Death by Molten Gold: The Real Story That Inspired Game of Thrones #WDRadio

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Imagine being tightly bound and surrounded by an angry group
of people in sixteenth century Ecuador. The crowd parts as
a man walks towards you with a crucible of molten gold.
He forces your mouth open as you struggle as hard
as you can, but to no avail. Boiling, bubbling, glowing
molten gold is poured into your open mouth, killing you

(00:31):
within seconds. Terrifying. Right, this is not a scene from
Game of Thrones. This is the real deal. Now, how
terrifying is it? I'm Darren Marler and this is Weird Darkness.

(00:57):
Welcome weirdos. I'm Darren Marler and this is Weird Darkness Radio,
where every week you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore,
the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and
unexplained coming up this hour. Typically, when you hear the

(01:21):
phrase high speed chase, you think of law enforcement trying
to catch the bad guys who are in a ghetaway vehicle,
perhaps after a bank robbery or after blowing a stop
sign and simply refusing to pull over. But have you
heard about that time that the police were involved in
a high speed chase up to one hundred miles per
hour trying to catch up to a flying saucer. When

(01:43):
the Black Plague arrived at their doorsteps, the villagers were
forced to choose between life or certain doom. It's the
tragic tale of England's plague village, The Village of Eame
first step when it comes to receiving the death sentence
has given us several ways to go about the execution, hanging,

(02:04):
firing squad, gas chamber, being stoned to death, or burned
at the stake. But you have to be some whole
new level of hated by the people if your deathblow
comes by way of molten gold being poured down your throat.
We begin there. If you're new here, welcome to the show.

(02:24):
And if you're already a member of this weirdo family,
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(02:45):
Sign up for the free newsletter, grab Weird Darkness merchandise
and more. That's Weird Darkness dot Com Now bult your doors,
lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with
me into the Weird Darkness. Death by molten gold isn't

(03:20):
just a grisly Game of Thrones invention. In the third century,
a Roman emperor named Valerian is alleged to have died
when his rival poured liquid gold down his throat. Valerian's
gruesome death was nearly as bad as the horrific executions
and Henry the Eighth's time, and that's really saying something. Unfortunately,

(03:41):
for Valerian, his execution was only one part of his
humiliating captivity in the hands of the Persians, that is,
if we are to believe the account of Lucius Cassilius
Ermanius Lactantius, an early Christian author who was no fan
of Valerians. According to Lactanians, Persian king Shapur the First

(04:02):
captured Valerian in battle and tormented him relentlessly. He used
Emperor Valerian as a footstool, mocked him, and stuffed his
flayed skin with straw. The humiliation of Emperor Valerian was
so bad that his own son didn't even try to
rescue him. What happened to Emperor Valerian after his capture

(04:23):
at the Battle of Odessa. King Shapur the First and
the Roman Emperor Valerian came from clashing superpowers, and the
Persians made an example of Valerian to taunt Romans with
their lost glory. The question of whether this involved a
life of imprisonment and a fade into nothingness or a
violent death by way of having molten gold poured down

(04:45):
his throat is one to which we will likely never
have a definitive answer. When Valerian became emperor in two
fifty three, Rome was in the middle of the Crisis
of the third century. In a period of only fifty years,
the Empire would most a staggering total of nearly fifty
different emperors. Many emperors only lasted a few months, assassinated

(05:07):
by rivals or even their own troops. As historian pat
Southern put it, to be declared emperor once marked the
apogee of a man's career. In the third century, it
was a death sentence. Valerian's seven years of rule might
seem like a success then until he was captured by
Rome's greatest enemy, the Persians. Valerian's rival was King Shapur

(05:31):
the First of Persia. As Rome attempted to expand to
the Middle East, Shappour pushed them back, first killing Roman
Emperor Gordian the Third at the Battle of Messich and
then defeating his successor to capture the city of Antioch.
But Shappour's greatest victory came in two sixty when he
captured Emperor Valerian at the Battle of Odessa. Lactantius, an

(05:54):
early Christian writer who was twenty when Valerian died, wrote
a description of the emperor's treatment at the hands of
the Persians. After his capture, Valerian wasted the remainder of
his days in the vilest condition of slavery, Lactantius reported.
Lactantius wrote that King Shappur even humiliated Valerian by using

(06:15):
him as a human footstool. The king of the Persians,
who had made him prisoner, whenever he chose to get
into his carriage or to mount on horseback, commanded the
Roman to stoop and present his back. Shappur did more
than just step on Valerian's back. According to Lactantius, every
time the king trod on the emperor, he smiled and said,

(06:38):
this is true, and not what the Romans delineate on
board or plaster, mocking the emperor's fall from power. The
Romans weren't about to carve a statue of Valarian's humiliation,
but Valerian became a popular subject in Persian and European
art for centuries after the Emperor's death in the sixteenth century.

(06:59):
Over a thousand years later, Hans Holbein was still drawing
the Roman with a Persian king's foot on his back
during Valerian's humiliation. His son Galinus ruled Rome, but Galinus
was so weak that he never attempted to rescue his
own father. Instead, Galiinus had his hands full trying to
suppress a revolt in Rome's western provinces, where a rival Posthumus,

(07:22):
had declared himself emperor of the Gallic Empire. Lactantius didn't
buy Galinus's excuse, though, He paints a picture of a
despondent Valerian lamenting his abject and servile state, and then
Lactantius turns the knife. Neither indeed was he ever demanded back.
Apparently Galinus was too busy to write a letter to Shapur,

(07:44):
or he was too embarrassed about his father's purported footstool status.
The Persians made decorative cameos to celebrate Valarian's humiliation, showing
the emperor helpless against Shapur, who's able to subdue and
capture the Roman by simply grabbing his arm. During the
Roman emperor's captivity, Schapour could have executed Valerian at any time,

(08:07):
and according to some historians, this is likely exactly what happened. Lactantius, however,
claimed that the king wanted to ensure that the Roman
name remained long a scoff and derision of the barbarians.
As a result, Shappour subjected the humiliated emperor to a
barrage of insults. It doesn't get much worse than having

(08:28):
molten gold poured over your head, as Season one of
Game of Thrones proved, except if the gold is poured
down your throat. That might have exactly been what happened
to Valerian when King Shapur got tired of consulting It.
Horrific as this sounds, it does beg the question just
what killed the victim? Was it the hot gold itself,

(08:51):
the steam? Maybe suffocation. The blog It's Interesting points to
a two thousand and three study in the Journal of
Clinical Pathology in which which investigators decided to find out
instead of gold, they used lead, another historically accurate, if
less expensive agent of execution. We obtained a bovine larynx
from a local slaughter house. They said no animal was

(09:14):
harmed or killed specifically for this purpose. After fixing the
larynx and a horizontal position to a piece of wood
and closing the distal end using tissue paper, seven hundred
and fifty grams of pure lead gold is expensive, you know,
was heated until melting around four hundred and fifty degrees celsius,
and then poured into the larynx. Immediately, large amounts of

(09:34):
steam appeared at both ends of the specimen, and the
clot of tissue was expelled with force by the steam.
Within ten seconds, the lead had congealed again, completely filling
the larynx. After the lead and larynx cooled down, the
experimenters examined the larynx by taking cross sections and looking
at them under a light microscope. The throat mucous layer

(09:56):
had been completely burned off and the muscle was cooked
or damaged to the depth of about one centimeter. They
report having molten lead or gold poured down your throat.
They conclude is a pretty sure way to die. It
might rupture your organs, burn your lungs, and choke you ultimately,
though it's probably the steam that pulls the plug. According

(10:20):
to an alternative cause of death postulated by Lactantius, Valerian
was flayed alive and his skin stripped from the flesh
was dyed with vermilion and placed in the temple of
the Gods of the Barbarians. His flayed skin was stuffed
with straw, and Valerian was preserved in taxidermaite form. Valerians

(10:40):
stuffed red corpse stood as a symbol a Persian triumph
and a reminder to the Romans to not be too
confident about their strength. King Shapur's triumph over Valerian was
carved into the rocks of Noxi roustamp in far As, Iran.
The relief shows two of the Roman emperors, who shad
poor humliated. In the image, the king seizes Valerian with

(11:03):
his bare hands while a second Roman emperor Philip bows
to Shapur. According to Persian legend, Philip owed his throne
to the Persians after paying them ransom to let him
return to Rome. The belief made the Romans look weak
and feeble compared to the mighty Persian king. Lactantius had
his own reasons for not liking Valerian. As emperor, Valarian

(11:27):
gleefully persecuted Christians, executing bishops and priests and sending others
off in chains as forced laborers. He martyred two future saints,
Pope Sixtus the Second and Saint Lawrence of Rome. Lactantius
may have exaggerated his tales of Valerian's torture to further
shame the emperor and demonstrate that those who persecute Christians

(11:50):
get what's coming to them. His book was titled The
Manner in which the Persecutors died after All, and he
wrote God punished Valerian in a new and extraordinary manner,
that it might be a lesson to future ages that
the adversaries of heaven always received the just recompense of
their iniquities. Many historians posit the idea that it served

(12:12):
Lactantius to write an account of Valerian meeting an ungodly
gruesome end. After all, Lactantius was a staunch early Christian,
and Valerian was ruthless in his persecution of believers in christ.
Lactanius's contemporaries might have adopted his story so readily because
it served a different end to paint Persia as barbarically

(12:34):
as possible. In the long conflict between Rome and Persia,
Propagandists were motivated to treat whatever side they weren't on
as the epitome of wickedness. Roman writers hearing Lactantius's version
of what happened to Valerian might have also added to
and spread the story, and from there a gruesome legend

(12:55):
was born. Even if Lactantius exaggerated, the Persians definitely did
not treat Valerian like an honored guest. They imprisoned and
executed him, after all, and the Romans were known for
their gruesome forms of torture, including crucifixion and throwing people
to wild animals. King Shappur's reign turned Persia into a

(13:16):
superpower on par with Rome. After Valerian's grisly death, his
son was assassinated by his own troops. In the middle
of the third century, over a dozen Roman emperors were
murdered or died in battle. But this is not the
only recorded case of death by golden throat. It also
happened to a Spanish governor in the colonial settlement of

(13:39):
Langrano in fifteen ninety nine. It turns out the governor
of the Amazonian town had been cheating the indigenous Zavarro
tribe also known as Shuar, in their gold trade, which
resulted in a violent revolt. The Javarro attacked the Lagronio settlement,
and during the ensuing massacre of up to twenty five
thousand Spaniards, executed the governor by pouring the object of

(14:02):
his greed down his throat. The Javarro then burned the
remaining settlement to the ground. Marcus Lcinius Crassus one fifteen
to fifty three BC was a Roman politician, mentor of
Julius Caesar, and quite possibly one of the wealthiest men
in Roman history. Crassus amassed a personal fortune primarily by

(14:24):
seizing the assets, including property, slaves, and riches, of those
declared enemies of the state. A shrewd and well liked leader,
Crassus was successful in both the political and military arenas.
Two of his most notable victories included the defeat of
the Spartacus slave rebellion and formation of the First Triumvirate,

(14:45):
a three way alliance between Crassus, Julius Caesar, and Ignaeus
Pompeius Magnus, better known as Pompey the Great. An ongoing
feud with Pompey ultimately proved to be the downfall of Crassus.
Driven by this grudge, Crass's embarked on his final military
campaign in Parthia, a region in modern day Iran. Crass's

(15:07):
and his legions were defeated by the Parthian king erode
As the second Crasis was taken alive and, according to legend,
executed by having molten gold poured down his throat as
literal reference to his unquenchable thirst for wealth, Referring to
the famous scene and Game of Thrones, this moment is

(15:27):
so iconic because it represents the height of poetic justice
in the series, says Luke Watson, founder of pop culture
site Essential TV. Visseries' entire persona and every decision he
makes is built upon a foundation of entitlement in combination
with a chip on his shoulder from being denied as birthright,
he makes life miserable for everyone around him in Pursuit

(15:50):
of the Crown, which reveals everything about how he would
rule if he ever won it. Although this are's story
arc was the first to be fully realized in the show,
it's set the tone for the entire series. Watson says,
Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin doesn't just
have a talent for murdering characters, but for doing so

