghost is roaming the halls of the salon. Multiple times, alone or not, she’ll hear a loud crash from another room over. When they check it out, they find the room covered in nail polish and the bottle smashed as if it had been thrown.
Like covered, covered in nail polish? Like all the walls and everything?
It didn’t quite elaborate on that point, so I assume she was just being hyperbolic. So this is the next paragraph or more like it’s silly. Lights have also been turning themselves off and on. Even her husband Chris has experienced unexplained events. One time, while alone in the building, he heard a loud noise upstairs. Checking it out, he found the door to the salon completely shut.
Even though they’d never been able to close it completely since buying the home. Despite everything, Lauren believes they are friendly ghosts, not frightening. I know this sounds weird, but it’s like celebratory, she said. It’s not a bad thing, it’s not a negative thing, it’s kind of a special thing.
My mum would disagree with that statement. I put nail polish on the walls when I was a child and she was not impressed.
This is more of a haunting that would scare your mum. Yeah, that was correct. There’s nail polish on everything! Alright, the three-nose stories are loaded into the Curse-O-Meter. We’ll get it to spit out the results for the cursiveness now. Please stand by.
And for the results of the first news story about the ghost asking to do sexual acts to the ghost hunting couple, the Curse-O-Meter says definitely cursed.
Yeah, you shouldn’t ask any random person for a sex act unless you know them, maybe?
It’s about even if you’re dead. I mean, you’re not going to get put in jail, you can’t get sued. But still, they’re still karma. You can’t go around doing bad things like that.
Yeah, plus like, just don’t do that in general, people.
And the results for the second news story about the bloody spellcasting woman who was arrested by the cops after they found human body parts in her home, the Curse-O-Meter says definitely cursed.
Yeah, there’s gotta be something a little unright about you if you’re going to cook people in a pot and leave dismembered body parts all over your property. Yep, it’s not good. Plus cursing your contractors that are working on your house is probably not a good call.
Yeah, those guys have it rough already. Yeah. I mean, we’re doing renovations around our own house and it’s just grueling.
Yeah, it would not recommend.
And the third and final news story about the haunted salon, the Curse-O-Meter says probably cursed.
I mean, look, don’t put nail polish on your walls. And don’t close doors that you couldn’t get closed before.
Yeah, I think it fixed a door in the house, which is good. Yep. But it also got nail polish all over everything, which is bad.
Yeah. Plus it’s making random noises like whatever is going on in our house. It’s unsettling. Yep.
Maybe like those, that thumping noise we heard was the jester clown running full speed across the floor.
I mean, I felt the floor vibrate under my feet when that occurred. Yeah.
I’ll have to take a look around. And that completes the calibration phase of the episode. Before we get to the main topic, we’ll take a trip over to the probably cursed museum and gift shop for the artifact dropping on our store today. So Sheryl and I have traveled far and wide visiting thrift shops, estate sales, antique stores, to en masse, a spooky collection of items that may have the potential of being cursed. In every episode, we release something from our collection for our listeners to purchase. And today that item is artifact number 15, the Cameo Locket. It is a metal locket containing an old-timey black and white photograph of a smiling young man wearing a flat cap, a white shirt, with a dark vest, and a very wide tie. I think it is made of brass-plated steel. The metalwork is ornates.
The front cover has a black cameo of a young woman in a Eduardan or Victorian style. There’s no writings or markings on the locket to give an idea of who it belonged to or who the man in the photo is. My intuition tells me it may have belonged to a widow. It is very well worn on the top and bottom, meaning to me that it had been handled and worn a lot.
It looks like there’s like a cross on the back of it. I don’t know if that necessarily means anything or not, but…
Yeah, I looked all over. I thought there might be something written on the back of the photo, but it looked too fragile to remove, so I left it in there.
Fair. And this artifact, you said we had gotten it from… More than a fad. Right, more than a fad, the thrift shop in the south end of town here. And I think you had seen it in their counter at the front entrance?
Yes. And immediately I was like, what is that? And then I grabbed it and I was like, that is coming home with me.
Now it is part of the collection. You can see artifact number 15 and even get it for yourself at probablycursed.etsy.com. All the items for sale in there help raise money to grow the podcast and contributes to our future plans to open a probably cursed physical location.
