Hollywood Stars Who Vanished Without a Trace

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
A frighteningly common phenomenon is that of people who, for
whatever reasons, have suddenly and without explanation, simply vanished without
a trace, never to be seen again. There are countless
cases of this throughout history, and such accounts never fail
to incite curiosity, speculation, and wonder. We are somewhat macably

(00:28):
drawn to the idea that someone could just seemingly cease
to exist, and the desire to have some closure and
explanation can be alluring to the point of obsession, a
gnawing need for answers that may never come. While many
of these vanished people have become famous simply because they
have disappeared so inexplicably, there are others that were well

(00:50):
known before these incidents. In tonight's episode, we're going to
look at famous actors, musicians, and writers who had prompt
futures but who have mysteriously disappeared and left a legacy
of both artistic endeavors and strange mysteries. I'm Darren Marler

(01:11):
and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome weirdos. I'm Darren Marler
and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of
the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved

(01:38):
and unexplained coming up in this episode. North Carolina's Great
Dismal Swamp is full of horror stories, but the worst
might be the fact that the swamp appears to swallow
people alive. A weeping man called the police to tearfully
apologize for murdering his victims, but that didn't stop him

(02:02):
from continuing to kill again and again. In Hindu culture,
it is believed if certain post death rituals are not
conducted on those who passed away, the deceased's family would
not prosper and there would be misfortunes of plenty. One
family in Bhutan had to learn that the hard way.

(02:26):
An apparent incident involving a gigantic cigar shaped ufo somewhere
over the Atlantic Ocean in May nineteen sixty three wasn't
reported for almost twenty years, when a witness to the
event finally came forward through a written letter. Of the incident.
In a beautiful little town in North Wales, children ran

(02:47):
through the graveyard searching for little men with big eyes
and long ears. They were searching for strange fairyfolk, the
Brownies of Bangor serial killer Ed Geen was caught and
arrested for his crimes in November of nineteen fifty seven,
but that didn't mean Gaen's neighbors would see the end

(03:07):
of his influence on their lives. Four people take a
trip to France and stay at a hotel that appeared
too good to be true because it was but first.
Showbiz is full of not just celebrities, but also of
crime and murder. But even stranger are those cases where

(03:28):
someone famous simply disappears, without a trace and without an explanation.
So bult your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights,
and come with me into the weird darkness. Hollywood has

(03:59):
had its fair share of mysterious crimes and unsolved mysteries
over the decades, and some of the most baffling have
been actors who have just seemed to have stepped off
the face of the earth to never be seen again.
One odd and tragic case is that of the child
TV and movie actor Joe Pitchler, perhaps most recognizable for
his film Roles and the Beethoven series The Fan Varsity

(04:23):
Blues children in their Birthdays and When Good Ghouls Go Bad.
Starting acting at six years old, Pitchler had a bit
of a success in Hollywood and was making a name
for himself, particularly with his role as Brennan Newton in
the Third and fourth Beethoven movies, so it was disappointing
to him when his family inevitably made him move back
to his hometown of Bremerton, Washington in two thousand and

(04:45):
three in order to finish high school. After graduating in
two thousand and five, Pitchler had planned to go back
to Los Angeles and continue his acting career, but the
plan was delayed due to his desire to wait until
his braces were off, which was scheduled to take about
a year. He grudgingly went about getting a normal job
in the meantime and settled into a normal life in Bremerton.

(05:08):
On the evening of January fifth, two thousand and six,
Filcher was hanging out drinking and playing cards at a
friend's house, which was a pretty usual night for them.
On this evening, nothing seemed to be a miss, and
Pitchler would later be described as having been cheerful and
in good spirits all evening. After the party, Pitchler drove
some friends home and then headed home himself, but he

(05:30):
would never arrive. At around four am, Pitchler called his
friend in a bizarre call, during which he would be
described as delirious and crying inconsolably before hanging up. This
would be the last time anyone would ever hear from him.
On January ninth, his abandoned car was located near a river,

(05:51):
and it was found to hold all of his belongings
except his wallet and car keys. As to where Pitchler
himself had gone, there was no clue. His apartment was
found to be unlocked and the lights had been left on,
which seemed rather odd for him. But stranger still was
a handwritten note by the missing man which lamented not
being a strong enough brother and requested that all of

(06:13):
his belongings be given to his younger brother. Authorities at
the time believed he had committed suicide by jumping into
the river, but not only had he been looking forward
to pursuing his acting career and had never been suicidal.
But no body was ever found despite intensive searches of
the river and surrounding areas. Joe Pilcher's disappearance has never

(06:35):
been salved. Another actor who famously vanished under strange circumstances
was Sean Flynn, perhaps better known for his father, legendary
actor Errol Flynn. Although he started out with an acting career,
he was forever in his father's shadow, and he got
bored with acting, deciding to branch out into something new,
going through a slew of different careers, including a safari

(06:57):
and big game hunting guide in Africa again, Aime Warden
and Kenya, and a singer before really finding his footing
with photojournalism. He was quite good at it, working for
such big publications as Time Magazine, and he was most
well known for his intense photos from war torn areas
of the world, in particular during the Vietnam War. It

(07:18):
was perhaps this constant putting himself in harm's way that
would lead to his mysterious disappearance. In April of nineteen seventy,
Flynn was in Cambodia on assignment along with a group
of other photojournalists, and he got the ill advised idea
in his head to travel by motorcycle with a colleague,
Dana Stone, rather than ride in the more protected limousines

(07:38):
like the others. Hoping to get up close photos of
Vietcong guerrillas, Flynn and Stone rather recklessly made their way
up Highway one to a known Vietcong checkpoint alone, they
were never seen again. It was not necessarily a surprise,
as many other reporters had been kidnapped at around that
time by the Vietcong, but in this case there was

(08:00):
no ransom ever demanded and no bodies ever found. It
is believed that the two men were held captive for
up to a year before being killed, but no one knows,
and no sign of either one of them has ever
been found despite massive search efforts. There have been just
as many strange and famous disappearances, if not more, in

(08:21):
the world of music. One of these cases revolves around
the artist Connie Converse, now widely revered by many as
being one of the first modern singer songwriters. Converse got
her start in the nineteen fifties and was known for
her acoustic guitar skills and her haunting, melancholic ballads, which
she crafted from her humble apartment in Greenwich Village at

(08:42):
a time when future musical legends such as Bob Dylan,
Joan Baiaz and Joni Mitchell were still little kids. She
gained quite a bit of respect from her contemporaries for
her poetic intimate style and subject matter of loneliness and
love and loss, which was rare in an era when
traditional folk music, upbeat John's, and political ballads were the

(09:03):
order of the day. Sadly, although she was beloved amongst
other artists of the time, her career never really took off,
and she remained obscure, finally quitting music altogether in nineteen
sixty one without ever having had a hit. By nineteen
seventy four, Converse had dropped off the musical radar and
had spiraled into depression and alcoholism, made worse by the

(09:26):
fact that her health was ailing her and she had
been told she needed a hysterectomy. Then, in the summer
of that year, she sent a series of letters to
her family and friends informing them that she was done
lamenting her life and failures, and that she was going
to go off and start fresh. She then packed up
all of her things, hopped into her car, and drove

(09:47):
off the face of the earth. Connie Converse has not
been seen since, nor has any clue as to what
happened to her ever been found, with even her Volkswagen
Beetle remaining missing. Mysterious vanishing has spawned a variety of theories,
such as that she committed suicide or that she really
did drop completely off the grid and start her life

(10:09):
completely anew, but no one knows. Interestingly, Converse would enjoy
the fame, success and recognition she had so craved only
after she dropped off the face of the earth. In
two thousand and nine, some of her obscure songs that
she had recorded in nineteen fifty four and the kitchen
of her friend Jean Deutsch were released on the record
label Squirrel Thing Recordings as an album entitled How Sad,

(10:33):
How Lovely. People took notice, with many wondering who this
lovely new artist was with the haunting voice and eerily
beautiful songs, and very few were aware that she had
been a long washed up musician who disappeared into thin air.
She is now widely considered to be a musical legend
and pioneer, one of the first modern singer songwriters, and

(10:55):
the record producer who started it all. David Herman has
said of Converse, is it considering it when it was
recorded sounds eerily contemporary. Her voice is really compelling. Add
to that the fact this was a woman writing singer
songwriter style music in the mid fifties, before being a
singer songwriter was a thing, and before a female songwriter

(11:15):
was something people were used to, and with the mystery
of the disappearance, the whole thing leaves you with more
questions than answers. Tommy Converse wasn't the only well known
musician to mysteriously disappear in the nineteen seventies, and it
perhaps isn't even the strangest case. In the nineteen sixties,
folk rocker Jim Sullivan burst onto the scene in Los Angeles,

(11:37):
where he worked the club scene, playing to sold out crowds,
especially at the prestigious club Raft in Malibu. Before long,
Sullivan was pallling around with big shots in the industry,
as well as Hollywood stars including Lee Majors, Lee Marvin,
and Harry Dean Stanton, and he even had a small
role in the cult classic film Easy Writer. It seemed

(11:58):
he was destined for great and in nineteen sixty nine
he was able to scrape together the funding for his
seminal album UFO, which had the talent and backing of
the session's musicians, The Wrecking Crew, who'd played with acts
like The Beach Boys and Simon and garfocal on some
of their biggest hits. Despite this talent on board, the
record couldn't find a major label, and so was released

(12:21):
on the small label called Mommi Records, which had been
cobbled together by Sullivan's friend Al Dobbs for the purpose
of getting it released. At the time, the album released
to little fanfare, and his second album, the self titled
Jim Sullivan, didn't fare much better, and they were both
considered to be flops, although UFO would acquire cult status

(12:42):
in later years. Nevertheless, at the time he had bombed,
and as with comic Converse, Sullivan sank into a thick
depression and faced the demon of alcoholism. His marriage began
to fall apart, and he became increasingly paranoid that his
music was being copied and stolen by the artists. On
March fourth, nineteen seventy five, Sullivan packed up his stuff

(13:05):
into his car, the Volkswagon Beetle, strangely enough, and headed
out onto the road towards Nashville, Tennessee, where he hoped
to revitalize his lagging music career. At some point during
his adventurous journey, he checked in to the La Mesa
Motel in Santa Rosa, New Mexico, and the following day
he was allegedly spotted wandering around at a ranch about
twenty six miles away. This would be the last anyone

