SALEM’S MOST BRUTAL EXECUTION: The 1692 Death of Giles Corey | #WDRadio WEEK OF AUG 31, 2025 - Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
This episode is dedicated to the men and women of
our armed forces and first responders. Whether you are currently
serving or have served in the past, you are appreciated.
It is because of your courage and sacrifice that we
enjoy the freedoms and liberties we hold dear, and I,
for one, appreciate every single one of you for protecting

(00:30):
what many of us take for granted. So thank you.
In January sixteen ninety two, a group of young girls
in Salem Village, Massachusetts, became consumed by disturbing fits accompanied

(00:55):
by seizures, violent contortions, and blood curdling screams. A doctor
diagnosed the children as being victims of black magic, and
over the next several months, allegations of witchcraft spread like
a virus through the small Puritan settlement. Twenty people were

(01:15):
eventually executed as witches, but contrary to popular belief, none
of the condemned was burned at the stake. The myth
of burnings at the stake in Salem is most likely
inspired by European witch trials, where execution by fire was
a disturbingly common practice. Medieval law codes such as the

(01:37):
Holy Roman Empires Constitutio Criminalis Krolina stipulated that malevolent witchcraft
should be punished by fire, and church leaders and local
governments oversaw the burning of witches across parts of modern
day Germany, Italy, Scotland, France, and Scandinavia. Historians have since

(01:58):
estimated that the witch hunt hysteria that peaked between the
fifteenth and eighteenth centuries saw some fifty thousand people executed
as witches in Europe. Many of these victims were hanged
or beheaded first, but their bodies were typically incinerated afterwards
to protect against post mortem sorcery. Other condemned witches were

(02:23):
still alive when they faced the flames and were left
to endure an excruciating death by burning and inhalation of
toxic fumes. Fortunately, that barbarity did not come to the
shores of America, but that does not mean that America
didn't create its own barbarities. Back in Salem Village, Massachusetts,

(02:44):
in accordance with English law, nineteen of the victims of
the Salem witch trials were instead taken to the infamous
Gallows Hill to die by hanging. Still more accused witches
and sorcerers died in jail while awaiting their trials. But
the elderly Guiles Cory, meanwhile, was to suffer a much greater,

(03:06):
much more horrible fate, a death which would later cause
this accused sorcerer to be seen not as a criminal,
but as a martyr. I'm Darren Marler and this is
Weird Darkness. Welcome Weirdos. I'm Darren Marler and this is

(03:36):
Weird Darkness Radio, where every week you'll find stories of
the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre,
unsolved and unexplained coming up this hour. When you think
of the Salem witch Trials, you typically think of women

(03:58):
being burned at the stake, innocently accused of witchcraft. There
are two incorrect assumptions about that mental picture. First, most
of the accused were hung, and none have been truly
verified to be burned alive, not in Salem at least.
And second, sorcery and Satan worship were not seen to

(04:19):
be bound by gender, and so either a man, woman, boy,
or a girl could be a witch. And one of
those unfortunate men was Giles Corey. But his punishment went
beyond the norm and into the gruesome. If you're new here,
welcome to the show. If you're already a member of
this Weirdo family, please take a moment and invite someone

(04:42):
else to listen in with you. Recommending Weird Darkness to
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You can find the daily Weird Darkness podcast, which comes
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(05:04):
find Weird Darkness merchandise and more. You can even send
in your own true story of something paranormal that has
happened to you or someone you know. You can find
it all at weird Darkness dot com. Now vult your doors,
lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with
me into the Weird Darkness. Giles Corey was killed during

(05:57):
the Salem witch Trials in six teen ninety two. These
trials were a series of events that have since become
renowned for their gory, shameful, and unjustified proceedings in the
strict and ultra religious Puritan Society of the New American colonies.
Citizens viewed witchcraft in Massachusetts as something utterly profane and inexcusable.