(16:10):
in a way that reinforces the broader themes of his story,
which also speaks to faults that are inherently human. Watson
says Martin has taken inspiration from real life history for
much of his fantasy, and though there is no record
of him specifically drawing from this gruesome execution method of
the past, it's not too much of a stretch to
think he might be aware of it. With so many

(16:33):
characters to kill, I'm sure he took note of many
memorable murder methods. If you've ever wanted to learn more
about the stories that I share in the podcast, you'll
want to sign up for the free Weird Darkness newsletter
several times per week, you'll get an email that not

(16:55):
only includes an audio player with a recent episode, but
a deep dive article of that same sub going more
in depth than what you heard in the podcast or
radio show. You can sign up for the free Weird
Darkness newsletter at Weirddarkness dot com slash newsletter coming up.
When the Black Plague arrived at their doorsteps, the villagers
were forced to choose between life or certain doom. It's

(17:18):
the tragic tale of England's plague village, the Village of em.
That story is up next. I do have a little
quick nugget here for you. First, the ghost of an
ice fisherman is said to be found on several lakes
around Metatawish Waters in Wisconsin, and you might just help
people find fish. I tend to think the reason people
go ice fishing is more about drinking beer and being

(17:40):
left alone than actually catching something. At least that's what
I see on TV. But you know what, I'm not
a fisherman, so maybe it really is about sitting in
the freezing cold, drilling holes in the ice and hoping
to catch something that sounds like you. And you're in
the Metatowish Waters area of Wisconsin. Sometime watch for the
ghost of an ice fisherman to lead you to a
good catch. The stories recorded in the book Northern Frights

(18:03):
by Dennis Boyer, and according to the account that he gives,
ghost fishermen are a dumb ad dozen up north. But
the ghost ice fisherman is unique. With the other ghost fisherman,
there's usually more of a story, and Old Duffer, says Boyer,
the name, some history, and sometimes an incident like a drowning,
sometimes even a good physical description. But with the ice
fisherman ghost, there's nothing like that, no background, just the

(18:25):
ghost in his hooded parka. This simplicity makes Boyer partial
to the story. He feels like he can trust that
it's not loaded down with the things that people thought
of later. Now this isn't one of your rooted ghosts,
the Old Duffer says, not stuck in one place, like
the alleged wailing up on Papoose Creek or a rumor
of the headless guy down in Powell Marsh. Now the
ice fisherman ghost has quite a range. Boyer's brother in

(18:47):
law saw the darn thing on Circle Lily Lake, Dead
Pike Lake Birch Lake and Big Crooked Lake. This guy
gets around a lot in Wisconsin. The spectral ized fisherman
also brought this old duffer's brother in law some good fortune.
Unlike other men who had marriage problems because of spending
a day fishing but returning home with no fish, the
brother in law always came home with fish because the
ghost of the ice fisherman showed him where to find them.

(19:09):
He got lots of fish, Boyer says, and he kept
his marriage happy. Head's right. He didn't go every day
all day and then come home without fish. Women kind
of distrust that. Hey, he came home early, cleaned the
fish too, a stand up guy. Boyer's old duffer also
has a little advice for tracking down reliable ghost stories.
You'll find lots of these outdoors and ghosts. Learning to

(19:29):
sniff them out. There's always an old guy telling the story, right,
but he's usually telling the story about how another old
guy told him the story, and the other old guy
is always toothless or missing fingers or has some deformity.
Watch out for those guys. It's one thing to tell
a story that maybe didn't happen, and then again maybe
it did. It's different for some of these guys, they'd
like to manipulate people send them off on missions. Hey,

(19:52):
either way you get a fun fishing trip out of it.

(20:31):
Contracting the plague in seventeenth century England was a death sentence.
While we now know that flea bitten rats spread the
sickness to humans, those living through the epidemic possessed no
such knowledge. Many feared the Black Death was the wrath
of God, leading sufferers to treat symptoms with curious methods
like fastening a toad to swollen bubo lumps in hopes

(20:54):
of removing the poison. London was hit especially hard in
its Great Plague outbreak of six teen sixty five, yet
one quiet English village due north of the city stands
out for its voluntary isolation after infection struck, even though
the decision spelled certain doom for the community. In the

(21:16):
fall of sixteen sixty five, as the plague raged through London,
a package of cloth was sent from the capital to
Alexander Hadfield, a tailor who lived in e m Derbyshire.
Hadfield wasn't home, so his apprentice, George Vickers, received the parcel.
Realizing the materials were damp, he hung them to dry
by the fire. Soon after, Vickers fell ill, becoming the

(21:40):
first in em to be struck by the plague. The
apprentice died within a week. Members of the household soon
followed suit. As more neighbors fell ill Throughout the fall,
the village of the Eam realized the plague had arrived.
Wealthy talents, folk, and those not tied to their land fled.

(22:00):
Some stayed in the area, constructing makeshift homes in nearby caves.
The illness receded in the winter months, but as the
weather warmed in the spring of sixteen sixty six, the
number of infected rose, leading those who were able to
flee Iam entirely, often taking the sickness with them. One
man who vowed to stay was Rector William Mompessen and

(22:22):
his wife Catherine. Their children were sent to Yorkshire. Though
the Black Death was all around him, the rector stood fast,
Determined to combat its spread. Rector Montpessen sought the help
of another man, Thomas Stanley, a Puritan and former rector
who still had considerable religious favor. The two had different

(22:43):
religious views, a big deal in those days, yet together
they agreed to take charge. The pair presented a bold
plan of forced quarantine to what remained in the village.
They asked everyone to subscribe to the following rules. Do
not bear the dead in the church graveyard. Instead bury

(23:03):
or deceased on your own land. The church will be
closed until further notice. Services will take place outside Cookwo
Delf and families should keep twelve feet distance from one another.
Eam will remain isolated and no one is to leave
or enter until the plague is eradicated. Parishioners understood the
deadly stakes of the self imposed quarantine. Doubly troubling was that,

(23:27):
according to their faith, the dead had to be buried
on holy ground so that they could rise on Judgment
Day and enter Heaven miraculously. Despite such physical and spiritual anxieties,
they came together. The quarantine of Eum commenced. Life was difficult,
but nearby villages pitched in with goods. The Earl of

(23:48):
Devonshire paid for medical supplies and food. These were delivered
at set drop off points outside of Eum. Plague stones
provided demarcations that outsiders knew not to cross. Coins were
left in the waters of Monday Brook, so named for
the day the town of Bagwell dropped off their goods.
Vinegar was also used as a disinfectant, with grooves drilled

(24:11):
into boundary stones and filled with the substance as a
kind of decontamination station. Unsurprisingly, the Black Death decimated Iam
during the quarantine, and reported seventy six families were infected,
with some experiencing huge losses that nearly eradicated their entire lineage. Catherine,
the Rector's wife succumbed to the illness. Missus Hancock, once

(24:36):
belonging to a family of eight, dug the graves of
her husband and six children within one week. Such heartbreaking
tales stretched beyond the walls of im Rowland Torque reportedly
lived in nearby Stony Middleton and had been meeting Emmett
Siddal of Eam in secret each day to gaze at
each other from afar, never touching. Then in April, Emmett

(24:59):
stopped coming. Rowland continued to wait for her each day
month after month, and finally entered town when the plague
was over. To his dismay, the said all family had perished.
In total, at least two hundred sixty people died in
Eam over the course of fourteen months. Alternate calculations set

(25:19):
the death toll at three hundred seventy. Those who survived
saw the end of the plague and a lifting of
the quarantine in Christmas sixteen sixty six. Survivors burned everything
but the clothes on their backs to ensure no further contamination. Today,
Eam and Derbyshire is known as England's Plague Village. Visitors

(25:42):
come from far and wide, attracted by the tale of
Eam villagers who sacrificed their lives so that others might live.
On the last Sunday of August, locals commemorate those brave
souls with a celebration known as Plague Sunday. It's five

(26:15):
am April seventeenth, nineteen sixty six, when two Portage County,
Ohio Sheriff's deputies stop to investigate an abandoned vehicle along
a road near Ravena. Deputy Dale's spar gets out of
his car while Wilburt Barney Neff remains at his He
hears a strange humming noise, so he turns around and

(26:36):
sees this giant UFO, said Bryan Siech, co founder of
the Center for Unexplained Events. The unidentified flying object rises
from behind the trees and hovers above them, the ground
drenched in bright light. What transpires next will be an
eighty six mile chase at speeds of more than one
hundred miles per hour that'll take the deputies and a

(26:59):
few more on a harrowing ride from Ohio to Pennsylvania.
For law enforcement officers, the bizarre trek won't end in Conway, Pennsylvania.
It will follow them for the rest of their lives.
Initially instructed by their dispatcher to shoot the object, spar
and f are told to stand down by Sergeant Henry Schoenfeldt,

(27:19):
who wonders if the two have found a government weather balloon.
About the same time, police Chief Gerald Bouchert, who was
on patrol the nearby mantawh hears the deputy's call about
lights in the sky. He raises home to get his
camera and snaps three shots of what he describes as
two table saucers put together. With the UFO's zips away

(27:40):
toward the east, spour and f give chase. Spower later
would say that from the ground, the object looked like
the head of a flashlight, about forty feet wide and
twenty feet tall. The lines of the object were very distinct,
he told reporters. Somebody had control over it. It wasn't
just floating around. Sieach said. The chase slowed down near Rochester.

(28:04):
The cars got tangled up at a mess of bridges,
according to Spar. Spar would later explain, when I came
out from under the bridge, it came down and waited
for us, just as though it knew these two cars
were following it. Siach said. As soon as Spar and Nef,
now low on gas, got close to it, the object
would speed up. It was almost as if it was

(28:26):
playing cat and mouse with them. Seach said. Their vehicles
were running on fumes. Their tires were balding, he said,
so they pulled into an Atlantic service station, where they
were met by Conway patrolman Frank Penzanella. By six fifteen am,
Spar had alerted Dispatch about the three fighter jets in
pursuit of the aircraft. The officers could pick up chatter

(28:47):
from the pilots on their police radios. The object hovered,
Seach said, then shot straight out of sight. Spar recounted,
we were close, closer than I ever want to be again.
Hundreds of people also reported seeing the shiny saucer in
the sky and heard the steady, faint humming sound. It
didn't take long for a major Hector Quintinella, director Project

(29:11):
blue Book, a government funded project that investigates UFO sidings
to come knocking Headquartered out of Wright's Patterson Air Force
Base near Dayton, Project blue Book also determined whether or
not UFOs were a threat to national security. He interviewed
SPA and F and it was a rather terse interview,
Seech said, adding that Quintinilla easily explained away the sightings

(29:33):
and the photos. First, it was a satellite they saw,
Quintinilla said, Then the planet Venus officers were chasing a
stationary object. Radar didn't indicate anything peculiar, and no fighter
jets were dispatched, and Bouchert's photos those were severely fogged.
Quintinella reported a processing defects and proved nothing. I know,

(29:58):
nobody's ever going to believe it, but it's true, Spar said.
Over time, the officers would back down from their original reports,
some refusing to talk about it. Spar never discounted his experience, though,
but it did cost him his marriage and livelihood. People
generally don't want to be different. They don't want to
stick out. Seach noted as Dale even said, they're going

(30:22):
to remember me as that nut who saw a flying saucer.
They chased something. We don't know what it was, but
they chased it. People still remember the incident and its
lasting impression, especially on a young filmmaker named Steven Spielberg.
He had used the police chase and other details in
his blockbuster movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I

(30:44):
think that is a pretty cool fact that maybe a
lot of people don't know, Seech said. As spar later said,
if I could change all that I've done in my life,
I would change just one thing, and that would be
the night we chased that damn thing, that saucer. If you,

(31:05):
or somebody you know is struggling with depression, dark thoughts,
or addiction, I'd like to invite you to visit the
Hope in the Darkness page at Weird Darkness dot Com.
There I have gathered numerous resources to find hope and
solutions for those suffering from thoughts of suicide or self harm.
There is the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline as well as
the Crisis Text Line. Both have trained counselors at all