Some updates that we didn’t have at the beginning of the show, but I usually put the segment here, other than the strange noises that potentially are heard on our podcast in this episode. Recently, Chris and I encountered some lights flashing light from our basement and some weird bangs.
There’s a bright flash of light in the basement. And like a couple days before that happened, in the middle of the night, I woke up because our bedroom had just exploded with light. So we’re on the second floor and our bedroom does not face the road, but it looked like headlights had swept through our bedroom.
And it’s odd because at least the time that I witnessed the lights flashing, Chris and I were both watching TV. And there was no light anywhere else. It was literally just in our basement.
It was like the whole basement lit up. Yeah, so I’m not sure what that’s about. Also, we thank everyone who commented on our social media about our Ram Head statue.
Yep, the shiny shiny gold ram’s head that you found with the mysterious symbols in it.
Yeah, so from what we can tell, it’s a prosperity spell.
Yeah, it’s Cornish Witchcraft, which our friend Kelly was able to track down the origin of.
And since grabbing the statue and putting it into our house collection, we’ve found over $20 worth of money just in random places. I found $5 walking the dog, and then I found another $4 or $5 in one of the random change machines at Safeway. And it just kind of went from there. Everywhere it looked, I looked down and see a Toonie or a Looney or something.
Just picking up steam. And then we buy the Conjuring House, and we move it here. Our Probably Curse shop also has items like repainted vintage little glass dolls. Upcycled artwork, I think is the term for it. We also have logo stickers. Let’s say Probably Curse. You can slap on whatever you’d like.
These are the very nice, very fancy vinyl, glossy vinyl stickers. Every purchase you make helps raise money for this podcast in our future museum. And that is the end of the museum segment. Now on to the main topic.
So Chris, what do you think of when you think of the Franklin Expedition?
I think of a lot of very, very cold sailors. Fair. I also recently finished a book, The Ministry of Time, that is a science fiction romance story about modern day London discovering a time machine and they kidnapped men from the past who mysteriously vanished because they figured that they wouldn’t be missing. And one of the captains was from the Franklin Expedition, was included.
Interesting. So you’ve been encountering at a bunch of places then.
All over the place. We were also listening to the Terror on our road trip to Montana, which is also about the Franklin Expedition.
Yeah, we should finish that over Christmas break.
Yeah, it’s a long audio book though.
So for me, the Franklin Expedition conjures up images of mummies and ships frozen in the ice. Mummies. Yeah, evidence of lead poisoning, missing men and death. But I don’t think anyone’s actually stopped to think about the ghosts and the supernatural occurrences that have surrounded the Franklin Expedition.
And is this ghost at the far remote location where they had all died or is this elsewhere?
Um, both.
Wow, some hard-working ghosts.
Yep, this episode has all the makings of a good winter ghost story. So as Chris mentioned before, we’ve been working our way through the audiobook The Terror, which is based on the true story of the Franklin expedition, and partway through I got curious about the real supernatural stories surrounding this Canadian mystery.
Now I’m going to start with a bit of the history. So the year was 1845, and on May 19th, the HMS Terror and the HMS Arabus left from England to find the Northwest Passage. The man in charge of this expedition was Sir John Franklin. Sir Franklin had already made about three trips to the Arctic already. He was experienced, he was brave, and he once even had to eat his own boot to survive.
Oh, I wonder what boots taste like. Probably not good. No. They probably taste like everything you’ve ever walked on.
I also wonder how much it would take to boil down a boot before you could actually eat it.
Yeah, it’s not a five-minute meal.
No, but Franklin was unstoppable. If anyone was going to find a way through the Northwest Passage, it was Sir John Franklin. Well, maybe. It turns out Franklin wasn’t actually the Emeraldies’ first choice. So the first choice was a man named Perry, but Perry declined because he was tired of exploring the Arctic.
It’s cold. Yeah. He’s like, I don’t want to go out anymore. Can’t I just explore them all?
The second choice was a man named James Clark Ross, but he declined because he had promised his wife he wouldn’t go on polar expeditions anymore.