(13:28):
saw of him, and his car would be found at
the same ranch, locked abandoned and containing his wallet, money, guitar, clothes,
and a box of his unsold records. Jim Sullivan himself
was nowhere to be found and hasn't been since, despite
intense searches and investigation. In later years, It's been speculated

(13:50):
that Sullivan was murdered, that he got lost in the
desert and died, or even that he was abducted by aliens,
but no one really has any idea. In later years,
we have the strange disappearance of the British rock icon
Richie Edwards, best known as being the guitarist and lyricist
for the alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers. Edwards was

(14:12):
known almost as much for his off stage antics and
publicity stunts as he was for his music, with his
most infamous being a time when he carved the words
for Real into his arm with a razor, but a
journalist accused him of being a poser. Brooding moody and wild.
Edwards was once deemed a lightning rod of sorts for
adolescent angst, but his legacy would get even strangers still

(14:36):
with his vanishing. On February first, nineteen ninety five. Edwards
was getting ready to travel to the United States as
part of a tour along with Manic Street Preacher's vocalist
James Dean Bradfield. However, he would never get on the
plane and Edwards vanished from his hotel room, with his
abandoned car later found on February fourteenth next to the

(14:57):
Severn Bridge which connects England in Wales. In the meantime,
his hotel room was found to contain a suitcase, most
of his belongings, and strangely, a box wrapped up and
decorated like a birthday present, which was inexplicably filled with books, videos,
and a copy of the play Equus, all tied up
and adorned with a note addressed to a Joe that

(15:19):
simply said I Love you. During the investigation into the
odd disappearance, some other strange clues would come forward as well.
It was found that Edwards had steadily withdrawn cash from
his bank account in the days before his vanishing, although
it's unknown if this was merely for his scheduled trip
or not. There was also a witness who claimed to

(15:41):
have seen Edwards hanging around the Newport Passport office and
at Newport Bus station in the time frame between when
he left the hotel and when his abandoned car was found,
although he did not realize the famous musician was technically
missing at the time. A taxi driver also claimed to
have driven Edwards around after his disappearance, saying that his
mysterious passenger had been asked to be taken to Pontypool

(16:04):
Railway station and had gotten out at the Severn View
service station. Strangest of all is the claim that on
the night before his vanishing, Edwards gave his friend a
book called Novel with Cocaine, which tells of a man
who goes to a mental asylum and vanishes, and told
her to read it. The official police consensus was that
the musician had committed suicide by jumping from the Severn Bridge,

(16:28):
a popular suicide spot, but his body was never found,
and despite his flamboyant and shocking ways, there was little
to show that he was actually suicidal in any way. Indeed,
he had actively derided suicide in the past. In more
recent years, Edwards had been sporadically spotted in places around
the world, like some sort of cryptid. He was allegedly

(16:50):
seen in such places as Goa, India, and on the
islands of Forda, Ventura and Lanzerote, among others. It's unclear
what any of these clues mean, if anything, and the
disappearance of Richie Edwards remains an impenetrable mystery. We've looked
at some odd disappearances in the worlds of movies and music,

(17:11):
and now we come to the literary world, which has
a few of its own. One of the most colorful
players in literature has to be Oscar Zeta Acosta, an
American attorney, politician, novelist, and outspoken activist in the Chicano movement.
Although Acosta wrote several novels of his own, he is
perhaps most famous for being friends with the more successful

(17:32):
author Hunter S. Thompson and the inspiration for the character
doctor Gonzo in his nineteen seventy two novel Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas. By all accounts, Fierro was a
larger than life character, indeed, with a prodigious appetite for drugs, booze, sex, fighting,
and all manner of debauchery. Thompson would once say a

(17:53):
fierro at a nineteen seventy seven article in Rolling Stone magazine,
Oscar was not into serious street fighting, but he was
hell on wheels in a barbarowl. Any combination of a
two hundred and fifty pound Mexican and LSD twenty five
is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach.
But when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly
angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything

(18:15):
that walks on less than three legs, and a de
facto suicidal conviction that he'll die at the age of
thirty three just like Jesus Christ, you have a serious
piece of work on your hands, especially if the guy
is already thirty three and a half years old, with
a head full of Sandaw's acid, a loaded three fifty
seven magnum in his belt, a hatchet wielding Chicano bodyguard
on his elbow at all times, and a disconcerting habit

(18:37):
of projectile vomiting geyser's of pure blood off the front
porch every thirty or forty minutes, or whenever his malignant
ulcer can't handle any more raw tequila. In May of
nineteen seventy four, Acosto was taking a trip through Mazatland, Mexico,
where he simply vanished off the face of the earth
after calling his son to cryptically inform him that he

(18:57):
was about to board a boat full of white snow.
There's no trace of what happened to him after this,
and this would be the last time any one ever
spoke to him or saw him. He was immediately presumed
that the volatile Acosta had gotten himself into trouble with
the wrong people while in Mexico and was probably murdered
and buried in a shallow grave somewhere out in the desert,

(19:18):
or that he overdosed on drugs, while others speculated that
he may have decided to leave his life behind and
live in Mexico, and still others insist that he moved
to Miami, where he has been sporadically cited. Hunter S.
Thompson spent many years earnestly looking for his lost friend
without any success, lamenting that he'd probably been killed by

(19:39):
drug dealers or a politically charged assassin, but Accosta's body
has never turned up. Another influential writer from an earlier
era was Barbara Newhall Follett, a novelist who was considered
a child prodigy, writing the critically acclaimed novel The House
Without Windows in nineteen twenty seven when she was just
twelve years old, and The Voyage of Norman Dy in

(20:01):
nineteen twenty eight, which she was fourteen. She was and
still is considered a masterful writing genius, her novels beloved
and influential within the literary world even now. This success
was somewhat tainted by family problems with her father, who
she had been very close with, abandoning her and her
mother to run off with another woman when she was

(20:22):
just fourteen years old. By all accounts, Folllett would never
recover from this betrayal, and her writing dried up entirely.
While she was held up as a rising star in
her youth, by the time she was in her twenties,
her life was beginning to unravel a bit. Her marriage
to Nickerson Rogers was beginning to disintegrate, and she found
herself in a deep depression due to being convinced her

(20:45):
husband was cheating on her on December seventh, nineteen thirty nine.
The two got into an argument and at some point
Ballett left the house to never return, only taking with
her thirty dollars in cash or around five hundred dollars
in today's money. Her husband, Rogers, must have been pretty
sure that she'd come crawling back, because it would be
two full weeks before he finally contacted authorities to report

(21:08):
her missing. Oddly, the whole case would not be seriously
pursued until years later, and it was sort of swept
under the carpet, not being widely reported on in the
media until nineteen sixty six, decades after the actual disappearance.
It's unclear why this should be, but no trace of
this once great child prodigy author has ever been found here.

(21:32):
We've looked at but a few of the many actors, musicians,
and writers who seemed to have simply blinked out of
existence and added a certain shadow of mystery over there
already intriguing lives. What happened to these people? Where did
they go? Was this foul play, suicide or simply a
desire to shuck off an old life for something new?

(21:54):
Will we ever find out the answers we seek or
are these cases doomed to forever remain unsolved, these people's
fame tinged with dark puzzles we may never unravel. There's
no way to know, And these individuals have grown to
become just about as famous for their sudden vanishings as
they were for anything else. Before becoming a well known celebrity,

(22:20):
you first have to be a rising star, and there
is no shortage of strange, unexplained disappearances of rising starlets either.
We'll look at a few cases when weird darkness returns.

(22:50):
Show business has always had a bit of a sinister,
unpleasant and twisted side. Countless people have traveled far and
wide to try and make it in the business, only
to have their dreams dashed, or more ominously, to rise high,
only to be devoured by the system and the decadent
lifestyle of it all, swallowed up into a sea of drugs, partying, disillusionment,

(23:12):
and eventually irrelevant obscurity and nothingness when the machine has
no more need for them. This is an industry that's
known for its voracious appetite to chew people up only
to spit them back out again. But on some occasions,
rising young stars do not emerge at all, instead vanishing
off the face of the earth. One early case of

(23:34):
a vanishing starlet hoping to make it big, which is
of course surrounded by weird clues and intrigue, is that
of twenty six year old Gene Spangler in nineteen forty nine.
Born in Seattle, Washington on September Tewod nineteen twenty three,
Spangler was a stunning model, dancer, and aspiring actress who
found her way to Hollywood and appeared in various bit

(23:55):
parts before finally able to land an influential agent. Her
career looked set to explode into the big leagues, and
things seemed to be going nowhere but up for the
beautiful rising star. But Spangler was not without her personal
problems and demons lurking in the background. In nineteen forty eight,
Spangler had just gone through a messy divorce with husband

(24:17):
Dexter Benner, amid allegations of infidelity on her part and
displeasure from Benner over her complete embrace of the Hollywood
hard partying lifestyle at the expense of their family. Subsequently,
Jean's beloved five year old daughter Christine was turned over
to Benner since it was determined that she was not
a suitable mother figure for the girl. By all accounts,

(24:38):
Jeane was devastated by this, and Brenner did not let
her see her daughter much after that, even threatening to
cancel their rare visits altogether. But then a stroke of
luck came when a fierce custody battle put the girl
back with her mother. Yet things were bound to take
a turn for the bazaar. On the evening of October seventh,
nineteen forty nine, Jean told her her sister in law, Sophie,

(25:01):
that she was going to go and meet her ex
husband for the purpose of trying to get increased child
support payments and to discuss the issue of an overdue payment,
after which she was going to drop by a film
shoot and then come home. She left her daughter in
Sophie's care since her mother, who she lived with, was
out of town, and headed out from her Wilshire, Los
Angeles home. At around five pm. A clerk at a

(25:23):
local shop claimed that they had seen Gene and that
she had appeared to be waiting for someone outside, but
after that there were no further sightings of her. Gene
Spangler had simply disappeared without a trace. When she did
not return home that night. Benner was contacted, but he
claimed that he had not met with Gene that evening
and had no knowledge of any plan to talk about

(25:44):
child support. Indeed, he claimed that he had not seen
his ex wife for several weeks. Furthermore, her agent said
that there had been no film shoots scheduled for the
evening in question, and no one working on any of
her shoots had seen her that night. When authorities launched
a search for the missing actress, they were able to
locate her purse lying on the ground in an area

(26:06):
of Los Angeles sprawling Griffith Park, and it was found
to have a broken strap that was surmised to be
the result of someone tearing it from her by force.
Although it seemed like burglary, oddly, no valuables were missing
from it, and within the purse was an unfinished, unsigned
note written by the woman that simply said, Kirk can't
wait any longer going to see doctor Scott. It will

(26:29):
work best this way while mother is away. This alarming
discovery prompted a full and extensive search of the park
and the surrounding area, which was scoured by hundreds of
police and volunteers, but there were no further clues as
to what had happened to the budding actress. The only
real piece of evidence was that purse and its cryptic note.

