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Episode: Legends 41: Monastic Memories
Author: Aaron Mahnke
Duration: 00:33:33
Episode Shownotes
Some locations in the world have a reputation for being peaceful sanctuaries. Which makes the legends told about them all the more terrifying. Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by Alex Robinson, and research by Jamie Vargas. ————————— Lore Resources: Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources All the
shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ————————— Sponsors: Quince: Premium European clothing and accessories for 50% to 80% less than similar brands, at Quince.com/LORE for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. SimpliSafe: Secure your home with 24/7 professional monitoring. Sign up today at SimpliSafe.com/Lore to get 20% off any new SimpliSafe system with Fast Protect Monitoring. Squarespace: Head to Squarespace.com/lore to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using the code LORE. ————————— ©2024 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.
Full Transcript
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Welcome to Lore Legends, a subset of lore episodes that explore the strange tales we whisper in the dark, even if they can't always be proven by the history books. So if you're ready, let's begin. A museum is a sacred space.
00:01:40 Speaker_01
You see, buildings don't have to contain a pulpit to be sacrosanct.
00:01:44 Speaker_01
In a world that increasingly values bite-sized blurbs over in-depth education, any hallowed hall dedicated to the slow, intentional consumption of knowledge is a place worthy of reverence. You can feel it in the air when you walk in, too.
00:01:59 Speaker_01
Something about a museum is just… still. As if the entire building knows what treasure it holds, and knows that it's worthy of respect. And in an environment like that, every exhibit label is a divine text.
00:02:12 Speaker_01
Every whispered exclamation, a shout of praise. Every quiet question, a prayer. On the morning of May 3rd of 1941, the World Museum in Liverpool, England was filled with that same reverent hush.
00:02:25 Speaker_01
Visitors wandered through vast halls full of ancient artifacts and animal bones. Every step they took beneath that vaulted ceiling brought them closer to the altar of knowledge. Everything was right. Everything was at peace.
00:02:38 Speaker_01
But this would be the museum's last peaceful day for years to come. That night, German pilots flew over Liverpool. Their bombs hit a nearby building, and all too quickly the flames from that explosion reached the World Museum.
00:02:52 Speaker_01
Within minutes, the entire place was destroyed. The before and after pictures are hard to look at. That once sacred space was absolutely devastated. It can be surprisingly simple to burn down any haven, be it a museum, a church, or a life.
00:03:09 Speaker_01
All it takes is a bomb, or bad news from a doctor, or the betrayal of a friend. Outside forces can come in at any moment and shatter the peace.
00:03:19 Speaker_01
But when it comes to sacred spaces, the most interesting disruptor by far is something that you'd never expect to be there at all. Ghosts. I'm Aaron Mankey and this is Lore Legends. There's almost nowhere more peaceful than a monastery.
00:03:50 Speaker_01
If you've never had the pleasure of visiting one, then allow me to lay the scene for you. The long stone hallways are silent. There are usually birds chirping in the garden.
00:04:00 Speaker_01
And off in the distance, you can hear the singing coming from inside the chapel. Everything is at peace. Anywhere that people who have dedicated their lives to faithful contemplation is a haven in our hectic world.
00:04:13 Speaker_01
Nunneries, convents, monasteries, temples, they all seem to exist slightly outside our realm. But as peaceful as they are, that peace can be broken in an instant. Because sometimes spirits stick around in the one place that they shouldn't, a church.
00:04:28 Speaker_01
Today, the Christian faith doesn't subscribe to a belief in ghosts, but it used to. Well, sometimes. You see, spirits in the church have a bit of a complicated history. There are only a couple of ghost stories from the church's earliest days.
00:04:42 Speaker_01
The most famous came from Perpetua, who was executed for her faith in 203 CE. Before she died, she wrote an account of her life, and this document is believed to be the earliest text written by a Christian woman.
00:04:55 Speaker_01
While she was in prison awaiting her fate, she claimed that her brother, Deinocrates, came to visit her in her dreams. Perpetua wrote,
00:05:03 Speaker_01
I beheld Dinocrates coming forth from a dark place, where were many others also, being both hot and thirsty, his raiment foul, his color pale, and the wound on his face which he had when he died, and between him and me was a great gulf, so that either might not go to the other.
00:05:22 Speaker_01
The early Christian theologians who came after her were skeptical about the existence of ghosts, or at the very least about how common they were. St. Augustine believed that ghostly visits were very rare.
