The Why Files: Operation Podcast - The Poltergeist Who Follows You Home

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

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Scotland was Presbyterian. No bishops, no king's influence, nobody outside the congregation with the say and how a Scott prayed. Charles wanted it to look like the Church of England, so he sent a new prayer book and ordered the country to use it. The Scott saw this as an attack on their religious independence. The next winter, a group of Presbyterians wrote the National Covenant. In the Covenant, they swore loyalty to the king.

but refused his authority over their faith. Copies went to every town in the country, but it was signed at Greyfriars Kirkyard. The signers were called Covenanters, and their covenants started 50 years of war. Charles I lost his head in 1649, but his son continued the fight. Ministers were thrown out of their churches,

so congregations posted lookouts and met in open fields. The government called the meetings treason. Violence broke out between the government and the Coventors and escalated for years. The war finally ended in June of 1679 at a bridge over the River Clyde. Government troops broke the Coviner Army in about an hour. 1,200 men surrendered and were marched to Edinburgh for a prosecution. And the man in charge of that prosecution was the Lord Advocate Sir George McKenzie.

There were trials, public hangings, then severed heads mounted on the city gates. Sir George made it clear, the cost of treason is your head. And those men were the lucky ones. The rest were held in pens in a field behind the Old Town Wall. And Burstall calls that field the Covenanter's Prison. The prisoners had no roofs to protect them from the cold Scottish rain. No fires were allowed. They got four ounces of bread a day.

That's it. The suffering and starvation were intentional. Any prisoner willing to sign a loyalty oath could walk out. Most didn't sign it. So they stayed in the pens and endured the cold and hunger and fever. By November, only 257 were left. and they were sent to the American colonies to work as slaves on the plantations.

But their ships never made it. Ten days out, the ship hit some rocks and started to sink. The crew made it to shore, but the prisoners were trapped in the ship's hold. The captain got paid for prisoners delivered were prisoners who died on the ship. Not for prisoners who escaped. So he had the hatches nailed shut.

One crewman went back to the wreck with an axe and got some men out, but most went down with the ship. For days, bodies were washing up all along the coast. That's when Sir George got his nickname, Bloody McKenzie. He died in 1691 and was buried just a short walk from the field where his prisoners starved. His tomb was called the Black Mausoleum. Bloody McKenzie was dead, but his reputation wasn't. Robert Lewis Stevenson even wrote about him. When a man's soul is certainly in hell, his body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb, however costly. Some time or other,

the door must open and the reprobate come forth in the abhorred garments of the grave. The world cursed Sir George McKenzie and in all that time the Black Museum was quiet. But after 300 years Bloody Mackenzie started fighting back. Bloody Mackenzie started his campaign of revenge with a woman who stopped to look at his tomb. She got within a few feet of the door and was hit with a blast of cold air hard enough to knock her on the ground. She was the first. Then it started happening to everybody. Visitors came out of that corner of the graveyard

with scratches down their arms and across their backs, three or four parallel lines, under clothes that were torn. Bruises in the shape of fingertips appeared while witnesses watched. Some people just collapsed. One woman was found outside the mausoleum with bruises around her throat.

She didn't remember going in. There were so many reports that Emveri City Council locked the gates and shut the whole place down. Jan Andrew Henderson lived near the cemetery and had an idea. He wanted to start a tour company and document everything. Names, dates, injuries, photographs. He convinced the council to give them access.

Now cameras worked fine until they got near Bloody McKenzie's tomb. Then they didn't work at all. People felt their hair being pulled from behind, but nobody was there. Dead animals were scattered all around the tomb every morning with no marks on them. Tour guides had to warn people in advance about the cold spots. Because if a cold spot appears, it's because Bloody McKenzie is watching you. One visitor got back to his hotel and felt like his back was burning. Even though he wore a shirt and heavy coat, he was covered in red welts.

Then a few of them started bleeding. By the end of 1999, the reports were in the hundreds. Colin Grant was a minister and had seen enough. In November, he walked into the Covenant of his prison with a Bible across in the camp. In front of the local press, he started to perform a ceremony to cast out the dark spirits. He never finished. About halfway through the ceremony, he collapsed. While his son carried him out, Grant said, whatever was in that graveyard was going to kill him.

Two months later, his heart stopped. His last words were about gray friars. He said there's no good news there, only bad. And during Grant's ceremony, a press photographer caught a dark shape in the church window behind him. the church was locked and empty, supposedly. Anyone who got close to McKenzie's tomb was a target. But if Bloody McKenzie wants you, it doesn't wait for you to come to him.