(26:51):
In light of this weird clue, every doctor named Scott
in the Los Angeles area was approached by police, but
none of them had ever met Spangler or even who
she was. They also heavily interviewed friends and family of
the missing woman, and it came to light that Gene
may have been pregnant at the time of her disappearance,
but it wasn't clear as to who the father might

(27:11):
have been. This led to the grim theory that she
had perhaps been seeking out an illegal abortion, and that
doctor Scott mentioned in the note was the one who
was going to covertly carry it out, in which case
it could have been anyone with the doctor's angle not
getting anywhere. One puzzling detail of the note that was
looked at was the identity of the Kirk that was mentioned. Interestingly,

(27:36):
actor Kirk Douglas came forward specifically to tell police that
it wasn't him, perhaps fearing that the connection would be made.
That Jean had been working on a small role in
one of his movies titled young Man with a Horn. Interestingly,
this attempt to clear his name would have the opposite
of the intended effect when authorities began to consider Douglas
a possible person of interest, but with a lack of

(27:58):
any evidence, he was dropped as a potential suspect other
than that Kirk was such a common name that it
was practically useless as evidence, and Jane apparently did not
know anyone else by that name that anyone knew of.
Authorities looked into Jane's sordid love life as well in
a search for possible leads, and there were many to
choose from, as she was known to get around. One

(28:21):
friend of Spangler's told authorities that she had been recently
dating an actor named Robert Cummings for a couple of weeks,
but there was no evidence at all to show that
he had anything to do with it. There was also
a man named Scottie with whom she had allegedly been intimate,
which was compelling considering the name resembled the one for
the doctor in the note, but Jean had apparently long
ago broken up with him. Another relationship she had had

(28:45):
proved to be even more intriguing as she had been
romantically involved with a man named David Ogle, who was
a local mobster. It also just so happened that Ogel
had also gone missing just two days before Spangler, and
they were claimed to have been cited together after their
vanishings in both Palm Springs and Texas. However, there has

(29:06):
never been any evidence to prove this, and it has
remained just another curiosity in this now long cold case.
In the end, no suspect in the disappearance of Gene
Spangler has ever been detained, and no solid evidence has
ever turned up. Theories range from that she died from
an illegal abortion that went wrong, that she was killed

(29:27):
by a serial killer, one of her lovers or even
her ex husband, that Kirk Douglas indeed did have something
to do with it, or that she just simply disappeared
to get away from her life and her vanishing had
gone on to be discussed and picked apart to this day,
whatever happened to this once promising young actress, Gene Spangler's
strange disappearance remains a profound mystery. Another bizarre vanishing of

(29:53):
a beautiful young starlet occurred in nineteen eighty three, when
eighteen year old model and actress Tammy Lynn Leppert of Rock,
Florida went missing without a trace under rather strange circumstances.
Tammy had been modeling since she was four years old,
and her striking good looks had won her two hundred
and eighty beauty pageants by the time she was sixteen.

(30:15):
Her stunning beauty helped her to land various small roles
in Hollywood films. She's probably most well known for her
brief role in the nineteen eighty three movie Scarface starring
Al Pacino, in which she played the gorgeous blonde who
distracts Tony Montana's friend Manny at the beach during a
drug deal that goes horribly wrong, as well as her
perhaps lesser known role in the nineteen eighty two film

(30:37):
spring Break. It seemed that although she had the potential
and all of the assets to make a name for
herself in the movie business, and had actually been planning
to move to Hollywood to pursue this, there were also
some bizarre incidents swirling about her. Not long after filming
her role in spring Break, Tammy went to a party
and came back visibly shaken. Although she would not say

(31:00):
exactly what had happened to her, It was obvious that
she had been deeply disturbed by something, and her friends
and family claim she became increasingly paranoid, withdrawn, and irritable
in the coming days. At one point, she approached her
mother and confided in her that she thought someone was
trying to kill her, but she would not give any
further details. In the meantime, Tammy's behavior kept getting increasingly

(31:23):
bizarre and erratic, and she was prone to sweeping mood swinks,
all of which was very uncharacteristic of her. It was
all around this time she was offered her role in
the movie Scarface, which was shooting in Miami, Florida. At
one point during the shoot, Tammy suffered an inexplicable full
mental breakdown during a violent scene involving fake blood. According

(31:45):
to the filmmakers, upon seeing the blood, the young woman
became completely and uncontrollably hysterical and had to be physically restrained.
She would then storm off set and quit the film,
although she still appears in the movie, and when friends
and family urged her to talk to police about what
was going on, she complied but refused to mention to
them that she felt someone meant her harm. Nevertheless, with

(32:08):
her family, she was just as paranoid as ever, telling
them that someone was stalking her and trying to poison her.
She began to refuse food or drinks in unopened containers,
did not eat food that she didn't see prepared herself,
such as in restaurants, and would even shy away from
sealed containers at times, But there was never any evidence

(32:29):
at all that this was anything more than a profound
paranoid delusion. One incident in particular caused a good amount
of concern when one evening, Tammy flew into a rage
fueled tantrum in which she began smashing windows and acting
hostile towards all around her. After this rather frightening breakdown,
Tammy was brought in for a psychiatric evaluation, but she

(32:52):
displayed no signs of drug or alcohol abuse, and doctors
could find nothing really wrong with her. She was released
after a seventy two hour period of observation and returned home.
The day after this, she reportedly had an argument with
the friend as they visited the beach, and she demanded
to be dropped off in a parking lot at Cocoa beach,

(33:12):
which was about five miles from her home. The friend
did as she was told, and that is the last
anyone ever saw of Tammy. No clues as to what
happened to Tammy turned up, and the friend who had
dropped her off was not seen as a person of interest. Curiously,
Tammy's mother claimed that on the day she disappeared, she
had gone out without putting on makeup or doing her hair,

(33:35):
which was seen as strange considering she always spent a
good amount of time on her appearance no matter where
she went. The significance of this is far from clear.
Other than this, there was absolutely no clue as to
where she had gone, and the theories began to fly. Police
initially suspected that she'd simply run away from home, but

(33:55):
none of Tammy's friends or family believed that this could
possibly be true, as she had never expressed such an
urge before. A more sinister possibility was that she'd fallen
victim to the serial killer Christopher Wilder, who was known
to have killed several young women in the vicinity at
the time, but no evidence could be found to link
him to the disappearance, and he would die in a

(34:16):
shootout with police before he could ever be deeply questioned
on the matter. Another killer believed to have possibly been
the culprit was the murderer and rapist John Crutchley, who
had also operated in the area, but again there is
no evidence to ever make this stick. There has also
been the idea that she may have been killed by
drug dealers or a stalker, but this is led nowhere.

(34:40):
What happened to Tammy Lynn Leppert and what transpired ad
that party to change her so dramatically to this day,
no one really knows, and she's another actress to vanish
before anyone really knew who she was. Moving into nineteen
ninety four, we come to the strange and tragic case
of Alinea Karisa, the daughter of Italian pop stars Albano

(35:03):
and Romina Power and granddaughter of Hollywood actor Tyrone Power.
Elenia already had roots in show business and seemed set
to follow a path into her own acting career. She
started off by becoming the letter turner for Italy's version
of the popular game show The Wheel of Fortune, called
the Rota de la Fortuna in Italy, and this gained
her wide recognition and a minor celebrity status with more

(35:26):
roles seemingly destined to come her way. At the age
of twenty three, Elania became somewhat sidetracked by the desire
to write a book and put her acting career on
hold so that she could research and write it. She
had it in her head to chronicle the lives of
street musicians in New Orleans, which she'd become interested in
through a trip to the city the previous summer, and

(35:47):
she made another trip to the United States, but the
purpose of immersing herself in this world for her planned book.
Upon arrival, she checked in to the low priced Ladal
hotel located in the French Quarter, where she shared a
room with local street musician Alexander Masekela. The police wasn't
exactly upscale, inhabited by drug addicts, transients and all kinds

(36:09):
of scum and weirdos, but perhaps this was in some
way what she wanted. At eleven am on January sixth,
nineteen ninety four, Elena left the hotel for unspecified reasons
and simply never returned. Within her room, she had left
all of her belongings, including her backpack, passport, travelers checks,
and cash, as well as notebooks, full of her ideas

(36:31):
and research for her beloved book. After several days, the
young woman still had not returned, and she was considered
to be a missing person. According to her family, the
last time they had heard from her was a phone
call they'd received on January first, at which time she
had seemed to be her normal self. Oddly, Mesekela would
be arrested several weeks later after trying to use the

(36:53):
missing woman's travelers checks to pay the bill for the
room when he finally checked out of the hotel. Indeed,
Messeca would become a prime suspect because of this, which
was only exacerbated by the fact that authorities soon learned
that he had a history of domestic violence, rape, and
drug use. Other street musicians who were asked about the
man also claimed that he was a habitual liar and

(37:16):
wooer of women. However, when he was brought in for questioning,
Mezekaela denied having any idea of where Elena had gone,
and with no evidence to hold him, authorities were forced
to release him. He proceeded to fate into the background.
One spooky clue came in several weeks after the vanishing
on January thirtieth, when a security guard at an autubonn

(37:39):
Aquarium of the Americas by the name of Alberta Cordova
claimed that he'd been on duty on the evening of
January sixth and had seen a woman at Woldenburg Park
hear the Mississippi River who he believed closely matched Elena's
description and was wearing a flower print dress of the
same type she had been wearing when she vanished. According
to the guard, the woman had been sitting on a

(38:00):
here and that when he had approached her to tell
her it was too late to be in the park,
she allegedly said that she belonged to the river, jumped
into the river, and disappeared under the waves. At the time,
the Coastguard had been notified and a search for the
mysterious woman had been carried out, but no body was
ever found, making it impossible to know if the woman
had been Elena or if she had really even drowned

(38:23):
at all. Regardless, there were many other alleged sightings of
Elena in the weeks after the incident, but none of
these were ever verified as being her. Was the mysterious
swimmer Elena Caresi did she drown If so, why would
she have been out there and why would she jump
into the river. If it was not her, then just

(38:44):
what did happen to Elena? Besides the clues pointing to
her drowning, there have of course been other theories as well.
The simplest one is that she committed suicide, but her
family denies that she had been suicidal in any way,
and have asserted that even if she had been the
one who jumped in the river, she was an exceptionally
strong swimmer and would not have done so to kill herself.