00:05:32 Speaker_01
He wrote that even if they did exist, and I quote, "...the dead, by their very nature, are not able to involve themselves in the affairs of the living." Fast forward 200 years to the 16th century, and St.
00:05:45 Speaker_01
Gregory the Great let it be known that he disagreed with Augustine's assessment. Gregory believed that spirits could linger on after death, and that strong relationships with the living might keep them tethered to the mortal plane.
00:05:58 Speaker_01
But by the 7th century, monastic chroniclers and scribes started including ghost stories and folktales in their written records. It seems that they mostly included them for posterity's sake, or to teach certain moral lessons.
00:06:11 Speaker_01
But no matter how often these stories were added to monastery libraries, there was still one thing stopping the majority of theologians from believing in ghosts.
00:06:19 Speaker_01
You see, a fundamental cornerstone of their faith centered around what happened to a soul after it passed on. It either went to heaven, or it went to hell.
00:06:27 Speaker_01
There just wasn't any wiggle room in this binary system for souls to slip through the cracks and end up back on Earth. But then, everything changed.
00:06:37 Speaker_01
In the 13th century, the church officially adopted the doctrine of purgatory, a sort of waiting room for the dead, where they could spend years or even centuries waiting to be made pure enough to go to heaven.
00:06:48 Speaker_01
There was a third option now, and it determined that souls in purgatory could become ghosts. If they died with unfinished business or without the holy sacraments of confession, then they could haunt the living until they got what they needed.
00:07:01 Speaker_01
Then their souls could finally move on to heaven, unburdened by worldly troubles. This vague idea of some kind of purgatory had existed for years before the Catholic Church finally accepted it as truth.
00:07:14 Speaker_01
And so ghost stories occasionally popped up before it was an official doctrine. For example, the Benedictine monk Alfred wrote about the ghost of St. Swithin in the 990s, 400 years before the Church took a stance on purgatory.
00:07:28 Speaker_01
In the story, the long-dead Swithin was upset that he had been forgotten by his community. He appeared to a local blacksmith and told him to ask the bishop to move his bones inside Winchester Cathedral, where more people would see them.
00:07:41 Speaker_01
The bishop, though, was too afraid to agree, and Swithin had to materialize in front of him three separate times to convince him to help out. In the end, the blacksmith could not convince the bishop to move Swithin's bones.
00:07:54 Speaker_01
So, the saint decided to take matters into his own hands. He started appearing to everyone, telling them to bring their sick loved ones and pray over his grave. When they prayed, he healed them.
00:08:04 Speaker_01
Soon, so many people were miraculously healed that the king took notice, and he had Swithin's bones moved into the church. It was a win-win. Saint Swithin got what he wanted,
00:08:14 Speaker_01
and the community experienced a mass miracle, and to this day he is the patron saint of Winchester Cathedral. This odd ghost acceptance didn't last forever, though.
00:08:24 Speaker_01
By the time the Renaissance came about, ghosts were interpreted not as souls from purgatory, but demons trying to lead people astray from God's teachings, and ever since, the church's stance on spirits has become more static.
00:08:38 Speaker_01
In spite of these changes, though, one thing remained constant. Ghost stories continued to claim that the dead were interfering in human affairs, and many of those ghosts came from within the church itself.
00:08:50 Speaker_01
Because every now and then, the peaceful silence of a monastic community needs to get a little shaken up. It was 10 o'clock in the morning, and Sister Mercedes Michael still hadn't come back from her walk. Her absence was noticeable.
00:09:18 Speaker_01
Sister Michael was a cafeteria worker at Pennsylvania's Providence Heights Alpha School, and it was getting dangerously close to lunchtime. But the day continued on, and she never made it to the school kitchens.
00:09:30 Speaker_01
Sister Michael's disappearance is one that has haunted the school's students for decades, and I mean that quite literally. Her demise has become a campus ghost story.
00:09:39 Speaker_01
The Sisters of Divine Providence established an order in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania back in 1876. Then, in 1926, the nuns opened the Alpha School on their 40-acre campus, dedicating themselves to educating the youth of rural Pennsylvania.
00:09:55 Speaker_01
Today, the students there still tell the story of Sister Michael. The most popular version of the legend claims that a blind nun went for a late-night walk across the campus.
00:10:04 Speaker_01
Somehow, though, she slipped and fell into a pond, and she never emerged from the water.
00:10:09 Speaker_01
Ever since her drowning, students at both the Alpha School and the later-established La Roche University have reported seeing a ghostly nun wandering across campus, repeating her doomed walk every evening on a perpetual loop.