I swear, if you go on one more polar expedition, you’re finished here, mister.
I wonder if it was written into their marriage vows. The third choice was James Fitz James, but the Appalachee rejected Fitz James because they said he was too young. However, Fitz James was made an officer on the Franklin expedition, so he still got to go.
He just wasn’t in charge of the whole thing. I guess that’s okay. Yeah. Oh, don’t worry.
They’re a little bit slighted. Uh-huh. There is more in store for Mr. Fitz James. There was also talk of making a man named Barrow leader of the expedition, but he had a reputation for being too argumentative. I don’t know why that doesn’t make you a good captain, but…
He just argued himself out of the job. I guess so.
Even Francis Crozier was asked. However, he declined out of modesty, but Crozier also ended up coming and he was put in command of the terror. Finally, with no other options, they decided to offer the position to Sir John Franklin. So the English were sure that Sir Franklin would make it to the Bering Strait within a year. They had supplied the expedition with the best ships England had to offer. They were fully stocked with enough food for three years and over a thousand books.
The crew had 24 officers and 110 men. And at first things were great. The ships stopped at Disco Bay in Greenland. Disco? Disco.
Bum, bum, bum. I have the same thought, but it’s spelled D-I-S-K-O. Oh.
Yeah, Disco Bay. Yeah, so they stopped there about 30 days into their journey. They slaughtered some oxen. They sent… The crew sent their last letters home and complained that Sir Franklin had banned drunkenness in swearing. They also sent five men back to England because the men were too sick to proceed on the journey.
That’s good. But telling sailors they can’t drink or swear. Yeah. I feel like that is just setting them up for failure.
The thing that made me laugh when I was reading that was they very much play up Franklin like that in the book, The Terror. He’s just the straight-laced guy of super Christian and whatever else. So when I read that, I was like, good. I guess that’s how he really was.
Was that Taika Waititi Pirate Show or…?
Oh, our flag means death.
Yeah, the very posh captain who has all the rules and etiquette surrounded just by a bunch of gross pirates.
Yep. That’s 100% what this is. Everyone seemed to be in good spirits when they left Disco Bay. In July of 1845, the terror and the arabists were spotted in Bamphen Bay where they were waiting for the right conditions to be able to continue into the Lancaster Sound. So this is the last time the ships would be seen by any other Europeans ever. Two years passed. Yeah, keyword being Europeans.
Yes, Europeans. Two years passed and there was no word from the crew. So over the years, people have tried to determine what the fate of the Franklin expedition actually is, but we can only piece together parts of what happened. So we know that their first winter was spent on Beachy Island and three men died there and were buried on the island.
Oh, I was about to say Beachy Island sounds like a really pleasant place.
No. It’s covered in beaches. I actually think Beachy might be named after a guy. Oh.
Yeah. I bet they also found that out when they got there.
Yeah, probably. Just named after a guy. It was not beaches. So the first guy to die was John Torrington and he actually died on January 1st of 1864. New Year’s Day. Yeah, of tuberculosis. John Hartnell died on January 4th, 1846 of Nivonia, which was also likely caused by tuberculosis. Hmm. And William Brain died on April 3rd, 1846, also having died from Nivonia from tuberculosis.
I mean, at least that one’s far off. Like the first two were there in like days of each other. If the third one was also within days, that would be a more unsettling trend.
It also makes me wonder how many people on the ship had tuberculosis. Like it’s very close quarters. Like how many had it and just got better versus how many just outright died.
Such a dirty sailor’s not washing their hands.
So this is where the mummies come in. So the remains were exhumed in the 1980s and there was evidence on the bodies that showed that autopsy’s have been performed on each of the men. We also know that when the ice melted in the summer of 1846, the ships traveled down Peel Sound where they froze in the ice again off the coast of King William’s Island in September of that year. The crew was stuck near King William’s Island for two winters before they just abandoned their ships.
Man, that was a long time.
Especially considering they only had food for three years.
Yep. Yeah. That’s getting down to the wire. For two years, you’re just like looking out and you’re like, yep, we’re still here.
And like with nothing else other than a thousand books to read. Probably like probably half of them were Bibles. Yeah, I was going to say most of them were unreadable. If you even had an education and knew how to read.
