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Mary Ann Conklin: Demon in Petticoats
14 Plays2 months ago
It’s episode 6, and we’re heading back to the muddy streets of 1850s Seattle to meet Mary Ann “Mother Damnable” Conklin, the woman who ruled a rough port town with a sharper tongue than any sailor. She ran Seattle’s first hotel, cursed in six languages, and scared even the Navy into retreat. Some called her a madam, others a witch, but everyone remembered her. And when she died, locals swore her body turned to stone, as if even death couldn’t silence her. Mary Ann Conklin: Demon in Petticoats is the story of Seattle’s most unforgettable woman, who was fierce, funny, and far too stubborn to stay buried.
⚠️ Content Warning: This episode includes references to abuse, trauma, and death. Listener discretion is advised.
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💌 Got theories or personal cult encounters? Email us at BTevergreens@gmail.com or DM on Instagram @BTEPodcast
Full source list and supplemental materials are available on our website at Beneaththeevergreens.com.
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Transcript
Introduction to Beneath the Evergreens
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Beneath the Evergreens, where murder, mysteries, and mayhem lurk in the shadows of the Pacific Northwest. I'm Jess. And I'm Anna. From haunted forests and unsolved disappearances to true crime cases buried deep in the moss and the mist, we're digging into the dark secrets hiding under the evergreens.
00:00:21
Speaker
Each episode will explore real cases, eerie encounters, and the legends that keep the Pacific Northwest up at night. So grab your flashlight, lock your doors, and join us beneath the evergreen.
Recap of Last Week's Episode
00:00:56
Speaker
Welcome to episode six, everyone. We're already here. I can't believe it. Last week's story was super fun. I did go on a deep dive. What did you find out?
00:01:06
Speaker
more just looking at the pictures of the people that were impacted. also ended up finding a journal of what this guy ate, the course of his stay.
00:01:16
Speaker
What it was once every three days or something like that. I can't remember specifics, but it really was tomato juice water. Yeah. And maybe an orange slice.
00:01:29
Speaker
If he was feeling crazy, it was scary. Yeah, it was wild. And the more I look at the picture of her booking photo, she does have the look of someone.
00:01:42
Speaker
I think I'm just assigning this her because I know what she did. But she looks kind of crazy. I could see when the sisters, their nanny, right?
00:01:53
Speaker
When she was kind of timid about getting the one sister out. I could, looking at that photo of Linda, I can see that sternness and how she would be like, absolutely not.
00:02:02
Speaker
And just overpower someone else. Yeah. She, she just has this look of no nonsense. She would be perfect as a drill instructor. Well, maybe not. Cause then she might kill everyone, but I could see her being i don't know, in charge in someone's business. She, she looks like a no nonsense.
00:02:18
Speaker
I would definitely be scared of her. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Discovery of the Arachnid Mega City
00:02:23
Speaker
Well, today i have a really fun story for you, but I kind of alluded to this off mic, but I sometimes find weird things on the internet.
00:02:33
Speaker
And one thing that I found on the internet this week was the scientist found an arachnid mega city. That terrifies the hell out of me.
00:02:46
Speaker
Like you're about to give me nightmares. Possibly the largest ever spiderweb found. And let me just give you some stats here. So the structure that it was found in is a silver cave in the Albanian Greece border.
00:03:04
Speaker
It spans 100 square meters. And the entire section of that 100 square meters is covered in a multi-layered web. Wow. Wow. I am finding this information on fizz.org, and it's an article by Paul Arnold called Sulphur Cave Spiders Build an Arachnid Megacity and Possibly the Largest Ever Spider Web.
00:03:29
Speaker
It has a colony of approximately 69,000
00:03:34
Speaker
Domestic house spiders and 42,000 vegan spiders. I don't know what those look like, but all I have to say is that is lot of fucking spiders to be living in a single web. Isn't that gross? I'm imagine the person that found this.
00:03:52
Speaker
You're just like looking through cave. Oh, yeah. Yeah. you're just looking for something here. You're. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. And I imagine they start crawling out. Oh, This is. Yeah, I'm trying to, I wonder if I can send you the screenshot of this. No, I can't. That's that's okay. Once again, you don't need to go into too many details.
