HOW TO CREATE AN URBAN LEGEND: From Campfire Tales to True Crime, The Psychology Behind Our Terrors

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Urban legends, those unsubstantiated stories of terror that allow us
to use our imaginations to fill in increasingly horrifying details
with each retelling, have been with us forever. While the
Internet has made dissemination of them easier, humans have been
goading one another with spooky anecdotes for centuries. Psychologists believe

(00:30):
we respond to these tales because we have a morbid
fascination with the disgusting. We also can't help but enjoy gossip.
Put those two things together and it makes for an
irresistible mix. Urban legends often come with a dose skepticism. No,
a killer with a hook hand has never terrorized necking couples.

(00:55):
But sometimes, as you'll hear in this episode, these stories
do turn out to be true. I'm Darren Marler and
this is Weird Darkness. Welcome weirdos. This is Weird Darkness.

(01:22):
Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre,
unsolved and unexplained coming up in this episode. Unidentified flying

(01:44):
objects have been around much longer than Roswell. Four centuries ago.
Before flying vehicles were known to even be possible, Ancient
Russia had quite a shock when they looked into the sky.
I Saint James Episcopal Cemetery in Marietta, Georgia, there is
a grave that people say began to weep tears of

(02:07):
blood when they got too close. A man believes he
hears the sound of a car crash, but it should
not be possible from where he lives. While serving a
life sentence for the murder of fourteen year old Mary
Ellen Deaner, Lester Eubanks was granted a trip to an
Ohio mall. Then he vanished without a trace. But first,

(02:34):
from monsters to ghosts, some scary urban legends and myths
have been spooking out the masses for years, and for
good reason, as they have backstories based on real figures
and events, from Candy Man to slender Man. We'll look
at a few of the most terrifying urban legends that

(02:54):
are based on true tales, and we'll look into what
it takes to create an urban legend of these magnitudes.
We begin there. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows,
turn off your lights, and come with me into the

(03:15):
weird darkness. Urban legends have existed as long as people

(03:40):
have been telling stories in hushed voices. Humans would warn
others of nefarious forces and bloodthirsty entities, like the bloodsucking
Chupacabra of Puerto Rican lore or the horse faced and
bat winged Jersey Devil of the New Jersey pine barrens.
Though urban myths are naturally imbaginative, some of these scary

(04:03):
urban legends have been supported by the sincere accounts of
multiple people. Take the case of Mothman, for example, in
nineteen sixty six, a slew of rural West Virginians all
separately witnessed a ten foot tailed creature flying between the trees.
These accounts suggested that the legend was perhaps more than

(04:26):
just a fantasy. Perhaps most horrifying about these legends, however,
is how they take on a life of their own
and inspire real fear or even violence. Slender Man, he
is a unique urban legend, unlike the others I'll tell

(04:48):
you about. Slender Man was born on the Internet as
a so called creepy pasta or scary urban legend that
was built online before it evolved offscreen into real lil life.
The urban myth of slender Man was created for an
innocuous June two thousand nine photoshop contest held by a
website called Something Awful. Users were challenged to take mundane

(05:14):
pictures and make them scary by adding realistic imagery of
the paranormal. Inspired by these surreal imaginings of H. P. Lovecraft,
one contestant named Eric Knudsen designed a tall, thin, eerie figure,
and slender Man was born. Nudsen's harmless creativity was quickly

(05:36):
co opted by countless Internet users. Mere days later, someone
made a horror film with a found footage esthetic that
told of young students being stalked by a slender Man
like figure. New images were made, and a spooky mythos
that lived offline was created as well. According to the

(05:59):
stories that littered creepypasta forums, Slenderman beckoned children into the forests,
where he then ordered them to kill in order to
become his proxies. What should have remained at internet meme
quickly devolved into real violence. On May thirtieth, twenty fourteen,

(06:20):
two twelve year old girls named Morgan Geiser and Anissa Weir,
who believed in the scary urban legend, lured a friend
into the woods outside their Milwaukee suburb, where they planned
to kill her and leave her as an offering to
Slender Man. They stabbed their twelve year old friend, Peyton Leitner,

(06:41):
nineteen times and left her in the woods to die,
but Lightner managed to survive, bleeding from her torso arms
and legs. She dragged herself to a nearby path and
was discovered by a cyclist who called nine one one.
Geyser and Weir were arrested sor after Lightner was rescued.

(07:02):
Geyser and Weir later admitted to police that they had
planned the attack for months, beginning in December twenty thirteen.
Weir claimed that Geyser proposed the idea, which they both
believed would earn them entry into slender Man's home and
a position as his proxies. Their belief in the scary
urban legend was so complete and their dedication to please

(07:25):
it so powerful, that they used a kitchen knife to
try and murder their friend that they had known since
the fourth grade. The state of Wisconsin chose to try
the two girls as adults, and Geyser was diagnosed with schizophrenia,
and a jury found Weir not criminally responsible because she
suffered from a shared delusional disorder. Geyser has since been

(07:49):
sentenced to forty years under institutional care, and all because
of an urban myth that began online. Rats in the
toilet bowl. You stagger into the bathroom at three am
to relieve yourself, groggy with sleep. You lift the lid

(08:10):
and position yourself over the toilet. You hear splashing. Turning
on the light, you see a rat looking back at
you from the bowl. You're never the same again. Urban
legends about animals in sewers have been a staple of
scary stories, particularly the one about baby alligators being flushed

(08:30):
down toilets and then growing to adult size and waste channels,
most often told about New York. Not true. While alligators
and crocodiles have been found in New York, they're generally
released and found above ground, and it's thought that New
York is too cold for them to survive for very
long anyway. But finding a rodent in your toilet inches

(08:55):
from very vulnerable areas of your body is a particular
kind of domestic terror, and one that happens to be possible.
Drain plumbing for toilets is typically three inches in diameter
or more, plenty of space for a rat to climb up.
The animals are attracted to sewage lines due to undigested

(09:17):
food in feces, and can travel through pipes before emerging
through an opening and into your bathroom. And yes, rats
can be somewhat testy when they complete their journey. One
aquatic rodent bit the rump of a female victim in Petersburg, Virginia,
in nineteen ninety nine. In Seattle, the issue is common

(09:39):
enough that public officials have given advice on what to
do in case you encounter one, which is by the way,
close the lid and flush. Lollrona a tragic figure in
Mexican folklore. Lallrona, or the Weeping Woman, is a ghostly

(10:00):
apparition that wears white and wanders the country's water sides
in profound grief. Some say she steals children, only to
drown them in a nearby body of water. The paranormal
entity recently garnered renewed attention in the wake of Hollywood's
horror film The Curse of Lallrona. Though her story is

(10:22):
possibly centuries old, There are several origin stories for the
urban myth of Lollroona, and the earliest recorded ones date
back four hundred years. Some believe that Lollerona is actually
just the conflation of two Aztec myths, or perhaps that
she is based off of these as well. The Aztecs

(10:44):
described a similar, willowy and white figure that was one
of ten goddesses or omens which heralded the conquest of Mexico.
She was known as the snake Woman and was described
as a savage beast and an evil omen who walks
about at night and cries into the moonlight. Another goddess,

(11:05):
whose name I will not even try to pronounce, means
the jade skirted one, and she oversaw the waters and
was said to drown people, and the Aztecs sacrificed children
in order to honor her. But there is a more
modern version to explain where the myth of Lalla Na
may have come from. As legend has it, a beautiful,

(11:26):
young peasant woman named Maria married a wealthy man. The
two lived happily and had two children, but Maria's husband
became unfaithful. One day, she and her children caught him
romantically engaged with another woman by the river. Enraged, Maria
threw her children into the river and drowned them. After

(11:48):
her anger subsided and reason kicked in, she spent the
rest of her life in profound grief, hopelessly wandering the
water side to find her children. The scar The urban
legend of Lalla Na could remain just that, were it
not for the chilling accounts of those who claimed to
have seen her. Patricia Lujon claimed to have first encountered

(12:11):
the wailing woman when he was a young boy in
nineteen thirties New Mexico. According to Lujan, even his parents
spotted the strange woman near their Santa Fe property, drifting
toward the local creek in a white dress that covered
her tall, slender body. When she reached the water, she disappeared.