(39:06):
Another idea is that she really was harmed or killed
by the street musician Mesechaela, a notion supported by her
family who think not enough was done to investigate him,
but with no evidence at all to charge him with,
this is a dead end so far. There's also the
possibility that Elena was kidnapped and forced into human slavery

(39:26):
or abducted for some other nefarious purpose, with her mother
Romina Power saying I've heard a lot of strange stories
in New Orleans about white slave trade and girls being
abducted for black magic rights. I believe she's being held
somewhere against her will. Despite all of these sinister possibilities,
there has been no evidence of any foul play in

(39:47):
the vanishing of Elena Caresi, and this is all pure speculation.
In the meantime, there have been no new suspects, no
new clues or leads, no revelations, no nothing. Indeed, there
is no evidence of anything at all other than Elena
left her things behind and walked out of that hotel

(40:07):
right off the face of the earth. There is no
apparent reason for any of it, and the disappearance remains
stubbornly unsolved. It is rather tragic to see these young, beautiful,
possibly quite talented people with big dreams in Hollywood's have
those visions of a star filled future cut short. One

(40:28):
wonders what would have become of them in the business
had they not mysteriously disappeared into the ether. Would they
have become major stars beloved by many. Could they have
launched into the pantheon unforgettable icons and the stratosphere of
fame if they had just not veered off into the unknown,
Or would they have been used, abused, and disposed of

(40:49):
by the show business beasts like so many others before them. Unfortunately,
considering they have seemingly dissolved into thin air. In these cases,
we will never know time slips. Suddenly finding yourself in

(41:23):
a much earlier era is an interesting Fortian phenomena. Unfortunately,
the ephemeral nature of these alleged experiences usually makes it
virtually impossible to confirm or refute the validity of these claims.
Did someone really through a way we can't come close
to understanding, visit a much different time and place? Or

(41:46):
is that our collective legs being pulled. That's usually up
to you to decide when I share these kinds of
stories here on Weird Darkness. This uncertainty is particularly frustrating
with the following tale, which, if true, would amount to
one of the most astonishing adventures on record. In October

(42:06):
nineteen seventy nine, two couples lenn and Cynthia Gisbee and
Jeff and Pauline Simpson, left their homes in Dover, England
for an end of summer road trip. They would ferry
across the Channel and spend two weeks driving through the
countryside of France and northern Spain. The excursion progressed in
a pleasantly uneventful fashion. On the night of October third,

(42:29):
the travelers were on the freeway north of Montemar, France,
looking for a place to spend the night. Before long,
they came across a motel that looked promising. Unfortunately, when
the Forsom went inside, the staffer they encountered in the
lobby a man in an unusual plumb colored uniform informed
them that there were no vacancies. However, he said that

(42:49):
if they took a certain road off the freeway they'd
find a small hotel. He was sure that this establishment
would have rooms. The party had no trouble finding the road,
interested to see that it was lined with old buildings
plastered with posters advertising a curiously vintage looking circus. The
road itself also seemed from another era, cobbled and narrow,

(43:11):
clearly not built for the automobile. After a short time,
they came across the only building that they had seen
on this road which showed signs of life. It was
brightly lit with some men standing outside. However, after inquiring inside,
they learned this was not a hotel but an inn,
so on they went. They eventually found two other buildings,

(43:34):
one a police station and the other sporting a large
sign reading hotel. It was, for our modern era, an
unusual looking hotel, only two stories tall and with a
decidedly old fashioned look. But the place looked decent, and
the two couples were too tired to be fussy about it.
They were relieved when, as the motel employee had promised,

(43:56):
they were able to get rooms there. One of our
four travelers spoke French, and the manager spoke no English.
Communication was necessarily limited, but the forsome made themselves understood
enough to be shown to their lodgings. They noticed that
the inside of the hotel was even more anachronistic than
the outside. Everything was made of old looking heavy wood.

(44:20):
The dining room tables had no tablecloths. They did not
see any telephones, elevators, or anything else to remind them
that this was the year nineteen seventy nine. The rooms
were in keeping with the rest of the hotel, barge
heavy beds and bolsters instead of pillows. The doors had
only wooden catches for locks. There were just wooden shutters

(44:42):
over the windows, not glass. The bathroom shared by the
foresome had vintage plumbing. Still, the rooms seemed clean and comfortable,
and the outdated feel of the place gave it a
quaint charm. It was certainly a novel experience. Unpacking, they
went to the dining room, where they were served a
simple but satisfying meal of eggs, steak, and potatoes, washed

(45:07):
down with longer. After such a meal, the four had
no problem settling down in their rooms for a long,
untroubled sleep. The next morning, the travelers returned to the
dining room, where they had a breakfast of bread, jam,
and thick, strong coffee that they found virtually unbrinkable. As
they ate, they noticed that the other guests looked as

(45:27):
oddly retro as the hotel itself. Opposite them was a
woman wearing a silk evening gown and carrying a small
dog under her arm. Two gendarmes came in, wearing curious
uniforms unlike any other that they had seen in France.
The travelers, enchanted by the strangeness of it all, decided
they needed a memento of their visit. Jeff photographed Pauline

(45:48):
standing by the windows, while Len took a picture of
Cynthia inside the hotel. He took an additional photo of
the hotel itself. After their picture taking, Len and Jeff
tried to ask the two gendarmes how to take the
freeway to the Spanish border, but the policemen, clearly puzzled
by the Englishman's terminology, just gave classic Gallic shrugs. Finally,

(46:11):
the Frenchman comprehended that the visitors wished to go to
Spain and told them to use the old Avignon road.
Len and Jeff knew enough of the local area to
think this was an unnecessarily roundabout way of getting to
their destination. They decided instead to retrace the way that
they had come to the hotel in order to return
to the Moltemar Freeway. When the two couples were ready

(46:34):
to leave, Len went to the manager to pay their bill.
He was flabbergasted to see that he was being charged
only nineteen francs or about three dollars in nineteen seventy
nine US dollars. Certain that the manager did not understand,
len endeavored to communicate to him that he was asking
for the bill for all four of them, four people
who had eaten meals there. In response, the manager just

(46:57):
continued to nod. Len showed the bill to the two gendarmes,
seeking confirmation. They just smiled yes, yes, that was the
correct amount. The cobbled little road was just as deserted
of other traffic as it had been the previous night.
They had no trouble finding their freeway and went on
to spend a very pleasant two weeks roaming around Spain.

(47:20):
On their way back across France, our tourists decided to
make another stop at the same hotel. You certainly couldn't
beat the prices. They found the turn off and drove
down the cobbled road with the buildings promoting the same circus.
It was definitely the same road, except the hotel was gone. Puzzled,
the travelers went to the motel by the freeway to

(47:42):
ask for directions. The employee, they questioned, had never heard
of any such hotel, and they had never had anybody
working there who wore a plum colored uniform. This was
all getting way too weird. The two couples drove along
the cobbled road several times, desperately trying to find the hotel,
but it was as if it had evaporated, leaving no

(48:05):
trace behind. One of the four suggested that it had
been demolished. Certainly at the rates they charged, the establishment
couldn't stay in business for long, but Jeff pointed out
that it would be impossible for the building to vanish
completely in a mere two weeks. The shaken and confused
couples finally gave up and found lodging at a hotel

(48:26):
and lion, which cost them a very modern two hundred
forty seven francs. The four travelers were puzzled by what
had happened, but they assumed that there had to be
a rational explanation. At least that was what they assumed
until the photographs that they had taken on their vacation
were developed. The three snapshots of the hotel were in

(48:47):
the middle of the roles of film used by Jeff
and len but none of those images came back from
the developers, even though each role of film had its
proper amount of photographs. The negatives of those tail shots
had not been defective. They had just disappeared as thoroughly
as the hotel itself. Now more confused than ever, the

(49:10):
Gisbies and the Simpsons resolved to tell no one of
their adventure outside of family and close friends. A friend
of Lenz, who was an amateur fashion historian, pointed out
to him that the odd uniforms the gendarmes had worn
matched the description of those used by the French police
in the very early nineteen hundreds. Another confidant suggested that

(49:31):
they'd experienced a time slip and, without knowing it, spent
the night at a hotel that had not existed for decades.
While the Gisbees thought there might be something to that theory,
the Simpsons opted to just put the whole strange affair
behind them. Jeff and Pauline did not get their wish.
Word of their story reached a reporter at their local newspaper.

(49:53):
In nineteen eighty two, she published a story about their
alleged brush with the weird, and before the two couples
knew it, they were famous. From that day to this,
paranormal researchers have scrutinized the case. It is now amongst
the most well known time slip stories, but it is
of course impossible to come to any definitive conclusions. In

(50:15):
nineteen eighty five, Jeff Simpson told paranormal investigator Jenny Randalls,
who subsequently wrote an article about the mystery for Fate magazine,
you tell us what the answer is. We only know
what happened, so either the Simpsons and the Gisbees had
the vacation that could truly be called out of this world,

(50:36):
or these two middle aged seemingly saying couples pulled off
an epic hoax. It's impossible to say for sure which
is the case. Either way, it's a heck of a
good story when weird darkness returns. In Hindu culture, it

(51:02):
is believed if certain post death rituals are not conducted
on those who have passed away, the deceased's family would
not prosper and there would be misfortunes of plenty. One
family in Bhutan had to learn that the hard way. Also,
in a beautiful little town in North Wales, children ran
through the graveyard searching for little men with big eyes

(51:24):
and long ears. They were searching for strange fairyfolk, the
Brownies of Bangor Plus. Serial killer Ed Geen was caught
and arrested for his crimes in November of nineteen fifty seven,
but that didn't mean that Gen's neighbors would see the
end of his influence on their lives. These stories and

(51:44):
more still to come. There follows a peculiar little story

(52:08):
from nineteen oh nine which has certainly not gotten the
attention it deserves from fairyists or from students of massysteria. Bangor,
for those outside the UK, is a pretty town in
North Wales. Brownies, meanwhile, are solitary fairies, typically associated with
houses in the north of England and parts of Scotland,

(52:29):
not Wales. Note though, that the word had already been
popularized by the late eighteen hundreds, above all by the
appalling twee Juliana Horatio Ewing, who lent the word to
Baden Powell, who used it for his girl Guide movement.
In any case, back to Bangor, and let's travel to
the cemetery there. This is an extract from the Manchester