(06:23):
They believed witches to be followers of Satan, and the
idea of witches living in the area caused mass hysteria
and societal breakdown, despite being entirely based on lies and fear.
Trouble started within the village of Salem when the two
daughters of Minister Samuel Parris began having fits of convulsions

(06:46):
and screaming. The cause was diagnosed as bewitchment and blamed
on Titeba, a slave woman brought from Barbados who was
working in the household. Other young girls in the village
began to exhibit the same symptoms, and more people were
consequently accused of witchcraft and dealing with the devil, and

(07:07):
so began various investigations, hearings, convictions, and even executions of
these supposed witches. Several of these accused of witches themselves
accused others in an attempt to lessen the punishment thrust
upon them. Paranoid frenzies spread like wildfire as more girls

(07:29):
joined in on the accusations, finding ludicrous ways to show evidence,
such as claiming specters of the accused visited them at night,
forcing them to sign the Devil's book. Sorcery and satan
worship were not seen to be bound by gender, and
so either a man, woman, boy, or girl could be

(07:51):
a witch. Giles Corey was one such village citizen who
was unfortunate enough to get caught up in the unjust
consequences of the delirium. Giles Cory was born in sixteen
eleven in England. He immigrated to Salem, where he lived
until sixteen fifty nine, at which point he bought a

(08:13):
large piece of farmland in Salem Farms, just outside of
Salem Village. He did not get on well with some
of his fellow villagers, clashing with many because he was
considered to have lived a scandalous life. He did in
fact have a few run ends with the law, proving
him to be not such an upstanding citizen. He was

(08:34):
accused of stealing twice, and in sixteen seventy five he
pummeled a farm worker named Jacob Goodell to death for
stealing apples, though he claimed Jacob had fallen from a horse.
He was put on trial, found guilty, and ordered to
pay a substantial fee in place of imprisonment. From all this,

(08:55):
he earned a horrible reputation, causing villagers to sometimes blame
him for other crimes, like when John Proctor's house burned down.
This most likely helped to contribute to his being accused
as a witch. He married a woman named Martha, who
was devoted to the church, and he then, at the

(09:17):
age of eighty, applied to be a member of the
church as well. He was asked to repent for his
sins for a month and was then accepted back to
the brethren. After marrying Martha, Giles never committed another crime,
and the village saw Martha as an impetus for change
in his life. It therefore speaks to the amount of

(09:39):
fearful panic and deranged paranoia running rampant that Martha, of
all people, was accused of witchcraft. When giving testimony in court,
she was so calm about her denial of it that
the judges mistook her demeanor for evil intentions. Martha incriminated
herself further when she tried to go to Anne Putnam's house,

(10:02):
where Anne and her mother acted as if Martha was
torturing them. Moreover, the village girls began to mimic Martha's
movements as if she was controlling them, cementing her guilt
in the eyes of the jury. Giles defended his wife
and was then swiftly accused of witchcraft as a result.
The fact that he was a stubborn man who very

(10:25):
likely expressed skepticism and criticism of the whole situation might
have also made him seem guilty. There was no substantial
evidence against him other than his previous murder conviction. He
was alleged to have been at a witch's sacrament torturing girls.
Giles was arrested and put in jail with his wife,

(10:46):
then left there for five months awaiting trial. At his
trial on September sixteenth, sixteen ninety two, he attended only
to plead not guilty, and then, being a proud man,
refused to put himself fully on the court to be
judged by a jury, as he knew they had already
decided on his definite guilt. He was ruled as a

(11:10):
standing mute because he denied being tried, and was thus
sentenced to death. He was given the atrocious death sentence
by way of pineforte adieure, which meant having heavier and
heavier stones placed on your body until you were crushed
to death. This practice was actually determined to be illegal

(11:32):
in the colony by the governor of Massachusetts because there
was no law permitting it and it went against the
Puritan code that disallowed barbarous punishment. Nevertheless, his sentence was
carried out. He was placed in a pit in the
field next to the jail where all his neighbors could see.
They positioned a large board across his body and heavy

(11:55):
stones set on top. He's famously known for continuing to
utter the words more weight in an attempt to seem
obstinate and quick in his death. Over the course of
two days, his request was granted with more and more weight,
until finally he was pressed to death at the age

