Loreplay

The Beautiful Stranger: Kate Morgan & the Hotel del Coronado

On Thanksgiving 1892, a young woman checked into the Hotel del Coronado alone, under a fake married name, with one small handbag and no luggage. For five days she told the staff she was dying and that her brother, a doctor, was on his way. He never came. On the morning of November 29th, the hotel electrician found her dead on the beach stairs, a newly bought revolver by her hand.

The papers called her "the Beautiful Stranger," because of course her face was the headline. Then a coroner ruled it suicide in record time, an anonymous doctor told reporters she'd tried to end a pregnancy, and her grandfather wired from Iowa: bury her and send me the bill. The San Diego Union's headline? "He Owns Her."

This week, we follow Kate Farmer Morgan from Iowa orphan to Los Angeles housemaid to the Del's most bankable ghost. Along the way we look at the lawyer who decided she was his great-great-grandmother, the theory that she was really someone else entirely, and a haunted room that can't settle on its own number. Underneath all of it is a question nobody in 1892 asked: what does a woman alone do when she runs out of options?

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Sources

• Kate Morgan, Wikipedia: birth, family, marriage, son's death, burial, May overview
• Randy Dotinga, "At the Hotel Del, a Deadly Obsession," Voice of San Diego (2011): anonymous physician, "He Owns Her" headline, Bush agent story, 1992 straw-slurping report, May's ancestor claim, gravestone text
• Jennifer Jones, "Kate Morgan: The Tragic Mystery of the Hotel del Coronado," The Dead History (2024): day-by-day timeline from 1892 papers, Harry West, R. Gomer, David Cone, trunk contents, telegrams, $16.50, women at the viewing, 1983 Eagle and Journal quote; comments include Elizabeth McGovern's corrections
• Terry Girardot, "The Ghost of the Hotel Del Coronado," Fremont County IAGenWeb (2001): Alan May's research path, Room 3312, headstone date, critique of May
• "I Tried It: Room 3327 at Hotel Del Coronado," San Diego Magazine (2021): hotel historian Gina Petrone on Kate's shifting stories
• "Coronado's Haunted Hotel Del Still Won't Let Kate Morgan's Mystery Rest," Hoodline (2026): May's 1990 book and caliber claim, Cullen's 2007 theory, hotel book by Christine Donovan
• Beautiful Stranger, Hotel del Coronado Heritage Department: official account summary
• Ghost City Tours, "The Haunted Hotel del Coronado": Wyllie misidentification and Toronto detail (secondary, tour-company source)
• John T. Cullen, Dead Move listing: Lizzie Wyllie and Spreckels theory
• All That's Interesting, "Kate Morgan": $3.80 room rate, ghost phenomena
• San Diego History Center, Hotel del Coronado Collection: rabbit-hunting founding story, 1885 purchase
• Historic Hotels of America, Hotel del Coronado history and Famous Hotels: 1888 opening, 1,440 guests, land-boom collapse, Spreckels
• PCAD, Hotel del Coronado: February 19, 1888 opening date, Spreckels buyout timing

The Flatwoods Monster: the 1952 West Virginia cryptid and UFO encounter, told campfire-style and then ripped apart.

On September 12, 1952, a fireball streaked across the sky over Flatwoods, West Virginia. A group of boys, a mom named Kathleen May, a teenage National Guardsman, and one very smart dog went up a hill to find where it landed. What they found was a ten-foot creature with a blood-red face, a spade-shaped hood, and a glowing green body that hissed and glided toward them. Within a week, the Braxton County Monster was national news.

In this episode of Loreplay, we tell the legend the way it scared a whole country, then dig into what actually happened. That includes the meteor logged in the Air Force's Project Blue Book, the red aircraft beacon, a guy named Max and his pickup truck, Joe Nickell's barn owl theory, and the lesser-known sightings from Audra Harper and George Snitowsky. We also follow the story's afterlife, from Gray Barker and the birth of the Men in Black legend to Kathleen May's claims of a government visit and Frank Feschino's theory of a secret alien dogfight over the East Coast.

Was it an alien, a monster, or a very angry owl? Either way, Flatwoods leaned all the way in, with a Flatwoods Monster Museum, giant monster chairs, and a spot in Fallout 76 right next to Mothman. Which brings us to the big question: which West Virginia sky daddy wins Best Loreplay Cryptid? Paranormal history, folklore, cryptids, UFOs, and weird legends, with a skeptic's eye and a believer's heart.

