Trick or Treat 2: Too Young

Tragic loss is often the catalyst for powerful tales that haunt us for generations. Today's collection of stories gathers some of the most chilling examples of that truth. Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing and research by Alex Robinson and GennaRose Nethercott. ————————— Lore Resources: Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music https://www.lorepodcast.com/music Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources https://www.lorepodcast.com/sources Official Lore Merchandise: lorepodcast.com/shop https://www.lorepodcast.com/shop All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com https://www.grimandmild.com ————————— To report a concern regarding a radio-style, non-Aaron ad in this episode, reach out to ads @ lorepodcast.com with the name of the company or organization so we can look into it. ————————— To advertise on this podcast please email: [email protected]. Or go to: https://advertising.libsyn.com/lore ————————— ©2025 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:10Aaron Mahnke?

  Welcome back to another edition of Trick or Treat, our way of helping you really lean into the spooky Halloween season. Every Friday in October, you'll find another of these bonus episodes waiting for you, packed full of short stories built around a theme. Today, we're exploring a difficult topic: child and infant mortality. If that's a tough subject for you to learn about or hear about, feel free to take a pass on this one. That said, it is one of the most common elements found in the legends and folktales that litter the pages of history. Life was very hard for a very long time, and many stories reflect that. Pain and loss, as we have learned on this show over the years, can often become the seeds of something darker.

• 1:52Aaron Mahnke?

  And these four tales will serve as powerful examples of that truth. So grab a cup of tea, turn on a light, and settle in for another edition of Trick or Treat. I'm Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

• 2:19Aaron Mahnke?

  Sometimes just leaving home can be treacherous. There are a lot of perfectly innocent things out there that can kill you. You can die in your garden from a bee sting. You can choke to death on a chicken bone in your favorite restaurant. Even getting into your car to go to work is a dangerous thing. You never know which commute could be your last. But part of being human is accepting that. To live our lives to the fullest, we have had to calculate the risk versus reward. And usually, the reward wins out. The fresh flowers are worth the sting. The fried chicken is worth the hazard. And the ability to travel anywhere we want is worth the chance that we could collide with another driver.

• 3:02Aaron Mahnke?

  Even so, sometimes, against all odds, these small moments become deadly. Sometimes the innocent die, and it's just the luck of the draw. There is no better story to demonstrate just how unfair life and the afterlife can be than the local legend from San Antonio. According to the story, this took place in the 1930s or 1940s. In one version of the events, a school bus was carrying a load of students home from school. But once the bus reached the intersection of Villamaine and Chain Roads, the engine stalled. Normally, it wouldn't be that big of a deal. But this time, it was, because the bus had stopped right on top of a train track. Panicking, the bus driver tried to get the students off the bus. But it was too late.

• 3:47Aaron Mahnke?

  A train was barreling toward them, and in just a few short seconds, it hit. There were no survivors. Another version of the tale claims that it was at nighttime, and a nun was driving a group of students home after a field trip. When her engine stalled over the train tracks, the children were asleep, and the nun quietly tried restarting the car so as not to wake them. She had no way of knowing, but it was the wrong choice. A train was careening down the tracks, and before she could react, it hit the bus, smashing it in half. The nun survived, but all the children died. The nun was eaten away with guilt, they say. Only a few weeks after the crash, she drove back to the crossroads and stopped on the tracks intentionally.

• 4:31Aaron Mahnke?

  Sitting back, she closed her eyes, waiting for death to take her too. Suddenly, she felt her car moving. Nothing she did made it stop. The entire thing rolled off the tracks just as the train rushed by. The nun got out of her car to inspect what happened, and she found child-sized handprints on the trunk. According to locals, if you put your car in neutral over the train tracks, then the spirits of all the children who died in that school bus crash will push your car off the rails. And reportedly, if you cover your bumper with baby powder, then you can see the evidence of their tiny hands. Thankfully, these stories are nothing more than an urban legend. There's no record of a devastating train crash in Texas that killed a group of schoolchildren.

• 5:16Aaron Mahnke?

  If you park your car on a train track in San Antonio, you will not be rescued by a group of ghostly kids. You'll just put yourself at risk. But it's possible that the locals adopted this legend from another state. You see, at 9:00 a.m. on December 1st of 1938, a school bus stalled on the train tracks in Salt Lake City, Utah. There was a heavy blizzard that morning, and the driver couldn't see much of anything out his windshield, not even the train coming down the tracks. The train tried to brake, but it was too late. It hit the school bus at 52 miles per hour. Thirty people died from the accident. Unsurprisingly, this tragic event was major news, and not just in Utah, but across the entire country.

• 6:00Aaron Mahnke?