(12:16):
of eighty one on September nineteenth, sixteen ninety two. Until
this day, he is the only person in the history
of the United States to be given a court ordered
death sentence via pressing. Giles Corey's tale led to him
being perceived as a martyr willing to die for what

(12:37):
was right, or at least as someone who fought against
the ridiculousness of what was happening in his society at
the time, his death influenced others to see the light
about the unfairness of trials, seeing as the way he
acted during his punishment did not reflect someone who was
indeed guilty of being a witch. To this day, he

(12:59):
is viewed as one of the faces who stood up
against the immoral and unwarranted proceedings. By the end of
the events, twenty five people had been killed, nineteen by hanging.
Martha Giles's wife, was hung to death on September twenty second,
only three days after her husband died, and was buried

(13:21):
along with him and all the other convicted people on
the part of town that became known as Gallows Hill.
The Arctic Circle is a frozen region in the northernmost

(13:42):
part of the globe, spanning Canada, Greenland, Alaska, and various
other icy lands. Like many desolate places, the Arctic has
its share of ghost stories and haunted legends floating around
the frigid, largely wild areas of its domain. It has
long been a popular site for exploration, with early expeditions

(14:04):
seeking to uncover the realm's many secrets and study the
strange animals living within it. Alas with the exploration of
such freezing wild lands comes, the expiration of its visitors,
and the basis for the creepy tales that emerge from it.
According to some spirits still hold court over specific locations,

(14:27):
unleashing their power upon the unfortunate and uneducated who dare
trespass upon their territory. From haunted hotels built on centuries
old land to ships facing misfortunate sea, more than a
few lingering souls remained desperate to make their presence felt
throughout the Arctic Circle. The cargo ship Octavius met its

(14:51):
demise in seventeen sixty one, after leaving China and setting
sail for Britain via the Northwest Passage. No ship had
ever successfully navigated the Northwest Passage at that time. The
Octavius disappeared, proving it was no exception. A whaling ship

(15:11):
came upon the damaged remains of Octavius on October eleventh,
seventeen seventy five, boarding it to look for survivors and cargo.
When the whalers ventured into the below decked quarters, they
found the ship's captain frozen at his desk mid entry
in the ship's log. The rest of the crew were
similarly encased in ice throughout their rooms. The whalers snatched

(15:35):
up the ship log and fled the Octavius, leaving behind
all including the first and last entries, which were unyieldingly
stuck to the captain's frozen desk. The log revealed that
the Arctic temperatures and ice captured the Octavius two hundred
fifty miles from Barrow, Alaska, where all those aboard perished

(15:56):
on November eleventh, seventeen sixty two. The whalers, however, found
the boat near Greenland, meaning it somehow made its way
through the Northwest Passage even with its crew frozen. Solid
Shamans in the Eskimaux culture speak of eight physical worlds

(16:16):
that exist on the edge of their own reality. YouTube
channel Zeno Hunters shared the story of an unnamed tribal
elder that, as a young girl, mistakenly fell into one
of these alternate planes for three days at the age
of eight. The girl was playing with her father outside
when suddenly the world seemed to shift and change around her.

(16:38):
In a moment, the world looked somehow different. Ensconced in
tall grass and a strange dreamlike feeling. After spending around
twenty or thirty minutes examining and exploring this world, the
young girl decided to clap her teeth on her hand
to awaken herself. Blood poured down her hand luedged to

(17:00):
have a scar to this day, but the world she
knew slowly shifted back into focus. Upon finding her father
searching for her, the girl found out the half hour
she experienced was three days in our world. The s
S Bashimo was built of steel and powered by steam

(17:21):
in nineteen fourteen Sweden. Weigh more than thirteen hundred tons,
the ship took cargo from Sweden to Germany and back
again until World War One, when it was sent to
the Hudson's Bay Company in Scotland. The ship once again
carried trade goods across the ocean, but to Canada and
Alaska instead of Europe. On October first, nineteen thirty one,

(17:44):
the Beshimo was caught in a perilous storm as it
sailed for British Columbia. As the vessel became trapped in ice,
the captain and crew evacuated to wait out the storm
in nearby Barrow, Alaska, before relocating to a frosty outcropping
closer to the ship. They waited for the Bechimo alternately
trapped in ice or drifting at sea until October fifteenth,