Sources

• Charleston Gazette coverage, September 1952
• Project Blue Book case file on the Flatwoods sighting (U.S. Air Force). 
• We the People (NBC, 1952). Kathleen May and Eugene Lemon's national TV appearance.
• George Snitowsky's account in Male magazine, July 1955.
• Gray Barker, "The Monster and the Saucer," Fate magazine, January 1953.
• Gray Barker, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956).
• Frank Feschino Jr., The Braxton County Monster: The Cover-Up of the Flatwoods Monster Revealed (2004).
• Joe Nickell, "The Flatwoods UFO Monster," Skeptical Inquirer, November 2000: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2000/11/the-flatwoods-ufo-monster/ This covers the barn owl theory, the beacon, "saw, heard and smelled nothing," and Eugene throwing up.
• Snopes, "What Was the Flatwoods Monster?": https://www.snopes.com/articles/383097/flatwoods-monster-mothman-owl/
• HISTORY, "In 1952, the Flatwoods Monster Terrified 6 Kids, a Mom, a Dog—and the Nation": https://www.history.com/articles/flatwoods-monster-west-virginia This has the John Gibson quotes about Rickie and a boy peeing his pants, Gray Barker's background, and the May brothers standing by their story.
• All That's Interesting, "Inside the Legend of the Flatwoods Monster": https://allthatsinteresting.com/flatwoods-monster This covers Audra Harper's sighting.
• Magonia magazine's critical re-examination of the case. It's the source for Max Lockard's timing and the plant-sap explanation for the residue. I don't have the exact link, so search "Magonia Flatwoods monster" to grab it.
• Visit Braxton, "The Flatwoods Monster": https://braxtonwv.org/the-flatwoods-monster/
• The Flatwoods Monster Museum, Sutton, WV. It holds the Audra Harper typewritten account and the original New York sketch.
• Wikipedia, "Flatwoods monster": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatwoods_monster
• Wikipedia, "Gray Barker": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Barker

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⚠️ Listener Discretion:
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Everyone knows the rhyme. Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks. The problem is that almost every word of it is bullshit.

In this episode, Dayna heads to Fall River, Massachusetts, to uncover the actual story behind one of America’s most infamous unsolved murders. We’re talking family resentment, inheritance drama, a mysterious note, an alleged attempt to buy poison, a suspiciously burned dress, a spectacularly messy investigation, and the courtroom decision to bring Andrew and Abby Borden’s actual skulls to trial. Because apparently cyanide testimony was too prejudicial, but placing Daddy’s skull on the prosecution table was perfectly reasonable.

We’ll separate documented history from folklore, fact-check Netflix’s Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, examine the evidence against Lizzie, and explore how gender, wealth, class, and Christian respectability shaped her acquittal. Was Lizzie an innocent woman destroyed by suspicion, a calculating murderer who got away with it, or something history can no longer prove?

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👀 GOT A STORY? (I know you do…)
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⚠️ Listener Discretion:
We talk about dark stuff here.. death, violence, and the occasional deeply cursed human behavior. If that’s not your vibe, totally fair… but if it is? Welcome home. 🖤

💀 If you liked this episode:
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Bekah Page joins Dayna to talk about her paranormal investigations at The Whaley House. Bekah has always been sensitive to energies and drawn to the paranormal. As a child, she visited the Whaley house and has been called back to it several times since. In this bonus episode, Dayna and Bekah discuss Violet Whaley, how a house can hold both grief and joy, Bekah's relationship with Violet Whaley, and what her paranormal investigation journey has looked like.

Find Bekahon Instagram @itsbekahpage and @beksboos
TikTok: @beksboos

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👀 GOT A STORY? (I know you do…)
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⚠️ Listener Discretion:
We talk about dark stuff here.. death, violence, and the occasional deeply cursed human behavior. If that’s not your vibe, totally fair… but if it is? Welcome home. 🖤

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A hanged man, two tragic young deaths, and a whole lot of frontier judgment. The Whaley House, built on top of a killing ground, had no choice but to be haunted. This week, Dayna tells the story of all the tragedy one house can hold. But if it can hold that much sorrow, can't it also hold that much joy? The Whaley House still stands today and is widely recognized as one of the most haunted houses in America. And THIS is why.

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👀 GOT A STORY? (I know you do…)
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⚠️ Listener Discretion:
We talk about dark stuff here.. death, violence, and the occasional deeply cursed human behavior. If that’s not your vibe, totally fair… but if it is? Welcome home. 🖤

💀 If you liked this episode:
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For the first time in Loreplay HISTORY, we have a guest on the show! Jenn Scott Pickett has been deep diving reincarnation and sharing the stories for years. She is an author, podcaster, and social media creator. In this episode, Dayna and Jenn talk about past life regressions, if it's woo woo bullshit, the many cases of past lives, scars, memories and more. Find Jenn on social media @jennscottpickett

For her book, "Reincarnation Explained without Religion": https://a.co/d/01lxb7ou
For her podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/researching-reincarnation-with-jenn-scott-pickett/id6795738792
 
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👀 GOT A STORY? (I know you do…)
If you’ve experienced something weird, spooky, glitchy, or straight-up unexplainable.. send it in. Your story might be featured in a future episode.