00:10:22 Speaker_01
The story became so popular that in 1966, a reporter for the La Roche University student newspaper investigated the origins of the legend, and soon enough, she dug up what really happened. You see, poor Sister Mercedes Michael wasn't just a story.
00:10:38 Speaker_01
She had been a real woman, and her death had been real as well. On March 22, 1949, a truck driver saw something floating in a pond.
00:10:47 Speaker_01
He pulled over to investigate and, to his horror, saw that the floating object was a person, and not just any person, but a nun. He retrieved the body from the water and carried her to the convent.
00:10:59 Speaker_01
Sister Michael really had been blind and had fallen into a pond. But those are really the only things that the ghost story got right. She hadn't slipped and drowned.
00:11:07 Speaker_01
An autopsy revealed that she had suffered a heart attack, during which she had probably fallen into the water. She had also not been out walking late at night. She had simply taken an early morning stroll.
00:11:18 Speaker_01
But of course, a nighttime death sounds much spookier than one at 6am. As to whether Sister Michael actually interrupts the ongoings at the Divine Sisters of Providence campus, well, I'll leave that for the students to answer.
00:11:32 Speaker_01
She is far from the only nun, though, to be turned into a ghostly story. Popular imagination seems to be completely enamored with this horrific idea that someone so good and peaceful could become an agent of chaos in the afterlife.
00:11:45 Speaker_01
This juxtaposition is understandably appealing, but rarely true. And sometimes the nuns didn't even have to die anytime near when the stories claim they did, for their names to become immortalized as unhappy spirits.
00:11:58 Speaker_01
A fantastic example of this can be seen at the Holy Trinity Church, Micklegate in York, England. It's a church that has served the York community for nearly a thousand years.
00:12:08 Speaker_01
The Benedictine Monastery was founded all the way back in the 11th century, and the church was built in the 12th. And that church was also once part of a larger complex belonging to the St. Clement's nunnery.
00:12:18 Speaker_01
All that to say, there were a significant number of clergy within its walls. That would change, though, in 1536. Henry VIII was on the throne. You know, the guy who was famous for his six wives?
00:12:30 Speaker_01
Well, in order to divorce his first wife and marry so many subsequent women, he had to break from the Catholic Church. And so he established his own Anglican Church, the Church of England.
00:12:41 Speaker_01
Then, for good measure, he dissolved all of England's Catholic monasteries and convents. Holy Trinity Mickelgate was one of the many orders dissolved under Henry's anti-Catholic rampage. Soldiers were sent to sack and plunder the convent's riches.
00:12:55 Speaker_01
They emptied out the complex, and then it was partially torn down, leaving the nuns essentially homeless. But legend claims that one nun stood up to the soldiers.
00:13:05 Speaker_01
The abbess confronted them when they entered, declaring that they could ransack the church over her dead body.
00:13:11 Speaker_01
Then she told them that if they killed her and continued their mission, she would haunt them from beyond the grave until the convent was rebuilt.
00:13:18 Speaker_01
The soldiers, though, didn't take her word seriously, and while laughing, they murdered the abbess where she stood. It took a few hundred years for her spirit to follow through on the promise she made before she died.
00:13:31 Speaker_01
But by the 19th century, people started reporting sightings of a ghostly nun wandering around Holy Trinity Mickelgate.
00:13:38 Speaker_01
One 1896 witness said that she looked like, and I quote, a shortish woman with something white folded over her, covering even her head and her face. Another called her a hooded figure with, and I quote, a form transparent, but yet thick with light.
00:13:54 Speaker_01
The robe was long and trailed. Most people never encountered her directly, though. Instead, 19th and 20th century witnesses saw her walking past the church through the sanctuary's stained glass window.
00:14:07 Speaker_01
If they had run into her, though, I'd imagine that they would learn that she was not the abbess they thought she was. Because the abbess of the story did not die when the monastery was dissolved. That's right, the entire tale about her death was a lie.
00:14:20 Speaker_01
The final abbess of Holy Trinity Mickelgate was named Isabel Ward, and Henry VIII's soldiers did not cut her down. Instead, she was allowed to live out the rest of her life in a little house, enjoying a quiet retirement.
00:14:33 Speaker_01
If there truly is a restless ghost at Holy Trinity, it is not her. And look, I know how compelling it can be to dream up tragic tales that cast clergy in the starring roles.
