The library at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County is pretty typical: rows of books, a cafe. But then there’s also a haunted stuffed mongoose. We visit the large parapsychology collection.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The library at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County has rows and rows of academic books and a cafe. But there’s also a haunted stuffed mongoose. In time for Halloween, Scott Maucione of member station WYPR paid a visit to its parapsychology collection.
SCOTT MAUCIONE, BYLINE: Parapsychology is the study of mental phenomena that can’t be explained by science. Think clairvoyance, telepathy and seances. Also, that stuffed mongoose.
BETH SAUNDERS: Yes. It was Gef, the talking mongoose, who was a supernatural mongoose that haunted a little farmhouse on the Isle of Man.
MAUCIONE: Beth Saunders is the curator in charge of this spooky hodgepodge at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, which also includes artifacts like pictures of UFOs and books on hauntings.
SAUNDERS: It has kind of, like, offended some people that a university library would collect material that they see as being full of hoaxes and things that aren’t truthful.
MAUCIONE: Saunders says cutting-edge technology has always been a source of conflict between believers and skeptics. For example, Polaroids don’t need darkrooms, so in the mid-20th century, it was thought the pictures couldn’t be tampered with. But tricksters still found a way.
SAUNDERS: And so it sort of becomes this, like, feedback loop of, you know, skepticism and belief.
MAUCIONE: The collection holds hundreds of hours of tapes with Hans Holzer, an occultist who documented trips to the Amityville Horror House with psychics, and his interview with Dorothy Sherry, a medium who claims she could channel Elvis from beyond the grave. In this 1978 tape, Holzer is talking to Sherry when she says Elvis is in the building.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DOROTHY SHERRY: He’s standing here, and he is here now.
HANS HOLZER: This is the whole point, that he’s…
SHERRY: Yes. He’s here now.
HOLZER: Yeah. He…
SHERRY: And he’s dressed in black.
HOLZER: What kind of material?
SHERRY: He has on a black cashmere sweater, V-neck.
MAUCIONE: She goes on to say that Elvis is tired of Graceland being open to the public. So it just goes to show – ghosts don’t like you in their house, either.
For NPR NEWS, I’m Scott Maucione in Baltimore.
(SOUNDBITE OF ROCKWELL SONG, “SOMEBODY’S WATCHING ME”)
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