(18:08):
when the Hudson's Bay Company rescued twenty two crew members.
The remaining captain and sailors stubbornly refused to abandon their ship.
They stayed in their camp, subsisting on supplies from their employer,
until November twenty fourth, when Beichimo disappeared from view, with
the vessel considered lost, and Inoit spotted it in the

(18:29):
ice forty five miles from its last known location. The ship,
badly damaged by the winter, was boarded by the captain
and crew to retrieve the more expensive cargo, and then
left to sink in the ocean. Instead of sinking, the
Beshimo became a spectral legend of the North Atlantic, spotted
in the waters repeatedly over the years, with the ship

(18:52):
avoiding most would be explorers with the deftness of a
manned vessel. Those who managed to board the cursed ship
find themselves surrounded by ice flows seemingly summoned by Bechimo itself,
unable to collect any cargo still on board. In nineteen
thirty three, a group of Inoit scavengers got trapped on

(19:13):
the ship for ten days while a frigid storm raged
around the ship. Last spotted in nineteen sixty nine, the
Bechimo is assumed direct and resting on the bottom of
the Atlantic, although there are no plans to prove it
with a diving expedition. Like many desolate places, the Arctic

(19:39):
has its share of ghost stories and haunted legends floating
around the frigid, wild areas of its domain. It might
be the frights, rather than the cold, that give you
goosebumps more ghostly shivers from the Arctic Circle when weird
darkness returns. On March fifteenth, eighteen fifty three, fur trader

(20:17):
Augustus Richard Peers passed while working as a post manager
for the Hudson's Bay Company's Fort McPherson. It was known
that Piers wished for his remains to be interred at
a location other than Fort McPherson. His supervisor, Roderick MacFarlane,
ignored that wish and buried him in the same place
where he passed. Around December eighteen fifty nine, McFarlane received

(20:42):
prompting from Pierre's widow to dig Peers up and relocate
his body. After finishing a sturdier coffin to securely transport
the body. Workers unearthed Peers and found him looking much
as he did during his life, free of six years
worth of decay and decomposition. The group was unnerved. Traveling

(21:03):
via dogs led the team began their journey with Peers
to Fort good Hope, three hundred miles from Fort McPherson,
on March twenty first, eighteen sixty. Peers and his transportation
made it to Fort good Hope, but not without incident.
Six days before reaching their destination, they heard a voice
conspicuously reminiscent of that of the departed, warning of approaching wolves.

(21:29):
Three days later, the voice spoke out again in McFarlane's encampment,
alerting the crew of a wolverine supposedly intending harm on
the in transit body. Two days after arrival, Peers found
his final resting place. While MacFarlane prepared to return to
Fort McPherson. At one point, McFarlane recalled feeling the spirit

(21:50):
of Pears surround him. Later that night, McFarlane awoke to
found the ghost of Peers staring at him and his
roommate As they slept. Both men sawears before them but
covered their heads and tried to will the specter away
instead of daring to interact with it. A man named
William shared an encounter that transpired when he and his

(22:13):
cousin chose to camp and fish near a lake said
by elders to be filled with bad spirits. After reaching
the spot and setting up camp, the two men had
a few drinks while sitting by the fire. All of
a sudden, William's cousin lunged at him and attempted to
start a fight. William fought him off, but noticed the

(22:34):
light of the fire illuminated the outline of two shadowy,
raven like wings on the cousin's back. Throughout the night,
the cousin's eyes remained completely black as he tried time
and time again to harm William, even attempting to lure
him into the lake to drown him. With the help
of his dog and with a defensive measure taught to

(22:56):
him by his grandmother firmly in mind, William fown off
the possessed cousin. Repeatedly, he called on all of his
ancestors that shared his name to assist him in keeping
the evil spirit within his cousin at bay. While His
dog alerted him to incoming strikes and kept the man
beside the blazing fire. When the sun rose, William ran

