TUNE IN TONIGHT - Monday, JULY 13, 2026 to Author/Medium Rob Gutro's two interviews tonight and overnight.
The first one is Ghost Box Radio at 11p.m. ET about Haunting of Wilson Castle.
LISTEN HERE: https://www.am950radio.com/listen-live/.
The 2nd is Coast to Coast AM radio Early Tuesday morning from 3am to 5am about Pets and the Afterlife!
To listen on line go to
In June we took a day trip to Portland, Maine to explore several historic places and landmarks and today's blog is about the first of those. In today's blog we'll tell you about a famous poet, Henry Wadsworth-Longfellow of the 1800s, give you a look at the inside of his house and his backyard gardens. The house is located in what is now downtown Portland, Maine.
NOT HAUNTED - One thing I usually note is whether or not a place has a resident ghost. Neither Tom nor I sensed any earthbound ghost in the house. Fortunately, no one opted to stay behind. 
TODAY YOU CAN TOUR THE HOUSE - The Wadsworth-Longfellow House is a historic house and museum at 489 Congress Street, Portland, Maine and is operated by the Maine Historical Society. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962, and administratively added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. 
911 calls reveal chaotic moments after Walton County double homicide
WALTON COUNTY, Ga. — The 911 calls released Friday provide new insight into the moments after a fatal shooting in Walton County that left a mother and daughter dead and resulted in murder charges against the family's patriarch.
Investigators say Ralph Mincey fatally shot his wife, Jennifer Mincey, and their daughter, Amanda McBrayer, outside the family's home Wednesday night before calling 911. Authorities arrested Mincey at the scene.
Deputies arrived to find McBrayer already dead. Jennifer Mincey was rushed to the hospital, where she later died. Mincey called 911 himself: “I just shot my daughter and my wife of 38 years.” Asked if they were still breathing, he said, “No, it don’t look like it. It was a nine millimeter right straight to the head.”
In one of the newly released calls, Amanda McBrayer's husband, Adam McGrath, told a dispatcher he fled the scene after witnessing the shooting.
"I literally ran away because I had two kids I've got to protect, and I'm scared to go back up there," McGrath said.
McGrath told dispatchers he believed the violence began after an argument between his wife and her father. According to the call, he said he brought his wife to her parents' home after she asked to be taken there.
"My wife was drunk, she was upset, she wanted me to bring her home," McGrath told the dispatcher. "So I brought her to her parent's house and then she got into it with her dad and her dad said, 'I've got a gun... I'm gonna pull the (bleep) trigger,' then shot her in the head. Then he grabbed his wife by the throat, threw her down and threatened to kill her too."
As deputies responded, dispatchers received another 911 call, this one from Ralph Mincey.
"My wife had told my daughter that I didn't take care of my mother. I do every day, and yeah, I just... I just shot my daughter and my wife of 38 years," Mincey told the dispatcher.
When asked whether the victims were still breathing, Mincey replied, "No, it don't look like it. It was a nine millimeter right straight to the head."
According to the Walton County Sheriff's Office, Jennifer Mincey was transported to a hospital, where she later died. Amanda McBrayer was pronounced dead at the scene.
Jail records show Ralph Mincey is charged with two counts of murder, along with several additional felony charges.
During the 911 call, Mincey also told the dispatcher he "lost it" after an argument.
Mincey’s public Facebook shows a decade expressing the kind of grievance that eventually led to violence — Confederate flag memes, “there are more of us than you can possibly imagine,” complaints about Confederate history being “erased,” posts fantasizing about a reckoning against “Democrats and Liberals,” and a defiant “I will NOT apologize” declaration for supporting Trump.
The warning signs are usually there. Save yourselves and get out before it’s too late.
Firefighters Rescue a Beagle Trapped in a Cave
NICHOLASVILLE, Ky. — Crews with the Jessamine County Fire District rescued a dog trapped in a cave the morning of March 21, 2026 after a technical rope operation in a wooded area off Handys Bend Road.