  It's suspected that the people of San Antonio read the story and used it as an example when teaching their children about train safety. Over time, the story was assumed to be true from Texas, and just like that, San Antonio had a new urban legend on its hands. At the end of the day, folklore is a tricky beast. It paints an enticing picture for us. It draws us in, but in the process, it sometimes hides the truth. And then again, story can be a powerful tool. And those who created and spread the story of the ghostly children of San Antonio might have been hoping that folklore could do something else to push us all off the tracks.

• 6:56Aaron Mahnke?

  It has been called the most haunted place in Utah. Nestled deep in Logan's Canyon is a collection of abandoned cabins known as the Nunnery. This campground has served many purposes and lived many lives, but more than anything, it's most well-known for being haunted. The most common rumor was that the Catholic Church once sent nuns here to hide them away if they ever became pregnant. The nuns would give birth, and then the babies would be put up for adoption, with no one the wiser. Well, as the story goes, in the 1940s, one nun couldn't bear to part with her baby, so in the middle of the night, she ran away with her newborn. Unfortunately, she must not have been quiet enough, because the Mother Superior soon noticed that she was gone.

• 7:38Aaron Mahnke?

  When the nun realized that Mother Superior was chasing her, she hid her baby in the underbrush, promising to come back to it, and then she ran deeper into the forest to hide. A few hours later, the mother came back for her baby, only to see that it was missing. Distraught, she looked everywhere, eventually making her way back to the nunnery that she had initially fled from. Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw there. Her baby was floating, face down in the swimming pool. It had drowned. Completely inconsolable, the mother took her own life that very same night. Now, that's one story. Another story says that there was never a nun who took her own life. Instead, two nuns got into a fight.

• 8:20Aaron Mahnke?

  One pushed the other into the pool, and she hit her head on the edge, dying instantly. Both of these stories, though, do end with the same warning, that the ghost of a nun wanders the property, forever trapped on the grounds. Some people also claim that they've heard a baby crying at night, others saying that they've seen ghostly children running around. There is a lot of speculation about the Nunnery. After all, it's a set of abandoned cabins in the wood. It was practically made to host a group of ghosts. But most of the urban legends are just that: tall tales. For those who enjoy their history though, I can tell you that the Nunnery was originally built by a local man named Ezekiel Hatch sometime between 1915 and 1918.

• 9:04Aaron Mahnke?

  And it wasn't called the Nunnery back then, it was called Hatch's Camp. Hatch's family would spend their summers staying in their singular cabin that he built, swimming in the nearby river, and enjoying their time in the sun. Over the years though, more cabins were added to the property. And then in the 1930s, it was all passed on to Hatch's son, L. Boyd Hatch. The son turned the cabins from a private family retreat into a luxury experience for the elites. The most wealthy celebrities in the country stayed there, from Marilyn Monroe to Joan Crawford. In 1951 though, the Hatch family donated the property to the Catholic Church, which changed the name to Saint Anne's Retreat. But the church didn't use it as a place to hide away disgraced nuns.

• 9:46Aaron Mahnke?

  Instead, it was used as a place of leisure, where the priests and nuns could take a break from serving their communities. And in the summers, the church used the property as a children's camp. By 1978, the camp had fallen into disrepair. Rather than fixing it up though, the church left it sitting empty, and it still sits empty today. The terrible stories about pregnant nuns don't hold much water when you compare them to the real history of the camp. Especially since those events were said to have happened in the 1940s, and the church hadn't even gained ownership until the 1950s. But the legends hold enough sway that, locally, it's still known as the Nunnery, rather than Saint Anne's Retreat. And teens have been known to break in every now and then for a look around, probably

• 10:31Aaron Mahnke?

  hoping to see a ghost. And sadly, the only tragic tale to happen at the Nunnery actually happened to one of those curious teenagers. In 1998, a group of 38 teens snuck onto the property. They had heard all of the spooky stories, and they wanted to investigate for themselves. Unfortunately though, they weren't alone. Three men had recently been hired as security guards for the property, which under normal circumstances would have been perfectly reasonable. But when these men saw the trespassers, they did not act rationally. They went on a power trip, and the result was torture, assault, and gross abuse of their power. The teenagers were eventually found and rescued, but they were traumatized for the rest of their lives. And they were sucked into a lengthy court battle after the incident.

• 11:16Aaron Mahnke?

  There may be no ghostly nuns haunting the grounds of the nunnery, but at one point, some very scary things did happen there. Things that were even scarier than seeing a ghost.

• 11:41Aaron Mahnke?

  Everyone loves to talk about haunted houses, haunted lighthouses even, and even haunted ships. But what about haunted amusement parks? They may seem gimmicky, but most theme parks have a history of visitors occasionally dying, although hopefully that history is extremely limited for most of them. But for some, it is not. For some, their experience with death goes back further than the existence of the park itself. Some, like West Virginia's Lake Shawnee Amusement Park. Now, believe it or not, the beginning of this particular haunting can be traced all the way back to the 18th century. In 1774, the royal governor of Virginia granted a man named Mitchell Clay 800 acres of land in what was then Virginia, but is now West Virginia.