(12:32):
She just seems to glide, as if having no legs,
Lujon recalled. Lujon wasn't the first nor last person to
describe such an encounter with the weeping woman, who was
said to be drawn to water where she wails for
her dead children. The urban legend is popular throughout the
southwestern US and Mexico, and many have been convinced to

(12:55):
have witnessed it for themselves. The legend of Polybius Vintage
video gamers have long traded stories about a coin operated
arcade game circa early nineteen eighties Portland that had strange
effects on its players. The game, titled Polybius, was alleged

(13:19):
to have prompted feelings of disorientation, amnesia, game addiction, and
even suicide. The machine's cabinet was said to be painted
entirely black, and it was rumored that stern looking men
would sometimes visit arcades to collect information from the machine
before disappearing. Was it a CIA experiment spun off from

(13:43):
mk ultra, the psychoactive drug study conducted on unsuspecting subjects.
While the entire story doesn't hold up to scrutiny, individual
pieces are actually based in fact. Brian Dunning, host of
the Skeptoid podcast, which I can highly recommend by the way,
did some investigative work and found that a twelve year

(14:05):
old named Brian Morrow had become sickened during a twenty
eight hour marathon video game contest in Portland in nineteen
eighty one. He apparently drank too much soda and experienced
stomach discomfort. Just a few days later, Portland area arcades
were raided by federal agents who seized cabinets that were

(14:26):
being used for gambling. Coupled with the existence of a
real arcade game named polly Play, these memories seemed to
amalgamate into the polybius legend the Mothman. November twelfth, nineteen
sixty six, marked the very first report of the elusive mothman,

(14:49):
a creature so bizarre that it can only be considered
the stuff of urban myths. But multiple sightings of the
monster that year challenged the notion that it exis only
in the imagination. On that fall day in nineteen sixty six,
a clendenin West Virginia gravedigger claimed to have seen an
unsettling creature that looked like a brown human being, soaring

(15:13):
over his head and moving from tree to tree at
rapid speeds. Three days later, four people driving through the
nearby town of Point Pleasant saw a gray winged entity
seven feet tall standing in front of their car. Roger
Scarberry and Steve Mallett told the Point Pleasant Register that

(15:33):
the creature had bright red eyes and a wingspan of
ten feet. All the witnesses commented on the creature's speed.
One of them claimed that it fled at up to
one hundred miles per hour and seemed to dislike the
car's blinding headlights. The witnesses also claimed that the being
chased their vehicle to the outskirts of town before vanishing

(15:55):
into a nearby field. If I had seen it while
by myself, I wouldn't have said anything, said Scarberry at
the time, but there were four of us who saw it.
The following year saw an ominous increase in sightings across
the state of West Virginia. The Gettysburg Times reported on
the elusive creature eight times within the first three days

(16:17):
of the grave Digger's initial report, which included two firefighters
describing a very large bird with large red eyes. In
another reported sighting, Salem, West Virginia, resident Newell Partridge claimed
he spotted two red eyes staring back at him after
his television displayed bizarre patterns and he went outside to

(16:37):
investigate a strange noise. That was the same night that
his dog vanished. But there are, of course skeptics. West
Virginia University professor of Wildlife Biology, doctor Robert L. Smith,
dismissed the urban legend as a misidentification of the sandhill
crane bird. Others are convinced the ear been legend was

(17:00):
intentionally spread by a committed prankster. There are also those
who believe that the mothman was a harbinger of doom,
an idea that was only reinforced when on December fifteenth,
nineteen sixty seven, Point Pleasant's Silver Bridge collapsed. Cars and
pedestrians were plunged into the icy Ohio River waters below,

(17:23):
and forty six people died. Author John Keel forever linked
the bridge collapse with the Mothman's sightings in his nineteen
seventy five book The Mothman Prophecies, which was later adapted
into a film of the same name. Point Pleasant hasn't
shied away from the erie urban legend either. To the contrary,

(17:44):
the town created a historical museum on the scary urban
legend and even constructed a twelve foot tall chrome polished
statue of the beast, and to this day they celebrate
the Mothman annually with a festival Cropsy. For years, kids
living in and around Staten Island raised goosebumps by relating

(18:07):
the tale of Cropsy, a boogieman who lived in the
woods and made a nocturnal habit of disemboweling children. Parents,
no doubt ease to their kid's fears by telling them
no such monster existed, but as a matter of fact,
he did. In nineteen eighty seven, Andre Rand was put

(18:29):
on trial and convicted for a child abduction Rand, it
turned out, may have been connected to a rash of
child disappearances in the nineteen seventies. He had once worked
at Willowbrook, a defunct mental institution. While he denies involvement
in other cases, it's clear Rand's activities had a heavy

(18:50):
influence in the word of mouth stories that followed the chupacambra.
It's the size of a small bear, with scaly skin,
a spiked tail, and it drinks the blood of livestock
across the Americas. At least, that's how the cheopicabra or

(19:10):
goat sucker, has been described since nineteen ninety five. A
staple in Puerto Rican folklore, the chupicabra has been said
to feed on everything from chickens and sheep to rabbits
and dogs. While skeptics are quick to dismiss the chupacabra
as an urban legend, many claim to have lost their
farm animals to the strange beast, and have found the

(19:33):
inexplicably bloodless corpses of these animals to prove it. One
of the earliest recorded sightings of the chepicabra happened in
the small town of Mocha in nineteen seventy five, when
livestock were found completely drained of their blood, with just
a few small puncture wounds found in their chests. Many

(19:53):
suspected that a local satanic cult was responsible, as more
farms reported dead animals, all blood dry through a series
of small circular incisions. Then, in nineteen ninety five, Madeline
Tolentino watched from a window in her Canavana's Puerto Rico
home as a bipedal creature hopped about her property. She

(20:15):
said it reeked of sulfur. Others corroborated her description, but
added that the creature they had seen was hairless. That
same year, eight sheep were discovered dead, each with three
puncture wounds in the chest and reportedly completely drained of blood.
As many as one hundred and fifty farm animals and

(20:38):
pets were reportedly killed in this manner in Tolentino's town
that year, but the carnage didn't end there. Sightings continue
into the modern day and across the world. In October
and December of twenty eighteen, there came many reports of
suspected chupicaburea attacks in Manipur, India and in Attoi. Over

(21:00):
twenty nineteen, a man named Mundo Ovne allegedly recorded an
attack on chickens in the Subaruquio sector of Lares, Puerto Rico.
I was, of course, initially skeptical of the creature's existence,
said American writer Benjamin Radford. At the same time, I
was mindful that new animals have yet to be discovered.
I didn't want to just debunk or dismiss it. If

(21:23):
the chewpacabra is real, I wanted to find it. Radford
thus embarked on a year's long quest to find or
disprove the existence of the chepicabra. However, he eventually came
to conclude that the urban legend was merely spurred by
anti US sentiment with Puerto Rico. He believed that locals

(21:44):
feared that Americans had set up a top secret experimentation
program in the Elunke rainforest, unleashing a hairless beast onto them.
There was also the matter of Species, a sci fi
horror film about an alien human heard hybrid that ravaged
the land and feasted on blood. Not only was the

(22:05):
film partially filmed in Puerto Rico, but Tolentino herself had
seen it the very same year that she reported her
chupicompra sighting. It's all there, said Radford. She sees the movie,
then later she sees something she mistakes for a monster. Nonetheless,
reports of chupicabras across the US continued into the two thousands.

(22:27):
Farmers found bodies of hairless, four legged creatures with burnt
looking skin, but authorities identified these creatures as dogs with
sarcoptic mange, which rendered them patchy, scaly, and largely hairless.
Despite this explanation, the scary urban legend has yet to
be fully dismissed. The leaping lawyer. Sooner or later, Toronto

(22:54):
residents hear the tale of a lawyer who had a
peculiar fondness for running full into his office windows to
demonstrate how strong they were. This practice caught up with
him eventually, as he crashed into a window and went
sailing to his death. This hobby was actually practiced by

(23:15):
Gary Hoy, a senior partner in an area law firm
with an office on the twenty fourth floor. On July ninth,
nineteen ninety three, Hoy made his signature tackle against the
window to impress some visiting law students, the pain finally
broke and sent him plummeting to his death. In the eulogy,
managing partner Peter Lowers called Hoy one of the best

(23:37):
and brightest at the firm. The Muppengari this is one
I must admit I'd not heard of until I began
putting this episode together. Brazilian folklore has described the Muppengawi
as a monstrous entity that dwells deep within the Amazon rainforest.

(24:00):
Depictions of the mythical beast have varied from a hairy
humanoid cyclops that walks on two legs to something closer
to a giant groundsloth that's been extinct for thousands of years.
Skeptics claim that the beast is but an urban legend,
but a mention of the Mapungari to those who live
around the Amazon is sure to cause shivers. Nearly every

(24:24):
native tribe in the Amazon has its own version of
the beast. Even tribes that have not encountered each other
have similar descriptions of the Mapenguri, which translates to the
roaring animal or the fetid beast. The being is said
to be bipedal, seven feet tall, with long, curling claws.