(31:28):
hours to help those in need, and the page even
includes text numbers for the US, Canada, United Kingdom and Ireland.
Those struggling with depression can get help through save dot org,
and there's information on the page for anybody to read
more about what depression truly is and how to identify it.
There are resources for those who battle addictions, be it drugs, alcohol,

(31:48):
or self destructive behavior, along with help for those related
to addicts. The page also has links to help you
find a therapist or a counselor to find help for
those who have a family member with Alzheimer's or dementia,
help for those at a crisis pregnancy, and more. These
resources are always there when you or somebody you love
needs them. On the Hope in the Darkness page at
Weird Darkness dot com. That's Weird Darkness dot com slash

(32:13):
hope coming up. In the eighteen hundreds, women finding themselves
with child but unmarried, they were treated like second class
citizens or worse, and during a time when birth control
was limited or even unavailable outside of the rhythm method.
What was a girl to do if she found herself
in such dire circumstances. Well, fortunately there was a woman

(32:33):
there ready to help, to take the baby off their
hands and give it a good home or sow. Everyone
thought at a time when having a child out of

(33:14):
wedlock was frowned upon, a time when contraception was either
nonexistent or difficult to come by. In the late eighteen
hundreds of New Zealand, this was a problem for many women. Fortunately,
there was a woman willing and able to step up,
step in and help out. Winifred Minnie McCullough was born

(33:34):
in Greenock in Western Scotland on September second, eighteen forty four.
She was one of seven children, all girls. Her father
was a railway engineer and her mother died of cancer
in eighteen fifty seven, while the exact date is unknown.
In the eighteen sixties Many moved to Invercargo with two
young girls. Her explanation she was the widow of a

(33:56):
Tasmanian doctor, which left some curious she maintained her maiden
name McCullough. There was no evidence of her husband's death
or even the marriage regardless. In eighteen seventy two she
married an innkeeper named Charles Dean. Minnie and Charles lived
in Edel Creek and a short eight years later, Minnie's

(34:17):
two daughters had married and moved on. Missing the sound
of children in the house, Minnie and Charles adopted a
five year old girl named Margaret Cameron. The three moved
to Wynton, New Zealand, having purchased an old, abandoned two story,
seven roomhouse named the Larches on twenty two acres of land. Unfortunately,
the house burnt down shortly thereafter. Charles built the family

(34:41):
a two room cottage with a lean to on the
site and took on the task of raising pigs. They
adopted another girl, esther, and to bring in some extra income,
Minnie began taking in on wanted babies for payment. The practice,
called baby farming, was considered a necessary evil. While contras
option was not readily available, abortion was illegal and dangerous,

(35:03):
and unwed mothers were ostracized and had little to know
provision for caring for the baby. Many was there to
help them out. She placed discreet ads in the newspaper
Respectable married woman, comfortable home country, wants to adopt an
infant address childless Times Office. Legal agreements were drawn up

(35:25):
and signed for most of the babies she took in,
and she earned five to eight shillings a week. Others
she adopted for a lump sum of ten pounds and
thirty pounds. Mini was known to take in as many
as nine children at a time. Infant mortality was a
significant problem in New Zealand at this time for children

(35:45):
of European descent, where it's estimated that between eighty and
one hundred of every one thousand live births did not survive,
so it wasn't surprising when a baby under her care
would die. In October eighteen eighty nine, a six month
old baby died of convulsions after being ill for three days.
In March eighteen ninety one, a six week old infant

(36:06):
died of inflammation of the heart valves and congestion of
the lungs. The medical witness at the time reported that
all the children living at the Larchest were well cared
for and received proper nourishment. However, the report also indicated
that the premises were inadequate. The coiner exonerated many of
any wrongdoing, but recommended she reduced the number of children

(36:27):
in her care as well as improved conditions. Many complied,
but only partially. She slightly reduced the number of children
she cared for but made no effort to improve the
conditions of her home. News of the deaths spread, and
the inquest itself left the community enraged. They began to

(36:47):
see many as a baby farmer, such as those in
Britain in Australia who had been convicted of murdering infants
for financial gain. No new deaths were reported, but that
did not stop people from gossiping and the subsequent rumors.
Police took an interest and kept her under surveillance. Their
hands were tied, however, due to insufficient child welfare laws.

(37:10):
Under these laws, police were not allowed to enter or
inspect the dean property, and many was not required to
keep records or answer any of their questions. This made
proving any wrongdoing difficult. They cannot even directly identify if
a child in her possession had died. Many didn't help
her case either. In eighteen ninety three, the proprietor of

(37:31):
a christ Church boarding house contacted the police. He reported
that a woman had acquired three week old baby during
her stay. The detective quickly removed the baby from her care.
In his report, he stated, I believe this woman would
have killed or abandoned this child before she got to
Dunedin if it had not been taken from her. The
woman was identified as Many Dean. On May second, eighteen

(37:56):
ninety five, the suspicions were confirmed. According to a railway guard,
Minnie Dean boarded a train with a baby and a
hat box. The hat box presumably empty as it weighed
very little. When she departed the train, the baby was
gone and the hat box was mysteriously heavy. A woman
by the name of Jane Hornsby came forward, claiming that

(38:17):
she had given her granddaughter Eva to Minnie that very day.
Searching Minnie's residence, clothes belonging to the girl were found,
but the child herself was nowhere to be seen. A
search along the railway turned up no sign of a child,
but that didn't matter. Minnie Dean was arrested and charged
with murder. Minnie's garden was searched, still looking for the baby.

(38:41):
It was there that they discovered the recently buried bodies
of two baby girls and the skeleton of a four
year old boy. Eva was confirmed to have died of suffocation,
and the other, one year old, Dorothy Edit Carter, had
died from an overdose of laudanum, a drug used as
a painkiller and sedative in children. They were unable to

(39:02):
determine the cause of death for the boy, however, Many
later admitted that he had drowned under her care the
year prior. At her trial, Minnie's lawyer, Alfred Hanlon, argued
that all the debts had been accidental and were only
covered up to prevent the outrage she had previously experienced.
Outside hat boxes containing dolls were reportedly sold as souvenirs,

(39:24):
and she was officially the most hated woman in New Zealand.
The trial lasted only four days. Her defense fell short,
and on June twenty first, eighteen ninety five, she was
found guilty of Dorothy Carter's murder and subsequently sentenced to
death by hanging. Between June and August eighteen ninety five,

(39:44):
Minnie Dean wrote down her own account. In this, she
claimed to have cared for twenty eight children, five of
which were in good health when her home was raided,
Six had died under her care, and one had been
reclaimed by her parents. Aside from her two adopted daughter,
that left fourteen children unaccounted for. On August twelfth, eighteen

(40:05):
ninety five, Many Dean was executed by Tom Long at
the Invocardo Jail at the intersection of Spay and Eleven
Streets and what's now the Nole Leaning car park. According
to the Otago Daily Times, she walked straight on without
a halt, to the drop door, gave a scrutinizing glance,
first at the gallows and its belongings, then at the

(40:26):
half dozen people standing below, a contemptuous loathing look at
the hangman, and placed herself in a position to facilitate
his work as much as possible, and took a few
long breaths while he was adjusting the rope and placing
the white calico cap over her head and face. Her
final words claimed her innocence. I have nothing to say

(40:47):
except that I am innocent. It is reported that as
she fell through the trap door, she cried out, Oh God,
let me not suffer. Minnie Dean is the only woman
to have been executed in New Zealand. Her body was
interred in the Winton Cemetery, now accompanied by her husband,
who died in a house fire in nineteen oh eight.

(41:08):
The crimes committed led to the passage of new child
welfare legislation, the Infant Life Protection Act eighteen ninety three
and the Infant Protection Act eighteen ninety six. Today, many
Dean exists in New Zealand folklore as the baby killer
of the South Island. According to the local legend, she
killed babies with a hatpin while dressed in all black.

(41:30):
Minnie was like the boogeyman of our town. When I
was a kid, said singer songwriter Helen Henderson, who grew
up in Scotland. If you were giving cheek to your
mom or being naughty, it was like, you'd better watch out,
or I'll send you off to Minny Dean's farm and
you'll never be heard of again. It's reported that even today,
no grass has ever grown on her grave. Thanks for listening.

(42:04):
If you like the show, please share it with someone
you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters,
or unsolved mysteries like you do. You can email me
anytime with your questions or comments at Darren at Weird
Darkness dot com. Darren is dr r e N. Weirddarkness
dot Com is also where you can find all of
my social media. Listen to audiobooks off narrated, sign up

(42:27):
for the email newsletter, visit the store for Weird Darkness merchandise,
read articles in my Weird Darknews blog, and more. Weirddarkness
dot Com is also where you can find the Hope
in the Darkness page if you or somebody you know
is struggling with depression or dark thoughts. All stories on
Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise.
Man you can find links to the stories or the

(42:48):
authors in the show notes. Weird Darkness is a registered
trademark copyright Weird Darkness. And now that we're coming out
of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light.
A'm i A twenty nine Verse eleven, for I know
the plans I have for you, declares the Lord plans
to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to
give you hope and the future. And a final thought,

(43:12):
life doesn't always require a detailed plan. Just take a
deep breath, let it all go, and have faith that
it'll all work out. Heidi Dlair. I'm Darren Marler. Thanks
for joining me in the Weird Darkness. In the three

(44:09):
Hungry days of the Roaring twenties, when speakeasies overflowed and
jazz filled smoke laden rooms, America's appetite for scandal seemed insatiable.
The public devoured tabloid headlines, but the same fervor they
consumed bootleg gin in no case fed that hunger. Quite
like the sordid tale of Ruth Snyder and jud Gray,

(44:32):
their bungled murder plot shocked the nation not for its brutality,
but for its stupidity. A cheap crime involving cheap people,
as one writer memorably dubbed it, What began as an
illicit affair between a bored Long Island housewife and a
forgettable corset salesman spiraled into one of the most sensatial

(44:52):
murder trials of the decade, complete with celebrity spectators, dueling confessions,
and a shocking photograph that would immortalize the moment death
came calling. It's known as the dumb Bell Murder, so
named because it was executed with weapons and wit equally blunt.

(45:22):
Welcome Weirdos. I'm Darren Marler and this is Weird Darkness Radio,
where every week you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore,
the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained.
Coming up this hour before he became a Civil War general.

(45:45):
Congressman Dan E. Sickles's scandalous murder trial changed our legal
system forever. He said outright that he had killed his
wife's lover, So how did he avoid being found guilty
of the crime that he admitted to committing. In the
year eleven fifty two children were found near Woolpit in England.
They wore strange clothes, spoke oddly, but the most identifiable

(46:08):
characteristic for both children was their skin was green. The
children themselves were a mystery. But what happened when they
grew up? Did they marry, did they have children? Could
there be descendants of the green children of Woolpit living
among us today? A man is found dead, fully clothed,

(46:29):
kneeling in his own bathtub. The physition of the man's
body and where he was found is strange enough, But
what happened to Christopher Case before his death is stranger still.
But first, Ruth Snyder and jud Gray devised a scheme
to get rid of Ruth's husband, and they planned it
so well that okay now, actually they were so ineft

(46:52):
that they were caught immediately, and even the police publicly
called them incompetent will begin with that story. If you're
new here, welcome to the show. And if you're already
a member of this weirdo family, please take a moment
and invite somebody else to listen in with you. Recommending
Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me
to keep doing the show. And while you're listening, be

(47:12):
sure to visit Weirddarkness dot com, where you can follow
me on social media, listen to free audiobooks that I've narrated.
Read my Weird dark News blog with stories that never
make it to the show. Sign up for the free newsletter,
grab Weird Darkness merchandise and more. That's Weird Darkness dot com.
Now bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights,

(47:35):
and come with me into the weird Darkness. The Snyder Murder,

(47:56):
as one crime writer put it, was a cheap crime
involving chief people. Many considered it the low point in
a history of the early nineteen hundreds. But for those
who lived in the thrill hungry days of the Roaring twenties,
they devoured every sordid detail and made the otherwise mundane.
Ruth Snyder and her accomplice jud Gray into infamous celebrities.