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⚠️ Listener Discretion:
We talk about dark stuff here.. death, violence, and the occasional deeply cursed human behavior. If that’s not your vibe, totally fair… but if it is? Welcome home. 🖤

💀 If you liked this episode:
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Imagine you're a hard boiled cop that doesn't believe in woo woo nonsense, and then you are forced to face that the woo woo nonsense might be on to something. Robert L. Snow, a police detective, was essentially dared to do a past life regression session. He went into the experience fully determined to debunk it all, even bringing his own recorder to the session, and ended up on a journey that took him to very unexplained places. With a list of 28 things that could be proved or disproved, Bob investigated his own PAST life. And what he found, changed his whole view on past lives.

This episodes primary source was from The Psychic and The Doc Youtube. found here: https://youtu.be/mfIBLHwHAao?si=pY4K-fCPnzr__6F0

Robert Snow's Book: https://a.co/d/0bCpl03o

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👀 GOT A STORY? (I know you do…)
If you’ve experienced something weird, spooky, glitchy, or straight-up unexplainable.. send it in. Your story might be featured in a future episode.

📩 Submit here: [email protected]

⚠️ Listener Discretion:
We talk about dark stuff here.. death, violence, and the occasional deeply cursed human behavior. If that’s not your vibe, totally fair… but if it is? Welcome home. 🖤

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The trials ended. The executions stopped. But according to the ghost stories, some of North Berwick’s dead never really left.

In this bonus episode of Loreplay, we’re heading back to Scotland to dig into the hauntings and paranormal legends that linger in the shadow of the North Berwick Witch Trials. From Agnes Sampson, better known in ghost lore as “Bald Agnes”, and her alleged appearances at Holyrood Palace, to the spirits, strange encounters, and centuries-old stories attached to the places touched by Scotland’s witch-hunting past, we’re looking at what happened when horrific history eventually became haunted history. And this time, there’s an important question hanging over all of it: are these really ghost stories… or are they one of the ways we’ve kept the memories of people like Agnes alive after history tried so damn hard to erase them? Either way, if anyone earned the right to haunt a royal palace, it’s Agnes fucking Sampson. Welcome back to North Berwick.

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⚠️ Listener Discretion:
We talk about dark stuff here—death, violence, and the occasional deeply cursed human behavior. If that’s not your vibe, totally fair… but if it is? Welcome home. 🖤

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Season 2 is HERE, and apparently we’re kicking things off with Satan’s cold ass, witches sailing the Scottish seas in kitchen colanders, a weaponized cat, and one very paranoid king. The North Berwick Witch Trials started with a royal wedding, some seriously shitty weather, and King James VI becoming convinced that witches were personally trying to murder him. What followed was one of Scotland’s most infamous witch hunts. This week, we’re getting into the stories of Geillis Duncan, Agnes Sampson, John Fian, Euphame MacCalzean, and the other real people who found themselves accused of belonging to an enormous satanic conspiracy. There’s torture. Forced confessions. A Devil who apparently takes attendance. A supernatural assassination attempt involving a toad. And yes, an alarming amount of discussion about the Devil’s bare ass. But underneath all of that ridiculousness is a story that gets very real, very fast—because once powerful people decided the conspiracy existed, every denial became evidence, every confession created another suspect, and innocent people paid for it with their lives.

Welcome back, my feral little lore lovers.

Season 2 is about to get fucking weird.

Sources & Further Reading

I went down a DEEP rabbit hole for this one. If you want to join me—or just make sure I’m not personally inventing Satan’s cold ass—here are some of the main sources used for this episode:

• The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft — University of Edinburgh — This is probably the single best resource for the Scottish witch trials. The database was created by historians Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, Joyce Miller and Louise Yeoman and contains records for thousands of accused people, including the North Berwick cases.
  Explore the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft
• Lawrence Normand & Gareth Roberts, Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI's Demonology and the North Berwick Witches — One of the major scholarly works on the trials, including surviving indictments for Agnes Sampson, John Fian, Barbara Napier and Euphame MacCalzean, as well as Francis Stewart's later trial. 
• Newes from Scotland (1591/1592) — The infamous contemporary pamphlet describing the North Berwick cases, John Fian, the alleged witches' meetings, attempts to sink James VI's ship, and examinations conducted in the king's presence. This is also where some of the episode's wildest details come from. Important disclaimer: contemporary does not mean unbiased. This thing was basically 16th-century witch-panic propaganda, so I treated its supernatural claims accordingly.
  View the Folger Shakespeare Library record for Newes from Scotland
• Liv Helene Willumsen, “Witchcraft against Royal Danish Ships in 1589 and the Transnational Transfer of Ideas” — Research based on Danish court records, state papers and diplomatic correspondence examining the witch trials surrounding Anne of Denmark's disastrous voyage and how those ideas traveled from Denmark to Scotland.
  Read the research article
• Scottish Witchcraft Trials / Barbara Napier & Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell — Surviving trial material is particularly useful here because Barbara's case shows James's personal involvement after her jury refused to convict her on everything, while Bothwell became the highest-status person formally accused of witchcraft in Scotland. 
• Scottish Government & Scottish Parliament records — In 2022, Nicola Sturgeon issued a formal posthumous apology on behalf of the Scottish Government to people accused, convicted, vilified or executed under Scotland's Witchcraft Act. A proposed bill that would have pardoned those convicted was later withdrawn in 2023, and the Scottish Government has explicitly confirmed that an apology was made, but no legal pardon was given.
  Read the Scottish Government's 2022 apology