He comes to you. Bloody McKenzie came for Jan and Drew Henderson first. For four years, Henderson wrote down every McKenzie attack. He published a book about the graveyard. The attacks came in faster than he could even file them. In October 2003, Henderson's house burned down. Everything he owned was destroyed in. the fire. Five years of letters, photographs, and eyewitness statements. Investigators went through

the ruins and couldn't say what started it. Not one of the surrounding buildings was even touched. Not yet, anyway. Bloody McKenzie did not want to be the subject of a book or a tour or an investigation. Henderson got the message and moved to Australia. Someone else tried to exercise the tomb. That didn't work either. And the guides have recordings of knocking coming from inside the tomb and from the ground under it. It's been more than 25 years since the floor gave way. Hundreds of attacks are on file. And more than 140 people just passed out in that field. Scratches and sets of three and four.

Burns in the shape of a handprint. Some people have got broken fingers. And he doesn't stay in the graveyard. People come back from the tour and light bulbs explode in their houses. Appliances turn themselves on and off, and they feel a presence that they can't see. Henderson's wasn't the only house near the cemetery that burned down. There are four more.

So far. Henderson spent years trying not to believe any of it, and this is where he landed. Let me put it this way. If the Mackenzie Poltergeist isn't a genuine supernatural entity, then I don't think there's any such thing. For 300 years, a stone door held Bloody Mackenzie in that graveyard with the men he killed. Then someone fell through the floor and released him. an iron plate over the whole now. There are gates, bars, and locks all around the tomb.

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Gather out. This happened at Hampton Court Palace outside London. A security guard on the night shifts got a call. A pair of fire doors in the exhibition wing were open. He shut them, went back to the office to check the camera. cameras. He watched it tape three times, then wrote up a report. Both doors flew open on their own, nobody in the hall, nobody in the entire wing. That was the first night. On the second night, the doors opened again, but this time the cameras saw him get it. Hampton Court was Henry the

Ace's palace. In the autumn of 1541, he brought his fifth wife home. Her name was Catherine Howard, and she was a teenager. The king was 50. He was sick. He was enormous, and he had six years left to live, but he was in love with her. One morning he went to the chapel and heard Mass, and he thanked God out loud for the good life he led with his new wife. A few days later, the archbishop came to that same chapel in the middle of mass, walked up to the king and slipped a folded paper in his hand. The note said the queen had a lover before she was a queen. A man from the house she grew up in. They shared a bed for two years. Then she came to court and married the king. And then she hired that man as her secretary. He had a man. He had a secretary. He had a

a room in the palace. The king read it and said it was forged. So they brought him the proof. He broke down in front of his own counsel and cried. Then it got worse. The king sent people to question her household and they found a second man. This one was one of the king's own gentleman, the men who dressed him and slept outside his door.

All that summer, on their tour, she met him at night with the king a few rooms away. The king had her locked in her room. She escaped. She got past the guards and ran down the, the long gallery toward the chapel screaming for her husband. The king was in his pew above the chapel, hearing mass again. She made it as far as the door.

The guards grabbed her and carried her back to her room with her still screaming his name. People heard it all over the palace. The king heard it. He stayed on his knees and finished the mass. The next morning, he went to another palace, and he never laid eyes on Catherine again. The archbishop went to her room that afternoon. She was beyond distraught. He was afraid she'd lose her mind or even die.

He told her the king might still show mercy, and she just went into another rage. Soon after, the archbishop called her whole household into one room and told them what she'd done, and dismissed every one of them on the spot. They shut her up in a house downriver for three months. Then they took her to the tower. Both of those men were already dead, and on the way, she passed under their heads, still up on spikes. A few days later, they cut her head off. She was 18.

They buried her in the chapel there in an unmarked grave next to Anne Boleyn. Ambelin was another one of King's wives who you've probably heard of. She was also Catherine's cousin. The gallery Catherine ran is called The Haunted Gallery now. A woman in White walks toward the chapel door.

She reaches the door and turns back. Her hair is down. Her clothes are torn open and her face is pure despair. And she screamed the whole way back until she goes through the door at the far end of the hall. And she's still in there.

