Wednesday, September 15, 2010

A Haunted Ripley Museum


The last time I read about Ripley Museums they were dealing with a shortage of Shrunken Heads.When you think of all the things to be found there it seems likely that some hauntings may happen,This appeared in AOL News.(A few highlights.Click the link at the end for the full account.Info about a TAPS tour also.)

"...you might want to head down to St. Augustine, Fla., the oldest city in the United States and home to the first -- and oldest -- Ripley's Believe It or Not museum, Castle Warden.

Both the city and the museum are reputed to be haunted.

In fact, The Atlantic Paranormal Society, or TAPS -- the real-life ghost busters of the Syfy Network's popular "Ghost Hunters International" series – have been to Castle Warden and other eerie spots around St. Augustine, searching for signs of a real haunting.

Castle Warden is a historic mansion, built in 1887 by millionaire William Warden. The building, which resembles a medieval fortress, became a hotel in the 1940s, where Robert Ripley was a frequent visitor.

The building was acquired by Ripley's heirs after his death in 1949, and in December 1950, it opened as the original Ripley's Believe It or Not museum, housing many artifacts from Ripley's personal collection of amazing oddities and curiosities from around the world.

There's everything from an Abraham Lincoln life mask to a vampire slaying kit to the erector set Ferris wheel that's two stories high that took a guy 17 years to make -- it's pure insanity at every turn."
On the truly freaky level, Ingwersen adds that visitors to Castle Warden often report hearing mysterious voices or catching glimpses of apparitions in the labyrinthine, four-story, 25-room building. He said that some claim to smell smoke from a fire in the 1940s that killed two women who were in the building when it was a hotel.

Now we get into the paranormal, where sensitives and psychics consistently come into these rooms and they keep getting these same premonitions and feelings that something terrible happened in that building. So that's one of the reasons why we think it's haunted."

Those are among many cases of ghostly occurrences that have been reported at Castle Warden, according to Ingwersen.
"We've had various people that have called the police because right up there on the third floor, they'll see a woman at a window, screaming. That window's been boarded up since 1950, but they see her screaming..."
http://www.aolnews.com/weird-news/article/syfy-network-ghost-hunter-dustin-pari-targets-ripleys-oldest-museum/19619042

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