(23:18):
back to his village. His cousin's wife asked what happened,
as her husband had returned muttering about seeing something by
the lake. The conversation with his mother led William to
believe that a spirit known as Evil Raven inhabited his
cousin's body. They determined his cousin's late father accidentally brought

(23:38):
the spirit back with him after visiting another cursed location alone,
leaving Evil Raven free to attach itself to the son
after the father passed. Another man named William shared tales
of his strange encounters during hunting and fishing trips around Alaska.
In order to get to his regular caveside camping spot

(24:01):
in a valley he frequented, William had to traverse a
tricky path that bottlenecks down to about a twelve foot width.
During one visit, he began his trek toward the bottleneck
as usual, when a robin suddenly began dropping sticks and
rocks onto his head as if to get William's attention.
Eventually decided to follow the robin, which took him to

(24:23):
a cliff that overlooked the path. After detecting the strong
scent of scat, William realized that bear one known to
locals as Scarface, stood directly in the bottleneck area of
the valley, supporting a large scar over part of its face.
The bear would have easily overpowered William and his twenty
two in such a narrow area. After saving William from

(24:46):
such an unwinnable altercation, the robin disappeared, leading him to
believe it was a guardian spirit protecting him. In November
nineteen thirty, a Canadian reporter named Emmett K Kellerher wrote
a piece about a trapper named Joe LaBelle who discovered
a ghost town on Lake and Jecuny, hundreds of kilometers

(25:10):
from civilization in Manitoba, Canada. LaBelle stumbled upon the supposed
village and found it empty of all human life, with
only two starving husky dogs in residence. LaBelle claimed to
see abandoned tents made of animal hides, seven dog cadavers,
multiple warm coats, and other signs of previous tenants in

(25:31):
the encampment. There was no trace of human remains, but
LaBelle said a traditional grave covered in stones was disturbed.
LaBelle wandered the area for an afternoon, noting that while
nothing showed signs of a fight, there was something in
the air. After feeding two freshly caught fish to the dogs,

(25:52):
LaBelle returned to civilization to share his tale about the
village and his inkling that an evil spirit named torn
Rock may have had to hand in its demise. Labrador,
Canada is the home of the Phantom Trapper, a specter
cursed to drive a team of fourteen pure white huskies

(26:14):
across the barren landscapes of winter for all eternity. His
real name is unknown. The Trapper appears dressed from head
to toe in furs and skins, and he endlessly speeds
his way through the afterlife. Legend has it that in life,
the trapper sold toxic alcohol to the indigenous population and

(26:34):
assaulted many women before meeting his end from natural causes.
Since the trapper evaded legal retribution during his life, he
never paid for his acts or asked for forgiveness. That
lack of earthly punishment prompted his unending mission to assist
those lost in the snow and guide them to safety
and eternal penance. A woman known as Married Jane told

(27:01):
YouTube channel Zeno Hunters about a strange experience from her youth.
She had a friend set out to find berry bushes
to pick salmon berries when they came upon a hill
along their path and they were greeted by an elderly couple.
The couple warned the girls that a grizzly bear was
prowling the road on the other side of the hill.

(27:21):
After checking for signs of the supposed animal, the girls
decided to walk over the hill and down to the road.
Once over the hill, Mary Jane and her friend began
to pick berries, checking every few minutes for the grizzly
After her companion wandered away, Mary Jane noticed a long
white cloud hovering above and seemingly following her just thirty

(27:43):
feet over her head. Emerging from the cloud were the
voices of two elderly women, frightening Mary Jane and prompting
her to check her surroundings. That's when she finally found
the grizzly bear working on the carcass of a reindeer
and paying her no mind. Mary Jane raced back up
and over the hill to safety. Talkitna, Alaska is a

(28:08):
small town with the haunted Fairview Inn within its city limits.
Built in nineteen twenty three, the Homie Inn once played
host to President Warren G. Harding and an extramarital affair.
Soon after his illicit stay in a hotel, Harding suffered
a heart attack. The room he occupied at the time
has since been labeled Cursed. The walls of the fair

(28:32):
Ofview in bear photographs of departed townspeople. Many believe the
ghosts haunting hotel are or were among them. Rocky Cummins
worked in the town as a miner and trapper. In
his spare time, he liked to party. Jim schaff had
ties to the military through his work and enjoyed gardening

