Caroline Mitchell Updated 2022

Jenna St. Clair and Gunnar Klailen narrate audiobooks, including romance and scary genres. They hope listeners enjoy their podcast from Scario.com. The story is set in the American frontier and begins in Sussex, England, then moves to Liverpool, New Orleans, and Utah. The Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City is described, along with the nearby Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum. The museum contains various artifacts from members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One night, an alarm goes off at the museum, and a police officer investigates. The story then shifts to Caroline Mitchell's journey to Utah in 1854, which was filled with hardships and loss. Her sampler, a piece of embroidery, is later stolen and appears for sale on eBay in 2007. This leads to a haunting at the museum, which ends after eight nights. The janitor who witnessed the ghost never returned to the museum. The story concludes by reflecting on This is Jenna St. Clair, and this is Gunnar Klailen. We narrate audiobooks, mostly romance and some scary. We hope you enjoy this podcast from Scario.com. The Scary Old West, stories from the American frontier, from Scario.com. This story begins in Sussex, England, then to Liverpool, New Orleans, USA and on to Utah. Just southeast of the Great Salt Lake, and just a tiny bit west of the Wasatch Mountains is the Utah State Capitol, Salt Lake City. The city is laid out on a very organized grid, just the way Brigham Young wanted them to do it. Everything runs north and south, east and west, and the streets are on a grid, both numbered and lettered in places, and in other places named. State Street, for example, runs the length of the city from north to south, and up a steep hill on the north end to the Utah State Capitol. Right next to the Capitol is the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum, a beautiful building, two stories high, with Doric columns in front, and it really matches the architecture of most capitals, state or federal. This beautiful building houses the memories of thousands of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Anything and everything that someone once held dear can be found in the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum. There are wedding dresses, baby carriages, an old fire truck. There are even scissors that some of the prominent members trimmed their beards with, combs, love letters, important government correspondence. There's a room entirely devoted to dolls, and it's in this room where we find Caroline Mitchell's sampler. The office of the Utah State Capitol Police has a wall filled with monitors as they switch through dozens of cameras aimed inside and outside the Utah State Capitol. On October 10, 2007, an alarm sounded, and the monitors instantly switched to the room where the movement was detected. The interesting part was, the room on the monitor wasn't in the Capitol. It was across the street at the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Memorial Museum. With the alarm blaring, one of the officers grabbed his jacket and headed over on foot to clear the room and reset the alarm. Other police stayed in the Capitol, peering into the screens to see if anything would show up to explain the alarm. Suddenly, a face appeared, a young lady with long, wavy black hair. At the same time, the officer arrives at the museum. Pausing at the front door to unlock it, he thinks he sees something inside. With his left hand holding his flashlight, he unlatches the door, puts his right hand on his pistol, kicks the door open and steps inside. Chapter 3 A Journey Like most people traveling to the U.S. in 1854, Caroline Mitchell is boarding a packet ship at the Liverpool docks. She has traveled all day from Sussex aboard trains and carriages, and she stands in heavy November rain with her little family, her husband James and two daughters. She is thirty-three years old, and, a recent convert to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she's going to Utah with her family. They're going to travel in steerage, below decks, with the mail, the food, cargo, and the other four hundred people who can't afford a cabin on the main deck. Food will be provided, but Caroline will have to prepare it herself in the ship's tiny kitchen. She has brought bedding for them, some clothes, and precious little elves. The conditions are sparse. There are no luxuries. When the ship leaves the dock, it's stormy. The steerage is smelly, dirty, and the rocking motion is sickening. Less than one day from shore, they turn back, overcome by the waves and wind. When the ship finally breaks clear of the harbor, eight days later, Caroline is already weak, terribly sick. She will be in the dark, filthy hold for six more weeks. Over four hundred passengers are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, almost the whole population of the ship. There will be eight marriages, one birth, and thirty deaths at sea. The little family arrives in New Orleans and transfers to a Mississippi river boat. They make it about two hundred miles north before tragedy strikes. Caroline will live long enough to bury her two-year-old daughter, Julia. Then Caroline herself will perish. The next day, James and his twelve-year-old daughter Jane travel on, by ship, wagon train, and even on foot, arriving in Salt Lake City, November 18th, almost a year to the day they left Liverpool. They have almost