00:14:45 Speaker_01
After all, it makes for a great story when we can give someone so pure such a devastating fate. But it's also important to separate fact from fiction when you romanticize their lives. And their deaths.
00:14:57 Speaker_01
We shouldn't twist them into something they weren't, not even in the afterlife. But if you do know of any ghosts haunting your local church, try to go beyond the urban legends and uncover the real story behind the spirit.
00:15:10 Speaker_01
Because the truth just might shock you. He never expected to be harassed by a ghost. After all, he was just a humble painter. Born in Croatia in 1889, Max Ovenka's artistic talents showed promise from a very young age.
00:15:36 Speaker_01
He attended the Royal Academy in Brussels and by the age of 25, he won the prestigious medal of King Albert for his art. But no matter how high he rose in the creative world, he never forgot his roots.
00:15:48 Speaker_01
Venka was Croatian through and through, and he cared more about interacting with the poor laborers of his nation than embracing high society. And because of that, he was well-loved by the Croatian villages that he frequented.
00:16:00 Speaker_01
In fact, some villagers began to believe that he was a saint after a flock of butterflies congregated in his beard. Touched by God or not, this actually seems to be a theme in Venka's life.
00:16:11 Speaker_01
His classmates at art school actually called him Inri, after the letters that are carved into crucifixes. Apparently Venka's bearded appearance resembled that of Christ.
00:16:21 Speaker_01
Funnily enough, Venka would one day find himself to be the central figure in a church, just not as the son of God. But first, he would have to travel to America.
00:16:31 Speaker_01
You see, when he was a young man, Wenka survived the First World War, and he had no desire to live through another. So in 1934, when things started looking a bit too dicey, Wenka, his wife, and their young daughter fled to America.
00:16:45 Speaker_01
And the family settled in New York. But he was an artist who needed to make ends meet, and sometimes he had to travel to sell his work. Which is why in 1935, he took an art job in Pittsburgh. And that's where he met Father Albert Zagar. Fr.
00:17:00 Speaker_01
Zegar was the priest of the St. Nicholas Church, which had been established so that Croatian immigrants could worship in their own language.
00:17:07 Speaker_01
Forced to leave everything that they had ever known behind, these people found a special kind of home within this church community that they could never have had otherwise. St. Nicholas was a pillar of the local Pittsburgh Croatian community, and Fr.
00:17:20 Speaker_01
Zegar was at the center of it all. Once the artist and priest met, the two men got on like a house on fire.
00:17:28 Speaker_01
And so it's unsurprising that when Father Zagar decided to add murals to the church's interior a couple of years later, he called on Venka to do the job. And Venka, eager to donate his time to his fellow countrymen, readily accepted.
00:17:42 Speaker_01
In 1937, Venka painted 11 murals within the span of two months. The subject matter of each painting revolved around immigrant laborers, and based on what we know about him, I think it's safe to say that this was a passion project for him.
00:17:55 Speaker_01
He promised to get the job done in two months, which, passion project or no, was an overly ambitious commitment. To make the deadline, he pushed himself harder than he probably should have.
00:18:05 Speaker_01
Vanca started pulling 14 to 16 hour days, painting into the early hours of the morning every single day. Several of the murals were on the ceiling too, so Vanca worked many of those long hours while balancing on top of scaffolding.
00:18:20 Speaker_01
And after everyone went to bed, he worked through the night, his only light coming from the small lamp that he kept on the scaffolding with him. It wasn't an ideal setup for sure, but Venka was fine with it.
00:18:31 Speaker_01
He could really focus once he was alone and the dark sanctuary was quiet and peaceful at night. Until it wasn't. Only a few days after he started painting, the organ suddenly bellowed, shattering the calm evening.
00:18:45 Speaker_01
It startled Venka, but he brushed it off. Something could have just fallen onto the keys, after all. Four days later, though, Venka's late night was once again interrupted, this time by a hooded figure.
00:18:56 Speaker_01
The man, clad all in black, was walking down between the pew aisles, gesturing with his hands. Venka assumed that it was just Father Zagar, and he returned back to work. A few days after that, Wenka saw the figure again.
00:19:10 Speaker_01
This time he could hear the man mumbling to himself. And as he drew closer to Wenka, the painter felt a chill wash over him. Doing his best to ignore it, he turned back to his work. And when he looked up again, the hooded figure was gone.
00:19:24 Speaker_01
Venka eventually went to confront Fr. Zagar about these moments, but the priest insisted that it had not been him. In fact, he said, it was probably a ghost. Fr. Zagar didn't know how the story had come about.