A note on the history: A lot of what survives from North Berwick comes from interrogations, accusations, legal records and Newes from Scotland. So when I say someone “confessed” to sailing across the sea in a sieve, kissing the Devil's ass, raising storms or doing some other absolutely unhinged shit, I'm describing what the historical record claims they confessed to—often after torture—not suggesting those things actually happened. Torture was used to obtain confessions during Scottish witch investigations, and the North Berwick panic was particularly notorious for physical torture. 

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👀 GOT A STORY? (I know you do…)
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📩 Submit here: [email protected]

⚠️ Listener Discretion:
We talk about dark stuff here—death, violence, and the occasional deeply cursed human behavior. If that’s not your vibe, totally fair… but if it is? Welcome home. 🖤

💀 If you liked this episode:
Follow, rate, review, share it with a friend who also loves questionable life choices and spooky stories. It helps the show grow—and keeps me emotionally stable (barely).

In 1928, on the night before Thanksgiving, a sixty-year-old Pennsylvania folk healer named Nelson Rehmeyer was beaten to death in his farmhouse by three men who believed he had cursed them. The house they tried to burn wouldn't burn. The clock above the stove stopped at 12:01. And the trial that followed became one of the most surreal legal spectacles in American history — partly because the judge edited the word "witch" out of the murder confession before the jury ever heard it. This week: Hex Hollow, Pennsylvania Powwow, the grimoire you can still buy on Amazon (four and a half stars), and the question of what happens when a community's entire system for understanding suffering points to a person. Dark, accurate, and genuinely strange.

Key Sources

Arthur Lewis, Hex (1969) — foundational narrative account. Still widely cited.

David W. Kriebel, Powwowing Among the Pennsylvania Dutch (Penn State University Press, 2007) — definitive academic treatment of Braucherei. Source for cure specifics (wound chant, hog bladder remedy, dollar bill vision test).

Johann Georg Hohman, Pow-Wows; or, Long Lost Friend (1820, multiple editions) — free on Internet Archive; annotated academic edition from Penn State University Press; also Amazon.

Shane Free, dir., Hex Hollow: Witchcraft and Murder in Pennsylvania (2015) — free to stream; features descendants of all parties and modern Powwow practitioners. Highly recommended companion viewing.

CrimeReads (2021), "A Tale of Witchcraft and Murder in Jazz Age America" — best single account of the trial proceedings and courtroom dynamics.

Wikipedia, Rehmeyer's Hollow — for baseline fact-check. Note: some popular sources contain errors on dates and childhood healer details; trial transcripts are the more reliable source.

Hey hey, my fellow Lore Lovers… welcome to Loreplay. 🖤

This is the podcast where history gets messy, folklore gets questionable, and I willingly spiral so you don’t have to. I’m your host, Dayna Pereira—your resident investigator of all things creepy, cursed, and deeply side-eye worthy.

Each week, we dig into the stories that make you go “wait… what the hell actually happened?”—from haunted places and urban legends to true crime and historical chaos. We separate fact from fiction… and then stare directly into the uncomfortable space in between.

📲 Come hang out with me outside the void:
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Prefer to Watch 👀
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👀 GOT A STORY? (I know you do…)
If you’ve experienced something weird, spooky, glitchy, or straight-up unexplainable—send it in. Your story might be featured in a future episode.

📩 Submit here: [email protected]

⚠️ Listener Discretion:
We talk about dark stuff here—death, violence, and the occasional deeply cursed human behavior. If that’s not your vibe, totally fair… but if it is? Welcome home. 🖤

💀 If you liked this episode:
Follow, rate, review, share it with a friend who also loves questionable life choices and spooky stories. It helps the show grow—and keeps me emotionally stable (barely).

And remember…
Just because it’s folklore… doesn’t mean it’s (all) fiction. 😏