(48:19):
In addition to murder, their second greatest crime was simply
being stupid. The events in the case began quietly in
nineteen twenty five, when Ruth Brown Snyder, a discontented Long
Island housewife, met a Corset salesman named Henry Judd Gray
while having lunch in New York. Ruth thirty two, was
a tall blonde with solid, good looks and commanding personality.

(48:44):
Jud Gray, thirty four, was short and almost instantly forgettable.
He had a cleft chin and thick glasses that gave
him a perpetual look of surprise. Despite the fact that
they seemed to be polar opposites, sexual attraction flared between
the two of them at their first meeting, and they
soon began having a torrid affair. Ruth Snyder's husband, Albert,

(49:07):
was the art editor of the magazine Motor Boating Now Laughing,
and was never home during the day. The adulterous couple
only had the Snyder's nine year old daughter, Lorraine to
contend with, and the amorous pair would often meet at
the Snyder's home while Lorraine was a school. On other occasions,
the little girl would be left in a hotel lobby
while her mother and her lover met upstairs. They met

(49:29):
as often as possible and seemed unable to get enough
of one another. But Ruth Snyder soon changed from a
sex obsessed housewife to a woman with devious plans. Bored
in her loveless marriage. She tried to convince jud that
her husband mistreated her and that he must be killed.
Gray objected, but Ruth continued to pester him with hints, suggestions,

(49:54):
and then outright demands. Finally, on Saturday, March nineteenth, nineteen
twenty seven, jud gave in. It was a cold, raw
day on Long Island, and Gray spent most of the
day drinking, trying to summon the courage to go through
with the murder. He and Ruth had cooked up a
plan that had him traveling by train to New York

(50:16):
from Syracuse and then by bust along Island. When he
arrived in Queen's Village, where the Snyders lived, he walked
around for an hour, stopping under street lights to take
drinks from his flask. It was almost as if he
hoped to be spotted and arrested for breaking the law.
No one paid any attention to him. Though, and finally
he had to enter the Snyder home. He came in

(50:39):
through the back door, as he and Ruth had planned.
The Snyder family was away at a party and would
return late. Judah promised to hide in a spare room
where Ruth had left a window sash wait, rubber gloves,
and chloroform, all the tools of murder. Ruth returned home
around two a m. And she opened the bedroom door

(51:01):
a crack. She whispered, are you in there, bud dear.
She soon returned wearing only a slip and the two
had sex, with her husband asleep just down the hallway. Finally,
after about an hour, Gray grabbed the window sash weight
and Ruth led him to the master bedroom, where Albert
Snyder slept with the blankets up over his head. The

(51:23):
two of them stood on opposite sides of the bed,
and then Gray raised the sash weight and brought it
down clumsily onto Snyder's head. The weak blow merely glanced
off the man's skull, and while stunned, he let out
a roar and tried to seize his attacker. Jud became
terrified and led out a whining scream for help. There

(51:44):
was no panic in Ruth Snyder, and with a snort
of disgust and anger, she grabbed the weight from Jud's
hands and crashed it down on her husband's skull, killing him.
After that, the two of them went downstairs, had drinks
and chatted about the rest of their plan. They faked
a robbery by knocking over some chairs and loosely tying

(52:05):
Ruth's hands and feet. Minutes after Gray left, Ruth began
banging on Lorraine's door. The child ran out and removed
the gag from her mother's mouth. She told her daughter
to get help, and Lorraine ran next door to the
neighbor's house, where the police were called. Even though the
pair believed they had planned well, their robbery was far

(52:26):
from convincing to experienced police officers. All of the items
that Ruth said had been taken by the mysterious burglar
were found hidden inside the house, and detectives began to
question her. Surprisingly, she gave up almost at once and
confessed to the murder, but not surprisingly, she blamed everything
on jud Gray. He was found hours later hiding in

(52:49):
the Syracuse hotel room. He shrieked his innocence and insisted
that he had not been in New York. When confronted
with the train ticket, stubbed that he had carelessly tossed
in the trash cannon in the hotel room. He broke
down and confessed. Like Ruth, he blamed everything on his accomplice,
Damon Runyon. The celebrated newsman, later wrote that Ruth and

(53:11):
Judd were inept idiots and called the whole mess the
dumb Bell Murder because it was so dumb. By the
time the case went to trial, the two former lovers
were at one another's throats, each blaming the other for
the deadly deed. The trial became a media frenzy. Celebrities
attended in droves, including mystery writer Mary Roberts Reinhardt, director

(53:34):
d W. Griffith, author Will Durant, evangelists Billy Sunday and
Amy Semple, McPherson, and many others. Both defendants had separate
attorneys arguing for their innocence. Ruth's lawyer stated that her
husband drove love out from the house by longing after
a departed sweetheart, leaving her no choice but to have

(53:55):
an affair. Judge, she claimed, took her to speakeasies and
drank himself senseless but she never touched a drop of liquor.
When jud took the stand, his lawyer blamed Ruth for
everything and described his client's situation as the most tragic
story that has ever gripped the human heart. Just as
Ruth had blamed everything on him, he told the jury

(54:18):
that she had forced him to kill her husband. The
jury didn't care, and in just ninety eight minutes found
them both guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair.
Jud Gray was executed first on January twelfth, nineteen twenty eight.
He sat smiling in his cell when the warden came

(54:38):
for him. He told the warden that he was ready
to go. He said, I have nothing to fear. Ruth
Snyder followed her former lover just minutes after she watched
the prison light's flicker, signaling that the switch had been
thrown for the electric chair. Reporters remembered that as she
was being led to the death chamber that she had
said days before that God had forgiven her and that

(54:59):
she hoped the world would. A clever reporter from the
New York Daily News smuggled a camera into the death
chamber by strapping it to his ankle. He managed to
click off a photo just as the current entered Root's
body and snapped her body against the chair straps. The
photograph ran in the next day's edition of the paper,
but soon the lurid tale faded into history. Soon people

(55:22):
remembered the photo more than they remembered who had been
sitting in the chair. The Dumbbell murder was another one
for the history books when Weird Darkness returns. Before he

(55:46):
became a Civil War general, Congress Dany Sickle's scandalous murder
trial changed our legal system forever. He sat outright that
he had killed his wife's lover, So how did he
avoid being found guilty of the crime he admitted to committing.
First though a man is found dead, fully clothed, kneeling
in his own bathtub, the position of the man's body

(56:08):
and where he is found is strange enough, But what
happened to Christopher Case before his death is stranger still.
That story is up next. If you like what you're hearing,
you can get Weird Darkness seven days a week through
the Weird Darkness Podcast. You can find it wherever you
listen to podcasts. You can also find it on YouTube,

(56:28):
or just visit Weirddarkness dot com and find a list
of all the apps where you can listen to the
show or listen to it right there on the website
that's weird darkness dot com. On the morning of April eighteenth,

(57:13):
nineteen ninety one, a thirty five year old man named
Christopher was found dead in his apartment. No signs of
struggle or fight were found, and even no forced entry.
His body was discovered in an empty bathtub, fully dressed
in a kneeling position, with his head resting on the wall.
The death of Christopher case shook the whole of Washington.

(57:37):
When police searched his place, they found a lot of candles, crucifixes, books,
salts poured on each and every entry of his home,
even windows. When the police further investigated, they heard religious
music playing in his room, maybe to keep his home
safe from supernatural powers. The doctors told that he'd died

(58:00):
because of a heart attack. Looking at his place, it
doesn't seem like a natural death. Everything pointed towards something paranormal.
Was it really a heart attack or some supernatural powers
which scared him to death. Christopher was a thirty five
year old, intelligent and sophisticated man who grew up in Richmond, Virginia.

(58:23):
It was a small town radio DJ. He was very
much passionate about his music, so he decided to move
to Seattle, Washington to start a new career as a
music executive, where he worked for Muzac Holdings. Christopher made
a lot of new friends in Seattle, but never lost
touch with the old ones. He was single for a

(58:43):
long time as he was used to traveling a lot
because of his work and lived alone. He was a
fitness zealot, used to take his vitamin supplements regularly. He
didn't have any serious health issues, and he used to
exercise regularly. Then what happened which made him do all
of this? Why was he afraid? April eleventh, nineteen ninety one,

(59:07):
seven days before his death, he had a meeting in
San Francisco with other music executives. He was introduced to
an older woman who shared her ancient music interest with him.
She seemed interested in him as well and asked him
to take her home. He refused her politely, as she
was his senior. This rejection made her angry, and she

(59:29):
told him something creepy that she was a witch and
cursed him and that he would die within a week. Christopher,
of course, did not take this seriously as he did
not believe in any supernatural things. He went back to
his home in Seattle the next morning. After a couple
of days, he completely forgot about the incident. On April fourteenth,

(59:50):
he called his friend Sammy and told her that he
wasn't able to sleep at night because of strange whispers footsteps,
like someone was watching him. On April sixteenth, he again
called his friend to tell her how he got attacked
last night when he was sleeping. He told her that
someone was trying to suffocate him by unseen hands. After

(01:00:11):
some time, he also noticed some cuts on his fingers
and bloodstains on his bed sheet. In the morning, he
went to a religious bookstore and picked a handful of crucifixes.
After being asked by the store manager, he told him
that he was being attacked by some supernatural powers, and
the store manager handed him some religious books that might
help him. On April sixteenth, in the afternoon, he placed

(01:00:34):
crucifixes all around his home with candles and poured salt
on all the entries, and also wrote notes on how
to overcome supernatural powers that were scattered all over his place.
On April sixteenth, in the evening, something strange happened, which
is not clear even now, but he was so frightened
that he left his home to stay in a hotel,

(01:00:57):
and because of this he was not able to contact
his friends and Sammy didn't receive any call from Christopher
that night, so she called the local Seattle police force
to do a welfare check on Christopher's property. Police found
the residents locked and were unable to have access, so
they reported back to Sammy. Sammy lived in another part

(01:01:17):
of the country and was feeling helpless as she couldn't
reach him on the seventeenth of April. That morning, Sammy
got a message from Christopher on the answering machine in
which he said that they almost got him and it's
his last day on earth. Not only Sammy, but two
more people heard from him that day, a Catholic church

(01:01:38):
priest and the religious bookstore owner. They told him the
necessary things, but despite all his efforts, Christopher lost his
life on the night of April seventeenth, nineteen ninety one.
Mile Cardiatis was said to be the main cause of
Christopher's death, as he was used to taking vitamin supplements,
but in further investigation it was told that he didn't

(01:01:59):
have any symptoms of myocarditis. His friends to this day
still believe he died due to the supernatural curse of
a witch. Up next, it's the story about how that
congressman apparently got away with murder even after admitting to

(01:02:21):
the crime. Before we jump into the break though, there
are numerous methods for execution, hanging, stoning, being burned at
the stake. What about death by elephant? Elephants are one
of the smartest and most powerful animals in the world.
It's no wonder then, that these magnificent beasts were exploited
and trained to be brutal executioners. True story. Death by

(01:02:44):
elephant is a form of capital punishment that's been used
for at least two thousand years, particularly in India, but
also in other parts of South and Southeast Asia. Execution
by elephant is, of course brutal and terrifying. In India,
where this form of capital punishment known as gungarou, the
accused was crushed to death with brute force, but the

(01:03:05):
death was not always swift. Elephants runder the constant control
of an elephant trainer who forced the animal, through the
use of a sharp metal hook, to carry out their commands.
Under the control of this person, the elephant could inflict
a slow and tortuous death by crushing the convicted person's
limbs one by one and tossing them about the ground,
dragging them, or stabbing them with their tusks, before finishing

(01:03:27):
them off by crushing their skull. In neighboring Sri Lanka,
elephants were said to have been fitted with sharp blades
on their tusks, which would rip the criminal to pieces.
In the former Kingdom of Siam now Thailand, elephants were
trained to toss their victims into the air before crushing
them to death. In the Kingdom of Kachinchina southern Vietnam,
criminals were tied to a stake while an elephant would