According to an incident report, units were dispatched at approximately 10:45 a.m. March 21 to 2500 Handys Bend Road, Wilmore, Kentucky, near the Bluegrass Sportsman’s League, for a report of a dog stuck underground. Responding crews included Rescue 22, Engine 26 and Engine 23.
(Photo: It was a team effort to rescue Foxy from a cave. Credit: Jessamine County Firefighters)
Firefighters located the cave roughly 100 yards into the woods past a campground. Officials described it as a narrow vertical slot cave, about 35 feet deep and only a few feet wide at its largest point. It extends about 40 feet below ground.
Using a rope system anchored to nearby trees, one rescuer was lowered vertically into the cave to search for the animal. The dog, a beagle later identified as “Foxy,” was located approximately 35 to 40 feet below the surface in a tight chamber beyond the initial drop.
Crews said the rescuer was able to make contact quickly and coax the dog closer using voice commands and food. Once within reach, the dog was secured in a canine rescue harness provided by Jessamine County Animal Care and Control.
The operation then shifted to a haul system, allowing crews on the surface to raise both the rescuer and the dog safely out of the cave. Officials said the team navigated minor obstacles, including rock formations and debris near the entrance, during the lift.
A rescuer was lowered into the cave and found the dog approximately 35-40 feet down. Crews lifted the rescuer and dog out of the cave using a rope system. They say the dog appeared to be uninjured.
The book characters include a 23-year-old, 6-foot tall ranch hand named Dan Killoe, his dad, his step brother Tap and a bunch of other supporting characters. They decide to move their large herd west to find a new place to live, and travel through desert and hostile lands with maurading cattlerustlers, Comanches who have bloodlust, and others.
My Take- Usually I really like westerns, but this one was slow-going for me. I couldn't get into the characters. Dan, the main character, felt like he was always being told he wasn't good enough. It wasn't until 2/3rds of the way through the book, he had to take charge, but it still didn't grab me. If you like stories where characters lose almost everything, and then somehow get things back, this works. I honestly read faster to get to the end. 3 out of 5 stars for this one.
ABOUT THE BOOK: Dan Killoe—over six feet of tough, raw, lightning fast man. He had a trail heard and a mass of settlers to get across unknown territory to a new land. Then he gave shelter to a stranger being hunted by Felipe Soto, scar-faced leader of the renegade Comancheros. ...
IT'S A NEW VIDEO! WAVY-TV is located in Hampton, Virginia. Recently, WAVY-TV's Ghost Tales host, Ashley Knight speaks with medium Rob Gutro about his paranormal experiences while on vacation (in this 25 min. interview), and his "Ghosts on a Medium's Vacation" series of books that cover Ireland, England and Tombstone, Arizona's BirdCageTheatre.
(To get the 3 books in the series: https://tinyurl.com/4c4hu3pn )
(A photo of a Cozumel fox lying on stones after being released. The Cozumel fox was captured by a highway and later released into the Laguna Colombia State Reserve. (Image credit: Rafael Chacón))
Elusive dwarf fox, feared extinct, photographed for the first time on island off Yucatán
By Patrick Pester, Live Science, June 16, 2026
An elusive dwarf fox that was feared extinct has been photographed for the first time, after being spotted near a highway in Cozumel, Mexico.
The tiny animal was part of the mysterious Cozumel fox population, a potentially undescribed species that had not been officially sighted in more than 20 years.
Cozumel foxes live only on Cozumel, an island near Cancún. Researchers know very little about these mysterious predators, which are roughly 20% to 40% smaller than their gray fox (Urocyon cinereoargenteus) cousins that live on the mainland.
Park and museum officials spotted and captured the fox in 2023 and, after a health assessment, released it back into the wild. Researchers have now shared the photographs and documented the encounter in a new study published May 4 in the journal Neotropical Biology and Conservation.
Although the rediscovery confirms that Cozumel foxes are still alive, they are likely on the brink of extinction, the study authors noted; the photographs highlight the need for focused research and conservation efforts.