00:04:12
Speaker
Yes. It looks creepy. It's gross. It almost looks like just a white sheen is over the rock, but it's just all spiderwebs. You're accessing this side of me where I'm super intrigued, but also horribly disgusted. And I want to see, but I know I'm immediately going to regret it.
00:04:28
Speaker
Anyways, okay.
Mary Ann Conklin: The Demon in Petticoats
00:04:29
Speaker
So today i have a story for you about a demon in petticoats. That is, that's a catchy hook. When you, it's a catchy when you texted me about this earlier this week, i was like, I have to know more.
00:04:43
Speaker
I, I'm so, so intrigued. I'm so excited for this. It's one of the founders in Seattle, and I never knew that this person existed I have never heard a story about her.
00:04:54
Speaker
So shout out to The Stranger. It's a Seattle newspaper. They did a lot of deep dives on her, and it's how I found out about the demon in petticoats.
00:05:03
Speaker
So- Picture this. We're in the mid-1800s in Seattle. We're not in the coffee shop-filled, startup-dreaming Seattle we know today, but it's a smoggy, smoky, mud-slicked timber port where sailors, loggers, and they're perpetually unlucky, come looking for their fortune, but usually found some trouble.
00:05:27
Speaker
I'm imagining like a Pirates of the Caribbean version of Seattle. ah Please do, because that's exactly what it was. So this is a place where like whiskey was breakfast and the streets were nothing but mud.
00:05:40
Speaker
And if you can even call them streets, it's more just like logging roads that you could use as a street. And the population of SAWs outnumbered women by probably 150 1.
00:05:52
Speaker
It's very much logging during this time. It's also, you know, white people are trying to strip Native Americans of their land. And so it is somewhat of a bloodbath at this time. Like there's a lot of fighting. There's a lot of, you know, just a lot of things going on.
00:06:11
Speaker
And in the middle of this mess, one woman ruled with a sharper tongue than any man's knife. Her name was Mary Ann Conklin, but the city knew her as something much darker and much funnier.
00:06:22
Speaker
Her original nickname was Mother Damnedable, but through people's dealings with her, she actually became known as the demon in petticoats. So the story I'm about to tell you is her story.
00:06:36
Speaker
It's a tale of love. It's a tale of fury. and a body that allegedly turned to stone. Ooh. We're going to go how the demon was born. Yes.
00:06:49
Speaker
So Mary Ann Conklin was actually born Mary Ann Boyer, and she entered the world in 1821 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. So there's not a lot of record keeping because, first of all, she was a woman. So why bother to you know track a woman's life?
00:07:04
Speaker
But second, it is believed that she left Pennsylvania for a short time. And then returned in her mid to late 20s to Pennsylvania. But details are scarce, so not a lot is known about what's going on. But you might hear she lived elsewhere later on in the story.
00:07:24
Speaker
But this is after she moved back to Pennsylvania. She was, you know, a scandalous spinster. She was 30 and unmarried.
00:07:35
Speaker
But then ah man came to town. oh named Captain David Conklin, also known as the quote, Bull. So Captain Bull took a vested interest in Marianne, and they decided that they were going to get married.
00:07:56
Speaker
ah One thing you need to know about the bull is that he was 50. So 20 years her senior, which I think that's of the time, but I guess she's 30, 50. That's not a huge age you got. But then I think when he was 20 years old and like doing all this rowdy stuff, she was being born, which i don't know, gives me the heebie-jeebies. Yeah.
00:08:17
Speaker
That's neither here nor there.
Mary Ann's Abandonment in Port Townsend
00:08:17
Speaker
So he was 50. He was very, very loud, very rambunctious, just kind of typical Wild West cowboy character. But instead of being a cowboy, he was a whaling captain.
00:08:30
Speaker
Oh, OK. Yes. So he was very wealthy and he was a captain of a ship. But because of his whaling responsibilities, he didn't own a house. What he did on was a ship.
00:08:43
Speaker
And where did he live? He lived on this ship. So essentially he lived on a floating slaughterhouse to which Mary, now being his chattel, also needed to live on.
00:08:56
Speaker
So picture this. It's the 1850s. You have this devoted wife that you just married and she's all loving and you guys are getting together and it's like your honeymoon. And then she comes to move in with you and it's literally on a ship with no running water.
00:09:12
Speaker
Hundreds of other men. It smells nasty just because men not washing their body and it's got aroma of whale guts. Like living the dream right there.