(01:03:47):
charge into them and crush them to death. The popularity
of execution by elephant continued into the nineteenth century, and
it was only with the increasing presence of the British
in India that the popularity of this brutal penalty and
they went into decline. Talk about an executionerer working for
peanuts In eighteen fifty nine, Congressman Dan Sickles pulled out

(01:04:35):
a pistol and shot his wife's lover standing in full
view of the White House. Sickles screamed, you scoundrel, you
have dishonored my house. You must die. The shocking crime
made headlines around the world, and Sickles became the first
person in American history to plead temporary insanity to try

(01:04:56):
and get away with murder. The son of a wealthy
New York Familyan Sickles earned a law degree and seduced
a teenager before he was elected to Congress. Sickles was
thirty three when he married sixteen year old Teresa Bagioli.
When he was elected to the House of Representatives in
eighteen fifty six, the couple took Washington, d c. By storm,

(01:05:16):
becoming fixtures in high society. Both Dan and Teresa pursued affairs.
Dan also had a reputation for visiting brothels, but only
Teresa's dalliance raised eyebrows. In the nineteenth century, a wife's
affair transformed her husband into a cuckold, undermining his masculinity,

(01:05:36):
while a husband's affairs were simply business as usual. According
to Dan Sickles, Teresa's affair drove him to murder. Beginning
in the spring of eighteen fifty eight, Teresa carried on
an affair with Barton Keith, a close friend of Congressman
Sickles and the son of Francis Scott Key, who penned
the lyrics to the Star Spangled Banner. One DC gossip

(01:05:58):
columnist called he the handsomest man in all Washington society.
Key signaled Teresa by waving his pocket handkerchief on the street.
The pair would meet at an abandoned house only steps
from the White House, where Teresa confessed, I did what
is usual for a wicked woman to do. Everything changed
on February twenty fourth, eighteen fifty nine, when Sickles received

(01:06:22):
an anonymous letter. The enraged congressman confronted Teresa and forced
her to write a confession. Three days later, Sickles spotted
Key outside his home, waving his handkerchief to signal Teresa
that villain is out there now making signs. Sickles raged,
grabbing three guns, Sickles rushed out to confront Key. Sickles

(01:06:45):
fired his pistol before he could say a word. Key
threw a pair of opera glasses at Sickle and tried
to hide behind a tree, but Sickles continued to fire
until a bystander wrestled him to the ground. Sickles had
gonned down Key in Lafayette Park on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
With no chance of escape, Sickles took a carriage to

(01:07:06):
the home of Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black, where he surrendered.
The sensational murder became front page news. The tragic affair
produced a great sensation, reported the New York Herald. In
the streets, the law courts, public houses, private dwellings, and
in fact everywhere. It was the prominent topic of conversation.

(01:07:28):
Even President James Buchanan took sides in the sensational case.
He sent the letter of support to the imprisoned congressman.
From jail, Sickles gave interviews with the press. He has
dishonored me, and we could not live together on the
same planet, Sickles told one paper. Harper's Weekly judged the
outcome before the trial even began. The public of the

(01:07:50):
United States will justify him in the killing of the
man who dishonored his bed. Van Sickles, who admitted firing
the shots that killed Key, PopEd the would agree with
Harper's Weekly. Congressman Dan Sickles hired eight defense attorneys to
represent him during his trial. One of them, John Graham,
spent a full two days on his opening statement defending

(01:08:12):
sickles adultery was evil. Graham intuned quoting Shakespeare's Othello to
justify sickles actions, discovering the affair had made Sickles temporarily insane.
Temporary insanity was a new concept in American courts. While
defendants had pleaded insanity before, no one had claimed to

(01:08:33):
be insane only temporarily. But Graham relied on the jury's
sympathy towards Sickles to justify the murder. It may be
tragical to shed human blood, but I will always maintain
that there is no tragedy about slaying the adulterer, Graham argued.
The trial also painted Teresa Sickles as a prostitute and murderer,

(01:08:56):
a wife who surrendered to the adulterer longed for her
own own husband's death. One defense attorney argued, either by
the cup of the poisoner or the dagger or pistol
of the assassin. Another attorney added that the affair pulled
Teresa toward the horrid filth that is common prostitution. Dan
Sickles painted himself as the avenger of the invaded household,

(01:09:21):
his wife was an immoral woman, and Key deserved to die.
Was the murder of Key justifiable homicide or temporary insanity?
Dan sickles attorneys argued both at the same time. The
presiding judge didn't put much stock in the temporary insanity defense.

(01:09:42):
In his jury instructions on April twenty sixth, Judge Crawford
warned the jurors that a gap between Sickles's learning of
the affair and killing Keys weighed the scales toward premeditated murder,
and in fact, Sickles had spent three days plotting his
revenge after receiving the anonymous note. It only took the
jury an hour to declare Dan Sickles not guilty by

(01:10:04):
reason of temporary insanity. The packed courtroom burst into applause,
and fifteen hundred people led Sickles through the streets in
an impromptu victory parade. From the start, many predicted Sickles
would walk for his crime. During jury selection, seventy two
of the first seventy five prospective jurors were excused for

(01:10:26):
sympathizing with the murderer. We regard this as a most
mistaken and most mischievous verdict, declared the Tribune. It's a
verdict which carries this country a long stride backwards toward
the age when Mite was right and all wrongs were
redressed by the red hand, or not at all. The
trial turned Dan Sickles into a nationally known figure, but

(01:10:49):
his actions after the trial kept Sickles in the headlines
for decades. Shortly after his acquittal, Sickles and his wife Teresa,
publicly reconciled, drawing criticism from their peers in Washington and
in the press. We hope the sympathizers with mister Sickles
at Washington, and especially the jury who exalted him into
a great champion of the sanctity of marital relations, will

(01:11:11):
be satisfied with this result, the Baltimore American wrote. Next.
Sickles left his congressional seats in eighteen sixty, quickly turning
around to raise a brigade of man for the Civil War.
As a general, Sickles led troops at Gettysburg, where he
ignored his superior officer's orders and lost the leg to
a cannonball. As an ambassador to Spain. After the war,

(01:11:34):
Sickles seduced the queen, and in his final years, Sickles
was accused of stealing public funds. The legacy of Dan
Sickles's trial outlived Sickles himself. While his case represents the
first successful temporary insanity plea, the jury almost certainly did
not buy that defense. Instead, Victorian moralists decided that well

(01:11:59):
Key had it coming. Even a notorious philanderer like Sickles
could claim righteousness if cuckolded. Yet, even though Dan sickles
trial says more about the nineteenth century views of masculinity
in women's sexuality, the ruling still broke new legal ground.
In the past one hundred and fifty years, the temporary
insanity defense has become a mainstay in the American legal system.

(01:12:37):
It's a common stereotype that extraterrestrials may have green skin color,
from green Martians to the Egyptian god Osiris depicted with
greenish skin. Ancient Celtic mythology often depicts the green man,
dating back before the Roman Empire, and in twelfth century England,
there is the story of the curious Green children of Wilpit.

(01:13:00):
The story appears to have been based on real people,
who may even have descendants today. The story is woven
together from accounts by two famous English chroniclers, William of Newburgh,
a monk from the Augustinian Priory of Newburgh, and Ralph
of Kagesheal, a monk of the Cistercian abbey Congoshall heard
the story from a man named Richard de Kom and

(01:13:23):
wrote about it in the Chronican Anglicanum around eleven eighty nine.
William of Newburg wrote about it later in Historia reream Anglicarium,
published in twelve twenty. In the mid twelfth century, in
the English county of Suffolk, there was an ancient town
called Woolpit. In Old English, the town's name was wolf Pitt,

(01:13:43):
named for pitts dug in the ground to catch roaming wolves.
In those days, the wolves were killing livestock and terrorizing villagers,
but today the village is famous for two green children
on its sign. Around eleven fifty, during the reign of
King Stephens, reaping the fields, came across two children near

(01:14:03):
a wolf pit who were acting distressed and speaking to
each other in an unknown language. A version of the
tale says they emerged from the wolf pit twice as
tall as the children and a couple hundred square feet
in area. The children wore strange clothes, unfamiliar to the villagers,
and spoke an unrecognizable language, and that, of course, their

(01:14:23):
skin was green, a startling sight, but otherwise they appeared
to be normal children. In Ralph of Kagashul's story, the
children were taken in by Sir Richard d. Kane, the
man who told him the story. There they were offered food,
but reacted to everything that they were given as if
they had never seen it before, and refused to eat it.

(01:14:45):
It seemed as if the children would starve until they
came across something familiar, green beans. In Kagashul's story, they
find the beans in the garden and gobble them up.
In another telling, the children spotted a servant carrying a
plate of beans and immediately wanted them. Thereafter, the children
were fed beans, but slowly weaned over to other food.

(01:15:07):
As their diet changed, the green coloration of their skin
began to appear normal. Sadly, the boy died soon afterward,
succumbing to an unknown illness. After a period of severe
melancholy and lethargy. However, the girl survived and was named Agnes.
As she adjusted to her new life, she learned English

(01:15:28):
and could finally answer questions about where she and her
brother had come from. According to historic uk Agnes said,
we are inhabitants of the land of Saint Martin, who
was regarded with peculiar veneration, in the country which gave
us birth. We are ignorant of how we arrived here.
We only remember this that on a certain day, when

(01:15:48):
we were feeding our father's flocks in the fields, we
heard a great sound, such as we are now accustomed
to hear at Saint Edmund's when the bells are chiming.
And whilst listening to the sound and admiration, we became
came on a sudden as it were entranced, and found
ourselves among you in the fields where you were reaping.
The sun does not rise upon our countrymen. Our land

(01:16:09):
is little cheered by its means. We are contented with
that twilight which among you precedes the sunrise or follows
the sunset. Moreover, a certain luminous country is seen not
far distant from ours, and divided from it by a
very considerable river. Another version of the story says the
children were kurding their father's cattle and herd. The bells

(01:16:33):
then entered into a cave and came out into Wolfbit.
They couldn't find their way back and were discovered by
the villagers. Agnes was baptized and lived and worked for
Sir Richard, and later was married to the Archdeacon of Ely,
Richard Barr. The couple had at least one child, thus
her descendants may exist today. According to the East Anglian

(01:16:56):
Daily Times, Agnes was known for her very wanton and
imputed behavior while in the employ of dcal and that
Richard Barr was a man from King's Lynn in Norfolk,
then a senior ambassador for Henry the Second. It is
said that England's blue blood even today as a Green
tinge through Agnes's bloodline. The source claims that finding the

(01:17:17):
descendants has been tricky, perhaps a carefully guarded local secret.
In nineteen seventy eight, local author and folks singer Bob
Roberts wrote in A Slice of Suffolk that I was
told there are still people in Wolpitt who are descendants
from the Green Children, but nobody would tell me who
they are. To this day, mystery surrounds this story, and

(01:17:38):
many people believe these children came from another world or
another dimension. Is it possible they came through some sort
of portal and ended up in the relatively densely populated
English town. Did they really come from a twilight place
where everyone had green skin? Why were they so unfamiliar
with bright sunlight? Why did they only recognize and accept

(01:18:01):
green beans, refusing other foods. Lastly, if they were ordinary children,
why didn't any relatives ever try to find them? Now
it's clearly much more fun to imagine the green children
came from another realm, and historically there are similar ancient
tales of celestial beings who existed in an underground or

(01:18:23):
hidden world, accessed via portals or fairy rings at ancient
megalithic structures. The Twatha Dednnon of Ireland was a pre
Celtic Irish tribe of legends that say they were shining
beings forced to remove themselves to the underground. They may
have been driven away by the Celts, who often depicted

(01:18:44):
the green Man. Today, the Tuatha live on in modern
fairy tales and epic movies, and novels about elves, such
as Lord of the Rings the more likely explanations and
one that echoes a dark fairy tale called the Babes
in the Woods tale for published in fifteen ninety five.
According to The Guardian, it told the story of a

(01:19:05):
wicked uncle who hires a couple of murderers to kill
his orphaned niece and nephew because if they die young,
he will inherit their estate. The assassins take pity on
the children and abandon them in the wood, where they
get lost, starve, and eventually perish. Another theory along the
lines of this terrible tale is that the children were

(01:19:25):
poisoned with arsenic by an earl from Norfolk, which tinted
their skin green. An interesting side note, in the nineteenth century,
arsenic and copper were used to die fabric's green, Paris
green and shields green were popular colors worn by the
social elite in Europe. Arsenic was also found in candy, paper, toys, wallpaper,

(01:19:49):
and medicine before people knew that it was deadly toxic. Thus,
many in Victorian society died mysteriously. Symptoms could include green hands,
yellow nails, and crater like scars. If arsenic poisoning was
not to blame but the green skin. Then the green
sickness called chlorosis might be to blame. The condition caused

(01:20:12):
a green complexion and results from iron deficiency. This might
explain why Agnes lost her green skin over time as
her diet changed. A third theory is that the Green
children were Flemish victims of persecution during the Battle of
Fornham in eleven seventy three. According to Mentalfloss, Fornham Saint
Martin was a nearby village, separated from Wolpit by a

(01:20:34):
river and just a few miles from Bury Saint Edmunds
were loud bells often chimed. It's possible that children had
been orphaned, suffered a poor diet while lost and on
their own, and eventually made their way to Woolpit from
Fornham Saint Martin by following the clanging bells. If you
consider all the theories, there is still no clear and

(01:20:56):
definite answer. If Agnes and her brother were Flemish children
who had lost their parents, why does she make no
mention of losing her father. She said that she was
hurting her father's cows by one account, but doesn't mention
anything out of the ordinary. Why does one account suggest
that the green skin coloration was the norm in their

(01:21:17):
place of origin? And lastly, how did the children end
up in a pit in the ground after traveling through
a cavern. Abundant questions remain about the green children of Woolpit,
which makes it a fascinating mystery even today. Keep listening.