(52:51):
Guardian newspaper. Bangor people probably never realized before that the
town contained such a number of children as were visible
about eight o'clock, gambling and shouting in both fear and
delight in a disused cemetery in the middle of the town.
The attraction, a correspondent writes, was a story which spread

(53:12):
among the juveniles, though their elders had heard nothing of it,
to the effect that little men with big eyes and
long ears had been seen playing amongst the tombstones, and
with one accord the children in hundreds trooped gayly to
the cemetery and searched eagerly for the brownies. Needless to say,
none of the fairies was seen, but the children, with
shrieks and cries, searched every nook and corner of the

(53:35):
old cemetery, peeping fearfully around every tombstone and under the
dark yew trees. At last, the din became so great
that the police had to chase the children out of
the enclosure. This extract appeared in the Manchester Guardian on
May nineteenth of that year, and it would be better
to have a North Walligan version to rely on. For example,

(53:57):
was the word brownie really u used by the bangor
children or is this a man Cunian gloss Note the
brownies were not traditionally found in Manchester either. There's also
the rather unusual description of big eyes. Of course, folklore
has lots of creatures with eyes as big as saucers,
and more curiously, those long ears. However, the single most

(54:20):
fascinating thing here is the striking parallel with a famous
leprechaun case from Liverpool in nineteen sixty four. June thirty,
nineteen sixty four, children number un specified saw little men
numbers variable in Jubilee Park, near that vortex of northern necrotism,
the Bowling Green. Quite what the children saw has been

(54:43):
much debated. White hats on the little men were noted,
as were their antics and throwing sods at each other.
What is documented is that very rapidly the little men
were interpreted by the press as being leprechauns. Leprechauns are,
of course an Irish sol military ferry, known for shoemaking
and vast wealth. Beach's daughter recently shared with him the

(55:06):
insight that the leprechaun might be rich because he sells
lots of shoes. Legend claims that if you grab and
hold a leprechaun, you'll be able to claim the phase treasure.
So was the word leprechaun just a reflex word picked
up by a local journalist leprecaun are always male. The
connection might have been as simple as that. Or do

(55:27):
we have here third of fourth generation Irish children living
the stories told them by their grandparents and great grandparents,
And in either case was this all hysteria? Beach's belief
system requires him to nod sagely here, But some modern
Liverpoolians have memories. Make what you will of the following two.

(55:50):
I was one of the school children that saw those leprechauns.
I attended bray Street School and we all saw them
popping in and out of a window overlooking the school yard,
about four of them, all tiny, dressed like a schoolbook
idea of a typical gnome, and they sat swinging their
legs on the window ledge getting in and out. What
they were I don't know. I only know what they
looked like. I'd love to know the truth. I certainly

(56:14):
remember leprechauns, and I actually saw a few of them
on Kensington Fields, close to the library, but my parents
and other adults tried to convince me that I'd been
seeing things. This would be one afternoon in early July
nineteen sixty four, around four thirty pm, and I remember
it as if it were yesterday. I was ten at
the time and on my way to play football with
my mates and saw these little, i'd say just a

(56:36):
few inches tall men dressed in red and black, standing
in the grass looking at me. I'm sure one of
them had some type of hat on. I panicked and
ran all the way home. My mom said that there
had been reports of leprechauns and little men on Jubilee
Drive and Edge Lean the day before. That same evening,
crowds turned up on Jubilee Drive, and I remember a
girl with a jam jar that she was going to

(56:57):
put the leprechauns in. By the first the word was
spreading among the little folk, the children, that is, not
the fairies, and swarms descended on Jubilee Park to see
for themselves. It was all too much for Irish Park's
Constable James. No one, I don't believe in leprekans myself,
he said. He called in the city police, police and

(57:19):
cars and motorcycles arrived. They cleared the hundreds of youngsters
from the Bowling Greens, the reported playground of the wee folk,
closed the gate and stood guard. But beyond the Bowling
Green gates, the youngsters milled tiny tots to fourteen year olds.
They crammed the top of the covered reservoir for a
better view of the Bowling Green. Tolerant bobbies wandered about

(57:40):
trying to get the youngsters on the move, but the
kids would not believe that there were no little green men.
It was not until after ten pm that the park
was finally cleared. How the story started was not known,
but it lasted two nights. And how did those little
brownies who helped the Irish housewife with their chores come
to arrive in Liverpool? Maybe they flew from Old Ireland.

(58:04):
A woman resident in Crosby reported seeing strange objects glistening
in the sky whizzing over the river to the city
from the Irish Sea. The Crosby UFO and perhaps the
green men can be dismissed. They both sound like a
journalist's fugue. But by July tenth rumor had come to
nearby Kirby, where children believed that there were ferries in

(58:26):
the churchyard of Saint Chad's. There it took ten days
and the intervention of clergy and policemen to get the
children out from among the graves. Beach wonders very vaguely
if the hunting element children with jam jars and by
some accounts air rifles were responding to the idea of
capturing the leprechauns to get their treasure. Beach should end

(58:48):
by noting that rational explanations have been offered up, as
they always are in these cases. There is the circus
school that claims that the leprechaun scare began with a
household of traveling midgets. There's the James Nolan school that
claims that Nolan, the park constable, set up the rumor
mill as a prank. Evidence includes the testimony of a colleague.

(59:10):
Then there is the diminutive gardener Brian Jones, who may
have set off the leprechaun fever and who claimed as
much in a Liverpool newspaper in nineteen eighty two. In
any case, the Liverpool Kirby kerfuffle would make a great
final chapter for a book of modern fairy. Even after

(59:48):
police arrested fifty one year old ed Gean on November seventeenth,
nineteen fifty seven, his playing field, Wisconsin neighbors likely failed
to realize that their lives would never be the same again.
While Gain had a reputation for being a weird loaner,
he was still regarded as generally harmless. In fact, he

(01:00:09):
often served as an occasional babysitter for many of the
families living near the one hundred and sixty acre farm
where Gain had been living alone since the death of
his mother Augusta in nineteen forty five. While one local
boy tried to tell his family about the collection of
shrunken heads that he'd once seen in Gen's farmhouse. People
generally dismissed what he saw as yet another of Ed's

(01:00:31):
crazy pranks. If neighbors were put off by his fascination
with taxidermy, they largely kept that to themselves. But after
police discovered the body of local hardware store owner Bernice
Warden in a shack connected to Gen's farmhouse, they soon
discovered more about their quiet neighbor much more. Though the

(01:00:55):
Green farmhouse was largely dilapidated, Ed only lived in two
small rooms. The rest of the house was sealed off.
Police kept making bizarre discovery after bizarre discovery as they
searched the farmhouse and surrounding grounds. Not only had the
headless body of Bernice Warden been strung up by her heels,
they also found cereal in a bowl made from a

(01:01:17):
human skull, lampshades and waste baskets formed from human skin,
a shoe box filled with the sexual organs of women,
a belt with human nipples attached, a loose collection of noses,
and a human heart. But their most grotesque discovery was
of a woman suit made from the sewn together skins

(01:01:38):
of Gaen's various victims, which he would later admit to
wearing to make himself feel as if he had breasts
and female genitalia. All told, police found the remains of
eleven women, though Gain would only confess to murdering two
of them, Bernice Warden and a second woman, Mary Hogan,
who had gone missing some time earlier. The other bodies

(01:02:00):
had been taken from the local cemetery, something that came
as an unpleasant revelation, as the fellow townspeople had no
idea that the graves of their loved ones had been desecrated.
Police had trouble believing that Gean could have stolen the
bodies undetected. To bolster their case, they took him to
the Plainfield Cemetery to show them which graves had been opened.

(01:02:20):
This would be a controversial move when it came out.
Prosecutors quickly charged ed Geen with first degree murder for
the deaths of Bernice Warden and Mary Hogan. But any
hope the locals had of avoiding publicity ended when news
of what police found at the Green Farm hit the newspapers.
Ed Geen and Plainfield, Wisconsin became household names, with curiosity

(01:02:44):
seekers descending on Plainfield from across the country. Many of
the locals grudgingly gave media interviews, but most of them
hoped that things would blow over in time. As for
ed Gean, he was assessed by doctors at the Central
State Hospital for the Criminal Insane in Wapin, Wisconsin now
the Dodge Correctional Institution, and soon diagnosed him as a

(01:03:06):
sexual psychopath. They also recommended that Geen be kept in
the hospital for the rest of his life. Even as
prosecutors and defense attorneys wrestled over the question of Geen's sanity,
a battle of another kind was already taking place elsewhere.
When an auction house offered up the contents of ed
Gean's house at a public sale. Thousands of people from

(01:03:29):
all over the country came to Plainfield to acquire souvenirs.
Even before the auction began, the auction house offered tours
of Geen's house and farm for fifty cents apiece. Though
the outraged families of Gen's victims tried to stop the saal,
it still went ahead as scheduled. The farm itself was
sold to a local real estate dealer who announced plans

(01:03:52):
to turn the property into a tree farm. As for
the nineteen forty nine truck that Gene used to cart
bodies to his farm, it was sold to junk dealer
Chet Sales for two hundred and fifteen dollars. While Sales
told reporters that he would keep the truck as a souvenir.
He later sent the truck on tour with the carnival circuit,
where it was billed as Geen's Google Car. It would

(01:04:15):
be a familiar sight at carnivals for years afterward. Considering
the simmering anger that the people of Plainfield had over
the industry that had sprung up around Geen and his crimes,
nobody was really surprised when the local volunteer fire department
was called to a fire at the Green Farm on
March twentieth, nineteen fifty eight. While no one took credit

(01:04:38):
for setting the fire, just about everyone in town, including
the firefighters, simply stood and watched as the Sinister house
burned to the ground, and so with ed Geen in
the hospital where he would remain for the rest of
his life, and the last physical trace of his life
in Plainfield gone up in flames. His former neighbors must

(01:04:58):
have felt some hope that the Butcher of Plainfield would
be slowly forgotten, and that might actually have happened had
it not been for Robert Albert Block, already well known
for his work in crime, horror, and fantasy the Wisconsin
borne Block had been living in nearby Wayowega when ed

(01:05:20):
Geene's crimes were revealed, and he followed the case with
more than professional interest. Block had long been fascinated by
abnormal psychology, and he had already written several stories about
killers with disassociative identity disorder known as multiple personality disorder
in those days. Drawing on his research into ed Gene's