00:19:36 Speaker_01
All he knew was that for about 15 years, people had reported seeing a spirit in the church, and no one knew where it came from.
00:19:44 Speaker_01
Naturally, Venka wasn't terribly excited to hear that he might have been chosen as the focus of a new haunting, and not because he was afraid of ghosts.
00:19:52 Speaker_01
No, he was simply afraid that if the ghosts startled him too badly, he might fall off his scaffolding and seriously injure himself. The priest agreed to help with the situation. The following night, Father Zagar joined Venka in the church.
00:20:06 Speaker_01
And as Venka painted, the father began taunting the ghost, calling out, come on ghost, show yourself. In response, the men heard knocking sounds coming from the back of the room. The ghostly knocks soon began to move around the church.
00:20:19 Speaker_01
And the whole time, Father Zagar followed the noise saying, if you are a dead man, go with God, peace to you. I shall pray for you. Only please don't bother us. And then suddenly, a figure materialized in the fourth pew.
00:20:33 Speaker_01
He had the face of an old man, and his skin had an odd blue tinge to it. There was a sad, wistful look on his face, but neither man got the chance to examine him more closely. After just a few seconds, he vanished.
00:20:47 Speaker_01
The ghost didn't stay gone for long, though. Just a few nights later, the figure came back. And this time, it was on a mission. You see, hanging above the altar was a sanctuary lamp.
00:20:57 Speaker_01
It was lit by an eternal flame, and was tended to by the nuns from the convent next door. By 1937, it had already been burning for eight years straight, and it was meant to burn for many more to come.
00:21:09 Speaker_01
Except, on the night the ghost returned, all of that changed. The figure reappeared while Venka was working, Father Zagar there to keep him company.
00:21:18 Speaker_01
Both men watched as the hooded figure moved about the sanctuary, until finally it made its way to the lamp above the altar. Without opening the glass that protected it, the ghost took aim and blew firmly on the flame within.
00:21:32 Speaker_01
In an instant, it had gone dark. As the eternal flame winked out of existence, so too did the vision of the mysterious figure. and Max Ovenka never saw him again. There are certain spaces in our world that we expect to be absent of conflict.
00:22:00 Speaker_01
We cling to them as a place of refuge, or reassurance, or peace. It's something humans have been doing for a very long time, and there's no sign of that notion fading away.
00:22:10 Speaker_01
Just think back on the news coverage that blanketed the world when Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire a few years ago.
00:22:16 Speaker_01
Yes, some of the fear and grief was due to such an ancient structure being touched by destruction, but another side of it all was the invasion of tranquility by something chaotic.
00:22:27 Speaker_01
Max Ovenka didn't experience anything that tragic in his church that night, but in the moment I imagine it was no less frightening.
00:22:34 Speaker_01
And sure, he could easily write off the whole event as a hallucination resulting from too many paint fumes and too little sleep. But even if you believe in ghosts, the story presents a lot of questions. Why would the spirit aim for the lamp?
00:22:49 Speaker_01
And why then, at that moment, after 15 years of harmlessly wandering around the church? We may never know the answers to those questions, but we do know that the people who worshipped there were used to overcoming hardship.
00:23:02 Speaker_01
They were an immigrant community who had been forced to leave everything behind and start afresh. They had learned to be strong in the face of danger, to be brave when the odds looked bad.
00:23:13 Speaker_01
Yes, a lamp can be relit, whether or not it was designed to be eternal. But the flame of hope? That's a lot harder for evil to blow out. Legends grow up from the most unusual and unexpected places.
00:23:42 Speaker_01
With that in mind, I hope today's collection of hauntings within peaceful places helped you see a new side to folklore. Disturbing the peace isn't something the living has exclusive rights to. But even when peace is shattered, it can be rebuilt.
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Head over to squarespace.com slash lore for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code lore to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Squarespace. Build something beautiful. The monks had strayed from their vows.
00:28:49 Speaker_01
Of course, this didn't apply to all the monks in the entire world, just those who resided at the convent of St. Joseph.
00:28:55 Speaker_01
It had been established for the Catholic Order of the Barefoot Carmelites in Barcelona back in 1586, and it stood proudly there for 249 years. But that was a long time to maintain a life of piety.
00:29:09 Speaker_01
Over the years, according to the legend, the monks had grown lax in their devotion. After all, the barefoot Carmelites were supposed to prioritize prayer, contemplation, and simplicity.