(01:21:43):
I got another story for you coming up, but wanted
to let you know that in the podcast version of
tonight's radio show, I have Sudden Death overtime with even
more content that I don't have time to put into
Tonight's show. Tom and Lena are in a loving relationship.
They have a young child together. It sounds like the
perfect family, except for one tiny detail about their relationship.

(01:22:04):
Tom and Lena are biological brother and sister. Also in Norfolk, England,
the village of Eccles was slowly gobbled by the rising
waters of the sea in the early sixteen hundreds, but
even today, sometimes during a particularly heavy storm, you can
see Saint Mary's Church mysteriously reappear, bringing with it the

(01:22:24):
dead buried in the church graveyard who could not find rest.
Also in Tonight's Sudden Death Overtime, Lorii Price and his
wife Ethel mysteriously disappeared from Mary in Illinois. But then
sometimes that happens when you're mixed up with the mob,
or may have learned something you weren't supposed to. And
the Catacombs of Saint Calixtus in Rome, Italy hold the

(01:22:45):
remains of sixteen popes, several martyrs, and around half a
million Christians, and according to one author, a not of
this world entity. All of those stories in the Sudden
Death overtime content in tonight's podcast, which I'll be releasing
tonight after the show at weird Darkness dot com. Welcome

(01:23:30):
back to Weird Darkness. I'm Daryn Marler. You know, dance
fever might sound like a fun night out on the
weekend now, but in the sixteenth century Strasburg, which is
now France, there was a whole summer when a village
twerked themselves to death and nobody knows why. The cause
of the mysterious dancing plague was never discovered. One theory

(01:23:52):
suggests that the dancing plague was a result of mass
hysteria caused by fear and anxiety. There's also the medical
theory that ergat, a toxic mold found in damp rye
can produce spasms and hallucinations, but there's no proof that
either of these theories were the cause of the dancing plague. Switzerland, Holland,
and Germany they had similar plagues, although none were quite

(01:24:15):
as large as Strasburg. Occasional later history. We know something
strange and inexplicable will befall a town or village because
it was well documented, but modern historians just can't explain
it anymore than the ones who lived through it. The
Dancing Plague of fifteen eighteen is one such event that
began in July when a woman believed to be Frau
Trufo Frau means missus in German. She bust out her

(01:24:38):
dance moves in the middle of the street, but then
didn't stop. Presumably it's exactly the sort of thing that
town and footloose was worried about, because she turned into
a pied piper tempress of cutting a rug, and soon
others were joining in her strange and never ending dance.
People stopped eating or sleeping, it just joined in the
frenzied dance as if being whirled away from the cares

(01:24:59):
of the mortal world and soon the dancers began to
collapse and sometimes die. The strange and growing crowd of
dancers is said to have reached four hundred people at
the height of the craze and didn't come to an
end until September of the same year. The problem became
so bad that government officials, doctors, and religious figures were
all trying every solution they could think of to end

(01:25:21):
the twerking terror. And while it's ultimately unknown why it
came to an end, the church went ahead and claimed
credit for Saint Vitus. Anyway, there have been several outbreaks
of dancing mania in history, but it largely died out
by the seventeenth century. Living a strange mystery that may
never be solved. The leading theories on what caused phenomena
are or got poisoning known to cause hallucinogenic effects, or

(01:25:43):
stress induced massysteria, the scientific way of saying living conditions
were so bad that a lot of people just mentally snapped.
That does sound like some fae antics, though to be sure,
it also kind of sounds like that summer when everybody
was playing Pokemon Go. What was that all about? Thanks

(01:26:08):
for listening. If you like the show, please share it
with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories,
true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do. You
can email me anytime with your questions or comments at
Darren at Weird Darkness dot com. Darren is dr r
e N. Weirddarkness dot Com is also where you can
find all of my social media. Listen to audiobooks I've narrated,

(01:26:31):
sign up for the email newsletter, visit the store for
Weird Darkness merchandise, read articles in my Weird Darknews blog,
and more. Weirddarkness dot Com is also where you can
find the Hope in the Darkness page if you or
somebody you know is struggling with depression or dark thoughts.
And remember, I have a lot more material in Tonight's
Sudden Death overtime content which you can hear in the

(01:26:52):
podcast version of tonight's show, which I will be uploading
to the website immediately after Tonight's show is over. Tom
and Lena are biological brothers, but they fell in love
with each other and decided to start a family. We
have the disappearing and reappearing village of Eccles, and we
have the Callixtus Catacomb's entity a lot more material to
listen to. If you like what you've already heard, you

(01:27:12):
can find it at weirddarkness dot com immediately after tonight's show.
All stories on Weird Darkness are purported to be true
unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the
stories or the authors in the show notes. Weird Darkness
is a registered trademark copyright Weird Darkness. And now that
we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with
a little light two Timothy one, verse seven, for God

(01:27:36):
gave us a spirit, not a fear, but of power
and love and self control. And a final thought, how
beautiful it is to find someone who asks for nothing
but your company, Bridget Nicole. I'm Darren Marler. Thanks for
joining me in the Weird Darkness. All of the names

(01:28:26):
in this next story have been changed to protect the
identities of those disgusts, and you're about to find out why.
Tom's profile picture shows him and his girlfriend Lena. She
hugs him from behind, lovingly kissing him on the neck.
He's smiling, twining his fingers in her long brown hair.
Strictly speaking, nothing's wrong with this photo. It shows two

(01:28:48):
people who love each other, a relationship based on mutual attraction.
But Lena is Tom's sister, and for most people this
changes everything. The photograph actually becomes criminal evidence. I'm scared
of people finding me disgusting, says Tom. He looks away
and claws at his fingers. He's been in a committed

(01:29:10):
relationship with his sister now for twenty years, and the
couple even as a child together. There's nothing that I
haven't heard before, he said. People have called me a desecrator,
sister effort, or simply retarded, and all of that has
come out of the mouths of people who were at
one time my friends. Even if society won't recognize us,
we exist and there are more of us than you think.

(01:29:33):
Rotront Perner is a psychotherapist to his work, among other things,
on various incest cases since nineteen seventy five. In most cases,
my patients were very shy towards strangers, he says. They
clearly exhibited social anxiety and tended to stay at home. This,
of course, was often linked to their backstory. Most of
them were not allowed to meet up with other people

(01:29:54):
as children because their parents were either very jealous or
very stern limiting their children's movements. Tom and Lena grew
up in a small Austrian village. They lived in a
huge white fairy tale house with a dog on the
front lawn. Their mother was a housewife and their father
a civil servant. The kids were well behaved, went to school,

(01:30:14):
and did their best not to attract negative attention in
their family. There were no quarrels, and smiles were obligatory
otherwise what would the neighbors think. At some point Tom
realized that he wasn't perfect. Lena felt the same way.
I started getting real feelings for her when we both
enter puberty, said Tom. She was blossoming. Sometimes I would

(01:30:37):
watch her getting dressed in her room and always felt
ashamed myself. Afterwards, Tom reassured himself that curiosity about the
female body is normal. He wasn't attracted to his sister,
but to women in general, but his feelings kept growing stronger. Then,
at seventeen, Lena got her first real boyfriend. That was

(01:30:59):
hell for me. Tom confesses, I hated each one of
her boyfriend's guts. Lena used to cry because I wouldn't
get on with them. Today, I know it was pure jealousy.
After a three year relationship, Lena's boyfriend cheated on her.
In the middle of the night, she stumbled into Tom's bedroom.
He was already asleep and was woken by your sobbing.

(01:31:22):
To console her, he fetched some wine from the cellar.
After the first glass came the second, and then the
third in quick succession. Intoxicated in the moment, Lena cuddled
up to his shoulder. In Rochot Pernter's view, this is
not abnormal per se from my professional experience, he said,
It's not true that people don't find their siblings attractive.

(01:31:44):
Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. More importantly, relationships between
siblings are defined by envy, rivalry, and admiration, along with
the need to cuddle or have secrets from the rest
of the world. All those things are linked to certain fantasies,
some of them induced by pop culture in the media,
others by their upbringing and family situation. Whether or not

(01:32:06):
you make those fantasies a reality depends on how good
you are at evaluating that reality. People and incestuous relationships
often lack that skill. In the case of Tom and Lena,
their fantasy soon came to life. I can still remember
it like it happened yesterday, says Tom. She looked up
at me and asked why other men can't be more

(01:32:27):
like me. That's when it happened. Tom felt sure that
he and Lena were not just siblings, but before he
could make a move, Lena leaned in and kissed him.
Tom pushed his sister away. What the hell are you doing,
he screamed. Lena started to cry. The following days were
torture for Tom. Of course they could have just blamed

(01:32:48):
it on the alcohol, but was it really a one off?
His thoughts just wouldn't leave him alone. He begun to
remember specific situations. It became clear to me that Lena
and I I were always flirting, he said. I always
used to take it as a joke, but it couldn't
have been. All these strange situations suddenly became crystal clear.