00:09:23
Speaker
Oh, anne and don't forget, she's probably wearing a corset and like a shit ton of petticoats and I can't. So romantic, right? So they're enjoying their love story on the high seas, but actually they're not because history actually has it that...
00:09:43
Speaker
You know, some couples, they marry for love. Some couples marry because they work well together. Maybe there's not this deep love, but there's this friendship and they just kind of assimilate their lives. They mess their lives well.
00:09:54
Speaker
Well, these two were like fire and ice. Apparently it was nonstop screaming back and forth. When he asked her to do something, she was like, no way, go do it yourself.
00:10:05
Speaker
Like they were not, they were not having a great time. It was not a history of a great love story. And in fact, by 1853, the bull, Captain Bull, if you will, decided he had enough.
00:10:18
Speaker
While they happened to be docked in Port Townsend, he did the most 19th century version of ghosting imaginable. He literally kicked her off the ship and sailed away. Are you serious?
00:10:33
Speaker
He just left her there. Like kicked her off the ship and peaced out. There was no, no, no divorce papers. Just like peace out. I can't deal with you anymore.
00:10:45
Speaker
Never came back. Oh my God. You're that ghosting has been around for longer than I thought. Damn.
Rise in Seattle: Mother Damnedable
00:10:53
Speaker
Longer than I thought to. I would be pissed.
00:10:57
Speaker
So mad. But there she was. So she, Marianne is, you know, she's stranded. She's furious and she's very, very done with bull. And I feel like a lot of women in this, in this age would kind of, I mean, be terrified. I mean, this is a time when women had no legal rights. You weren't allowed a bank account. You weren't allowed credit.
00:11:19
Speaker
you couldn't sign a lease by yourself. And oh yeah, Washington state is still considered a frontier. Like, oh yeah. There's not a huge established, cities here, right? I mean, Port Townsend used to be called the New York of Washington state. Like it was supposed to be one of the biggest ports ever.
00:11:38
Speaker
The only reason why it didn't become like Seattle was because the railway station decided to use Tacoma as their docking port instead of Port Townsend. So it was one of the bigger cities, but it by all means wasn't that big.
00:11:52
Speaker
Looking back on that, imagining Port Townsend as a booming metropolis, it's just a little silly to think about. I know, like in an alternate timeline, it's crazy. But actually, because it was essentially vacated because it wasn't going to be used as a bigger port, it's actually one of the only remaining Victorian ports in the United States.
00:12:14
Speaker
Really? Really? Yeah. It's actually like really historically significant. And if you look at old pictures of the main downtown streets of Port Townsend in like the 1850s, it looks almost identical to today's. Like there's been little to no changes.
00:12:29
Speaker
Yeah. We're just adding more stops on our road trip. Nah. We sure are. So poor Mary, she's, you know, in this Victorian port town. She doesn't have any money. She doesn't have a bank account. So she kind of stuck.
00:12:46
Speaker
But instead of wilting and having a panic attack, like most people I feel like would be in her position, she dusted off her petticoats. She set her jaw and she started walking south.
00:12:57
Speaker
And she walked and she walked through forests, through rains, until she reached a muddy village that you may have heard of, Seattle. She walked? Now, some reports say that she was able to catch like a ferry ride from, you know, Port Townsend over to Seattle area.
00:13:18
Speaker
But I prefer to think that she walked the entire way. Because she just seems like a badass. She seems like she would do that. So when she arrived in Seattle, there wasn't really anything there to look at.
00:13:30
Speaker
At this time, it's just a couple of wooden shacks, some stumps, a sawmill, and a ton of loud men trying to make really fast money before they got killed by whiskey, the Native Americans, or boredom.
00:13:45
Speaker
But luck or maybe fate was waiting for Mary in this town. It just so happens when she arrived, there was another sea captain named Leonard Felker. He had just hauled a prefabricated house.
00:13:59
Speaker
So essentially like a modular home across the ocean on a ship on his ship, actually the Franklin Adams. And he decided to set this prefabricated house and at the corner of Jackson Street and First Avenue.
00:14:15
Speaker
What is Jackson Street and First Avenue today? Okay. And in a brainstorm of brilliance, for lack of a better word, he decided to call it the Felker House because that's super original.
00:14:28
Speaker
There's so much. Okay. If you had a hotel, what would you name it? Like just off the cuff. Paradise Inn. I think I would call it like peacock pillows or something just outrageous.