• 12:25Aaron Mahnke?

  And so, looking ahead to what they were sure would be a bright future, Mitchell and his wife moved their 14 children out to their farmland in what is today Mercer County. But that bright future would be cut short. Tragedy struck less than a decade after they moved into their new home. In August of 1783, Mitchell Clay went out hunting. He left two of his sons at the farm to store that year's harvest while his daughters handled the laundry down at the farm's creek. It was a day of chores and laughter, just like any other. But while the children were working, a party of indigenous Shawnee crept up on the group, and then they fired. Their bullet struck one of the boys, a young lad named Bartley. Hearing the gun go off, the others fled, running toward the safety of the house. But they didn't run fast enough.

• 13:09Aaron Mahnke?

  An attacker caught one of the daughters, Tabitha, and stabbed her to death. A third child, Ezekiel, was kidnapped from the farm. When Mitchell returned home, it was to a bloody scene. Two of his children were dead, their corpses scalped, and one was gone. Grief-stricken, Mitchell gathered his neighbors, who formed a hunting party, and furiously pursued the attackers. They caught up to the Shawnee in Boone County, and some of the indigenous men were killed during the altercation. But most got away, including the men who had been holding tight to Ezekiel. Mitchell wasn't ever able to recover his son. By the time he was able to track Ezekiel down at the Shawnee settlement in Ohio, the 16-year-old had already been murdered. And the Clay family was never the same.

• 13:52Aaron Mahnke?

  As the years passed by, the remaining children slowly moved on with their lives, some of them even immigrating to western territories as adults. But the pain of losing three children stayed with everyone, especially with Mitchell and his wife Phoebe. Today, there is a statue of the two grieving parents outside the Mercer County courthouse titled "Agony in Stone." Because that kind of heartache doesn't just disappear. And some would argue that that anguish seeped into the very land where the children had been massacred. The Clay family land stayed largely unchanged for the next century and a half. It sat stagnant, a monument to tragedy, until it was bought by an entrepreneur in the 1920s. His goal? To build an amusement park.

• 14:34Aaron Mahnke?

  Now, to be fair to him, he knew nothing about the land's violent history. He only knew that he wanted to create a space for local families to enjoy themselves. But some have said that despite his ignorance, his choice to build on top of the Clay farm cursed his park. When it opened, the Lake Shawnee amusement park was a hit. It boasted a water slide, a swimming hole, a dance hall, and a speakeasy. There were even rides like a Ferris wheel and a circular swing. There was the perfect place for people of all ages to let loose and have some fun. Everything went smoothly for the first 20 years or so of operation. But then, another child lost their life on the very same land where the Clay children lost theirs. In the summer of 1955, the park was crowded,

• 15:19Aaron Mahnke?

  and it was hard for anyone to navigate through it. Confused by the chaos, a delivery truck driver accidentally backed into the spinning swing set, and a little girl's swing collided with the truck. She tragically died on impact. And if that wasn't enough, a second incident occurred only a few years later. When one mother came to pick up her son from the park at the end of the day, he was nowhere to be found. She frantically searched the entire premises until she found his body, floating in the park's pond. Her little boy had drowned. The pool was filled with sand shortly afterwards, to prevent any more unexpected deaths. The park was eventually abandoned in 1966. Now, some sources say that there were financial issues, while others say that the closure was a result of those children's deaths.

• 16:04Aaron Mahnke?

  Honestly, though, so much of the park's history has been twisted by urban legends that it's hard to say for sure which version of the events is true. And then, the Shawnee Lake Amusement Park sat empty. Until 1985, when it was bought by a man named Gaylord White. White wanted to turn the park into family-friendly neighborhoods, but once his team broke ground, they were immediately forced to stop construction. The entire amusement park had been built on top of an ancient burial ground. And I know that sounds stereotypical, and that is often used in folklore and urban legends to add some level of spookiness to a story. But in this case, it was actually true. An archaeological dig in 1988 determined that the burial site had been abandoned

• 16:48Aaron Mahnke?

  hundreds of years before white settlers ever came to the area. Estimates put the number of graves there at around 3,000. Before deciding to leave the remaining bodies undisturbed, the team dug up 13 skeletons, most of which had belonged to children. Today, the Shawnee Lake Amusement Park is private property, but they do offer haunted tours for anyone who wants to have a look around. The park has been named one of the most haunted places on Earth, with visitors reporting disembodied voices, mysteriously locking doors, and a swing that still moves on its own. But of course, the most common sightings of all always involve the ghosts of children.