(01:33:11):
He now knows that he used to watch Lena getting
dressed because he was keen on her. He wasn't just
aroused because she was a woman, but also because he
had feelings for her. Lena and Tom have since spoken
about that a lot. Lena has told Tom that she
would leave her door open on purpose so that he
could observe her she was trying to seduce him, yet

(01:33:34):
that only became clear to her after their kiss. I
was relieved to find out she felt the same way
about me, said Tom. We could be happy together, but
of course that was a kind of utopia. In reality,
our love was a curse. It still is. The type
of relationship that Tom and Lena have would be taboo

(01:33:54):
in nearly every culture, and it's also illegal in many
countries around the world, including most of Europe. Sexual relationships
between close relatives are prohibited. In Austria, where Tom and
Lena are from, incest between parents and children is punishable
by up to a year in prison. An incest between
siblings can result in six months behind bars. When Tom

(01:34:17):
slept with Lena for the first time, it wasn't just
an act of love but also a criminal offense. It
was then that I realized we're criminals. But paragraph two
eleven of the Austrian Criminal Code punishes consenting adults for
entering relationships with other adults. We're not forcing each other
into anything. For Tom, this paragraph is a huge black

(01:34:38):
cloud hovering above him. He can't understand why he should
be sent to prison, since when is discussed a reason
to imprison others. He said, nobody would make someone serve
time for having sex with a cake just because someone
else found it disgusting. Of course, there's also a biological
dimension to incest. Bands share a common gene pool that

(01:35:01):
becomes more and more similar the closer the blood relationship is.
Frankel Lacone, a doctor from the Institute of Medical Genetics
at the Medical School of Vienna, said, of course, everybody
carries what we call silent mutations, which are completely harmless.
The problems start only when you carry the same mutations
in the exact same genes. The risk for this increases

(01:35:23):
significantly between relatives. If the parents are first cousins, the
probability of recessive genetic defects increases to six percent, while healthy,
non related parents have a risk of only three percent
for handing down such defects. For mothers, getting pregnant from
incestuous intercourse is approximately as dangerous as getting pregnant as
someone from trisomi, according to Laconne. Not surprisingly, Tom has

(01:35:48):
been preoccupied with the legal status of incest for years.
When Patrick Stubing, who had four children with his sister,
challenged Germany's incest laws in court, a decade ago. In
two thousand and eight, rejoiced he really believed that the
law could be repealed, but the appeal was rejected in
two thousand and eight by judges who cited several reasons

(01:36:08):
the law should stand, including maintaining a diverse gene pool
as in the best interests of public health. Laws against
incests can protect vulnerable people from trauma that could arise
even from consensual sexual acts, and decriminalizing incest law could
send the wrong message to the public. For Tom, the
third reason is based on arbitrary societal norms, and though

(01:36:32):
his cause is a long way from the mainstream, he's
not alone. Hans Jorg Albrecht, director of the Max Planck
Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Germany, has
tried to disprove the most common rumors surrounding incest in
a lengthy analysis. Albrecht's writings are Tom's Bible. The majority
of people think that paragraph two eleven serves children who

(01:36:54):
are yet to be born, says Tom. They're just so wrong.
They assume that one hundred percent of chills ldren who
arise from incestuous relationships are handicapped. In general, the children
of related couples are more likely to have certain kinds
of genetic conditions, but according to the Genetic Alliance, a
UK based group that works to improve the lives of
people with genetic conditions, most related couples have healthy children.

(01:37:18):
I'd understand if you told me you are going to
prison because you are endangering your child, Tom said, But
my child is healthy, and my wife and I love
each other voluntarily. Therefore all good reasons for punishment do
not apply. Tom and Lena kept their relationship secret for
several years. For a long time, we thought we were sick.

(01:37:40):
What kind of a person is in love with his sister?
Tom said, It's unbelievable what a taboo can do to
your feelings of self worth. Tom became depressed. At one point,
Tom became depressed, separating from Lena and trying to kill himself,
and Lena found him unconscious in the bath with sleeping
tablets beside him. That was a moment of self realization

(01:38:01):
for him. Something had to change. I felt like I
lived in a bubble, said Tom. Selina and Tom decided
to move out of their parents' home and far away
from anyone who knew them. Today, they share an apartment
in Germany. Their new friends think they're married. When Lena
gave birth to their daughter, Tom said, she declared the

(01:38:21):
father to be unknown. We didn't want to risk anything.
There's no way I'll let them put me in prison
and take me away from my family. Swallowed by the

(01:38:43):
greedy sea, most of the ancient village of eccless On
Sea is now under water or beneath the sand that
we walk on today. All that is left of another
of Norfolk's vanishing villages is the pre war Bush Estate,
which hides behind the sand dunes. Thriving medieval village that
was once here is now beneath the waves or underneath

(01:39:04):
the sand. Saint Mary's Church was one of the last
survivors of the village lost to the North Sea. Some
say you can still hear its bells ringing underwater as
you sail by. Probably built during the twelfth century with
a belfry at it two hundred years later, Saint Mary's
appears to have been in use until the late fifteen hundreds.

(01:39:25):
Three horrific storms in fifteen seventy wiped out swaths of
the village houses and left the church in a dreadful
state of disrepair and led it to being largely dismantled.
The tower, however, was left standing a useful sea mark
to aid navigation for passing ships. In sixteen oh five,

(01:39:45):
villagers and Necklace presented a petition to Norwich Quarter Sessions
for a reduction in their taxes, pointing out that advancing
seas had gulped down one thousand acres of their land,
half of what they had, and left only fourteen houses
and church in ruins. By the beginning of the eighteenth century,
the church was on the landward edge of the dunes,

(01:40:06):
but sand began to bury it, leaving only the octagonal
belfry visible. But unusually high tides on Boxing Day eighteen
sixty two carved into the sand hills and left the
tower exposed, once again, like a late Christmas gift for
the villagers of Eclas. From this moment it led a

(01:40:26):
colorful life, sometimes partially covered in drifts of sand, other
times laid bare by scouring tides. Families and artists sought
it out for picnics or a subject matter, and became
known affectionately as the Lonely Sentinel, and as such a
fashionable place to visit in norfolk life. By Lilias Ryder Haggard.

(01:40:47):
She remembers the eerie site of the stranded church tower
and even more terrifyingly, the hideous site of sea bleached
skeletons exposed in the sandy graveyard. She wrote one September
day years ago, when the tower of Eckless Church still
stood on the dunes. There came a northeasterly gale and
a scour which swept the sand from the old graveyard,

(01:41:10):
leaving the long outlines of the graves washed clean by
the sea. In one lay an almost perfect skeleton embedded
in the clay, the hollow eyed skull gazing up at
the limitless sweep of the sky. Until eighteen ninety five,
the tower was one of Dorfilk's best known landmarks and
a constant reminder of the ever encroaching North Sea. A

(01:41:33):
dreadful gale on January twenty third, eighteen ninety five, the
worst in living memory, finally sunk the tower for good.
Author Ernest Stuffling, who lived at next door Habsburg, tried
the lightest pipe inside the tower as the storm began
to gain momentum. That I was the last to enter
the old tower is certain, as during the night the

(01:41:53):
wind increased greatly in force, and the next day blew
with such hurricane violence that the tower was continually surrounded
by the sea, he wrote. The next day, an Eastern
Daily Press correspondent wrote, on visiting the scene, the desolation
presented to one's view is appalling. Within months, most of
the flint masonry of Saint Mary's had been swept away

(01:42:15):
or covered in sand, until only a few large sections remained,
often completely buried. The church was remembered every year by
an annual beach service held at the spot on the
August Bank Holiday Sunday. David Stannard, who was previously a
geologist in the offshore industry but has also worked as
a lecturer at City College Norwich and in local government

(01:42:38):
in Great Yarmouth before becoming an amateur archaeologist, author and historian,
happened upon the ruins of Saint Mary's during a particularly
low tide in nineteen eighty six. He said, if you
go down the beach on a Saturday evening when it's
getting dark and there is the ruin of a church
and a circle of flints in the sand, he can
only think how did that happen? Only reason we saw

(01:43:00):
anything at all, he continued, was the sea scouring away
the area. What was exposed was foundations cart tracks in
the clay, Roman pottery, skeletons in graves, and these wells
between nineteen eighty six and nineteen ninety six telltale flint
circles or rings of clay bricks in the sand gave

(01:43:21):
away the locations of eleven wells, which at the end
of their useful life had become medieval toilets and rubbish dumps,
creating a time capsule of history beneath the Eckless Sands.
But at Ecklas the ruins have not been seen since
about two thousand, after the Environment Agency's urgent work to
build an offshore rock reef and recharge the beach to

(01:43:44):
protect homes and property. I don't think I'll see Saint
Mary's Church again in my lifetime, but who knows, mister
Standard added, and what of those drowned bells tolling beneath
the waves before storms? In May nineteen thirty, Lieutenant Commander
RNA Brooks, the captain of the HMS Boena, reported hearing

(01:44:05):
a bell at around nine thirty in the morning close
to Eccless and having heard the stories and dunewhich of
underwater bells similar to that wrote to the EDP when
abreast of sea palling at about nine thirty am, I
very plainly heard one stroke of a deep toned bell.
If any of your readers heard any superstition of eckless
church bells being heard at sea, read the letter. According

(01:44:28):
to mister Standard, it is unlikely that spectral bells are
chiming beneath the waves. Firstly, the bells were probably sold
off by the Lord of the Manor, Thomas Brampton in
fifteen seventy one. Secondly, there are no mention of bells
from any of the Victorian tourists' reports. And thirdly, Saint
Mary's Tower is now thirty feet below the sand. On

(01:45:07):
January nineteenth, nineteen twenty seven, an Illinois State Police officer
named Lori Price, along with his wife Ethel mysteriously vanished
from their home in Marion, Illinois. Some say that Price's
disappearance could be blamed on the company that he kept,
or at least what he knew, because he was a
longtime friend of southern Illinois gangster Charlie Berger, who believed

(01:45:30):
that Price had information about the destruction of his hideout
near Harrisburg, a barbecue stand called Shady Rest. But whatever
the reason for Lori and Ethel's vanishings, it signed a
death sentence for Charlie Burger and left a lingering haunting
behind Loori. Price was a frequent visitor at Shady Rest.

(01:45:52):
There was no denying that. Rumors claimed that he worked
with Berger in a stolen car racket. Berger's men would
steal a car until a reward was posted, then park
it in some remote spot and tip off Price as
to its whereabouts. Price would then find the car and
split the reward with Berger. Whether this rumor was true,

(01:46:13):
it is certain that Price was on close terms with
Berger and his gunman. He was also one of the
last people to see Shady Rest before it was destroyed
by a bomb, presumably placed by members of the Shelton Gang,
enemies of Berger. At the inquest into the deaths of
four people killed when the building exploded, Price admitted that
he had been at Shady Rest on January eighth. He

(01:46:37):
stopped in after attending a movie in Marion. Steve George,
the resorts caretaker, greeted him at the door and asked
him to come in and meet his wife. While there,
Price noticed a man he had never seen before, sitting
apparently half intoxicated, near the fireplace. He also saw a
young man whom George called Clarence, passed out drunk on

(01:46:57):
a cot in an adjoining room. George told Price that
when the stranger left, he was going to bed. Price
testified that he stayed just a few minutes and then
returned to Marion. He was having breakfast early the next
morning when he heard that two explosions had leveled Shady Rest.
One week after the inquest, Pryce's stepfather, who lived nearby

(01:47:19):
on the edge of Marion, became concerned over the fact
that he had not seen Price or his wife Ethel
for two days. He knocked repeatedly, but getting no response,
he called the police. Deputies forced the door open. Pryce's
highway patrolman uniform was folded over a chair, and his
pistol and gun belt were lying on the dining room table.

(01:47:40):
Although the bed was rumpled, no one had slept in it.
Ethel's nightgown neatly folded lay on the coverlet, Her hat
and coat were missing, and the telephone wires to the
house had been cut. Price and his wife had both vanished,
had they been kidnapped or worse. Onbus fifth, nineteen twenty seven,

(01:48:02):
Lori Price's body was discovered in a field near Dubois,
about twenty five miles north of Heron. A local farmer
found the partially clothed corpse and called the police. Price
had been shot several times and was covered with blood.
The body had apparently been in the field for several days,
since animals had chewed on his hands and other extremities.