00:14:39
Speaker
Like,
00:14:44
Speaker
i don't know, like something, don't know, something other than the Felker house. I feel like that sounds so, I don't know, like I have to have a bow tie to be able to pass a threshold. i don't know. I mean, key probably did.
00:14:58
Speaker
oh yeah. Well, we'll see. We'll see about that. So this actually became the Felker house became Seattle's very first hotel. And because of Captain Leonard's work, he had to be, like, out on a ship the majority of the time. So he needed to find a manager for the this hotel.
00:15:19
Speaker
And after looking for a while, he came across our girl, Mary Ann. yeah. And under her watch, the Felker house became the busiest, the rowdiest and the cleanest place in the settlement.
00:15:35
Speaker
The sheets were crisp, the food was solid, but the prices she charged a pretty penny. I mean, it's the only establishment there. It's only boarding house.
00:15:45
Speaker
And she took advantage of that. And if you didn't pay your bill, You would get a Marianne that no one wanted to see. She would cuss you out in not one, not two, but six different languages.
00:16:00
Speaker
So she'd be cursing you on English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and even a little German. Like she would let you have it. And this is how she got her first nickname of Mother Damnedable.
00:16:14
Speaker
oh Some said she got this because her language. Others said it was their her temper. But either way, you know, it's it's stuck. And Mother Damnedable is actually not like ah an invention of the Seattleites that saw this woman as something crazy. No, it's actually an old English term used for witches, brothel keepers or women who didn't know their place.
00:16:39
Speaker
Interesting. So essentially I would consider myself a mother damnable as well, but, or any woman with an opinion would actually be called this. But, so Marianne, she obviously fit all of these kind categories and she kind of just accepted the name and eventually started calling herself mother damnable, okay which is crazy that you just, I mean, go, go her. She's embracing it.
00:17:01
Speaker
I'm all for it. Yep, she's embracing it. So she ran her hotel like a general. she The sheets were clean. The food was was above par.
00:17:12
Speaker
And she got her money. And actually, when the territorial government came and needed rooms, they were like, hey, can you give us a room? Like the average price I think back then was maybe like $1.
00:17:24
Speaker
five dollars a day no she drove a hard bargain she charged them 25 a day for their say which is 750 in today's money a day oh and the jurors that were needed for while the government stayed there and this is over like a month they're going to be staying there for a month she charged them an extra ten dollars a day So she wasn't messing around. She's like, I'm getting my money and you're not gonna back out. yeah And the terriial to the territorial government, she was so fierce that they just said, you know what? We'll pay whatever you want. Just leave us alone.
00:18:02
Speaker
So one of the prosecutors that was here with the territorial government who was like doing some of the proceedings of prisoners and all this other kind of stuff, he actually asked Mary or Mother Damnedable for a receipt of his stay because the cost was so high. He had to like show a receipt to his superiors to say, hey, these this is the reason why my expenses were so much.
00:18:22
Speaker
Instead of filling out a receipt and saying, sure, here you go. She grabbed a piece of firewood from her stove that was still on fire. And threw it at his face.
00:18:34
Speaker
Okay. And then started screaming, you want a receipt? There's your receipt. So threw a burning log at his face. He dodges it. And he just goes, you know what? I don't need it. And just left the premises.
00:18:47
Speaker
Which is wild. I would say a minor overreaction. but Minor overreaction. I mean, she got away with it though. So go, go. Yeah. I mean, Tim, she, yeah, she's a fierce little
Entrepreneurial Spirit and Brothel Management
00:19:01
Speaker
lady. And, it was actually known around town from that day forward. no one ever asked her for any type of receipt or any type of like change back that no one asked her.
00:19:13
Speaker
No one asked her again. And as I mentioned earlier, this was a logging town. So Seattle had plenty of lumber, very few women. And Marianne, ever the entrepreneur, allegedly turned part of her hotel into, shall we say, negotiated affection parlor.
00:19:34
Speaker
oh Oh. Which made the Felker House even more of a hot commodity. And girls started flocking to the upstairs room. And men started, you know, purchasing some affections.
00:19:46
Speaker
And she became even richer and made the hotel even more of a hot commodity in the north, and in Seattle. And so she wasn't just Seattle's first hotelier. No, she was actually the first madam of Seattle.