00:29:19 Speaker_01
Unfortunately for them, Barcelona was a colorful place, and their convent stood on one of the main streets. The city was full of worldly distractions, and gradually, the monks gave in to them.
00:29:31 Speaker_01
They say that their strict routines just didn't appeal to them anymore. Over time, the monks stopped acknowledging holy days and even stopped praying to their patron saint, Our Lady of Carmen. One young man at St.
00:29:43 Speaker_01
Joseph, though, was still just as dedicated to his divine calling as the others in his order should have been. Appalled by the unholy pursuits of his brothers, he went to the prior in 1835 to report their behavior.
00:29:56 Speaker_01
The prior, though, didn't care, so the young monk was left to worry about his brother's souls alone. He wouldn't fret for long, though. On the night of July 15th, the eve of Our Lady of Carmen, in fact, the monks of St. Joseph all received a message.
00:30:11 Speaker_01
They were all awakened in the middle of the night to an eerie sound, which only got louder as they left their beds and approached the church. And when they opened the doors, they were greeted by a terrifying sight. It was a choir of skeletal monks.
00:30:26 Speaker_01
The dead filled the sanctuary, singing what has been described as unholy hymns that sounded like music not of this earth. Some stories say that they looked like walking cadavers in various states of decay.
00:30:39 Speaker_01
Others though claim that they were just skeletons with no flesh left on their bones. And these revenants were singing to the living monks, some say as a warning, others as a curse.
00:30:50 Speaker_01
None of the monks, though, were brave enough to interrupt the bone-chilling concert. They just stood there, frightened beyond belief, as the choir wrapped up its show.
00:30:59 Speaker_01
And then, cautiously, the living monks lit candles and led the ghostly choir to the cemetery, where their caskets were all wide open waiting for them. And one by one, the dead monks stepped back into their graves.
00:31:13 Speaker_01
And then the night was, once again, silent. Now, there are two versions of what happened next.
00:31:19 Speaker_01
One story says that when the monks returned to the church later to investigate, they found the cold, dead body of the young monk who had reported them to the prior.
00:31:27 Speaker_01
Another version, though, claims that he didn't actually die, that he was, instead, the only survivor of the upcoming bloodbath. Because whether the ghostly choir was a warning or a curse, the outcome was the same.
00:31:40 Speaker_01
Ten days later, on July 25th of 1835, every single monk at the convent of St. Joseph was slaughtered. You see, anti-clerical riots had been sweeping the nation for months at this point.
00:31:53 Speaker_01
Furious at the Catholic Church's religious orders for their role in suppressing certain political movements, the people of Spain exploded in 1834.
00:32:01 Speaker_01
For the next year, they ransacked churches, monasteries, and nunneries, killing any clergy they encountered, including the monks of St. Joseph. The only alleged survivor was that single devout monk, but his name was not part of the official records.
00:32:17 Speaker_01
Rather than standing as solid proof, he exists now as just a legend, and perhaps as a lesson in piety and devotion. The convent of Saint Joseph was never rebuilt.
00:32:29 Speaker_01
Instead, the land was absorbed into a nearby market known today as La Boqueria, one that dates back to the 13th century.
00:32:37 Speaker_01
After the riots, though, the city decided to bring that market inside the city walls, and it was moved right on top of the site where the convent had been. And you can still visit La Boqueria today, although if you do, go in July.
00:32:51 Speaker_01
Legend claims that every year on July 15th and July 25th, you can hear the echoes of that skeletal choir singing once again. And maybe, if you close your eyes and focus on their voices, you'll find peace in a place that was once destroyed.
00:33:23 Speaker_01
This episode of Lore Legends was produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with writing by Alex Robinson and research by Jamie Vargas. Just like you fine folks, I also don't care too much for ads.
00:33:33 Speaker_01
I'm grateful they support this show, but I recognize that they can often be a distraction from the stories you love. Thankfully, I've got a solution. Over on Apple Podcasts and Patreon, you can find a version of this show that is 100% ad-free.
00:33:47 Speaker_01
On top of that, subscribers get bonus weekly mini-episodes called Lore Bites. It's a bargain for all of that ad-free storytelling and a great way to support this show and the team behind it.
00:33:58 Speaker_01
For more information about those ad-free options, go to lorepodcast.com. Lore is, of course, more than just a podcast. There's the book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime.
00:34:12 Speaker_01
Information about all of that is available over at lorepodcast.com. And you can also follow this show on threads, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi.
00:34:26 Speaker_01
I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.