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Others have claimed that the creature has a gaping mouth
on its stomach that's large enough to feast on anything
it encounters. These tales have led scientists on countless expeditions
to find it, while the endeavor has remained fruitless. The
former director of research at the Gold Institute and Bellum,
David Orn, has a theory. It is quite clear to

(25:09):
me that the legend of the Mapengauri is based on
human contact with the last of the ground sloths thousands
of years ago. He said. We know that extinct species
can survive as legends for hundreds of years, but whether
such an animal still exists or not is another question
one we can't answer. The elephant sized prehistoric sloth is

(25:31):
known as Megatherium, and it lived in South America for
nearly five point three million years until it went mysteriously
extinct at the end of the Pleistocene era. Scientists have
found fossils of the giant ground sloth from eleven thousand
years ago, suggesting it did cohabit with humans. It's said
to have emitted a foul stench and fed on large

(25:53):
animals like cattle with ease, but some believe the creature
lives on Carriatana of the Cartiana tribe in Brazil, is
adamant that his son encountered one in the forest. While
the young man escaped, the Mapungari left the area in ruins,
as if a boulder had rolled through and knocked down

(26:13):
all the trees and vines. Reports like Cartiana's remain a
curious and frustrating anomaly. Either scientists are correct and the
urban myth exists as the remnants of prehistoric man's imagination,
or the ravenous beast isn't extinct and has survived for
millennia secretly dwelling in the Amazon to this day. Bloody Mary.

(26:41):
Virtually every young child raised in the Western world is
familiar with the scary urban legend of Bloody Mary. Myth
has it that repeating the name Bloody Mary in a
cramped closet or into the mirror of a dark bathroom
summon the vengeful spirit of a real woman, Queen Mary,
the First of England. In most cases, some are adamant

(27:04):
that Mary's name must be uttered thirteen times, whereas others
claim three times will suffice. Some claim that her spirit
appears as a woman holding a dead baby, while others
insist that she will come after you or your own children.
But the terrifying tale is rooted in medieval history and

(27:25):
begins with the birth of the first Queen Regent of England,
Queen Mary the First, the eldest surviving child of King
Henry the Eighth, Mary did not fulfill her father's desperate
life long hope for a male heir. She was thus
ignored by him and declared illegitimate by Parliament. Her life

(27:45):
was plagued by pain in addition to isolation. According to
Giovanni Michieli, the Venetian ambassador to her court, Mary experienced
terrible menstrual pains and irregularity in her cycles, as well
as deeps of depression. Nonetheless, Mary managed to take the
throne at the age of thirty seven after marrying Philip

(28:07):
of Spain and became pregnant with his child. But when
her due date came and a baby did not, the
country was in chuck. Mary had appeared pregnant, but after
her due date came and went, her pregnant belly disappeared
as well. The inexplicable false pregnancy coincided with Mary having

(28:28):
just signed an act into law known as the Mary
in Persecutions in accordance of which two hundred and forty
men and sixty women were burned the stake for being Protestant.
The despondent monarch came to believe that she'd been punished
by God for her actions, and died childless at the
age of forty two. Besides the sad story of the

(28:51):
real Bloody Mary of England, there are other more paranormal
tales that inspired the scary urban legend of Bloody Mary.
Perhaps most famous is the tale of a witch named Mary,
who was said to have been executed for studying black magic.
According to this legend, Mary would appear in a mirror
during divining rituals in medieval times to seek vengeance. Some

(29:15):
believe this ethereal mirror witch kills her summoner upon arrival,
while others claim that she drags her victims through the
reflective portal into her world. Verifying the legend of Bloody Mary, however,
is easy enough. Simply look into the mirror and chant
her name if you dare the body under the bed.

(29:41):
Vacationing couples, newlyweds, Disneyland guests all have been the subject
of an urban legend involving hotel occupants who fall blissfully
to sleep, only to wake up to an awful stench
coming from either under the bed or inside the mattres.
Closer inspection reveals that a dead body has been stashed

(30:05):
away there, presumably not anyone who has died of natural causes.
This traveling tale has been confirmed multiple times over. At
least a dozen newspaper stories have detailed hotel rooms that
have doubled as body disposal sites. While the smell is
usually apparent right away, at least one couple slept on

(30:27):
a mattress containing a body in Atlantic City in nineteen
ninety nine. Cases in Colorado, Florida, and Virginia have also
been reported. In twenty ten, guests at a budget lodge
in Memphis were horrified to discover that they had been
sleeping above the body of Sunny Millbrook, a missing person.

(30:49):
Fabric softener had been stuffed in the ceiling tiles to
try and mask the smell. At least three other occupants
had also rented the room since Millbrook's disappearance. A court
eventually convicted Milbrook's boyfriend, Lakeith Moody of the crime the Candyman.

(31:11):
Though the urban legend of Candyman largely begins and ends
with the eponymous nineteen ninety two horror film, it does
have a terrifying basis in history. The urban legend that
the film is based on is said to be inspired
by Chicago's inner city violence, segregation laws, American slavery, and

(31:34):
systematic racism. The film is also based on Clive Barker's
nineteen eighty one short story The Forbidden, in which candy
Man was originally depicted as a white man dressed in
a patchwork outfit. Set in the slums of Liverpool, England.
The story centers on a young woman studying graffiti who

(31:55):
finds herself haunted by a deadly figure. The same year
that Barker's story was published, the Cabrini Green housing projects
in Chicago recorded eleven murders and thirty seven murders by gunfire,
all in the span of three months. The combination of
Barker's short story and America's bloody racist climate all worked

(32:17):
to inspire the scary urban legend behind the nineteen ninety
two film of the same name. In the film, there
was an urban myth that revolved around a former slave
named Daniel Robtail, a successful shoe manufacturer. Robtail eventually became
a respectable painter and was commissioned to paint a portrait
of a white woman named Caroline Sullivan. The pair fell

(32:40):
in love, and Sullivan became pregnant out of wedlock. An
enraged white mob subsequently hacked Uptail's right hand off smeared
it in honey, and let a swarm of killer bees,
sting him to death. But Robtail returned as an angry
ghost and vowed to kill anyone who uttered the name
Candyman five times in a mirror. He'd appear behind them

(33:03):
and kill them with one stroke of a hook fixed
to his hand. The film took cues from Chicago's violent
realities throughout the nineteen eighties, and was shot in Chicago
at the Kabrini Green Projects, specifically, in fact one, particularly
chilling murder at the Kabriny Green Project inspired Candy Man
the movie. On April twenty second, nineteen eighty seven, a

(33:27):
mentally ill Chicagoan named Ruthie May McCoy dialed nine to
one one begging for help, claiming that somebody was trying
to invade her home through the bathroom mirror. Despite neighbors
reporting gunshots thereafter. It took police two days to report
to the scene, where they found McCoy shot to death

(33:48):
and a hole in her bathroom wall. The urban myth
of candy Man is a disturbing example of how the
horrors of reality can inspire fables. The main hermit. For decades,
people who vacationed in Central mainez North Pond area were
puzzled by items that would go missing, batteries and food

(34:12):
from cabins, flashlights from camping tents. Rumours spread that a
permanent fixture of the area would forage for sustenance and supplies.
They were right. For twenty seven years, Christopher Knight lived
alone in the woods, keeping tabs on the hikers, canoeists
and other temporary residents of the grounds. When he was

(34:35):
confronted by a game warden in twenty thirteen, Knight admitted
he was responsible for an average of around forty robberies
a year. Despite the likely protests of family and friends
who dismissed tales of a hermit lurking somewhere in the woods,
his identification proved that someone had been watching and waiting
for nearly three decades. England's phantom social workers who steal children.

(35:05):
Here's another urban legend I wasn't aware of previous to
this episode. The most upsetting urban myths typically involve children,
and England's phantom social worker phenomenon is a prime example.
The legend began in the nineteen nineties when British newspapers
started reporting on unidentified men posing as social workers and

(35:28):
taking children from their homes for an evaluation. According to legend,
one man, who would be accompanied by several women would
masquerade as a social worker. He would enter and inspect
homes for safety and examine children for signs of abuse,
and then whisk the children away, never to be seen again.

(35:51):
The urban myth spawned such hysteria that it spurred local
law enforcement in South Yorkshire to create a task force
to investigate the claim. In nineteen ninety, the so called
Operation Childcare received more than two hundred and fifty reports
of this type of abduction as a result, though only
two proved to be valid. One of those was the

(36:14):
report of Anne Wiley, who claimed that a woman pretending
to be a social worker suddenly appeared at her home
after her twenty month old son had been hospitalized for asthma.
The woman had no identification and was accompanied by a
man waiting outside. Suspicious, Wiley demanded more information. The strange

(36:34):
woman placed her son's medical records on the table, but
after the couple left, Wiley was able to confirm that
they were not social workers after all. Despite this chilling account,
in its four years as an active task force, Operation
Childcare did not make a single arrest. Instead, authorities blamed

(36:55):
the press for hyping a small legitimate problem into a
large scale paranoia that then spawned in urban legend. Nonetheless,
there were at least two groups of individuals who abducted
children by posing as social workers. Authorities believed these were
vigilantes who believed that it was their duty to protect

(37:16):
children from abuse in the wake of a major child
abuse scandal in the nineteen eighties. That scandal involved pediatricians
Marrietta Higgs and Jeffrey Watt. The two doctors had developed
a diagnostic test to detect sexual abuse in children, which
involved probing the area around a child's anus. Naturally, this

(37:37):
traumatized more subjects than it saved. Dozens of children were
referred to a Middlesborough hospital as a result, with the
record twenty four children being admitted in one day. In total,
they had removed one hundred twenty one children from their
homes and incorrectly identified ninety four of them as abuse victims.