00:20:02
Speaker
And so now it's 1856.
Confrontation with the Navy
00:20:05
Speaker
We're moving forward just a little bit. Seattle is still a pretty small, still muddy, but it is now under the protection of the U.S. Navy and particularly the ship, the Decatur.
00:20:18
Speaker
This is because there were settlers violently clashing with the local native tribe, and the Navy was there to try and, like, keep the peace or, you know,
00:20:28
Speaker
All of the horrible stuff that happened with like Chief Seattle and everything like that. So part of the peacekeeping that the Decatur was doing was building a new road through town.
00:20:40
Speaker
Unfortunately for the sailors, this new road would go right in front of the Felker House. Well... Miss Mary, she liked her space.
00:20:52
Speaker
She liked her privacy. She also wanted to keep some of what the Felker House was doing a secret. And so anytime the sailors would come by with their shovels, Mother Damnedable would come charging out like a psychopath with her apron full of rocks,
00:21:11
Speaker
three dogs behind her. She would tell the dogs to attack, attack the sailors and then start pelting them with rocks as she's screaming at them in like all these different languages telling them like, it was so bad that multiple people had in their notes.
00:21:27
Speaker
This woman is crazy. The vocabulary she's used. I've never heard before my life. In fact, Lieutenant Thomas Phelps of the Decatur later wrote that she was a, quote, demon in petticoats and a terror to our men whose tongue was more feared than the entire Indian army.
00:21:47
Speaker
Oh, my God. Yes. Hence when demon in petticoats was born. That is her, like that's when her new nickname started to come into effect that she was just a demon in petticoats and that's how they would address her.
00:22:00
Speaker
And also according to Phelps, the moment our men appeared, this, I don't know this word, this turgament came tearing from her house, hurling stones and curses alike.
00:22:11
Speaker
Officers and men fled before her as if old Satan himself were after them. Oh my God. Isn't that wild? And like at this time to be in the U S Navy, you had to be pretty tough.
00:22:26
Speaker
Yeah. Like you're on a ship with other men without running water for very, very long periods of time. You don't have technology. You don't have a way to escape. Like you're also having to do stuff like scrub the deck for real. And like,
00:22:40
Speaker
like it's you're essentially a legal pirate. Yeah. Like you're not messing around. And if you're building a road with shovels, you have to have some type of, I don't know, backbone.
00:22:52
Speaker
And I'm guessing also this is a time when women aren't super respected. Like you're supposed to be seen, not heard type of a situation. Yeah. So if she's so crazy that they're turning and running from her, I can only imagine how violent she was.
00:23:07
Speaker
Oh yeah. Like I, secretly love her. So also these U S Navy officers, they're armed. They have guns. What? And they're just like, she's scared. She's scaring them off.
00:23:21
Speaker
Damn. Okay. Mary, seriously. I know. Like, seriously, that's power. and That is what power is. So after several failed attempts to finish their road, the ship's quartermaster, a man named Sam silk decided to confront her because he heard about this woman. She's like,
00:23:40
Speaker
scaring people off. And he's like, you guys are armed men. What are you doing? just build the road. we're like, we can't, this lady's crazy. And so he tries to go and reason with her.
00:23:51
Speaker
And so he goes to the hotel, he knocks on the door and he starts by saying, madam, like what's going on here? She spits in his face. starts calling him all these crazy words, again grabs a chunk of firewoods, tries to start beating him with it, and then anyway he goes, wait, wait, you damned Herodon, I know you.
00:24:13
Speaker
And she kind of stops, and she's like, what? And he's like, many times I've seen you howling thunder around Fells Point, Baltimore. Now let me tell you a little bit about Fells Point, Baltimore.
00:24:26
Speaker
This is the reddest of red light districts. In Baltimore. and So what Mr. Silk is suggesting is that mother damnable, nay demon in petticoats, had a pre-Seattle career path as, you know, a brothel participant.
00:24:46
Speaker
And as soon as he said that, and as soon as she realized he recognized her, it hit a nerve.
