Loremen Podcast - San Francisco Minisode

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

A Loreman Abroad! James sends back a podcast from America, as The Proclaimers never sang. Naturally, the Loremaster has tracked down a couple of local ghosts: a vengeful wife and a cruel pirate captain from the good old Californi of A.

Hello, lawfolk. This is Alistair Beckett-King, one half of the lawmen, and I don't know what to tell you, really. I've got a mysterious package in front of me, and it contains a cassette tape. I'll just pop it out of the player. Let's see what's on there. Oh, hello. This is a little sort of audio postcard from America, because that's where I am. First of all, I just wanted to say thank you very much to everyone's kind messages. They really mean a lot to me. Thank you very, very much. And so to business. So I'm here in America, in California specifically, and I've been doing a little wandering around, taking a few field reports. i was in a place called muir woods

the other day which is named after a chap called john muir who well let's just have a quick look at his wikipedia page so he's he's did a lot of stuff in setting up national parks and stuff. He had some interesting beliefs. Pretty racist, basically. These woods, Muir Woods, there's a couple of really good little stories about them. There's a couple of ghost stories. One of them is the Witch of the Woods. There's a woman called Katie Smith

who lived in Muir Woods with her husband, who was a logger, and he apparently tried to set up a logging business and it didn't do very well and she was really annoyed at his poor investment decisions so she waited until a full moon and then did a ritual and murdered him with a hook. I'm not sure what the necessity of the ritual was. To this day you can still see a ghost carrying this hook around the forest on the nights of full moons and perhaps she's just there looking out for her next victim who's made a bad financial decision on the nights of full moons you can hear her

right clicking and save asing on people's NFTs. There is another ghost story in a place called Pirate's Cove. It's the ghost of a pirate, a guy called Hippolyte Bouchard or Hippolyto Bouchard, who was a French born Argentinian, basically pirate. He was a privateer, so he didn't have a peg leg and an eye patch. He had dangly things on his shoulders. So this Hippolyte Bouchard was quite the character. He was born 15th of January 1780 and died the 4th of January 1837. You do the maths. january 1837 you do the maths just under 57 years old he was in fact murdered by his servant on the 4th of january which is 11 days before his birthday presumably that servant had forgotten to

buy him a present and it was just the ultimate way of getting out of that awkwardness. We've all thought of doing it. So he was born in Saint-Tropez, which is French for without Tropez. He started off as a sailor in the merchant fleet, served in the French Navy, campaigned in Egypt, but he became disillusioned with the direction of the French Revolution. So he went to Argentina and joined in their revolution and became part of the national Argentine fleet. Played a major role in defending the city of Buenos Aires, which is Spanish for Good Aries. And he took part in the Battle of San Lorenzo, which I don't need to tell you what that's French for, without Lorenzo. Captured a Spanish flag, granted Argentine citizenship,

married someone called Norberto Melo. Apparently he only spent 10 months of his life with her because, boom, straight away he started a new naval campaign under the command of William Brown. campaign under the command of William Brown. Bouchard got up to all sorts of fun. Goonies type piracy. Blockading this, sinking that. He wasn't the nicest captain. If there were any incidents with his crew, they were solved with violence. He had a duel with one of his sergeants. When the officers of one of the boats under his command told Bouchard that their ship was in danger of foundering, Bouchard ordered them to carry on. As a result, they mutinied and headed to the Galapagos Islands. So I'm sort of seeing a picture of why his servant finally murdered him. I don't want to victim blame, but he did seem quite difficult. His ghost is supposed

to walk in Pirate's Cve because he's supposed to have buried some treasure there but forgotten where he buried it and now his ghost is meant to wander around looking for treasure much like your eye would look for our keys or phone and there's another pirate ghost down there as well that's meant to be his first mate which was a position it wasn't like his friend from primary school or something and this first mate has got a crazed look in his eyes and a noose around his neck and he just sort of goes around freaking people out so that's a little couple of little fun little stories from america we'll be back to normal next week i reckon and i'll be putting out a couple of field reports from muir Woods and Yosemite Park

which I visited today which was nice but raining so all of those wonderful views that you can see we did not see because it was too cloudy there were some really nice things to see that were a lot closer up didn Didn't mention me. Once. I don't know if you noticed that. Not once. Outrageous.