nothing to remember the loved ones they lost, a lock of Julia's hair and a sampler Caroline stitched when she was ten years old. James will marry again and live out his life in Fillmore, Utah, dying in 1914 at the age of ninety-seven. He donates the Caroline Mitchell sampler to the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers for safekeeping just before he dies. Every year on July 24th, Utahns celebrate Pioneer Day. It was a tremendously memorable one in 1950, when the Daughters of Utah Pioneers gave a gleaming new museum to the state of Utah. Two stories tall and a third floor counting the basement, the building is very impressive in stature and location, mere feet from the state capital, and already filled upon opening with artifacts collected over many years from the donations of many faithful families. The brushes, razors and combs, tables, carriages, suits, and even wedding dresses all have deep meaning for the people who gave them to the museum, both the living and the dead. For they remember the cost, they celebrate the courage, and the sacrifice. They annually reenact the journey to Utah from the Midwest, and with no hesitation, they tell the sad stories, like the Caroline Mitchell story. eBay. A genuine sampler like the one Caroline made can sell for $300 to over $2,000, so you won't be surprised to hear that three samplers were stolen in the 1980s. There were no ghosts, poltergeists, lights clicking on or off. In fact, nothing happened. The samplers disappeared and that was that. Routine life went on at the museum for decades, and the samplers were considered lost forever until October 2007. If you think about it, eBay was Caroline's only chance to bring notice to living persons that her sampler still exists. As long as it was hidden in a drawer somewhere, she couldn't communicate in a way any living person would understand. But when her sampler turned up for sale on eBay, the people at the museum noticed it, and so did Caroline. The appearance of both Caroline and her sampler were nearly simultaneous. After the museum contacted the seller and arranged to reclaim their lost artifact, Caroline did her part, appearing every night in the museum and on the Capitol Police security monitors. The church members are passionate about their history and heritage, and the Pioneer Memorial Museum was built by the daughters of Utah pioneers to ensure we always remember the immigrants who packed their families onto trains, boats, wagons, and hand carts, suffering hunger, illness, weather, and injury to realize a dream. Most painfully, many pioneers were lost along the trail, as families lost mothers, fathers, and sisters and brothers. When Caroline Mitchell's sampler was stolen in the 1980s, there was no activity or immediate response, but once the sampler appeared on eBay in 2007, the ghost saw her chance, and the haunting began. In addition to security, the museum shares maintenance and housekeeping workers with the state capitol. Most custodial work is done in the dark hours between midnight and dawn, and so the only person to see the ghost, other than the police, was a janitor, and he saw her several times, including the grand finale you will soon hear. It was loud, mysterious, and sudden how night after night for eight days the alarms went off and the ghost appeared. It was unusual that you could plan on it. The ghost was active every night for eight nights, but just as suddenly it all ended. The haunting was over. Chapter Four The Last Night On the eighth night of the haunting, capitol police practically had the museum visit on the nightly schedule. The alarms did go off, the officer cleared the building, but the janitor arrived shortly after him and turned the alarms off. Sweeping and emptying trash and going room to room, he worked his way from the back to the front, finally arriving at the entrance, where a lovely young lady, with long, wavy black hair, sat on a bench. He explained the museum was closed and walked to the doors, opening one for her, and he smiled at her as she walked silently past him. He watched as she walked onto the porch and out over the stone steps, but she did not descend. She floated out above them and away over the patio and lawns, fading into the darkness and six feet above the ground, leaving the Pioneer Memorial Museum forever. Epilogue It's been thirteen years since the haunting of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Memorial Museum, and it's over. There hasn't been any mysterious activity since that last night in 2007. Hauntings happen most often where emotions run deep. As we've already seen, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints hold their history and family as dear as anyone, perhaps more than most, and they work to preserve the rich memories from their past. The cumulative feelings of deep emotion for both the living and the dead find a fascinating crossroads in the historic sites of Utah. You can feel the connection yourself if you're patient and quiet and let the objects and history that catch your interest sit with you for a while. It could be a voice or a feeling or a vision, real or imagined. It's the same thing. It's you connecting with the lives of others. The magical part is that you're still here. They are reaching out to you from another life. The janitor who opened the doors for Caroline that night left the very same moment. And while he has kept his job by working at the Capitol, he never set foot in the museum again.