Yeah, you’re probably getting like if you could read the other guys are probably asking you to read to them. Yeah.
So the HMS Erebus was found recently in 2014, 80 kilometers south of King William’s Island. And the HMS Terror was also found slightly further north in Terror Bay in 2016.
Did they say how they found them like in the 80s? I guess is when satellites were first popping up into the sky that they could take photos.
So I think for finding the bodies on Beachy Island, I think the way that they found that they were there was because we’ll get into it a little bit in the story. But when they originally sent out the search parties to look for the Franklin expedition, they did stumble across the graves. So the graves were known to be there. Just no one had to zoom them until the 80s.
Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. I understand.
Yeah. So before abandoning their ships in the hopes of crossing the Arctic Overland, Sir Franklin had already died along with eight other naval officers and 15 crewmen. That left the remaining 105 men with the task of walking from Victory Point to Back River, which is approximately 400 kilometer walk. And of course, the remaining crew subsequently perished trying to walk across the Canadian Tundra.
Oh, that’s not a nice walk. That’s not a walk in the park.
Also remember James Fitz James? Yeah. The third choice for leader of the Franklin expedition? Well, archaeologists in October of 2024 were able to find evidence that Captain Fitz James was cannibalized. Oh, they ate him. They ate him. Inuit oral history stated that the men of the Franklin expedition resorted to cannibalism, but there were reports were initially dismissed. But the evidence that has been collected over the last few years have shown that the Inuit were right.
So there you go. They didn’t want to believe it. No. No one would eat Jimmy Fitz Jimmy.
With all this tragedy, it’s no wonder that there are ghost stories associated with the ill-fated expedition. And ironically, the first ghost story to occur around is around the time England began to realize that the expedition had been lost. So in 1850, a shipbuilder named William Coppin sent Lady Jane Franklin, who is John Franklin’s wife, a letter claiming that the Coppin’s daughter, Louisa, or Wheezy, as her family called her.
Wheezy. It’s an unfortunate name, had information about the location of the lost ships. So Louisa had died in May of 1849 at the age of three. However, shortly after her death, the family began seeing a blue ball of light, which the family all agreed was the spirit of the little girl.
I recognize that ball of light. Anywhere.
Her favorite color was blue. Louisa’s ghost had already predicted the death of a town banker at this point. And it was decided that if she had been right about that death, that maybe the young girl’s ghost could locate the missing arabus and terror.
This is a helpful ghost. Except for that banker.
When asked if Franklin was still alive, the ghost described seeing a man with a round face ascending a tall mast. And when asked about the location of the ships, she responded with a series of abbreviations. So p.ir and bs.
Yeah. So it’s two different things. The first word or first abbreviation is p.ir. And then the second abbreviation is bs. So when Lady Franklin announced that they would be sending out search parties to look for her husband’s expedition, Mr. Coppin sent a letter to inform Lady Franklin that the ghost of the Louisa using abbreviations was telling the search party to look along Barrow Strait in the Prince Region Inlet. Lady Franklin had already determined that this was the best area to search.
So it felt like it confirmed that her regional decision was the right decision. And she sent out a crew to search for her husband. So the party located the three bodies on BG Island. However, when they finally managed to reach the Prince Region Inlet, there was no evidence of the ships to be found. Some records note that this is likely because they veered in the wrong direction and missed some crucial evidence that the Franklin crew had actually been there.
Just carved on a rock, BRB. Yeah. Five minutes.
And there is proof that there would have actually been evidence if they had done a better job of searching. Like we now know.
Oh, like they just showed up, looked around. And they’re like, I don’t see them.
Yep. Fortunately, this is not the only prediction that the ghost of Weezy made. Apparently, she also conjured the words Arabus and Terror, Ser John Franklin, Lancaster Sound, Prince Region Inlet, Victory Point, and Victoria Channel.
This ghost is working hard. Yeah. And ironically, at the time, there was actually no place called Victory Point. So it conjured something that didn’t yet exist. And after three failed attempts of finding the Franklin crew, in 1859, Leopold and the Clintalk found a Karen at the now named Victory Point via Victoria Strait, which was the ghost’s prediction. And it was the final letter ever written by Ser John Franklin. So 1840.
