From the Bunker — Weird Frequencies
Every investigator has one story that isn’t really about ghosts. It’s about family. Ash Hamilton brought his to The Haunted Heartland, and it stopped the table cold.
Ash’s next film is a documentary — not a mockumentary, he was clear about that — built almost entirely on a journal his grandfather wrote about something that happened to him when he was young. The grandfather grew up in a rural river town in east-central Illinois, the kind of place where Irish immigrants settled along the old bootleg trail. When he was twelve, going on thirteen, there was a woman in the area people went to when they were sick — a healer, with a small goat farm. History remembers her, when it remembers her at all, as the Goat Woman. Her name, the journal says, may have been Joanne.
The journal describes a secretive, strange relationship: the boy walking past her farm on the way to school, the woman coming out to talk, and — in Ash’s telling — visits that came at night. When his grandfather was dying, Ash told us, he confessed that she had visited him again, right before his passing.
And then there’s the journal itself, which behaves like something out of the story it contains. For years it was a rumor in the family — everybody had heard of it, nobody knew where it was. Ash finally found it at his sister’s house while looking through things during a family illness, scanned every page for safekeeping… and since then, it has disappeared again. “It sort of rears its head and then goes away,” Ash said.
His team is now doing the unglamorous work of real investigation: census records, old maps, deeds, land plots — trying to give the Goat Woman back her full name, find where she came from, and learn whether she has descendants. People in the area, he says, do remember the legend. It became a dare — high school kids driving past her place at night to scare themselves.
There was a moment in the telling that said everything about why Ash is making this film. The woman had such an influence on his grandfather, he told us, that the man named his first daughter after her. Some families bury a story like that. Ash is digging it up, respectfully, with a camera.
The documentary is in early production — working titles include The Goat Woman — and Ash put out a call on our air: if you’ve heard the legend, anywhere within a couple of hours of Central Illinois, he wants to talk to you. Legends travel. Somebody out there knows her name.