(01:48:24):
County officers identified the dead man as the missing State Patrolman.
Reporters immediately broadcast the sensational news. One reporter at the
trial of the Shelton brothers, where Charlie Berger had recently
testified against them, asked carl Shelton if he had any
idea about who might have killed Lori Price. He replied, well,

(01:48:44):
this is my theory. You know. We used to hang
around Charlie Berger's place and the papers said that he
was there before it burned down, and Verger, you know,
was always suspicious of spies. I always figured he did
away with Price on the theory that Price was going
to inform those who destroyed it of a good time
to do it. I never had any trouble with Price,
and I don't know his wife. Charlie Berger could not

(01:49:07):
be reached for comment. Investigators for the Illinois State Police
continued to work the puzzling case, but would not get
a break until May nineteen twenty seven. Initially, they believed
that Price had been killed by the Sheltons, but an
informant within the Berger gang hiding out in Ohio told
them that Price had been killed by Berger simply because

(01:49:29):
he knew too much. No one knew what had happened
to Ethel Price until Art Newman began to talk. Newman
was a trusted Berger gang member who had gone on
the run to California when things became too hot in Illinois.
He was picked up in Long Beach and extra dieded
back to Illinois. Franklin County Sheriff Jim Pritchard went to

(01:49:51):
California to bring Newman back, and he took along a
reporter for the Saint Louis Post Dispatch named John T. Rogers. Somehow,
during the long run back to Illinois, Rogers got Newman
to tell his story. The confession was given to the
state's attorney when they returned, and he indicted Newman, Charlie Berger,
Ernest Blue, Connie Ritter, Leslie Simpson, and Riley Simmons for

(01:50:13):
the murder of Lori Price. The story that Newman told
was a chilling one. He claimed that on the day
that the Prices disappeared, Berger had called him to Harrisburg
and informed him that the gang intended to question Price
about his snitching to William County authorities. The Prices had
visitors until after midnight, when Berger and the others entered

(01:50:35):
the house. Even though Price stated that he had not
been informing on Berger and had nothing to do with
the explosion at Shady Rest, Berger ordered him into Newman's car.
Price asked Charlie if he planned to hurt him, but
Berger said he just wanted to talk to him. He
shoved Price into the back seat of the car and
climbed in next to him. Wooten's led into the passenger

(01:50:58):
seat next to Newman, and as the car started arted,
Berger called out to the men who were heading for
the second automobile. He yelled, take that woman and do
away with her. Chrice pleaded with Berger not to hurt
his wife, but Charley told him to shut up. He
ordered Newman to keep driving, and then he began to
question the patrolman about everything he suspected about him. Price

(01:51:19):
was an informant, Berger declared, and there was nothing worse
than a disloyal friend. He ordered Newman to drive them
to the ruins of Shady Rest. They arrived around two
a m. And Berger dragged Price out of the car.
Chris denied again that he had betrayed the gang, but
Berger shot him three times. Just then, the second car

(01:51:39):
of the gangsters pulled onto the road next to the ruins.
Wooton panicked, certain that Ethel Price had seen the murder
of her husband. One of the newcomers climbed out of
the car, heard the conversation and told them not to
worry about the woman. They had killed her. When asked
what they had done with her, the man replied, we
shot her and threw her into a mine shaft near Carterville.

(01:52:01):
Berger proposed putting Price's body in the same shaft, but
gang members told him that they had dumped metal and
timbers down over her to hide the body. Berger thought
for a moment and then suggested another mine near to coin,
But when he suggested putting the bloody and still breathing
Price back into the car. Newman claimed that he balked.
Berger flew into a rage and said that he would

(01:52:23):
kill any man who didn't go along with him. Pryce
was tossed into the back seat of Newman's car, and
Berger climbed in after him, weapons still in hand, and
sat down on top of his body. Near Carbondale, he
ordered Newman to stop the car. He hurried to the
side of the road and began to vomit. He gasped
out words when he was able to speak again, that's

(01:52:44):
too much for me. I can kill a man, but
I can't sit on him. I don't know what in
hell's the matter with me. It isn't my nerves. Every
time I kill a man, it makes me sick afterward.
I guess it's my stomach. Berger switched places in the
car with Connie Ritter, and a few miles down the road,
Price regained consciousness and pleaded with Ritter, swearing that he

(01:53:05):
was an innocent man. Ridder told him to shut up
or he would turn the machine gun on him. A
few miles later, Pryce spoke again, his voice almost to whisper, Connie,
you'll live to regret this. Berger ordered Newman to drive
to a nearby mine, but finding a watchman on duty,
scrapped the plan. Eventually, they dumped Price in the field,

(01:53:26):
where he was later found. Burger shot him several more
times to make sure that he was dead. On the
way back to Harrisburg, one of the men who had
kidnapped Ethel Price allegedly told Newman that he and the
others had taken her to the abandoned mine, shot her,
and then had thrown her body to the bottom of
the shaft. Then they'd covered it with timbers, stones and debris.

(01:53:49):
No one, he claimed, would ever find her, but of
course that turned out to be wrong. As soon as
the gruesome story of Ethel Price's fate was made public,
workers began and removing the debris that Newman said the
men had used to clog the shaft of the old
Carterville District mine. The crowd of onlookers began to gather
as the opening deepened, and miners with picks and shovels

(01:54:12):
worked relentlessly to clear the way. Lines formed and buckets
filled with dirt, rocks and other debris began to be
passed upward from hand to hand, dumped, and then passed
back down again. County officials and sheriff or and Coleman
labored alongside the outraged citizens who came to volunteer their help.
As darkness fell, lights were strung up over the pit,

(01:54:35):
illuminating the ghastly scene. Work continued throughout the night and
into the next morning, only stopping briefly during a rainstorm
that came during the early hours. By Sunday afternoon, June twelfth,
the men had achieved a depth of nearly thirty feet.
Planks were nailed on telephone poles that had been laid
across the opening earlier in the day. From this platform,

(01:54:56):
it was easy to lower buckets down into the shaft
in order to haul the debris up even faster. Early
Monday morning, Ethel Price's body was finally found. She was
taken to the Osbent Funeral Home in Marion, and the
surrounding streets had to be cordoned off to keep back
the curiosity seekers. Her funeral was held two days later.

(01:55:18):
For many years after the discovery of Ethel Price's body,
the area around the abandoned shaft of the old Carterville
District mine was largely avoided by people in the vicinity,
even teenagers looking for a thrill on a late Saturday night,
were afraid to go there. According to a friend of
mine who grew up nearby, many were convinced that the
ghost of Ethel Price haunted the place. Stories circulated of

(01:55:43):
a woman in a white dress who was sometimes seen
around the site of the old forgotten shaft. She reportedly
wept in despair, and those who dared drive too close
to her sometimes claimed that she threw herself at the
windows of the car, begging to be let inside. Always
continued for many years, and are sometimes recounted even today. Thankfully,

(01:56:05):
though current reports of a lingering spirit here have been few,
we could only hope that Ethel Price is finally resting
in peace. As it turned out, the discovery of Ethel
Price's body was the downfall of Charlie Berger. Public opinion,
which often painted him as sort of a full hero,
turned most people against him. After Ethel's body was found,

(01:56:26):
Berger was moved from the jail in Benton, Illinois, to
the Sangamon County Jail in Springfield. His attorneys had already
appeared before a judge and requested the change of venue,
but the charged atmosphere surrounding the search for Ethel Price
made it clear to Sheriff Richard that a lynching might
occur if Berger remained in Benton. Burger arrived in Springfield

(01:56:47):
on the very day that Ethel's body was removed from
the bottom of the Carterville mine shaft. Reporters were waiting
for him. When he stepped out of the automobile that
had been used to transport him. He shook his head
at them as they shouted out questions. He only had
one statement to make, I'm done. Berger was eventually prosecuted

(01:57:07):
for murder, not for Lauri and Ethel Price, though, but
for that of Joe Adams, the mayor of West City, Illinois.
He went to the gallows in April nineteen twenty eight.

(01:57:30):
When We're Darkness returns, the catacombs of Saint Calixtus in Rome,
Italy hold the remains of sixteen popes, several martyrs, and
around half a million Christians, and, according to one author,
a not of this world entity as well. That story
is up next sad in tenth over Time. Here Darkness,

(01:58:12):
the catacombs of Saint Calixtus in Rome, Italy hold the
remains of sixteen popes, several martyrs, and around half a
million Christians. Nine of those popes were buried in the
famous Crypt of the Popes. The underground burial chambers, named
after Callixtus, who at the time of their construction was
the deacon of Rum under Pope Zephanirius, have long been

(01:58:33):
a popular tourist attraction. Collixtus was later elected pope and
eventually martyred for his Christian beliefs. Those who visited this
rather gloomy place say they experienced something strange here. Among
these people are two authors who report a very strange
encounter with a mysterious entity they believed was not of
this world. What did they see and why were they

(01:58:57):
under the impression this being was not of this world?
Did they accidentally catch a glimpse of someone from another reality?
There is one particular aspect of this case that makes
the experience very unusual, to say the least. Lionel and
Patricia Fanthorpe have investigated the world's unsolved mysteries for more
than thirty years and are the authors of fifteen best

(01:59:20):
selling books. In their fascinating book Mysteries and Secrets of Time,
they recall a highly unusual sighting of a being who
was present inside the Catacombs of Saint Calixtus. Lionel was
visiting the catacombs together with Patricia, and they were both
behind the rest of the party. They were so far
away from the rest of the other tourists that they

(01:59:41):
could still see them, but both authors are convinced no one,
absolutely no one, was behind them. According to their own testimony,
Lionel and Patricia were not walking side by side. Lionel
was about thirty meters behind Patricia and she was far
behind the party in the catacomb. Lionel remembers how he

(02:00:01):
suddenly became aware of someone's presence right behind him. In
their book, the authors write, the tall stranger behind him
in the eerie darkness of the Calyxtus Catacombs was not
of this earth, but he was nothing hostile or negative.
If he gave off any psychic atmosphere at all, it
seemed to be curiosity. He seemed to be asking politely

(02:00:23):
enough who Lionel was and what he was doing there.
Lionel also got the impression that the entity was probably
an ordained deacon or a priest. He was wearing a
tall pointed hat, like a traditional wizard from legend and folklore.
And a long cake, which together with the hat, gave
the outline of a tall, upright cone. The cloak and

(02:00:44):
hat were black, but they shone gleaming and glistening, as
though something bright and sparkling was woven into them. When
Lionel turned to look more closely at the entity, he
could see nothing. It was one of those apparitions that
it's restricted to peripheral vision. Because as a priest, Lionel
is frequently called upon to conduct funerals, and regards comforting

(02:01:05):
and helping the bereaved as one of the most important
parts of his priestly work. He wondered whether the entity
that had looked over his shoulder down there in the
solemn silence of the Collixtus Catacombs had also been a priest,
one who had laid to rest the immortal remains of
those that lay there. The experience made a big impression
on Lionel, who tried to make sense of who he

(02:01:27):
had encountered in the Callixtus Catacombs. In time, Lionel became
convinced the mysterious stranger must have been an early Christian
funeral priest. This puzzling encounter raises many intriguing questions. Listeners
who believe in the existence of ghosts would most likely
say Lionel witnessed a spirit or phantom of some sort.

(02:01:49):
As mentioned on several occasions, the number of scientists who
promote the multiverse theory is steadily increasing. If our reality
is surrounded by multiple words invisible to our naked eye,
it can occasionally happen that these worlds collide with our own,
and we can watch brief glimpses from other realities. Lionel

(02:02:10):
and Patricia wonder if the encounter in the catacombs could
have been a time slip. In their book, the authors
ask did a priest from the third or fourth century
encounter a fellow priest from the twenty first century? Did
a man who had done his best to help the
bereaved seventeen centuries ago glide through a mysterious portal in

(02:02:31):
time to encounter a kindred spirit doing that same work today.
Assuming this was a time slip, it cannot be denied
it was a very different experience than most time slip
cases reported worldwide. What's unusual about this particular case is
that Lionel saw the mysterious being once again, but this

(02:02:52):
time not in the catacombs. When Lionel and Patricia returned
to their hotel, the sightings continued for the next thirty
six hours. Lionel saw brief glimpses of the same entity
that simply wasn't there in physical form. Lionel, who thought
this must have been a priest, says the man seemed
to be surrounded by animals, most likely sheep, dogs or

(02:03:15):
tamed docile wolves. As time passed, Lionel's peripheral visions faded
until they were completely gone and he could no longer
see the unknown stranger anymore. Lionel and Patricia think the
experience was most likely a time slip and not an
encounter with a ghost. As theologian, Lionel had a great

(02:03:35):
deal of sympathy for Callixtus, and he has wondered whether
the entity he encountered could have been the deacon himself.
In their book, Lionel asks could that strange figure looking
over Lionel's shoulder in the cantacomb have been Collixtus himself
from the days when he was the deacon responsible for it?
It Collixtus sense that this British priest visiting these ancient

(02:03:58):
Roman burial places from a century, seventeen hundred years ahead
of his own, was a tolerant, kindred spirit, potentially a
theological comrade in arms, who would stand beside him and
his dispute with bitter opponents who held cruder, narrower, less
merciful views. These are valid questions, and the reasoning is logical.

(02:04:19):
But let's not forget that most who report time slips
have no relation with the places or people they witnessed.

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