• 17:43Aaron Mahnke?

  Today's tour through haunting stories about lost children might not have been easy to listen to, but I hope you found some peace and connection within the experiences of others. The fact is, no matter how old we get, we will always be somebody's baby. Sadly, there are plenty of stories in this dark corner of folklore, so before we wrap things up, my team and I have one more tale we'd like to share. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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• 19:45Aaron Mahnke?

  Green Lake is one of Seattle's most beloved parks. A space to picnic, to swim, to relax from the hardships and bustle of urban life. The lake itself has rested there for over 50,000 years, ever since glaciers carved through the rocky western earth. It's the sort of place where you can feel the history in the very shape of the land. And sometimes, there by the water's edge, history takes on a different form. That of a woman, shimmering and translucent, weeping into her hands. Sylvia Gaines had her whole life ahead of her. The year was 1926, and she had just graduated from Smith College. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Sylvia had lived a gentle enough life.

• 20:27Aaron Mahnke?

  Sure, she was a child of divorce, but she'd only been five when her parents had split, and had grown up on the east coast with her loving, single mother ever since. By the time Sylvia was 22, she could already see her bright future shimmering in front of her. She was beautiful, smart, well-educated, and even had some family members in prominent positions in city government. But there was one piece of unfinished business that had been nagging at Sylvia, and she decided it was finally time to address it. And so she packed up, headed west, and steeled herself to spend time with her father. Now, after her parents had separated, Sylvia's father Bob had moved all the way out to Seattle. So she honestly barely knew the guy, but this trip was going to change that, she decided.

• 21:11Aaron Mahnke?

  After all, he was family. Fewer than 10 months after her arrival, though, two workmen were walking along Seattle's Green Lake when they found a pair of shoes. Shoes and blood, in a red trail leading right to the lifeless body of Sylvia Gaines. Blame quickly fell upon her father, and on August 2nd of 1926, he was tried for her murder. And to be fair, he did seem, well, pretty suspicious. He'd been seen drunkenly quarreling with her shortly before her death, and in the hours before she was found, he had even said to a friend, and I quote, "You know what I have always told you, that if anyone in my house told me when I should come and go, and when I should drink, and how much..." Why, I would have killed him. Well, that's what happened.

• 21:55Aaron Mahnke?

  Yeah, not a good look, right? And add to this a lot of rumors that there was some sort of an inappropriate relationship between Bob and Sylvia, and all in all, it didn't look good for Mr. Gaines. The trial was a huge deal in Seattle at the time. Bob Gaines was a wealthy, well-respected man after all. His brother was even the Chair of the King County Board of Commissioners. This was a prominent man from a prominent family, and now it looked like he had not only murdered his daughter, but had been involved in an inappropriate relationship with her. So on August 31st of 1928, after three hours of deliberation, a jury found Bob Gaines guilty. And although he insisted on his innocence until the end, he was hanged for his crime.

• 22:38Aaron Mahnke?

  Now, in remembrance of Sylvia, the spot where the young woman lost her life became known as Gaines Point, and 30 black cottonwood trees were planted there, allegedly placed there in her honor. And for over 70 years, those trees grew and thrived. They reached toward the sky and lived the kinds of full, healthy lives that Sylvia herself had been robbed of. But time passed. The people of Seattle forgot about the murder and the trial. In fact, they forgot about Sylvia altogether. Eventually, even the cottonwood trees were removed due to the falling limbs, and today, if you were to visit that quiet lakeside spot, you might never know what happened there at all. That is, unless the stories are true. You see, just because Sylvia Gaines' body may be gone, along with her tall grove of

• 23:23Aaron Mahnke?

  cottonwood trees, some say her ghost never left. Visitors have witnessed a young woman walking along the water's edge racked with sobs, or at least they think it's a woman. It's hard to tell, because those who come upon the crying figure say that they can see right through her. Still, others claim to have seen her pale face peeking out from among the lakeside bushes. A face, that is. With no body attached.

• 24:01Aaron Mahnke?

  This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Manke, with writing and research by Alex Robinson and Jenna Rose Nethercot. Today's collection of stories is a themed pack of Lore Bytes, which started out life as member-only bonus episodes for our paid subscribers. Along with weekly Bytes and discounts on Lore merchandise and access to my inbox, our paid members also get to enjoy ad-free episodes. It's a bargain for all of that ad-free storytelling and a great way to support this show and the talented humans who make it. For more information about your ad-free options, head over to lorepodcast.com/support. And don't forget the book series available in bookstores and online and two seasons of the TV adaptation on Amazon Prime. Learn more over at lorepodcast.com.

• 24:44Aaron Mahnke?

  And you can also follow the show on platforms like Threads, Instagram, Blue Sky, and YouTube. Just search for Lore Podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.

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