(37:57):
It's no wonder that in nineteen ninety one, a year
after the phantom social worker scare, that legislators implemented the
Children Act, which enforced strict regulations for social workers. At
least this urban myth spawned positive real life action the
fake cup. You may have had an overly concerned parent

(38:22):
or friend warn you of people impersonating police officers using
that veneer of authority to attack victims who have let
their guard down. While there aren't many who are in
full patrol uniform or traveling in marked vehicles, there have
been many documented cases of assailants posing as law enforcement,

(38:42):
at least two this past summer alone. In Bloomington, Illinois,
a man using flashing lights to get a vehicle to
pull over. After walking up to the vehicle, the man
tried unsuccessfully to overpower the driver before they managed to
get away. In Fayetteville, George, a man donda uniform and
pulled over a teenage boy on a bike, forcing him

(39:04):
to empty his pockets. Talking to real police later, the
boy told them a second car had pulled up with
a man matching the description of someone who'd been caught
impersonating an officer two weeks prior. The Jersey Devil. New
Jersey is home to far more frightening elements than its

(39:24):
record number of shopping malls, including a creature described as
a kangaroo like demon that was designated in nineteen thirty
eight as the country's only state demon. Meet the Jersey Devil,
the legend of which has kept New Jersey residents awake
at night for more than three hundred years. The beast

(39:46):
has many descriptions, ranging from a horse faced demon with
bat wings to a dog headed entity with the talons
of a dragon. As one of America's oldest urban myths,
the origins of the legend of the Jersey Devil. What
is inarguable, however, is that the urban myth first appeared
in the Jersey Pine barrens. Some say that the Jersey Devil,

(40:10):
also called the Leeds Devil, dates back to seventeen thirty five,
when a poor woman named Mother Leads learned that she
was pregnant with her thirteenth child. Desperate, Mother Leeds cursed
the unborn child and when she gave birth nine months later,
a winged creature slithered out of her body and escaped

(40:31):
through the chimney. Some versions of the story cast mother
Leads as a witch who was impregnated by the devil
on purpose. Early versions of this urban myth described the
Jersey Devil swooping across the land, killing local children. The
myth only grew stronger over time, and even Emperor Napoleon's

(40:51):
older brother Joseph once reported a sighting in New Jersey
in eighteen twenty. Then in eighteen forty, the mysterious killing
of newmans livestock were attributed to the elusive beast. Newspapers
around New Jersey began reporting on a plethora of sightings
in nineteen oh nine, when people saw mysterious footprints on
the ground, strange shadows that fell across their windows, and

(41:15):
unidentified and decomposed carcasses in the woods. Terrified citizens closed
schools and work for a week in January of that year,
and the Jersey Devil became the creature's official name from
a Greenwich, New Jersey farmer who shot at a mysterious
creature matching the Jersey Devil's description in nineteen twenty five

(41:36):
to a group of Gibston boys spotting the beast in
the woods in nineteen fifty one. It seemed as though
the entity had survived for centuries, and the nineteen sixty
reward of ten thousand dollars on behalf of Camden Merchants
for anyone managing to capture the beast as yet to
be claimed. The legend of the bunny Man. If you

(42:02):
lived in or around Virginia in the nineteen seventies, you
were probably exposed to the story of the bunny Man
in the tail. An escaped mental patient takes to gutting
bunnies and hanging them from a bridge underpass. Later, the
maniac is said to have graduated to gutting and hanging
teenagers in a similar manner. Locals were cautioned to never

(42:26):
be caught near the underpass, which is now known to
most people as bunny Man Bridge on Halloween night. This
story likely spawned from the very real presence of a
roving madman in the area. In October nineteen seventy, a
couple reported seeing a man dressed in a white suit
and wearing bunny ears, who began yelling at them that

(42:48):
they were on private property. To punctuate his point, he
threw a hatchet at their windscreen, apparently shattering it. There
was a second sighting a bunny man two weeks later,
when a secure guard spotted a hatchet wielding man chipping
away at a porch. Railing police tried unsuccessfully to locate
the man. While he didn't disembowel anyone, the thought of

(43:11):
an adult wielding both a hatchet and a pair of
rabbit ears somehow manages to be just as disturbing the
story of Edward more Drake. Edward more Drake was said
to be a man doomed with a second face on
the back of his head. His disturbing situation was popularized

(43:34):
by George Gould and Walter Pyle in an eighteen ninety
six science textbook, but as it turns out, Mordrake's story
is a complete fabrication turned urban legend. A story published
on December eighth, eighteen ninety five, in the Boston Sunday
Post titled The Wonders of Modern Society described how a

(43:56):
man named Edward more Drake had a second female face
as lovely as a dream, hideous as a devil on
the back of his head. The face would whisper such
things as they only speak of in hell, to pour
Mordrake at night, and sneered at him whenever he cried.
Driven insane by the face, Mordrake was said to have

(44:17):
taken his own life at twenty three years of age.
A suicide note begged for the face to be destroyed
lest it continues its dreadful whispering in my grave. Then,
Gould and Pile popularized the tragic tale in their Anomalies
and Curiosities of Medicine, which was published the following year.

(44:39):
Mordrake's story became fodder for countless publications and begat callous
writing about physical deformities and weird wonders of the world.
While creniofacial duplication is a real biological phenomenon, those born
with an extra face rarely live long, and none are
capable of ind and speech, as there is only one brain.

(45:04):
It was only in twenty fifteen that the Museum of
Hoaxes uncovered that the original Boston Sunday Post article about
more Drake was actually written by a science fiction author
and was otherwise utterly baseless, Though the writer's predilection for
genre doesn't disprove the claims in his article. The sources
he employed, which were not later verified diligently enough by

(45:27):
Gould and Pile, certainly seemed to The Post article cited
the Royal Scientific Society as one of its most substantial sources,
but this organization didn't exist. Furthermore, the writer's additional references
to the Fishwoman of Lincoln, a mermaid type of creature,
and the Norfolk Spider, a human head with six legs,

(45:50):
were entirely fabricated. No literary or scientific database yielded anything
remotely similar to these creatures. Nonetheless, the urban myth of
the two faced Edward Moore Drake has endured. It was
most recently chronicled in an episode of the television show
American Horror Story, to chilling effect. Perhaps what is most

(46:12):
ghastly about this urban legend is how quickly an unfounded
narrative can take hold and reverberate in popular consciousness for centuries.
Charlie no Face. Imagine finding yourself outside and alone in
the dark on a residential street. You hear footsteps approaching.

(46:36):
Suddenly a man with a misshapen face appears. You run, terrified,
beyond words, you spread the story of the man with
no face throughout Pennsylvania. Charlie No Face, also called the
green Man, was actually a man named Ray Robinson, and
he was no figment of anyone's imagination. Born at nineteen

(47:00):
teen ten, Robinson was disfigured as the result of an
electrical accident at the age of eight. He touched active wires,
which effectively maimed him. Knowing his appearance could be disconcerting,
Robinson chose to take strolls after dark. He often walked
a path along Route three fifty one in Beaver County, Pennsylvania.