A few years before the doors started opening, a team of scientists put thermal cameras in the haunted gallery and sent hundreds of visitors through it one at a time and asked them to write down what they felt. About half of them felt the temperature drop right out from under them or felt someone standing behind them when nobody was. A few saw a woman in a Tudor dress. And the cameras found two spots in that gallery

that went cold over and over with nobody near them. That's the door she never got through. And more than 400 years later in that same palace, those doors started to open. I'd say I'm pretty on top of my finances. I check my accounts, I budget, I know where my money's going, but subscriptions are a different story. Those things just pile up quietly in the background. Before you know it, you're paying for three streaming services you forgot you signed up for,

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That's RocketMoney.com slash the W-Files. RocketMoney.com slash the Y files. Rocketmoney.com slash the Y files. On night two, the alarm went off on those same doors. The guard walked out to shut them the way he had the night before. But when he got there, the doors were already closed. He stood in the hall for a minute. And he went back to the office to run the tape.

He expected to see nothing just like the night before. Picture yourself in that chair. It's a middle of the night in a 500-year-old palace. There's a row of monitors in front of you. And the only thing moving on any of them is you. You've done this a thousand time. You know what an empty hall looks like on tape. On screen, the doors were closed.

Then they flew open again, hard, the same as the night before, but nothing in the doorway. Then something stepped into it. It was the shape of a man. He came out of the dark on the far side of the doors, in a long robe that went all the way to the floor. One arm was out in front of him, his hand closed on the door handle, and he pulled the door shut. Whatever threw them open, this thing was. The thing walked out after and closed them like it was tidying up. The guard leaned into the screen.

The picture around the figure was blurred, but the figure wasn't. You can see the hand and the fingers around the handle. The face above it was white, dead white, whiter than anything else in the frame. And it didn't look like a face. I was shocked when the CCTV footage showed an eerie figure in period dress in the doorway. It was incredibly spooky because the face just, well, it didn't look human. His first thought was that somebody was playing a joke, so he called his colleagues and ran the tape. They stood behind his chair and watched the doors fly open and the thing in the robe come out and close him.

And nobody laughed. They watched it again and again. Then they ran the first night's tape again right next to the second. Same doors, same swing, same force. But only one of them had somebody coming to shut them. The palace has staff who walked the rooms in Tudor dress for the visitors. The guards went to them first. Nobody had Hampton court owned a robe like that. Then somebody checked the visitor's book.

A woman who came through that wing wrote that she saw a ghost, right there in the same part of the palace as the door. That was night too, but the ghost wasn't finished. The third night and the doors flew open again. He ran the tape, and this time he knew what to look for. But there was no robe, no hand, no face. The doors opened on their own, and nothing came to close them. The hallway was empty.

That was worse than the face, because the face was at least something. Then it stopped. No fourth night, no fifth. Three nights, one door, and a few seconds of tape with a man on it. The palace kept that tape to itself for two months. Then a week before Christmas, they released a single frame of it to the press. And the press asked the obvious question. Was this a joke? Look, we're baffled, too.

It's not a joke. We haven't manufactured it. We genuinely don't know who it is or what it is. The picture went everywhere. Newspapers and television in India, Australia, in Peru. Somebody in the press looked at the white face and started calling it Skeletor. And the name stuck. The palace didn't think it was funny.

They asked the public for help. Anyone who was in that wing? Anyone who owned that robe or had a story like it. Anyone who could tell them what stood in that doorway? That was more than 20 years ago. And the security staff who were there are still baffled by it. The door is still there. Every night a guard walks out to that wing.

checks it and makes sure it's locked. If it was a prank, nobody's ever taken credit. The palace puts it this way. No living soul has ever come forward. If they ruled out the living, it leaves only one other option. Gather round. This happened in the village of Belmez in the south of Spain. Maria was standing at the stove in her kitchen making lunch.

She looked down at the floor between her feet, and the floor looked back. A face in the concrete. Eyes, nose, and a mouth open like a man in pain. She called a mason. He scraped off the face and plastered over it. The face came back through the plaster. Maria's husband took a pickaxe to the floor. He broke it up. He poured new concrete.

The face came up through the new concrete. Same spot. Same face contorted in pain. Maria and her husband didn't know what to do, but they knew they needed help when his second face appeared. The city wouldn't let them break the floor again without proof. So the mayor came to the house to see for himself. himself. He watched the first face come back twice, and he wanted the second one left where it was so people could see it. He asked for witnesses, and he got them. The entire village came first,

then villages around it, then the whole province, until there was a line down the street. People waited from morning to night, while a man at the door sold photographs to the floor for ten besadas each. The town cut the first face out of the floor in a slab and hung it on the kitchen wall behind glass. The floor responded. New faces came up where the old one was. A woman, a child, a face with an arm next to it, and a hand reaching for something. Then more, until you couldn't cross the kitchen without stepping on somebody. And they changed. A mouth that was shut one week was open the next. A face faded out of one corner and came up in another. So the village stopped watching and started digging. Men with picks and shovels took the whole floor out. They turned Maria's kitchen into a pit

almost 10 feet deep. They slowed down the digging when they found the first human bone, then another, then more and more skeletons. They weren't sure how many bodies were buried here, but what upset them most was all the skulls were missing. The remains were buried near a church and blessed by a priest. The men filled the hole, poured a new floor and went back home. Everybody was relieved it was over. The dead war resting in peace, and Maria's house went quiet. Then the faces came back.