"The biggest challenge facing the Cozumel fox is that we still know almost nothing about it, including its remaining population size, distribution, or ecology," study first author Travis Bayer, executive director of the conservation organization Pathos Wildlife, said in a statement. "That uncertainty alone is dangerous, because it makes effective conservation extremely difficult."
Cozumel foxes are an example of insular dwarfism, an evolutionary process in which larger animals, including fox-sized mammals, evolve to be smaller after colonizing islands, where there are limited resources and less space than on the mainland. The foxes aren't the only mammals that have shrunk on Cozumel over time; other examples include the island's critically endangered pygmy raccoons (Procyon pygmaeus) and dwarf coatis.
Archaeological evidence suggests that Cozumel foxes have lived on the island for at least 5,000 years, likely since before the arrival of the Maya within the past few millennia, and potentially for tens of thousands of years before that. Prior to this rediscovery, the last confirmed sighting of a Cozumel fox was in 2001, according to the study.
The rediscovery began with reports of a disoriented animal wandering near the highway on the southeastern side of the island. Officials with the Parks and Museums Foundation of Cozumel located and captured the fox, an adult male, on Sep. 14, 2023. They checked its health and later released the fox in the Laguna Colombia State Reserve, a protected area just south of where it was captured.
Elusive goblin shark captured on camera for the first time
By Sascha Pare,LIVE SCIENCE, June 14, 2026
For the first time ever, scientists have captured deep-sea footage of the elusive goblin shark, extending its known range far into the Central Pacific and down to nearly 6,560 feet (2,000 meters) below the water's surface.
The goblin shark (Mitsukurina owstoni) is a deepwater shark with an elongated snout and protrusible jaws that shoot out to snatch prey. The species, which has been around for about 125 million years, is described as a "living fossil." Until now, it had been seen alive only briefly, when it got hooked on fishing lines and hauled to the surface, according to a new study.
In the new footage, researchers documented two goblin shark sightings — one near Jarvis Island in the South Central Pacific Ocean and another at the Tonga Trench in the Southwest Pacific. Researchers suspect that goblin sharks live throughout the planet's oceans, as they have been caught in many different regions, but the specimen record is very sparse. So far, goblin sharks have been found only in narrow regions in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, as well as in small patches off the western U.S., Australia, Japan and Taiwan.
"The goblin shark is a deep-sea charismatic animal, and I never thought we'd see one alive," study co-author Alan Jamieson, the director of the Minderoo-University of Western Australia Deep-Sea Research Centre, said in a statement.
Not only was it fascinating to capture footage of goblin sharks in their natural habitat for the first time, but the specimen in the Tonga Trench was found swimming 2,300 feet (700 m) deeper than any other goblin shark, at around 6,550 feet (1,997 m), Jamieson said.
Did you ever wonder where the common cracker came from? The New England Historical Society shared the cracker's history, and that's today's blog.
New England Historical Society, May 2026
Every so often when you’re looking through a book of old New England recipes, you’ll find one that calls for the common cracker. Well, there are plenty of common crackers around. Saltines come to mind.
But the common crackers these recipes call for are actually a specific type of common cracker. And these days, they’re anything but common.
If you dropped back in time, say 30 years, you’d know exactly what the recipe needs. Well into the 1970s, the common cracker was ubiquitous throughout New England.
But to get the full picture, you’d need to step back in time a bit further, to the days when fresh bread was not easy to buy and before science took over the business of baking. With preservatives and cellophane and cardboard packaging, today you can commonly eat crackers made anywhere in the world.
But in the early 1800s, that wasn’t the case. Baking science hadn’t evolved so, and the common cracker solved a problem for hungry families needing a staple that would keep for months.
Inventor of the Common Cracker cross cracker
If you want to figure out who invented the first common cracker, you probably won’t have any luck. They went by many names and many bakers produced them, with small variations in size. The Boston Cracker in Massachusetts, the Portland Cracker in Maine, the Montpelier Cracker in Vermont, and so forth.
American crackers, themselves, first came into existence in Newburyport, Mass. — or so the story goes– in the bakery of Theodore Pearson. There he created pilot biscuits.