(01:05:40):
life as well as some related cases, Block wrote a
book that would be forever associated with his name, Psycho,
Published in nineteen fifty eight. Psycho told the story of
Norman Bates, a motel owner operator who was also an
amateur taxidermist with an abnormal fascination with his mother. Still,

(01:06:01):
while Bloc had no hesitation about depicting Norman as a murderer,
it likely says a lot that the bizarre psycho sexual
urges that inspired ed Geen were carefully omitted. Block knew
his audience to be fair, Block never claimed that his
book was based exclusively on Geen, but rather on the
idea that he represented a mass murderer living undetected and

(01:06:24):
unsuspected in a typical American town. Since its publication, Psycho
has since been recognized as one of the great horror
classics of the twentieth century and not surprisingly generated renewed
interest in Geen and his crimes. But the book gained
even greater fame when director Alfred Hitchcock managed to secure

(01:06:45):
the film rights for a modest sum, largely by using
a fake name, something which Block would complain about the
rest of his life. While the eminent director faced major
opposition in getting funding for a full Hollywood production over
such a controversial project, he managed to produce the film
for immodest eight hundred thousand dollars by using the production

(01:07:06):
crew from his then television show. The screenplay, which was
faithful to the book, carefully downplayed any suggestion that Norman
Bates was a sexual psychopath like Geen. Filmed in black
and white due to limited funding, Psycho, released in nineteen sixty,
was a hit from the very beginning and made a
star of Anthony Perkins playing Norman Bates. Even with luke

(01:07:29):
warm reviews by critics, some of whom condemned it as
a gimmick film, Psycho proved to be one of Hitchcock's
most profitable productions and has since been recognized as a
movie classic and one of Hitchcock's most memorable films. The
film appeal came from its shock value, largely because Hitchcock
managed to defy censors trying to enforce the Motion Picture

(01:07:51):
Production Code that had been enforced in Hollywood for decades.
While the code was already fraying badly by nineteen sixty,
the film's bowld portrayals of sexuality and violence, including the
controversial shower scene, helped open the floodgates to a host
of copycat films that attempted to trade on Psycho's success.

(01:08:12):
This meant the introduction of splatter films, which largely focused
on violence and gore rather than the bizarre sexual aspects
of ed Geene's crimes. It would still take decades for
Hollywood to catch up with ed Geen, with films such
as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre nineteen seventy four and Silence
of the Lambs in nineteen ninety one. As for ed

(01:08:34):
Geen himself, he seemed quietly unaware of how his crimes
had influenced American culture. By all accounts, he was thoroughly
content with his new life at the Central State Hospital.
A model inmate, he never required sedation or restraints, and
he spent his time reading books, chatting with staff and
other patients, and carrying out his chores without complaint. Aside

(01:08:58):
from mis disturbing habit of staring at female staff and
avoiding them whenever possible, Gean's life seemed idyllic until his
death from cancer on July twenty sixth, nineteen eighty four.
He was buried between his mother and brother in Plainfield Cemetery,
not far from the graves he had desecrated decades earlier,

(01:09:18):
which must have horrified the families involved. Along with the
films he helped inspire, ed Gean continues to fascinate true
crime buffs, many of whom still descend on Plainfield seeking
out physical traces of his crimes. While the remains of
his abandoned farmhouse and the hardware store where Bernice Warden
was murdered are still accessible, visitors to Plainfield seeking out

(01:09:42):
Gean's grave might be surprised to find that it is
now unmarked. The one hundred and fifty pound tombstone that
used to mark the site was stolen in two thousand
and Despite being later recovered by police, it was never
returned to the cemetery and has been kept in the
basement of the Plainfield Police Department ever since. There is still,

(01:10:03):
though a noticeable hole on Gene's gravesite, where visitors often
steal dirt as a souvenir, but little else though to
mark the existence of Plainfield's most notorious resident and the
man whose crimes inspired some of Hollywood's most memorable movie monsters.

(01:10:40):
In December twenty nineteen, the ghost returned from its hideout
to terrorize the Glli family of sombec In, Sangoscholin, Samsa
and Bhutan. A barrage of stones land on the roof.
Every now and then family members have been hurt. A
shaman had visited severe Golli's house to conduct ghost beating rituals.

(01:11:00):
The quiet not lasts, however. The next day, December fourth,
Sabir's mother, man Kumari Golly seventy five, was hit with
a stone on her temple. Cod Gasinge Golly, a neighbor
and a relative rushed to the scene. Man Kamari's grandson,
Sunil Golli, Sabir's son, was hiding behind the altar, trembling
with fear. An eerie quiet followed. Cod Gasinge Golly said

(01:11:26):
Kumari's gathered seven stones that came straight her way. A
huge flat stone is landed on the edge of the roof.
A crowd is gathered. They wait for the stone, but
it doesn't come. It all started on the night of
November nineteenth, twenty nineteen. Sannil Golli, fifteen, was with his
grandfather bugalaal Golly seventy six, in a makeshift hut with cattle,

(01:11:48):
far from home in the woods. At around seven pm,
when they were sleeping, stones hit the roof of the hut.
It would not stop and continued through the night. They
made way to a relative's hut nearby, but the melting continued,
so they went to a nearby village for the night.
I went to the grazing land next day. Sabir Golly said,
the pelting started at three thirty pm. I was shocked.

(01:12:11):
Sabir and his son stayed at the hut until five pm.
That day and went to their relative's hut. Pelting continued
with bigger stones. This time they had to run home.
Something was chasing us. It followed us all the way,
he said. The next day, Sebir was accompanied by his father,
son and wife. The pelting started at noon. The following day,

(01:12:32):
it started at seven am. One time, when Sabir Golly
was in his paddy fields, Soneil called. His son was
unconscious with an injury to his head. Soneil said, the
pots and pans went flying out in the open. I
saw it with my eyes. It was terrifying, he said.
People began to notice something about this affair. The pelting
happened wherever the fifteen year old Sneil was. One time,

(01:12:56):
Sidel was running from market with his uncle in a bolero.
The windows were closed, there were people in the vehicle.
Stones hit Sigel even inside the vehicle. The bolero driver,
Tanned Indorgi, attested to it that were several stones in
his vehicle. When they reached home, a shaman was invited
to figure out what was behind all this. A stone

(01:13:17):
hid him and he left to invite his master instead.
After news reached the Sangosholing Guag office, ten monks in
an Iem were also sent to Sombek to conduct rituals.
There were more than forty people in the Gali home,
but to everyone's disbelief, stones kept falling on the roof.
Sherbahadur Ghali, thirty, a shaman, lives in Sipsu. After the ritual,

(01:13:39):
he had informed the family that stone pelting would return.
I told them to conduct the rituals three times, but
they failed to come, he said. Scherbahadur Ghali had never
seen something like this before. Before he was invited, the
Galli family had sent one of the stones to his place.
He still has the stone at his home in Sipsu.
This stone barked and became like a magnet when I

(01:14:01):
put it on a bronze plate for a ritual, he said.
Then I knew there was something wrong and decided to
go to Sambec. Sher Bahadur Ghali said, behind all of
this is Sebir's great grandfather. The shaman began narrating the
story from four generations ago. He was a great shaman,
but had renounced shamanism to become asad who scher Bahadur said,

(01:14:23):
adding that he could not become an accomplished Sadu. When
he died, his family had not conducted the death rights properly.
That is why he is haunting his family. In Hindu culture,
people often conduct rituals and offerings in the name of
their dead ancestors. It's believed that if rituals like these
are not conducted, that particular family would not prosper and

(01:14:45):
there would be misfortunes of plenty. The i Am also
said that a great shaman in the family had died
in the past and rites were not performed. Shaman scher
Bahadur Ghali said, I will have to do this the
shaman way to set him free. The Gale family also
has a budding shaman among them. Sadeil dropped out of
school after it was discovered that he had these special powers.

(01:15:09):
He would suddenly go in a trance like State village
coordinator Khadka sing Gali said the size of the stones
that came flying would sometimes kill a person. He said
stones falling on the roof when the monks were conducting
rituals inside the house was scary. I am yet to
understand what it is, he said. Coming up North Carolina's

(01:15:43):
Great Dismal Swamp is full of horror stories, but the
worst might be the fact that the swamp appears to
swallow people alive. But first, an apparent incident involving a
gigantic cigar shaped UFO somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean in
May nineteen sixty three wasn't reported for almost twenty years,

(01:16:05):
when a witness to the event finally came forward through
a written letter of the event. That story is up next.

(01:16:39):
An apparent incident involving a gigantic cigar shaped UFO somewhere
over the Atlantic Ocean in May nineteen sixty three would
remain unreported for almost twenty years until the editorial team
behind Flying Saucer Revue magazine received a letter in late
nineteen eighty from the witness to the affair. The reason

(01:17:00):
the witness left the incident unreported for so long was
simply that the witness had very little knowledge of UFO reports,
as well as the fact that she found the entire
episode terrifying. Only after reading about the subject purely by
chance did she begin to realize just how extraordinary the
incident was. Although the incident is not one of the

(01:17:22):
most exciting on record, it is another incident that has
a connection with such official organizations as NATO North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, who have a small plethora of UFO accounts
attached to their name. If we assume these strange crafts
are piloted by intelligent beings from another world, would it
make sense that they would take an interest in such

(01:17:43):
key organizations. The details of the witness have been withheld
from the public domain. We know that she is female
and from a country in Western Europe that are members
of NATO, and was married to an Englishman at the
time that she gave the report. According to investigators at
Flying Sat Saucer Review, she is an incredibly credible witness,

(01:18:03):
meaning in turn that the account is likely equally credible.
They would eventually release details of the encounter in their
November nineteen eighty one edition, Volume twenty seven, number three.
It is from that report that we base the following
account on. Just what did the witnesses see that day
somewhere in the North Atlantic and for what reason were

(01:18:25):
these apparent visitors here in the first place. According to
the witness, the following incident took place in the first
or second week of May nineteen sixty three. The witness
was a NATO employee in the capacity of an English
language secretary, normally based in Paris, France. On the day
in question, she was part of fifty NATO employees who

(01:18:47):
were about to board a flight to take them to
Ottawa and Canada for NATO ministerial meetings. It was around
ten am when the DCA left the runway at Early
Airport in Paris. The weather was perfect, with visibility as
the pilot took the plane to just over thirty five
thousand feet. The witness recalled that there appeared to be
a feeling of military control on the plane that day,