(47:21):
While his intentions were honorable, encountering Robinson in the dead
of night inevitably led to spreading stories about a boogieman
haunting the town. Robinson died in nineteen eighty five. The
Navajos Skinwalker The Navajos Skinwalker is described as a humanoid

(47:43):
shape shifter that can transform into a four legged beasts
and terrorizes families in the American Southwest. While it sounds
like the stuff of urban legend, the Skinwalker has deep
roots in Native American lore. Mainstream America first heard about
the u s entities in nineteen ninety six, when The
Desert News published an article on a Utah family's harrowing

(48:06):
experience with a ferocious beast that ravaged its cattle. Only
eighteen months after moving on to their new ranch, Terry Sherman,
the father of the family, spotted the creature for the
first time. Sherman claimed the beast was three times bigger
than a wolf, with glowing red eyes. Perhaps most disturbingly,

(48:26):
it appeared unfazed when he shot at it. The Shermans
moved out shortly after the incident, and several new owners
of the ranch recorded similar encounters. Today, that property is
known as Skinwalker Ranch, and it's believed to be a
curious hub of paranormal activity. According to Navajo English dictionary Skinwalker,

(48:50):
which was translated from Navajo Yi naglushi, which literally means
by means of it, it goes on all fours. Navajo
folklore describes a variot of these creatures, and the Pueblo, Apache,
and Hopie people all have their own origin stories for
such beasts. Some traditions claim that skinwalkers are born of

(49:11):
Navajo medicine men who initially benevolent, abuse their magic for
personal gain. Bestowed with mythical powers of evil, these tribesmen
can then transform into any animal or person of their choosing,
but a ravenous bloodlust will follow their new found abilities.
They are reportedly near impossible to kill, unless with a

(49:33):
knife or bullet that was dipped in white ash. The Navajo, meanwhile,
are vehemently opposed to discussing the creature with outsiders and
even amongst their own. Since the inexplicable sightings on the
Sherman's ranch, the area has become a purported hotbed of
paranormal activity. On March twelfth, nineteen eighty seven, biochemist doctor

(49:56):
Colin kelliher reportedly spotted his skin walker on the property,
perched twenty feet off the ground and about fifty feet
away from him. Kellerherst said it was hard to see clearly,
but that the creature was undoubtedly non human. The large
creature lay motionless, almost casually in the tree. He later wrote,
the only indication of the beast's presence was the penetrating

(50:18):
yellow light of the unblinking eyes as they stared fixedly
back into the light. Whether or not skin walkers are
indeed real, there will perhaps always appear to be elusive
creatures with qualities science has yet to assess. What is
clear however, is that the urban myths of creatures like
these continue to mesmerize people from all walks of life

(50:42):
and take on a life of their own through storytelling,
time and fear, and finally, the real corpse decoration. Notorious
outlaw Elmer McCurdy took on a second life following his
death in nineteen eleven. The embalmed corpse of mccurty became
a grim side show attraction throughout Texas, with people eager

(51:06):
to see the famed criminal on display in funeral parlors
and carnivals that it's hard to document all of his travels.
He eventually wound up in Long Beach, California, where someone
apparently mistook him for a prop. Mccurty was hung in
a funhouse at the New Plique Amusement Park, his humanity

(51:26):
discovered only after a crew member on the TV shows
Six Million Dollar Man, which was filming there in nineteen
seventy six, tried to adjust his posture, dislodging his very
real arm. The following year, his corpse was put to
proper rest. Coming up, what does it take to create

(51:55):
urban legends like these, stories that seemed to create a
life of their own and spread like wildfire from mouth
to ear, terrifying those who hear of them. Up next,
we'll look at what it takes to create an urban legend. Plus,
unidentified flying objects had been around much longer than Roswell.

(52:16):
Four centuries ago, before flying vehicles were known to even
be possible, Ancient Russia had quite a shock when they
looked into the sky. These stories and more, when Weird
Darkness returns, you've already met slender Man, the preternaturally tall

(52:55):
spectral being wearing a black suit and tie with a
white and feetless face. He's often seen in the shadows
of photos stalking small children, and some say that he
can drive you insane with terror. One of his first
sightings came at an asylum after a bloody rampage in
a hospital. The photo emerged of his ghostly but silent

(53:19):
presence hiding in the stairwell while the chaos erupted around him.
Rising from humble Internet forums, this modern urban legend has
now inspired a slew of fan fiction, best selling computer games,
and a series of short movies, but the tale has
also taken a darker turn as the line between myth

(53:39):
and reality became blurred. Some are convinced that they have
spotted slender Man lurking behind trees and scaling the sides
of buildings, and in January there were more acclaimed sightings
in the UK reported by the British tabloids. Jamie Tehrani
at the University of Durham said, I find it fast

(54:00):
because it really shows how folklore is always adapting to
new technologies and media, rather than being some kind of
relic of the past. The question is why did this
particular story infect people's minds in a profound way? Assuming
such widely shared tales are not actually true, what makes

(54:21):
them endure. During the last decades, psychologists have started to
sift out some of the features that make certain stories contagious,
potentially explaining the appeal of everything from urban legends to
Little Red Riding Hood. To understand the appeal of tales
like slender Man, it makes sense to begin with his

(54:41):
first outing. Starting on the Something Awful forum in two
thousand and six, a user, Victor Surge, posted two photos
doctor but the ghostly figure in the background. Beneath he
wrote some short, enigmatic captions implicating the shadowy figure and
the mysterious reduction of fourteen children one caption read one

(55:04):
of two recovered photographs from the Sterling City Library Blaze,
notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished
and for what is referred to as the slender Man
deformities cited as film defects by officials, fire and library
occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence nineteen
eighty six photographer Mary Thomas missing since June thirteenth, nineteen

(55:28):
eighty six, and the other photograph with a caption we
didn't want to go. We didn't want to kill them,
but its persistent silence and outstretched arms horrified and comforted
us at the same time. Nineteen eighty three photographer unknown
presumed debt. His descriptions are chilling, for sure, but perhaps

(55:50):
part of the appeal lay in the gaps of Surge's story,
which leaves space for us to project our own imagination.
Victor Surge's original post provides tantalizing hints of a larger
narrative involving a terrifying creature, notes Semiautitian Jeffrey Tolbert. It
suggests the being's unique power to induce violence, and indicates

(56:13):
that the photographers responsible for the images are missing or dead,
and thus sets the stage for the processes that would
lead to the communal construction of an entire narrative tradition.
It's probably no coincidence that within that skeletal framework, slender
Man also evokes some familiar fairy tale elements. Psychologists are

(56:35):
finding that there's a good reason that those stories often
follow certain set formula. Firstly, tales of the supernatural may
be especially appealing since they are minimally counterintuitive, combining both
the familiar and the bizarre. They depart from what's expected
and as a result push us to process the information

(56:57):
more deeply, says our anorin Zion, the University of British Columbia,
so we remember more and are more likely to retell them.
Counterintuitive elements could include a talking animal or a pumpkin
that turns into a chariot. But it's not so much
the nature as the number of these narrative devices that
seems to be crucial. Norn Zion's analysis of Grimm's fairy

(57:21):
tales found that the most popular stories, as measured by
the number of times that they've been sited online, only
have two or three supernatural surprises our brains. It seems
have only so much room for the bizarre before it
becomes too confusing to be enjoyable. Consider Little Red Ridinghood.

(57:41):
There are only a couple of things that don't make sense,
such as the talking wolf and her and the grandmother
being rescued from the stomach, says Tehrani, But the idea
of a girl visiting her grandmother that makes perfect sense.
Yet the lesser known tales such as the Donkey Lettuce
flout those constraints. Honestly, if you wanted me to summarize it,

(58:03):
I couldn't. There's just so much weird stuff going on.
The same goes for contemporary urban legends. Tehrani recently examined
the evolution of the Bloody Merry myth that if you
chant an incantation into the mirror, a mutilated face will
appear before you. There are many different variants involving different
characters and events, but as with Grimm's tales, the most

(58:27):
popular almost always contained just two or three unsettling events. Crucially,
slender Man seems to titillate the brain's senses of surprise
in exactly the same way. Slender Man is minimally counterintuitive, because,
on the one hand, we can attribute psychological motivations to him,

(58:48):
just as we would any other person, says Tehrani. But
on the other he appears to be able to violate
the laws of physics by appearing out of thin air,
and the laws of biology stretch and shrink his body
and grow tentacles. In other words, the tale offers just
enough hints of the eerie to peque our curiosity without

(59:09):
leaving us feeling too alienated. In terms of the wider themes,
psychologists have found that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most popular tales
also tend to evoke strong emotions, and the feeling of
disgust seems to make a story particularly potent. Julie Cultis
at the University of Sussex recently asked subjects to read

(59:32):
and share different versions of common urban legends, some more
disgusting than others. One in particular seemed to stay in
her student's mind about a woman who takes her poodle
to Vietnam. As the woman fumbles with her order for
a delicious steak, the dog trots into the kitchen. It
is only when the bill comes, minus the cost of

(59:54):
the meat, that she realizes she has eaten her beloved pet.
Even a year later, the students were still struck by
the tale. She says it was amazing to see the
difference in recall between the high and low discussed content stories.
Says cultis perhaps that can explain why urban legends are
so often in very bad taste. We're also drawn to

(01:00:17):
themes of survival, which is why many stories deal with
life and death. That makes sense given our evolution. Stories
have been an important way of transmitting valuable information that
could save our skin at a later point. But the
most memorable tales, according to Tehrani's recent lab experiments, involved
some kind of social connection. We just can't forget a

(01:00:40):
piece of lurid gossip. His participants were given a choice
of tales and asked to choose one to read, remember,
and then pass on to another person. Each tale reflected
the above biases in a different way, and it seemed
to have a big effect on their popularity. One told
the story of a woman who died after a poisonous