Sailors, soldiers, explorers and travelers have carried some variation of cracker with them for centuries, as far back as you can imagine. The Newburyport version of this was called hard tack (among other things).
Hard Tack Gives Way to the Cracker
Hard tack consists of an unleavened water and flour baked to within an inch of its life. It will last virtually forever. Hard tack produced for the War of 1812 was stored and then brought out for use in the Civil War, for example, none the worse for wear. Soldiers and sailors preferred it only slightly to starvation.
But hard tack soon gave rise (forgive the pun) to more elegant crackers for domestic use. The addition of yeast, a rising period of 24 hours (and more) and a long period of kneading, followed by baking and drying, resulted in a puffy white cracker with a hard thick outer shell. Voila! The common cracker.
The ingenious yankees had dozens of uses for them. Many involved mashing. They commonly used them as thickeners for soup and chowder or mashed and eaten with milk. Later, they split them, buttered them, toasted them and gave them all sorts of toppings. And when potatoes began to take over the chowder, the crackers shifted to the side for crumbling in just before eating.
The folks at The Food Timeline suggest Artemus Kennedy, a baker in what is now Arlington, Mass., originated the common cracker. Kennedy, their research suggests, began baking the crackers at his bakery founded in 1805. He rode around the nearby country on horseback selling them. But no one knows where he got the idea for them.
Early Bakers cross cracker color!
Another early baker who dabbled with the cracker was Josiah Bent, founder of the G.H. Bent company in Milton, Mass., in 1801. The company earned a reputation for making water crackers, which Bent prized for their ability to travel well on sea voyages. Bent’s water crackers are smaller than the common cracker, but he made other products as well. Bent definitely made a lot of hard tack for the government, as did Pearce, and the company revived that recipe for Civil War reenactors a century after the war itself ended.
Perhaps the best known of the common cracker makers was Charles Cross of Montpelier, Vt., and his tireless horse. Charles and his brother Thomas, originally from New Hampshire, founded Cross Bakers in 1828. The business continuously operated for 151 years, evolving into C.H. Cross & Sons before going bankrupt in 1979. Then the firm and its Cross Crackers moved to Claremont, N.H.
In the early days, Cross used a horse-powered treadmill to run the machinery for his bakery. His horse alternated jobs, one day powering the treadmill, the next hauling crackers for delivery. Over time, Cross grew to have a crew of salesmen traveling throughout New England selling his crackers to stores.
But in his earliest days, Cross packed up the crackers and displayed them in barrels. And this is probably how we most associate with common crackers: stored in a barrel that served as a centerpiece of the country store where they were sold. Visitors to the store would be invited to pull up a seat, crack open a cracker and put a piece of cheese on it. In this setting, men resolved the issues of the day, shared news and settled arguments.
Then the barrels disappeared. And as the humorist John Gould wrote, “everything has been on the skids since the common cracker declined.”
Julia Child
The common cracker had a new lease on life given to it by Julia Child, who gave them her stamp of approval for use with chowder. She became rather famously obsessed with cracking the recipe, which she eventually did.
Should you need a common cracker today, there are two companies still selling them: the aforementioned G.H. Bent, known as the Bent Cookie Factory, which has continuously operated since 1801; and Vermont Common Foods, which wholesales them and has a nice collection of recipes for how to cook with them. The company acquired the Cross cracker equipment, which it uses to make them today.
Our little Cody passed on March 6, 2026 unexpectedly, and we've done a number of things to keep his memory alive. One of them was to get a painting made of him that would join the wall with several of the other kids who passed. Today's blog is about the trial of that.
Our friends Michael and Brian introduced us to the "Paint Your Life" website where you submit a photo of anyone person or pet, and they assign an artist to bring them to life in a painting. In fact, they sent us paintings of Dolly, Franklin, Tyler and Dash and we are forever grateful.
When Cody passed, we expected they would do that for him (and they said they were!!) but we intercepted them, and sent Cody's photo to Paint Your Life (after going through a lot of pictures).