(01:19:09):
although the fact that there was only fifty NATO staff
on board the plane that appeared decisively empty. Because of this,
passengers had an array of seats to choose to settle
down in for the majority of the journey. The witness
chose to sit next to one of the windows, which
she recalled was a lot larger than a standard commercial
airliner window. It was as she was preparing to settle

(01:19:31):
down in her seat with a book with the cold
waves of the Atlantic Ocean below them, but she noticed
a strange object below. She would describe it as something
dark and absolutely tremendous. What's more, It stood out in
vivid contrast to the brightness of the early afternoon sky.
When she moved her face as close to the window
as possible so as to get a closer look, she

(01:19:53):
would see the object appeared to be a gigantic, dark
gray torpedo. She would elaborate that the object appeared to
menacing and frightening as she continued to watch it. She
continued to observe the strange object for several minutes. She
was unable to see any wings, windows, or any apparent
propulsion systems or engines. Although she would describe what she

(01:20:15):
believed was the bank of the object as cut off
sharply and squarely. The witness would estimate the object was
around six thousand to seven thousand feet below them. She
watched it for several more moments until it disappeared into
the clouds. She suddenly looked around the plane. It appeared
she was the only person who had noticed the strange

(01:20:36):
object below. She would debate with herself whether to mention
what she had seen. However, she feared that they would
not believe her. As she sat back into her seat,
she began to ponder whether the object had any connection
to nuclear weapons. Although she would indeed remain quiet for
the time being, she resolved that she would speak to
a colleague in Paris with expertise in nuclear matters. However,

(01:21:00):
as she would later reveal in her report, she would
decide against mentioning the incident. It was while she was
considering these things that the plane suddenly began to shudder
and pitch up and down violently. Although she told herself
that this was just normal turbulence, she knew that she
had not experienced anything as intense or as prolonged as

(01:21:22):
this disturbance appeared to be. And what's more, she couldn't
shake the feeling that the disturbance to the flight was
due to the object that very well might still be
below them. She would begin researching what the object might
have been. She would do this privately before finally issuing
her report to UFO magazine in nineteen eighty. It is
unfortunate that there were no other corroborating witnesses to an

(01:21:45):
otherwise intriguing account, and while this is something that skeptics
to such accounts will use to their advantage. Aside from
the apparent credibility of the witness, as well as the
credibility of those behind the one time UFO publication. The
fact that the account is not overblown or dramatic in
any way would suggest it to be authentic, and it

(01:22:06):
is certainly possible that there were other witnesses on the
DC eight that afternoon. It's also equally possible and plausible
that they too, opted to keep the siding to themselves
in the belief that they were the only person to
have seen the strange object. As we've mentioned before, there
are very likely a whole host of UFO sightings that
go unreported simply because the respective witnesses fear being labeled

(01:22:29):
crazy or being called a liar. What perhaps makes this
account credible is the details that show up in other
similar UFO reports, not least the shape of the object itself.
While a great many UFOs are disc shaped or even triangular,
a great many sightings of cigar shaped objects can also
be found in the mountain of UFO reports. What's more

(01:22:53):
so can the detail that there appeared no obvious source
of propulsion. What's also interesting and often overlooked, is the
fact that the incident occurred over the water. Many UFO
sidings occur on or near water, and at least according
to your researcher, Gordon Crichton, many of the objects witnessed
over the seas and oceans of the planet are cigar

(01:23:14):
shaped craft. Might this be to do with their potentially
aquatic environment. Perhaps such a shape would likely cut through
the water all the easier. What the connection between such
craft and water is, however, remains a mystery. Whatever the
object was that the witness saw from her plane seat
that afternoon over the Atlantic Ocean, we know the details

(01:23:35):
offered are very much in line with other sightings both
before and since, and undoubtedly there will be other sightings,
both in the contemporary era or from years ago that
have yet to surface, which will also likely contain similar details.
Should we take this incident as credible? Considering the people
involved with the Flying Saucer Review magazine, we should perhaps

(01:23:58):
state yes, and that's such mysterious craft, or more specifically,
the intelligence behind it should take an interest in a
NATO military plane is perhaps not too surprising to many
in the UFO community. For example, during the latter months
of the Belgian Wave, there was an increased NATO presence
in the region, and there are multiple accounts on record

(01:24:19):
of UFO sidings and incidents during NATO training exercises. Might
we even consider that the strange craft was not of
extraterrestrial origin at all, but a secret world military craft,
one which discreetly made the journey under the cover of
the NATO flight. Admittedly, this is pure speculation here. With

(01:24:40):
all of that said, all we can do with the
account is leave it on our mental back burners, ready
to bring it to the forefronts of our minds when
we spot similarities with other incidents, or indeed, if further
witnesses suddenly stepped forward to tell their version of events.

(01:25:18):
On the border of North Carolina and Virginia, there is
a swamp. To call this swamp unholy might be a stretch,
but the stories that bubble up from this region are
far from sanctimonious. Even the settlers who named the swamp
seemed aware of such malignant evil festering in this boggy wilderness.

(01:25:38):
They named it the Great Dismal Swamp, and the name
is stuck. There are all sorts of horror stories about
these eerie wetlands. Those brave enough to enter the mere
risk being lost, vanishing without a trace. You might be
accosted by ghostly lights in the park, or stumble onto
a graveyard that isn't on any map and is said

(01:26:00):
to be the home of half living witches and Native
American curses and darker entities may roam the reeds. Are
you brave enough to tread the miry ground of the
Great Dismal Swamp. You'd better be, because the swamp is
ready for you. People have definitely passed on in the
Great Dismal Swamp, but you don't have to be deceased

(01:26:23):
to accidentally end up in the swamp's most notorious graveyard.
As the legend goes, there is a graveyard in the
swamp that only appears to those who have lost their way.
Explorers looking for the graves won't find them. They can
only be discovered by those not explicitly searching for them.
Some believe this is the work of benevolent spirits trying

(01:26:44):
to warn the loss that they have strayed away from
their path. The graveyard is not locked to one location
and can theoretically appear anywhere in the swamp as long
as a lost soul is in the area. Creepy stories
may be true or false, but you can't are argue
with the facts. According to the park manager, the swamp
is a long history of swallowing up explorers. People enter

(01:27:08):
and just seem to vanish, and it's not entirely clear why.
It might be part of the nature of the swamp,
as there are those who say the swamp is a
habit of making one confused and frightened. It's easy to
get lost and near impossible to find your way again.
One story about William Drummond, a colonial prisoner after whom

(01:27:28):
the Swamp's Lake Drummond is named, entered the swamp with
a large hunting party. History tells us the group got lost,
and after several days in the wilderness, the only person
to emerge alive was Drummond himself. If you think the
swamp is creepy during the day, just wait until nightfalls.
The Great Dismal Swamp is known to get extremely dark

(01:27:51):
at night, so much so that park officials have gone
on record to caution people about it. A park manager
described nighttime in unequivocal terms. It's pitch black dark. It's
scary dark. The park is closed at night for obvious reasons,
but it's open during the day to anyone brave enough

(01:28:12):
to explore it. The Great disbel Swamp is home to
many legends and myths, including the sad tale of the
Lady of the Lake. This native myth refers to a
young bride to bee who passed on shortly before her wedding.
Her suffering soul now resides in the swamp, paddling a
white canoe aimlessly through the marshes. During the dark nights,

(01:28:34):
she can be seen by the light of her lantern.
Inside the lantern is said to be a collection of
fireflies she uses to light her way. Reports of lights
are common throughout the area, leading some paranormal enthusiasts to
believe the Lady of the Lake might actually be real.
You don't have to be captured by a ghost to
disappear in the Great Dismal Swamp. It's a treacherous place,

(01:28:57):
even for those survivalists who know what they're doing. Snakes, bears,
and other wild animals call the swamp their home. Even
the water itself is lethal, as parts of the swamp
are much deeper than they seem. It's possible to get
stuck in a boggy mire and find yourself unable to
crawl out of the water. Many people have drowned over

(01:29:18):
the years, adding fuel to the fire that this swamp
is haunted. The Great Dismal Swamp is purportedly so haunted
that even the animals are spooky. There are plenty of
ominous rumors about the swamp, but that hasn't stopped hunters
from taking their chances anyway. There are stories that say
even the most successful hunters can go home empty handed

(01:29:39):
when preying upon the animals of the swamp. Wounded and
deceased animals are said to vanish without a trace, leaving
hunters confused and perturbed. Stories of bears and deer being shot,
only for the hunters to find no hint of the animal,
not even blood, are common. This would be related to
the story of the Cyprus trees in the swamp, as

(01:30:02):
legends tell that some animals can transform into these trees
when pursued by hunters. There are quite a few terrifying
tales about the swamp that were passed down from native cultures.
One such story centers around a mysterious cypress tree along
the shores of Lake Drummond. There are at least two
different versions of the tale, but both tell of a

(01:30:23):
creature fleeing from vicious predators. In one telling, the story
follows a deer being chased by hunters. While the deer
ran in terror through the swamp, the swamp decided to intervene.
It turned the deer into a tree, leaving the hunters confused.
They halted the chase, but the deer was forced to
remain a tree forever. The other version of this story

(01:30:45):
is about a witch coming across a group of hunting
dogs in the swamp. She teased the animals, but they
quickly turned on her. They chased her into the lake,
and as a last ditch effort, she turned herself into
a tree. Unfortunately, she was unable to reverse the trick.
One of the most widely reported phenomena in the Great
Dismal Swamp is the appearance of ghostly lights at night.