The mayor came back too. He bought a priest to local police and the national police. In front of all of them, he took a pickaxe to one of the faces. He ground it into powder. He had fresh concrete poured over the spot. Then he locked the kitchen door and everyone left. In the morning, there was a face in the new concrete. The mayor wrote to the governor.

He had photos and more witness statements than he can count, including police reports. They wasn't sure the governor would take the letter seriously, but he did. And in a few days, a team of scientists were in that kitchen. The governor sent national police and scientists. They brought cases of gear, tools, and instruments, and stayed eight days. They photographed the floor, measured it, took samples, and sent them to a lab in Madrid. On the last day, Maria asked the scientists what they thought was happening. The scientists and the police all agreed.

We have no idea. A week later, a letter came for the mayor, not from the governor, from higher up. It said, one more word about the faces in public, and you lose your office. Then the national newspaper that put the faces on its front page in January announced that the mystery was over. It was a hoax. Somebody painted the faces, and the paper explained how. But the faces didn't. read the paper. They kept coming. A parapsychologist from Madrid, a man who spent his life in

rooms just like this one, started sleeping in the kitchen. He sat up nights with a tape recorder running on the floor. Most nights nothing. Then one morning he played a tape back and there was a voice on it, low and close to the microphone. In April, he was in the kitchen with two reporters when the concrete between them started to darken. The three of them watched a face come up out of the floor in about 10 minutes, the way a photograph comes up in a darkroom tray. Gray on gray at first, then darker, until there were eyes in it. The parapsychologist called in Hans Bender from Germany. Bender was familiar with every haunted house in Europe. Bender looked at the floor and gave it a name,

teleplasty, a picture pressed into solid matter by somebody's mind. He saw it once before in Chicago. Tetsirius could put a picture on a roll of film by staring at the camera, but he never saw it happen in concrete. Then they sealed the kitchen. They laid a clear plastic sheet over the whole floor and glued the edges to the walls so nothing could touch it. Not a hand, not a brush, not a drop of water. And they locked the door.

A few hours later, two people from the village looked through the window. Under the plastic, on the bare concrete, there was a new face, half made, still forming. They ran for the photographer, but by the time he got there with his camera, the face was gone. The seals on the wall were unbroken.

The next spring, a professor, brought in more than 100 students from Madrid. They packed the kitchen in shifts. 30 of them watched three faces come up out of the floor while they were standing there. By the time the bus left, all three faces were gone. The professor from Germany said there was no doubt where the faces came from.

They came from Maria. She was making them, but she didn't know it. She lived in that kitchen with the faces for 33 more years, and the entire time, faces faded, came back, and changed. Eventually, had been to be there. theory was maybe proved right or wrong, because after Maria passed away, the faces kept coming. But this time, people recognized them. In February of 2004, Maria died in a hospital in the city.

She was an old woman by then. The faces on her kitchen floor were fading. A few blocks away, Maria's nieces live in the house where Maria was born. A few months after the funeral, a face came up on the wall of a bedroom in that house, than another in the basement, then more, men, women, and a child. The nieces stood in front of them the way the whole village once stood in Maria's kitchen.

They knew the faces. Everybody and the family knew them. One of the nieces saw her grandmother. Another face was her aunt, her aunt, Maria. Years later, a city official came to the house and sealed the room. When she broke the seal in front of witnesses, there were new faces inside.

That summer, she came back and sealed another room and it happened again. The town built a museum for the faces, and once a year they opened both houses to the public. People still come to Belmas from all over the world, and the faces are still coming. The town cut the first face out in Maria's kitchen floor in 1971 and hung up behind glass, and it's still there. Maria always said the faces would go with her, and they did. They went to the house where she was born, and that's where they stayed.

People say there are more every year, and they're moving up through the house, floor by floor, making sure that the world never forgets their face. Thank you so much for hanging out today. My name is A.J., this is The Wi-Files, and that was a campfire story. No debunking, no analysis, just a creepy story to scare you and the kids. And that one is true and unsolved. Now, if you had fun, I'd appreciate it if you can like, subscribe, comment, and share. That stuff really helps.

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No, it never end With them chaos Would the shadow be pulled under And what the dark watchers