(28:53):
as well as hanging out with Cummins. The duo is
thought to be behind both the random flushing of toilets
in guest rooms and the mysterious faucets that turn themselves
on when no one's around. Many also suspect Cummins and
schafft locked doors on guests, drow around beer cans and napkins,
and generally make mary in the haunted room, Room one

(29:16):
where the pair hung out during their lifetimes. Pounding sounds,
rattling door knobs and creaky footsteps on the floorboards can
be heard in the haunted room. Visitors have reported seeing
apparitions in the halls while making their way between rooms,
despite the end being presumptively unoccupied. Located in central Alaska,

(29:40):
the Arctic Circle Hot Springs Resort is the site of
a four hundred gallons per minute hot spring of crystal
clear water, first discovered by a prospector in the eighteen nineties.
By nineteen eighteen, Franklin Leech gained ownership of the spring
and patented it, with three hundred twenty acres of land
surrounding it. Leech and his wife expanded the property to

(30:03):
a resort with gardens and a restaurant, and made various
upgrades over the years until leech is passing in nineteen
fifty five. Robert and Laverna Miller bought the estate in
nineteen eighty and kept the resort open until two thousand
and two, when financial setbacks forced the business to close.
While the history of the location is rich already, the

(30:25):
creepy encounter is reported by staff and visitors. Only add
to the intrigue. The third floor library is supposedly home
to a female ghost that roams the premises. A staff
of kitchen workers under the Millers heard repeated whistling noises
they couldn't account for, even after following the sound outside

(30:46):
the resort into the surrounding acreage. On another occasion, a
teacher from California visited and recorded an attempt to contact
the late Missus Leech from the fourth floor. He caught
doors opening and closing on their own, and described feeling
the presence of Missus Leech around him. Laverna Miller saw
chandeliers in the hotel swinging without the aid of wind,

(31:08):
and shared other accounts from visitors who heard unexplained footsteps
on the stairs during their stay. Averse to changes to
the building, the spirits are allegedly more active during construction
and enjoy moving objects or even bringing paintings on the
wall to life. In twenty twelve, a Travel Channel ghost

(31:28):
hunting series visited the resort. The eighteen forty five expedition
of Captain Sir John Franklin and his subsequent disappearance features
several elements of the mystical and spiritual, with clairvoyance and
mesmerists taking part in the search for him. It was

(31:49):
Franklin's fourth time exploring the Arctic. He took his ships
Erebus and Terror to seek a northwest passage and attempted
to reclaim his positive reputation after nearly star harving on
a prior journey. Instructed to travel north, the Franklin Expedition
was last glimpsed outside Lancaster Sound before disappearing. One of

(32:11):
the rescue groups sent out in eighteen fifty to recover
the lost Franklin crew in ships was headed by Commander
Edward Belcher. Supposedly one of Belcher's friends was a member
of the Franklin Expedition, leading him to write about an
encounter with a charmed wolf he felt might be his
fallen comrade quote, it is a ridiculous feeling, yet who

(32:33):
is free from it? Indeed, I have been so far,
at times a victim to some such feeling, as even
to attach the name of one of my friends to
this coming visitor. Up next, on Weird Darkness, you never

(32:54):
know what might be lurking just out of sight, in
the shadows behind a door. I'll share a few true
stories that might make you double check the locks at
night and check the closet before going to bed. The

(33:31):
following stories are taken from various asque Reddit threads and
are all supposedly true to me. That makes them so
much scarier. Ghost stories are fun and all, but I'm
just not a sucker for a campfire tale. If you
tell me a story that's actually happened, though, well, I'll
be much less inclined to turn off the hallway light

(33:54):
at night, if you know what I mean, because who
knows what's lurking just out of view in the middle
of the woods. Growing up, I lived in the middle
of the woods. No neighbors for about a mile on
each side, and we on sixty acres of forest, then
a swamp after that, so basically I lived in the