(01:01:01):
spider made a nest in her unwashed beehive haircut. Dealing
with death, it was a classic survival tale, but although
it piqued people's interest, it proved to be less easily
remembered than some of the others. In contrast, a more
memorable story concerned a woman who had cyber sex with
an unknown man, only to find out months later that

(01:01:25):
it was her father. It's hardly Jane Austen, but the
story requires you to consider others motives and decisions, tapping
into our social bias. Others along a similar vein might
include the story of the inadvertent biscuit thief that ends
in excruciating embarrassment. If you've not heard it before, here

(01:01:46):
it is. An elderly woman traveling by bus had a
layover during her journey. She purchased a package of Oreo
cookies from a vending machine in the bus terminal and
located a table. She placed her cookies on the table,
sat down, and proceeded to read her newspaper. She was
joined by a young man, who, to her surprise, opened

(01:02:07):
the package of Oreo cookies and began to eat them.
The woman, saying nothing, but giving him an icy stare,
grabbed cookie. The young man, with a funny look on
his face, ate another cookie. The woman again glared and
grabbed another cookie. The young man finished the third cookie
and offered the last to the woman. Completely aphalled, she

(01:02:30):
grabbed the cookie and the young man left. Outraged. The
woman threw down her paper, only to find her unopened
oreos on the table in front of her. Appealing to
both the social and survival biases, the story of a
serial killer who lures women to their death with the
sounds of a baby crying proved to be the most

(01:02:51):
popular of all. Tehrani thinks this too, can be explained
by considering human prehistory. As we lived in bigger societieties,
our survival depended less on environmental dangers and more on
other people, so we are primed to take notice of
quirks in other people's behavior as much as more immediate dangers. Surprisingly,

(01:03:13):
slender Man only partially confirms these findings. There are elements
of these memes that exploit our survival bias, such as
the fact he targets vulnerable children in a typical woodland
setting and our emotion bias fear and disgust, Tehrani says,
Yet the story is almost completely lacking in social information.

(01:03:35):
Even something as simple as little red riding Hood, he says,
asks us to exercise our ability to understand that the
wolf is lying as he builds up the girl's trust.
Slender Man, in comparison, simply entices his victims using some
kind of paranormal power. There is no social conundrum for
us to crack. One possibility is that slender Man is

(01:03:59):
just a fluke. The exception that proved the rule. More intriguing, however,
is the idea that it instead reflects a deeper change
in the way that we craft folk tales thanks to
the Internet. Tehrani points out, for instance, that social stories
may be more memorable, but they weren't necessarily more enjoyable.

(01:04:20):
According to his participants, memorability would have been crucial when
stories were past mouth to ear, but with the cut
and paste buttons on our desktop, it perhaps plays less
of a role. Now we may find social content easier
to remember, but actually we're just as likely to want
to hear about stories relevant to survival and to pass

(01:04:41):
them on. So the advantage of social information over other
biases disappears, Tehrani says. In other words, as more stories
are shared on the Internet, our stories may lose some
of their social nuances and become even more ghoulish. It
is certainly feasible that storytelling in the digital age may

(01:05:02):
evolve in a very different way from the fairy tales
of the past, which were shaped by the cognitive constraints
of oral transmission. These are just musings, of course. Taey
Rannie has yet to study the appeal of slender Man formally,
though he does plan to look into the stories on
creepypasta dot com, a website that allows users to share

(01:05:24):
and contribute many of these modern urban myths. It's very
much on our to do list, he says. Storytelling is,
after all, a craft like any other, evolving with tools
and technology. Our entertainment has already seen monumental changes in
literature and cinema, but perhaps those transformations are trickling down

(01:05:46):
to the myths and legends we tell each other too,
the humble stories that form a substantial, though neglected contribution
to our culture. It is an intriguing thought that the
elements forged by storyteller from across the millennia are now
being cast into a very different folk tale, the beginning

(01:06:06):
of a tradition that our descendants may be reading and
sharing on their tablets in centuries to come. It is

(01:06:28):
the most famous sighting of an unidentified object in the
history of ancient Russia. This flying object would not be
observed over the area of Roseero Lake, approximately eighty miles
southwest of bolozersk or White Lake Town. Officially, no flying
vehicles were present in the sky. Almost four centuries ago,

(01:06:49):
they did not even exist. Still, this amazing event, witnessed
by many people took place, and it cannot be explained
as a missile, ball lightning, or an airplane. An official
document describing the incident originates from the files of the
Archaeological Research Service and was first published in Historical Files

(01:07:11):
Compiled and issued by the Archaeological Commission, Part four, Saint Petersburg,
eighteen forty two. The document's authenticity is unquestionable. Today, many
newspapers worldwide would feature large headlines on their front pages
like enormous ball of fire creates panic, or ball lightning

(01:07:32):
or so something else over the lake. Three centuries ago,
there were no newspapers. What did people observe that day?
On this Saturday, between ten and twelve o'clock their local time,
inhabitants of the district of Belazero went to their local
parish church in the village of Robozero. While they were there,

(01:07:56):
an object emitting fire and a loud noise appeared in
a clear blue sky. It had a diameter of around
forty meters or one hundred thirty one feet, which is
the approximate height of a modern twelve story building. The objects,
traveling from south to west, suddenly stopped over a bazero lake,

(01:08:17):
which surfaces about two kilometers by one kilometer. It gave
out blue smoke and had two beams of fire about
twenty zausins. One zasin means about seven feet coming from
the object's front. When a great crash sounded, many people
left the church to see what was happening outside. According

(01:08:37):
to the report, the object appeared from the direction from
which we get winter and moved across from the church
to the lake. Then the observed object suddenly vanished out
of sight some distance above the lake in order to
reappear over the lake. Less than an hour later, the
people again came out to the square, and the same

(01:08:58):
fire suddenly re appeared over the same lake from the
same place where it first disappeared. It darted from the
south to the west and must have been fifteen hundred
feet away when it disappeared. But it appeared in a
short while back again from that another place, moving this
time to the west. The third time, the same fireball

(01:09:20):
appeared more terrific and width and disappeared having moved to
the west. And it had been remaining over robozero over
water for an hour and a half. And the length
of the lake is about seven thousand feet and the
width is thirty five hundred feet. The incident was observed
by multiple witnesses now experiencing yet another reappearance of the

(01:09:43):
mysterious flying vehicle. It went from the south to the
west and was about five hundred meters away when it
vanished again. The last time the object returned, it was
traveling westwards and then stopped. Its size appeared to be
much larger than before. It stayed over the lake for
one hour and a half. A group of fishermen in

(01:10:06):
their boat located on the lake approximately a mile away,
were seriously affected, suffering severe burns because of the scorching heat.
The lake water, according to the witnesses, also looked strange.
It was illuminated to their greatest depth of thirty feet,
and the fish swam away to the shore or fleeing
to all directions. They all saw that and where the

(01:10:28):
fireball came the water seemed to be covered with rust
under the reddish light, and it was then scattered by
the wind and the water became clean again. In his
book Astronomical Phenomena in Russian Chronicles, the Russian astronomer Di
Sfotsky wrote that the eye witnesses saw only pieces of
a meteorite that flew apart after an explosion. The explosion

(01:10:52):
of the meteor on the fifteenth of August sixteen sixty
three probably occurred in a southwesterly direction during the morning
before twelve, and in clear skies. Two fragments were projected
in a southerly direction over the lake, whilst a third
and fourth came down in the west. According to the
official explanation given by d. Spotsky, However, this does not

(01:11:14):
account for the sighting of the people in the boat
approaching a hovering body. P stone Hill, the Russian UFO
researcher says, and at the same time for all who
proposed another interpretation of the phenomenon, stone Hill explains that
the life span of lightning is short. Also, its diameter
is no more than three feet, certainly not one hundred

(01:11:36):
thirty feet. Moreover, ball lightning appears under stormy weather conditions,
and the weather was beautiful. On August fifteenth, sixteen sixty three.
It was a sunny and warm day. The sky was
perfectly clear. Here we're dealing with a large flying object
which approached suddenly and from nowhere. The behavior of the

(01:11:57):
reported flying object was definitely unlike that of a meteor
The object was seen by many witnesses in at least
two locations, three times at different time intervals. Fragments from
meteorites are ejected simultaneously. As a rule, the duration of
the sighting is unclear, but we can hardly expect more

(01:12:18):
details from the witnesses report, which is today almost four
centuries old. Is it possible that the hour and a
half refer to the whole sighting or its part only.
As for meteorites, it's generally known that they penetrate space
with a velocity of thirty to forty kilometers per second,
which corresponds to the speed of our globe in its