Legend of Mary Ann Conklin's Death
00:24:53
Speaker
And she drops everything. goes pale and just goes back inside and is never seen by the sailors of decatur again oh my god so now the demon in petticoats the terror of jackson street becomes ill in 1872 and unfortunately she has a pretty slow and painful death but eventually she dies in 1873 and she's buried in seattle's first cemetery right where denny park stands today wow
00:25:23
Speaker
Did you know Denny Park was the first seat cemetery in Seattle? I did not, no Yes. Well, Denny Park sounds lovely. Trees, benches, grass. Today it is gorgeous. it's It's a great park to go to.
00:25:35
Speaker
But back then it was actually a swamp. And when they buried people in the swamp, their coffins floated back up to the top. And you would often walk through the cemetery and be able to see like whole feet sticking out of old graves or like heads and hands and all this other craziness.
00:25:54
Speaker
So the city decided to relocate the cemetery to higher ground. And so the undertaker, Oliver Shorey, was in charge of this movement.
00:26:05
Speaker
And usually it takes about two people to move coffins out of these grave sites. Well, when they got to Mother Damnable, Mary's coffin, something strange happened. It was abnormally heavy.
00:26:18
Speaker
Like I'm talking it took six men straining to lift it out. What? They thought at first it was like just full of water or whatever. Yeah. But when they pried the lid off, they found a perfectly white figure inside.
00:26:34
Speaker
Perfectly preserved. What? Yeah, her body, they said, had turned to stone. In fact, the Seattle Post-Intelliger reported in 1884, she was white as marble and as hard as stone.
00:26:50
Speaker
Which is wild. So science offers an explanation for this. It's a process called gray wax. It's apparently when a body decomposes in wet, airless soil, aka a swamp, it turns fatty tissue into like a waxy soap substance.
00:27:05
Speaker
But I still don't understand how that would make it so heavy and hard like stone. My mind immediately goes to some like weird like so switcheroo.
00:27:17
Speaker
Like... I don't know. Mine goes to she was a witch. She was a witch. It was witchcraft. that's so That's the only acceptable answer, Anna. it so She was a witch. I feel like this absolutely exemplifies the ah differences between the two of us.
00:27:33
Speaker
ah The only explanation, witch or alien.
00:27:38
Speaker
So they already called her, and again, they already called her mother damnable. So of course she's a witch, and of course her body would refuse to rot. Also, I feel like she was so stubborn and so cantankerous that of course she would turn to stone.
00:27:52
Speaker
She's not just going to fade off into dust. Hell no. She's going to stay there as a stone statue. And from that day on, the story stuck. Marianne Conklin was too tough for life and too stubborn for death.
00:28:06
Speaker
And when Seattle burned in 1889, the Felker House was destroyed. All that remained was a legend and her grave marker, which you can still find today at the Lakeview Cemetery.
00:28:17
Speaker
Ooh. However, there's a twist.
Haunting Legacy in Seattle
00:28:20
Speaker
What? The headstone lists the wrong death year. lists 1887 instead
00:28:29
Speaker
So it could be coincidence or maybe she just wouldn't stay buried long enough to get the paperwork right.
00:28:40
Speaker
Other people, there is some local legends about her, though. Some people say that her body was actually never moved because it was too heavy and it still lays beneath Denny Park under the grass in the picnic table area.
00:28:54
Speaker
Okay. Could be a thing. Other claims, she's still part of the city itself. Her spirit is woven into the stones. Her voice rides on the wind of Elliott Bay. So if you're ever on Jackson Street or near where the Felker House was, apparently you can hear an old woman screaming at you in many different languages.
00:29:13
Speaker
haven't had that happen myself, but I'm interested. I've had other people scream at me on Jackson and first, but I don't know if it's an old thing. Yeah. Maybe it's a possession of Mother Danville. You never know.
Mary Ann's Controversial Legacy
00:29:27
Speaker
So just to reflect on on Mary's life, she was, you know, when we talk about Seattle's founding, we usually hear about, you know, the Denny party, sawmills, men who built things.
00:29:38
Speaker
But really, the city was shaped by a woman who just refused to be quiet. Mother Danville Conklin was one of those women. She got thrown off a ship, literally ghosted by her husband, and instead of quitting, she built an empire out of mud, terrified sailors, and became a legend.
00:29:56
Speaker
She wasn't polite, she wasn't proper, but she wasn't unforgettable.
00:30:02
Speaker
Yeah, that's my story for you. That was so good. Thank you. Now I'm so intrigued. So this is one of those things where I love that I have like the modern day context of these spots. Yes. And I'm, I like literally have a map while you're talking about this. Like, Oh yeah. I know exactly where like first to Jackson is. And like Alaskan way is where imagining they're digging.