Is this ghost still around? Like, could we employ it to like help us find things?
Not that I’m aware of. Although, you know, it would be worth seeing. Maybe there’s a ghost investigation team somewhere that has said they’ve contacted the ghost of Weezy. We’ll have to do some Googling.
Next time we’re in the UK, we gotta track down Weezy. Weezy. Have a whole list of questions of things we want to find.
She’s going to give us winning lottery numbers.
Find Atlantis. Figure out how to get to the Oak Island treasure.
In 1849, Lady Franklin consulted with various psychics. After the initial searches for her husband were unable to locate him or his body. One psychic named Emma, known as the Cirrus of Bolton, made a connection with what she claimed was a living Ser John Franklin after touching some of Ser John Franklin’s hair. The only thing I can figure is that it’s from a hairbrush. There’s no…
People used to give each other lots of hair.
Lots of hair. It’s possible. There’s no note of where or how.
I never gave you a lock of my hair.
No. That’s for the best, really. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I guess if there was a crime and they needed DNA evidence, it would be the point of the places they could go. I don’t know. So Emma noted that John was in good spirits and was hoping to return to England in nine months. Keep in mind, Ser John Franklin had died two years prior in 1847.
Maybe his ghost was hoping to make it home. It’s quite possible. Your ghost should probably have him walk home.
But she did say that he was living. She said the living Ser John Franklin. So she was convinced he was still alive.
She either got it wrong or she looked at the wrong Ser John Franklin.
Or Ser John Franklin gave his wife someone else’s hair. Yeah.
Oh, that was the hair from my ex-boyfriend.
Emma also made reports that he described the Arctic as cold and slippery.
Easy, easy prediction.
And once came into contact with Franklin and his crew, noting that they were clothed in rough skins. Emma provided additional descriptions of Ser John Franklin, noting that he was bald and on one occasion she even imitated his voice after drinking fish oil. Drinking fish oil. I don’t know. You know what? Party trick. No clue.
It was a different time 150 years ago.
Maybe the idea was that the fish had consumed his body and by her drinking the fish oil, his spirit transferred to her. I don’t know.
Or maybe if, because like women don’t have deep voices, but if you drink fish oil, maybe you temporarily gain a deeper voice and she does a spot on impression of a sea captain.
The Admiralty was so interested in what Emma was doing and saying in her predictions that they sent a man named Bacconi to scope out Emma’s seances. All right, all right, all right. Yet, and in Bacconi’s notes that he kept from these seances, he wrote the words gross humbug in the margins. He was not impressed.
That’s a old timey talk. There’s a lot of bullshit.
I did also want to add that a lot of Emma’s predictions, they said that they couldn’t have been made. Like the things that she knew about the Arctic, an uneducated woman could not have known those things about the Arctic, which kind of, I don’t know.
You have to go to school to learn these things.
There’s no other way. Yeah, you can’t read all those books on exploration of the Arctic that were from everyone else that’s been there several times.
Can’t go to a lecture. You can’t just chat up a professor at a bar.
This is also not the end of the story for Sir John Franklin because his ghost has been spotted several times and he continued to appear for decades after his death. In 1856, Sir Franklin was reported at a seance in Baltimore, where he revealed that he had discovered a tropical island beyond the open polar sea, which he described as being inhabited. Which he described as being inhabited by a race of quiet and inoffensive people. I don’t know what that means.
Who are the most inoffensive people in the world? Maybe like those Buddhists who just hang out and pray in their temples all day.
Yeah, I would agree. That’s probably pretty inoffensive.
Probably not people from Ontario. No. Some offensive Canadians.
Let’s be honest Edmonton has a bunch of offensive people too.
It wasn’t Edmonton. Uh-huh.