APPROVED THE 2ND VERSION - When we received the proof of the second painting, we agreed that was our Cody. Cody's portrait now hangs on the wall with the other four kids and we are very grateful to the Paint Your Life customer service folks, and to both artists.
Oklahoma pastor who was backed by Trump exits GOP House runoff after reports of inappropriate texts
By MEG KINNARD, Associated Press, June 17, 2026
Jackson Lahmeyer, an Oklahoma megachurch minister who founded Pastors for Trump, has withdrawn from a runoff for a U.S. House seat from Oklahoma, following reports that he had sent romantic text messages to a woman who is not his wife.
A day after advancing to the August runoff, Lahmeyer issued a statement on Wednesday saying that he had made the “difficult decision” to suspend his campaign “after prayerful consideration with my wife, Kendra, and my team over the last twenty four hours.”
“I do not want to be a distraction to my family, my church, and the great people of Oklahoma’s 1st Congressional District, who deserve a strong conservative voice representing them in Washington,” Lahmeyer added.
Lahmeyer’s email statement announcing his withdrawal hit inboxes just minutes after President Donald Trump endorsed his runoff opponent, Mark Tedford.
(Editors Note: Look! He got praise from a criminal!) “I greatly appreciate Jackson Lahmeyer’s hard work under difficult circumstances,” Trump wrote, going on to call Tedford — a state representative in Oklahoma — “Pro Trump and MAGA all the way!”
On Monday, a day before Oklahoma’s primary, Trump had reiterated his support for Lahmeyer, whom he initially endorsed last month, commending him for founding Pastors for Trump. The nationwide faith leader coalition was among the groups that worked to boost Trump in his 2024 campaign.
The Daily Mail reported Sunday that Lahmeyer had exchanged thousands of romantic text messages with a woman who worked as a fundraiser for his campaign. Multiple news organizations reported that Lahmeyer acknowledged his behavior in a now-deleted social media post, saying the matter “was already dealt with privately” and that he owned “crossing a boundary line through text messaging.”
Lahmeyer’s campaign did not immediately return a message.
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In the Primaries recently, 26% of Republican Voters cast a ballot for this idiot.
There's a long list of candidates running to secure the Republican nomination to succeed Rep. Kevin Hern, who is running for U.S. Senate. President Donald Trump endorsed Jackson Lahmeyer, a pastor who is connected with several members of Trump’s inner circle.
estimates| candidate | votes | pct |
|---|---|---|
| 23,230 | 32.2% | |
| 18,699 | 25.9% | |
| 11,532 | 16.0% | |
| 4,722 | 6.5% | |
| 3,419 | 4.7% |
This week's hero is a fast-thinking and observant student who was able to stop another student from walking in front of an oncoming car!
(Photo: A fifth grader from Brooke Grove Elementary School was honored for preventing a distracted student from crossing into the path of an oncoming vehicle. Montgomery County Police Department)
MoCo Fifth Grader Honored For Saving Younger Student's LifeGaby Arancibia,Patch Staff, , Jun 18, 2026
MONTGOMERY COUNTY, MD — A fifth grader who quickly acted to prevent a younger student from crossing in front of a car was honored at a School Safety Patrol ceremony.
Matthew Geiger, who serves as a safety patrol at Brooke Grove Elementary School in Olney, Maryland, carried out the quick-thinking save back in March 2026.
AAA Mid-Atlantic spokeswoman Ragina Ali said during the ceremony that Geiger was on patrol when he saw a distracted, younger student steps away from crossing into the path of an oncoming vehicle.
"Matthew performed a life-saving action at one of your school's busiest areas," Ali said during the ceremony. "Recognizing the immediate danger, Matthew acted proactively by physically intervening and immediately extending an arm that blocked the younger student's path."
"He communicated the hazards, pointing out the moving vehicle to ensure the student understood the danger, and he maintained the holding until the vehicle came to a complete stop and it was safe to proceed," she added. Geiger not only received recognition at his school but was also presented with a medal. Ali said that Geiger was just one of two children in the nation to receive such an award.