00:30:27
Speaker
Yeah. And like, I know it burned down, but I still, I still want to go back and like, kind of like, just like be in the same area. Cause that's so cool. Yeah. Especially like in the underground ground tours. I don't think it goes that far down, but have you done the underground tour? I have.
00:30:42
Speaker
worth it have not i've been it's on my bucket list i've been wanting to do it for years i i don't know if they still do this since covid but they used to do like a haunted ah haunted underground tour where you could go like at night really want do that oh that'd be fun i don't I'd probably pee my pants though.
00:31:02
Speaker
I say, I feel like I would, I want to do the, the daytime version first. It is dark. No matter when you go, I will say that because you're obviously underground, but there's these cool skylights.
00:31:13
Speaker
So, you know, when you walk around Seattle, they have those like patches of little lavender glass in the, in the sidewalks. Like it looks like a skylight, but it's just on the ground. Yeah.
00:31:25
Speaker
That actually goes down to the underground. Oh, no way. Yeah. I'm not sure if it's all of them, but yeah, you can see it. You can look up when you're in the Seattle Underground Tour. You can look up and you can see people walking over it.
00:31:39
Speaker
That's crazy. It's kind of creepy. So I used to go to this gym that was downtown. Yeah. And it was in the basement of this big office building. Mm-hmm. And it low-key felt like what I kind of imagined the underground tour is like. Because, I mean, it was furnished. There was, a bathroom down there. But there was, like, some weird doors.
00:31:57
Speaker
And one, was right by a squat rack. was always really funny because you would, hear things. But you opened it, it was, kind of, almost underneath the gutter in a way.
00:32:07
Speaker
Oh, weird. it wasn't, the sewer system. There was, drainage that came down in there. It was a breeding ground for God knows what. But it was some weird underground infrastructure that I imagine had some use at some point. current prohibition or something cool?
00:32:21
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, I used to scare the hell out of me because I'd be ah be there alone sometimes and I'd hear things and I'd be like, nope, nope, okay, I'm out. I'm gonna i'm actually going to go home.
00:32:34
Speaker
I'll finish this workout later. It's not that important. That's cool. I love stuff like that. In my mind, I feel like I would love ghost hunting and ESP and all that. don't even know if it's ESP, but – I would love to do it. But then I really think about it and I'm like, man, I would go in there. I would hear a rat scuttle by and i'd be like, nope, I'm out. ah Yep. I'm going home.
00:32:57
Speaker
Yes. Same. I love it. Yeah. But I've never heard about Marianne Conklin. I accidentally stumbled upon her and the demon in petticoats. I mean, what a nickname to get to achieve in one's life.
00:33:10
Speaker
Think of how like, absurdly amazing she must have been like to get all these nicknames like she's just scaring the hell out of every single man she meets
Speculation on Mary Ann's Early Life
00:33:20
Speaker
everything and so yeah back in a day where like woman couldn't own anything she's kicking ass she's like demanding $25 day like yeah remarkable remarkable remarkable Yeah.
00:33:33
Speaker
The part that I find crazy too is that like someone recognized her from Baltimore, but then like that was it. She was just – she was out. Like I'm so curious what happened and what she was like what was going through her mind. Was she afraid of something? someone else recognizing her or something following her?
00:33:49
Speaker
Yeah. i don't It had to be something though for her to just like kind of just curl up, especially because she's so feisty. Like she was about to hit him with Exactly. Yeah, like it had to be something like that really scared the hell out of her to make her just like completely change.
00:34:06
Speaker
essentially everything about it, right? Yeah. I wonder if it's like a flashlight flashback to another time. I don't know, but I felt that kind of made me a little sad, but I'm also glad she didn't end up getting arrested or something because hitting quartermaster with a log, I feel like won't bode well for you in the long run.
00:34:25
Speaker
That's fair. Yeah. That's it for today's dive into the dark corners of the Pacific Northwest. If you love the stories or shivered a little, be sure to subscribe and follow so you don't miss what's lurking beneath the evergreens next time.
00:34:39
Speaker
Thanks for joining us on Beneath the Evergreens. We appreciate you diving into the mysteries with us. Until next time, keep your eyes open. And your door is locked.