In that same year, Sir Franklin showed up at a seance in Nottingham, UK, where he stated that he had been killed by polar bears on September 24th of 1853. Again, quite later than his actual death of 1847. The final documented sighting of Sir Franklin was in 1911, where his spirit showed up to settle an argument between Captain Frederick Cook and Captain Robert Peary. The men were arguing about which one of them had actually managed to reach the North Pole first. And Sir Franklin showed up and declared Cook was the winner. Although if you Google it, the records still show Cook listed as allegedly being the first one to reach the North Pole. So no one really believed the ghost of Sir Drunk Franklin. Anyway. Did they see the ghost? Um, it didn’t say. So I suspect it was a seance.
I suspect someone was good at ventriloquism. Yes. Cook was the one who was the first. It’s true. The ghost says the truth. Yeah.
Even though this is considered the last official sighting of Sir Drunk Franklin, this is not the end of the sightings of the grossly crew. Many stories from the Inuit in the area recount stories of encounters with the spirits of the Franklin expedition. Men shambling across the ice in search of food and shelter in the cold.
These are the people that everyone kind of disregarded their testimony. They’re not Europeans, so we can’t trust what they say.
That’s the story of the Franklin expedition and the ghosts. It’s really cool. Yeah. It would have been interesting to get more information about the ghosts that are actually supposed to be in the Arctic themselves. But because most people don’t go up there, there is very little documentation of anything like that.
We’ll have to go on a podcast on-site investigation. Yes, please. We’ll even record. Are the ships still there? Are they underwater?
I believe they’re still underwater, but… We won’t record from inside the ships. We cannot do that.
I enjoyed that. All right, we will load in Sheryl’s report here to the Curse-O-Meter, determine if Franklin himself was cursed and if his expedition was cursed as well. Activating Curse-O-Meter now. Please stand by. For the Franklin expedition, the Curse-O-Meter says… Probably cursed. Definitely cursed, I say. Yeah. Things did not work out at all. Beachy Island wasn’t a beach.
I mean, I guess everyone died, so that’s definitely not a good sign.
That was a 100% fatal curse.
Yeah, and if no one wanted to be the captain of the expedition to begin with, it’s a really bad sign.
That is true. When you’re the last pick out of a list of people, everyone else said no or their wives told them they couldn’t go. I don’t wonder if that was a true account or he’s like, oh my wife says I can’t go. I never said that.
Probably. They just probably just blamed on her for the sake of it. Although, usually these expeditions are years long, so if you decide to just up and leave for a couple of years, I’d be pretty miffed the next time somebody asks you to do the same thing again.
Yeah, I can definitely understand that. Heck, you’ve worked a bunch of field work and you’ve been gone for some time. I don’t enjoy it. The results for if Sir John Franklin himself was cursed. The Curse-O-Meter says Sir John Franklin was probably cursed.
Yeah, poor guy had some terrible luck there.
Yeah, he wasn’t even the first choice. Like, he didn’t even have that to die proud of. He died on a mission that people didn’t even want him on originally.
Yeah, and he also at one point had eaten his own boot. He almost died in like another Arctic expedition and maybe that should have been assigned to not do it again.
Yeah, I was going to ask when his ghost appeared, did people mysteriously have nommarcs on all their shoes? I hope so. Well, that wraps up the topic for today’s episode. Before we start the topic, or at the start of the topic, I had stated a few of the things that had, or the Franklin expedition had come up recently, and I forgot to throw in that it had also come up in my research for the December episode about Santa Claus. So the reason why Santa is said to live at the North Pole is because a journalist, or I think a children’s author, somebody created a very popular written piece of fiction about Santa at the same time that the Franklin expedition was setting off. There is all of this interest in the North Pole is this mysterious land, and so this author had decided to set Santa at the North Pole because of the Franklin expedition.
Maybe this is the tropical island beyond the polar sea with the inoffensive people.
The elves. What if Santa, call back to our previous episode, found all those people and then made him be their slaves?
Oh, like Triline’s talk factory?
Yeah, he did it to the devil. He did it to that butcher that pickled children. Listen to our last episode if this makes no sense to you. You can listen to our episode next month coming out on February 1st. You can also keep an eye on all the things we’re up to on our social medias. We’re on TikTok, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook.
If you have any cursed artifacts that you would like to send our way, you can reach out to us at probably cursed podcasts, all one word, at gmail.com. And you can also check out our website at probablycursed.net.
And talk to you all next month.
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