(01:12:40):
journey around the Sun. The meteorite's fate depends upon its mass.
The larger it is, the greater the velocity. At the
Earth's surface, small meteorites weighing ten to one hundred grams
develop a speed of several tens of meters per second.
The larger ones, weighing a couple hundred kilograms, show a
velocity of about five hundred meters per second. If it

(01:13:05):
was a meteorite that showed up over the lake three
hundred fifty years ago, it must have been a large one,
weighing from thirty thousand to two hundred fifty thousand tons.
The speed of such a monster must have been enormous.
Not one, not a single witness would survive its approach,
but in fact all witnesses did. If the object, despite

(01:13:29):
its large size, traveled with a speed of less than
five kilometers per second, it was not than a falling meteor.
The fishermen, who also observed the object from their location
in the boat, said that they were unable to come
closer to the object because of the great heat coming
from it, and not because of its large speed. Apparently,

(01:13:50):
they could approach the object and even pursue it, because
its velocity was more probably similar to that of the
fisherman's boat itself. In other words, the velocity of both
the boat and the unidentified flying object was very low.
Whatever its speed, a meteorite must finally fall somewhere, and
the meteorite plunging to the ground could hardly pass unnoticed. Still,

(01:14:14):
nothing like this was documented because no fall was reported.
The UFO that came from nowhere made three visitations in
the area and disappeared into the unknown. Three months later,
on November thirtieth, a similar incident took place over the
same location. Was it the same unidentified flying object back

(01:14:36):
on yet another mission. No one knows. To this day,
no known scientific theory has explained the phenomenon. Up next,

(01:15:03):
a man believes he hears the sound of a car crash,
but it shouldn't be possible from where he lives, and
while serving a life sentence for the murder of fourteen
year old Mary Ellen deaner Lester Eubanks, was granted a
trip to an Ohio mall. Then he vanished without a trace.

(01:15:24):
But first, in Saint James's Episcopal Cemetery in Marietta, Georgia,
there is a grave that people say began to weep
tears of blood when they got too close. That story
is up next when weird Darkness returns. While the most

(01:16:08):
famous grave at Saint James Episcopal Cemetery in Maryetta, Georgia,
belongs to slain beauty Queen Jean Benet Ramsay. The eeriest
plot belongs to a woman named Mary MiNet. It's marked
by a large marble statue of a woman cradling two
infants in her arms. Thanks to her unique memorial, Mary

(01:16:30):
has become a celebrity at Saint James Episcopal. Those brave
enough to venture through the graveyard at night claim to
hear the sound of a woman weeping near Mary's memorial.
Those that have gotten close enough say the statue weeps
tears of blood. Others have heard the sound of a
young child calling out Mommy. Spookier Still, it's said that

(01:16:54):
the two babies in Mary's arms switch positions. Local legend
states that if you approach Mary's statue on Halloween night
and circle her memorial three times, asking Mary, Mary, how
did your children die? Her ghost will appear. A local
group of ghost hunters had not one, but two camera

(01:17:17):
batteries completely lose power as they approached the statue on
a research trip in two thousand five. Furthermore, all claimed
to hear footsteps behind them, though they appeared to be
the only ones in the cemetery. Ghosts of Marietta, a
Marietta ghost tour group, offers a trolley tour that includes

(01:17:38):
a trip through Saint James Episcopal Cemetery. The tour, known
as the Scarieta Ghost Tour, provides guests with an expanded
version of the minored Grave legend. According to representative Betsy Throupe,
Mary's marble statue is said to weep tears so real
that they roll down the statue's face and dampen the bodus.

(01:18:01):
Said tears are seemingly shed for the infant twins cradled
in Mary's arms. The legend states that if you run
around the statue thirteen times and say, Oh Mary, Oh Mary,
what happened to your babies? Then she will begin to cry.
Betsy is quick to discourage visitors from an after hour's

(01:18:21):
visit to Saint James, though for starters, trespassers may be arrested.
More importantly, as Betsy warns, it's never a good idea
to taunt the spirits. Other Worldly retributions aside the spell
of the merry minded Grave endoers, as does the allure
of its alleged Halloween hex. Many have wondered how Mary

(01:18:44):
came to rest at Saint James, and if perhaps the
presence of the infants in the statue indicate that she
died in childbirth. Some believe she died with her babies
in a fire. The truth is Mary, her real name
was Marion. Mary Minert, died of a long ailment, most

(01:19:04):
likely tuberculosis, in eighteen ninety eight, according to findegrave dot com.
Her obituary appeared in the Marietta Journal on May twenty sixth,
eighteen ninety eight, saying she was one of the most patient,
lovable women in Marietta. She had a heart that sympathized
with suffering humanity, and one who did more charitable work

(01:19:26):
in visiting the poor and sick, ministering unto their need
that did missus Minert. She was truly a disciple of
Christ and went about doing good. The explanation for her
arresting memorial is also revealed in her obituary, which says
she was in her thirty fourth year of age at
the time of her death. She leaves behind her husband

(01:19:48):
and six children. Of that number, two twin girls four
weeks old. It's clear that Mary was a beloved mother
and member of her community, so much so that her
headstone was erected to include her twin girls who entered
the world just as Mary left it. As for the

(01:20:08):
stories about Mary's ghost, you'll have to visit her famous
grave on Halloween Knight to find out the truth for yourself.

(01:20:38):
People occasionally experience something science cannot explain. This case is
a perfect example of how little we still understand about
the nature of reality. This time an explained mystery deals
with a baffling incident that happened to a man who,
for some unknown reason, suddenly heard a bizarre soun sound

(01:21:00):
of the crash. He wasn't supposed to have heard it,
but he did. It was an ordinary Sunday, nothing unusual
had happened. He was just getting ready for bed when
he heard something crashing. It was a sound he was
not meant to hear. It happened in a place far
away that he was not supposed to find. His remarkable

(01:21:23):
experience defies explanation. What happened on Sunday, June tenth, nineteen
sixty two is something Howard Wheeler will never forget. Howard
Wheeler was a broadcaster who lived in Charlotte, North Carolina.
He'd enjoyed a pleasant Sunday and was just going to bed.

(01:21:44):
Being a religious man, he kneeled beside his bed and prayed.
He was a daily habit. Suddenly he stopped praying and
said to his wife, Pat, I heard an automobile wreck.
I'll be right back. He ran out of the house
to his car. For some seconds, he didn't know what
to do, in which direction should he drive? Where was

(01:22:08):
the wreck, if there was one. His house was surrounded
by many streets in the accident could have happened anywhere. Then,
without hesitation, mister Wheeler drove quickly down Park Road. As
soon as he came to Woodlawn. He turned right and
drove down the hill to the shrimp boat, but to
his disappointment, he found nothing there. In an interview later,

(01:22:31):
he explained he got a feeling that he should turn
around and hurry back to Manford Drive, which he also did.
He went about two hundred yards on Manford around a
curve and there was a car smashed against the pull,
the engine driven back into the car. He saw no one,
but a voice said, help me, Humpy, help me. Mister

(01:22:52):
Wheeler hurried to the wreck, where he found a man
badly hurt and bleeding. At first he did not recognize him,
but then he saw the man in the wreck was
Joe Thunderburk, an old friend who always called mister Wheeler
by his nickname Humpy. It was not easy, but somehow
mister Wheeler managed to get his friend out of the
car wreck and drive to the hospital where surgery was performed.

(01:23:16):
Mister Wheeler saved his friend's life, but many people wondered
how he had learned about the accident. According to mister Wheeler,
the sound he heard was similar to the distant rumble
of railroad cars bumping together in some freight yard. Police
and newspapers were puzzled. How could mister Wheeler have heard

(01:23:37):
the sound of the crash half a mile from his home.
How could he locate the place of the accident? When
the police arrived forty five minutes later, mister Wheeler was
still the only person who had passed by and found
the wreck. How can we explain this case? His intuition

(01:23:57):
tapped into the extraordinary wisdom some people already have within them.
Mister Wheeler was a religious man. Listeners who believe in
the existence of God or other divine powers, or maybe
guardian angels, may find it interesting to know mister Wheeler
was praying at the time when he heard the ominous sound.