(01:31:09):
Even today, reports of lights are fairly common from those
brave enough to enter the park after dark. There are
all sorts of explanations for these lights, including the Lady
of the Lake and UFOs. While these eerie explanations are
great for campfire stories, the real reason behind the lights
is likely rooted in science. There are three leading theories

(01:31:31):
about the origin of the swamp lights. The first is foxfire,
a bioluminescent phenomenon that occurs when wood is decomposed by
certain species of fungi. The second explanation is that methane
gas from decomposing plant matter would occasionally ignite and create
transient flashes of light. The last explanation smoldering peat moss

(01:31:53):
is responsible for the lights. The eerie tragedy of the
Lady of the Lake is a haunting tale, one that
inspires a lot of emotions. Famed writers Edgar Allan Poe,
Edward Gory, and Thomas Moore were all so taken by
the story they decided to create their own renditions in tribute.
Moore's poem A Ballad The Lake of Dismal Swamp captured

(01:32:17):
the ghostly essence of the swamp so well it instigated
a flood of tourists visiting the region. His version suggests
the Lady of the Lake's lover took to the swamp
in grief to search for her, only to become lost
himself and reunite with his lost love on the other side.
Here is Moore's poem a Ballad The Lake of the

(01:32:38):
disbel Swamp by Thomas Moore, written at Norfolk in Virginia.
They made her a grave too cold and damp for
a soul so warm and true. And she's gone to
the lake of the dismal swamp, where all night long
by a firefly lamp she paddles her white canoe and

(01:33:00):
her firefly lamp. I soon shall see and her paddle.
I soon shall hear, long and loving our life shall be,
and I'll hide the maid in a cypress tree. When
the footstep of death is near. Away to the dismal
swamp he speeds. His path was rugged and sore, through
tangled juniper beds of reeds, through many a fen where

(01:33:22):
the serpent feeds and man never trod before. And when
on the earth he sunk to sleep, I slumber his
eyelids knew he lay where the deadly vine doth weep
its venomous tear, and nightly steep the flesh with blistering dew.
And near him the shee will stirred the break, and

(01:33:42):
the copper snake breathed in his ear, till he starting
cried from his dream awake, Oh, when shall I see
the dusty lake and the white canoe of my deer.
He saw the lake, and a meteor, bright quick over
its surface, played welcome. He said my dear one's light,
and the dim shore echoed for many a night the
name of the death cold maid, till he hollowed a

(01:34:05):
boat of the birch and Barque, which carried him off
from shore. Far far he followed the meteor spark. The
wind was high and the clouds were dark, and the
boat returned no more but oft from the Indian hunter's camp.
This lover and maid so true, are seen at the
hour of midnight, damp to cross the lake by a

(01:34:28):
firefly lamp and paddle their white canoe. Gory worked on
adapting Moore's poem into an opera, but passed before it
could be completed. Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Lake was
featured in the collection Tamerlane and Other Poems. It's a
short poem, so I'll share it here as well. In

(01:34:50):
Youth's Spring, It was my lot to haunt of the
wide earth spot, the which I could not love the
less so lovely was the loneliness of a wild lake,
with black rock bound, and the tall pines that towered around.
But when the night had thrown her, pall upon that
spot as upon all and the wind would pass me

(01:35:12):
by in a stilly melody, my boyous spirit would awake
to the terror of the lone Lake. Yet that terror
was not fright, but a tremulous delight and a feeling undefined,
springing from a darkened mind. Death was in that poisoned wave,
and in its gulf a fitting grave for which who

(01:35:33):
thence could solace bring to his lone imagining whose solitary
soul could make an eden of that dim lake. The
swamp has a long and complicated history with humans. It
was originally inhabited by Native Americans, but with the era

(01:35:54):
of colonialism came great changes. One of the most significant
changes was the arrival of slaves from Africa, and the
Great Dismal Swamp became massively important to them. It became
a wilderness refuge for escaped slaves, and they set up
hidden communities in the mire. Living off the land, they
were able to thrive away from their colonial masters. They

(01:36:17):
were known as Maroons. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about them
in her novel Dread, a Tale of the Great Dismal
Swamp A Place A link to that novel in the
show notes when Weird Darkness returns, a weeping man called

(01:36:50):
the police to tearfully apologize for murdering his victims, but
that didn't stop him from continuing to kill again and again.
I'll tell you about the weepy voiced killer coming up.

(01:37:32):
Between the end of nineteen eighty and August of nineteen
eighty two, three women were murdered and two others attacked
in Minnesota's Minneapolis Saint Paul area. The assaults turned out
to be the work of the same man, a shadowy
figure who contacted the police himself after most of his crimes,
begging them to stop him before he killed again. I

(01:37:54):
just stabbed somebody with an ice pick, the high pitched
voice sobbed into the phone. I can't stop myself. I
keep killing somebody. His tendency to call police and tearfully
confess his crimes led authorities to dub the assailant the
weepy voiced killer. But who was he and what drove
him to commit these heinous deeds, only to express such

(01:38:17):
emotional remorse afterward. Born in nineteen forty four, Paul Michael
Steffani was the second of ten children raised in what's
been described as a highly religious household. He made his
way to Saint Paul, Minnesota, in the mid nineteen sixties,
where he variously worked as a shipping clerk and a janitor.
He was employed at Malberg Manufacturing Company before being fired

(01:38:40):
in nineteen seventy seven. Three years later, his first victim
was found near the machine shop at Marlberg Manufacturing. Steffani
was married for a time and fathered a daughter before
getting divorced. Over the course of less than two years,
Steffani killed three women and brutally assaulted two others time
with one exception. He called the police afterward to tearfully

(01:39:04):
confess to his crimes, though never giving them his name
or any other information that could identify him. In the
calls that led the media to dub him the weepy
voiced Killer, Steffani apologized for his crimes and begged police
to stop him. I couldn't help it, Steffani said in
one of his calls to the police. They don't know
why I had to stabber. I'm so upset about it.

(01:39:27):
At three o'clock in the morning on New Year's Eve
nineteen eighty, police received the first ever phone call from
the weepy voiced Killer, though they didn't know that at
the time. All they knew was that a nearly hysterical,
high pitched voice directed them to a spot near the
Mahlberg Manufacturing Company machine shop off Pierce Butler Road because
there was a quote girl hurt there quote. Police found

(01:39:51):
a gruesome scene when they arrived there. Twenty year old
Karen Poddock was lying naked in the snow. She'd been
bludgeoned more than tenmes with a tire iron, the beating
so bad it cracked her skull and left her brain exposed,
yet she somehow survived. Pojak had come into Saint Paul
for a New Year's Eve party with her sisters, but

(01:40:12):
had left the party around midnight. She wandered around the
city intoxicated until she had the misfortune to cross paths
with Steffani. However, the damage from her assault was so
severe that she was left with multiple brain injuries and
couldn't identify her assailant. For now, the Weepy Voiced Killer
was free to stalk more victims. Tragically, the Weepy Voiced

(01:40:35):
Killer's other victims weren't so lucky. In nineteen eighty one,
eighteen year old Kimberly Compton got off a bus in
Saint Paul, Minnesota, Within hours, she was dead, stabbed with
an ice pick more than sixty times. Steffani called police
multiple times after the murder of Compton. Two days after
her death, he called to say that he was sorry

(01:40:56):
and that he would be turning himself in, but he
never did. The Next day, he called to correct some
of the media coverage around the attack. Then on June eleventh,
eight days after the brutal murder, he called the police
again and in a barely coherent voice, cried, I am
sorry for what I did to Compton. Sorry or not.

(01:41:16):
Though Compton wasn't the Weepy voiced Killer's last victim. In
July of nineteen eighty two, thirty three year old Kathleen
Greening was found drowned in her own bathtub at her
home just outside Saint Paul. At the time, police didn't
connect Greening's death with the weepy voiced killer. The attack
was much less brutal than the others laying, and no

(01:41:37):
phone call was made following her death. Then, in August,
Barbara Simons met Steffani at Hexagon Bar. When she offered
him a cigarette, Steffani offered her a ride home. Unfortunately,
that ride would be her last a newspaper carrier found
Simon's body alongside the Mississippi River the next morning. She'd

(01:41:58):
been stabbed more than one hundred times. Shortly thereafter the
police received another phone call, Please don't talk, just listen.
The now familiar voice of the weepy voiced killer said,
I'm sorry I killed that girl. The police now had
a description Steffani, thanks to eye witnesses linking him with

(01:42:19):
Simon's on the night of her death. However, he wasn't
brought in just yet. Instead, he picked up Denise Williams,
his final victim, on August twenty first. They met on
Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, where he offered her one hundred
dollars to have some fun. Williams, a nineteen year old
sex worker, rode with Stefani to his apartment in Saint Paul,

(01:42:40):
where they engaged in a sex act before he offered
to drive her home. Williams would later state that she
realized something was wrong when Steffani eschewed the freeway in
favor of back roads through suburban neighborhoods. When they reached
a dead end, Steffani began stabbing Williams with a screwdriver
before she was able to bash him over the head
with a glass bottle that she found on the floor

(01:43:01):
of the car. Her screams drew the attention of a neighbor,
who confronted Stefani before the killer fled the scene. Upon
arriving home, Steffani realized that he was injured quite badly
and called the Saint Paul Fire Department for medical assistance.
Authorities recognized his voice as that of the weepy voiced killer,
and Steffani was finally brought into custody. Paul Michael Steffani

(01:43:26):
was convicted of the murder of Barbara Simons and the
attempted murder of the niece Williams. Though his own sister
and ex wife testified in court that they believed Stefani's
voice matched to that of the weepy voiced killer, there
simply was not enough evidence to conclusively link him to
the other attacks. He received a sentence of forty years
in prison. In nineteen ninety seven, Stefani was diagnosed with

(01:43:50):
skin cancer and given only about a year to live.
With the diagnosis functionally a death sentence, Steffani told authorities
that he wanted to confess to his other crimes and
apologized to the families of the victims. To this day,
I can't believe it, Steffani said of the murders he committed.
I wake up in the morning thinking and hoping I'm

(01:44:10):
dreaming all this. It was only when Stefani confessed that
any connection was made between the Weepy Voiced Killer and
the drowning death of Kathleen Greening, which had gone unsolved
for over fifteen years. In all, Stefani confessed to three
murders and two vicious assaults. I don't know what to

(01:44:31):
do except say I wish I could turn back the clock,
the Weepy Voiced Killer said in his confessions. The next year,
Paul Michael Steffani, who had caused so much pain and havoc,
was dead from skin cancer at the age of fifty three.
So did Paul Michael Steffani truly regret his crimes or

(01:44:51):
were his tearful phone calls to police and the media
just an attention seeking ploy. We may never know, but
Steffani insists his apologies were genuine. All I can say
is I'm sick and I'm sorry, Stefani said before he died.
If sorry means anything after fifteen years. Thanks for listening.

(01:45:28):
Feel free to email me anytime with your questions or
comments at Daryn at Weird Darkness dot com, and sure
Weird Darkness with someone you know who loves the paranormal
or stream stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like
you do. All stories in the Weird Darkness are purported
to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find
source links or links to the authors in the show notes.

(01:45:52):
Weird Darkness is a production of Marlor House Productions. And
now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave
you with a little light. Blessed is the one who
perseveres under trial, because having stood the test, that person
will receive the crown of life that the Lord has
promised to those who love him James Wan, verse twelve.

(01:46:13):
At a final thought, start each day with a grateful heart.
I'm Darren Marler. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.

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