(01:24:35):
In nineteen seventy three, convicted child murderer Lester U Banks
escaped from prison incarcerated for life without parole. In nineteen
sixty six, u Banks had been a model inmate for
about seven years, so Ohio State Penitentiary granted him a
furlough to go Christmas shopping at a local mall that December,

(01:24:57):
But a busy holiday season mall provides d u Banks
with a perfect escape scenario. He was asked to meet
back at a specific time and place near the mall
when he was finished. Instead, he vanished and hasn't been
seen in nearly half a century. Lester Eubanks was imprisoned
in the first place for trying to rape a fourteen

(01:25:20):
year old girl before shooting her to death and then
bludgeoning her into a pulp with a brick. His disappearance
is plagued both authorities and the victim's families for decades. HALLI,
convicted killer so easily escaped prison and where he might
be today has since become fodder for unsolved mysteries. The

(01:25:41):
Netflix series second season aims to probe every detail of
the case, which has only gained more esteem the longer
Lester U Banks has been on the run. By the
time Lester U Banks murdered Mary Ellen Deaner, a fourteen
year old Mansfield, Ohio girl, he'd already committed a series
of sexual offenses, but the attack on Deaner on November fourteenth,

(01:26:03):
nineteen sixty five is the one that landed him in prison.
On that day, Mary Ellen Deaner and her younger sister,
twelve year old Brenda Sue, were doing laundry. Out of change,
Deaner walked to another laundromat for Nichols and dimes. Tragically,
she found U Banks instead. She put up a courageous

(01:26:23):
fight and thwarted his forcible sexual assault, but only anchored
U Banks into bloodlust in the process. He shot her twice,
then beat her with a brick. When she was found,
Deaner's family was naturally consumed with unbearable pain. The girl
had only tried to help her family out with chores

(01:26:44):
and ended up dead in the streets with change still
in her hand. As if her murder couldn't be any sadder,
Deaner had dreamt of becoming a nun. U Banks confessed
to the murder the following day, after local authorities placed
him under arrest after being charged with first degree murder

(01:27:06):
while perpetrating rape. He tried to plead insanity to no avail.
On May twenty fifth, nineteen sixty six, a jury found
him guilty and sentenced him to death, inarguably the first
time U Banks would escape justice. His sentence was commuted
to life in prison without parole when a U. S.
Supreme Court ruling in nineteen seventy two found the death

(01:27:28):
penalty unconstitutional, and the next year he escaped. For the
seven years lester U Banks was in jail, he acted
like a model prisoner. The inmate was even profiled while
still on death row in nineteen seventy two by the
Columbus Dispatch in an article on incarcerated artists. The publication

(01:27:48):
deemed him the best of the death row painters and
photographed him next to his Angela Davis triptych. The three
images showed Davis in glasses, her iconic afro, and a
resolute to stare. Perhaps it was the distinct change in
personalities U Bank related to so much. I have admiration
and respect for her, he told reporters. U Banks was

(01:28:12):
so well mannered and docile that he became an honor
inmate at the facility, which earned him certain privileges. The
program was born from hopes that time outside the prison
walls would help reform felons like him, and was heavily
curtailed after three convicts, including u Banks, escaped after being
escorted to the Great Southern Shopping Center on December seventh,

(01:28:35):
nineteen seventy three, the man who murdered Mary Ellen Dener vanished.
He never showed up to the designated pickup spot and
remains elusive to this day. For Deaner's family, that day
in December nearly paralleled the night of nineteen sixty five.
To use as powerful a word as I can think of,

(01:28:56):
we were traumatized, said sister Myrtle Carter, who was eighteen
at the time of the murder. We thought it was
over and then lo and behold, he goes Christmas shopping.
First of all, that's a shock, and then escapes. My
mom she was just beside herself. I don't want you
to think this is consumed my life, because it didn't,

(01:29:18):
said Myrtle Carter. I'm a Christian and I trust God,
and I allow him to do what he's going to do.
In my life. It doesn't consume me, but it bothers
me that he's still missing, that he's still free and
took her innocent life. That bothers me. While the Ohio
Department of Corrections immediately listed U Banks as a fugitive,
it would take decades for federal authorities to do the same.

(01:29:41):
It was clear to Deputy U. S Marshal David Siler,
who began working the case in twenty sixteen, that U
Bakes had planned his escape from justice all along. He
had to start this process two or three years prior,
said Siler, manipulating those guards, manipulating the system, being that
good guy that he portrayed aid himself to be. It

(01:30:01):
just got him outside the gates, and that's all he
was working towards. Then, in the early nineteen nineties, the
investigation began to pick up when a young officer directed
the public eye to the case. Law enforcement officer John
Arcuti was at high school when Dianer was killed. As
head of the Detective Bureau of the Mansfield Police Department,

(01:30:22):
he started digging into U Bank's disappearance in the early
nineteen nineties. He was shocked to find the National Crime
Information Center hadn't listed him as wanted. That u Banks
couldn't have been caught speeding or engaged in any other
minor infraction, and the officer who took his prints or
ran his license wouldn't have known he was a wanted fugitive.

(01:30:44):
It had been twenty years, and it was like nobody
was working the case that we were aware of, said Arcuti.
He was just out there on his own, and nobody
seemed concerned about it. Investigators suspect that Lester u Banks
maybe using the alias Victor Young. With no help on
the cold case from fellow authorities, Arcudi contacted America's most wanted.

(01:31:09):
All we need is that one tipster, that one person
that can bring in the last piece of the puzzle,
even if they knew him a year ago, two years ago,
said Syler. That's what we're looking for, someone who's like,
I know that guy. The nineteen ninety four TV episode
certainly helped, as hundreds of calls came in with promising

(01:31:29):
leads pointing to northern California. Arcudi notified the LAPD of
his search for Lester Eubanks and found a cooperative detective
in Tim Conner. The duo teamed up to check out
a mattress factory in Guardena, California, where an anonymous source
said Ubanks worked. I don't think he ever took employment,

(01:31:49):
that ever did any background check. He was a guy
who didn't lay his head in any one place for
very long. Though the media stunt helped raise awareness and
US Marshall's officially listed U Banks on their fifteen most
Wanted list, it was obvious that Lester U Banks had
heard of these developments too. The promising Guardina lead ended

(01:32:11):
with news that their suspect had quit his job and vanished.
I think we were probably fairly close to Lester at
some point, but the tips and the technology just didn't
make it where we could get close enough, said Connor.
He's very cunning. He's not a dumb guy. He's been
avoiding the authorities for forty plus years. Siler believes that
U Banks is most likely being unwittingly protected by people

(01:32:34):
who don't even know who he is. He's certain Lester
U Banks has likely fathered children by this point and
is potentially a grandfather as well. For Siler, tragedy and
pain marked the Lester U Banks case from all angles.
The sad thing is those who he has won over
are victims too, said Syler. They have no idea. So

(01:32:56):
when we come knocking on the door and apprehend that person,
their families become victims, and that's sad. Investigators say Lester
Eubanks was an avid martial arts enthusiast who loved music
and art. He's easily recognizable as he has a huge
scar on his right arm. The disappearance of Lester Eubanks

(01:33:16):
most recently garnered renewed attention with the second season of
Netflix series Unsolved Mysteries. While not an unsolved murder case,
the culprit's disappearance remains baffling. The show aims to understand
how anything like it could have happened for Connor. Two
things are clear. I've often thought of him over the years.
I think he's probably still alive. I think there's people

(01:33:38):
who know who he is and what he did. They're
just not giving him up. Fortunately, neither are authorities. As
the fiftieth anniversary of Lester Eubanks's escape approaches, investigators are
more determined than ever. Furthermore, it appears DNA evidence collected
from his biological son could yield enormously previously unavailable in catching.

(01:34:01):
In the US, Marshals are not deterred by the passage
of time when it comes to cases like this one,
said US Marshal Peter Elliott of the Northern District of Ohio.
We're fueled by one thing, and that is justice for
fourteen year old Mary Ellen Deaner of Mansfield, Ohio, the
innocent victim in this case. Thanks for listening. If you

(01:34:41):
like the podcast and you haven't already subscribed, be sure
to do so now so you don't miss future episodes,
and also please tell somebody else about the podcast. Recommend
Weird Darkness to your friends, family, and co workers who
love the paranormal, horror stories or true crime like you do.
All stories in Weird Darkness aren't purported to be true

(01:35:03):
unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links or
links to the authors in the show notes. The True
Stories behind Terrifying Urban Legends was written by Marco mcgerratoff
for All That's Interesting and Jake Rawson for Mental Floss.
What makes It Urban Legend was written by David Robson
from BBC dot Com. The Rob Zero Lake UFO of

(01:35:26):
sixteen sixty three is by A. Sutherland for Message to eagle.
The Halloween legend of Marymnerd's Grave is from Jessica Ferry
for the lineup. The Unexplained Sound of a crash is
by Ellen Lloyd for Ancient Pages, and the escape of
Lester Eubanks is from Marco mcgarratoff for All That's interesting.

(01:35:49):
Weird Darkness theme by Alibi Music, And now that we're
coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a
little light one Peter two, verse nine. But you are
a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's
special possession that you may declare the praises of Him
who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

(01:36:14):
And a final thought, kids learn faster than adults because
they don't spend their time thinking up reasons why they
can't do it. I'm Daryn Marler. Thanks for joining me
in the Weird Darkness.

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