(34:16):
middle of nowhere. One summer when I was about fourteen,
I was out in the middle of the woods playing
with my dog. I'm an only child and both of
my parents were out of town. When I kept feeling
something hit my elbow. I'd go to throw a Max's
ball and the bump would make me throw it almost
straight up. Assuming it was just me bumping it on

(34:37):
trees or something, I ignored it. After the fourth or
fifth time of it happening, I thought, well, this sucks
and I'll just go home. Walking back, I felt uneasy,
but I knew I was just freaking myself out because
we were alone. About an hour later, Max and I
are at home on the couch when the garage door
opens and he starts barking, barking, barking. I hop up

(35:01):
to go let in my mom or Dad, even though
they were home really early. I peered through the peepole
and saw the door was still shut and no one
was in the garage. Quieting Max down, I opened the
door slowly and called out for my dad. Nothing, no
response at all, So I go out to check the

(35:22):
door and it's still locked. Okay, sure, weird, but oh
well Max heard it too, so at least I know
I'm not crazy. About twenty minutes later, I hear the
door open again, and this time Max starts growling like crazy.
I quiet him down and again just assume it's the

(35:44):
wind or something making noise, even though by this point
my heart is racing. I hear footsteps come up the
stairs and think, oh, geez, Dad really is home this time,
and I hop up and run to the door. It
starts to jiggle, so I run faster to let him in.
I peeped through the hole, and even though my hand
is loosely around the jiggling handle, there is no one

(36:05):
on the other side of the door. Terrified, I go
hide on the couch with all the lights on. Max
is still growling. About an hour after that, I start
to feel a little better, even though I'm still terrified,
and then I hear the door handle jiggle again. This
time it was Max jiggling it. He needed to go outside,
and the only way outside is through the garage. Fantastic.

(36:31):
I literally sprint with him to the kennel and I'm
standing in there. I decided to ask this thing questions
to make myself feel better, because I knew it wouldn't
answer me. Thinking about what to ask it, my eyes
are drawn to the huge, heavy oak door on the kennel.
It was always open because it was too heavy for

(36:51):
me to move easily. I said, okay, ghost, if you're real,
you'll shut this heavy door. Nothing and it goes by nothing.
Max is still sniffing around. I turned around to yell
at him to hurry up, and then from behind me,
I hear click. I whipped around and saw the giant

(37:12):
door had swung shut and latched. Okay, clearly used just
the wind. It wasn't really windy, but it was the
wind for sure. It had to be. I proceed, Oh, okay, ghost,
that was the wind. If you're really real, you'll open
this massive door back up. Nothing. I relax a bit

(37:35):
and then squat down with my head in on my knees,
reminiscing about how lame I was just being scared. When
I hear click clack. The door was now wide open.
Max was done, so we booked it back into the house,
locking every door in the house. For the next four hours,
I would hear the footsteps on the stairs and the
door handle jiggling every few minutes, until finally I round

(37:58):
eleven PM. My dad walks and yells at me for
wasting electricity. I never told him or my mom about
it until about four months later, when my dad came
in from hunting after dark. He looked shaken, and I
asked him what was wrong. He said he aimed at
too deer but missed both completely because it felt as
if something was hitting his elbow and making him shoot

(38:21):
way above that deer. That's when I told him everything.
The house Sawnycorn Street. When I was fourteen, my family
and I fell on hard times. We got kicked out
of our house and ended up in emergency housing. Basically,
we went to charity who found us a house that

(38:43):
we were able to rent for one hundred dollars a month,
but only for three months. That summer, my mom and
stepdad separated temporarily, and my three younger siblings would go
to my stepdad's for a week or so, then come
back to my mom and me. This house was creepy.
It started off with just that feeling, you know, like

(39:07):
something isn't quite right, that you might not be the
only person in the room in the day. That's all.
It was, the feeling that something was up, your instincts
pricking at you. I tried to ignore it, but as
soon as dusk arrived, stuff would start happening. More than once.
I could hear this static filled music playing, but I

(39:30):
couldn't find the source. It just filled the halls. I
heard whispering and went to my sister's room. In the
open closet, A pair of eyes looked at me and disappeared.
My brother spent one night in the house and didn't
come back. In my room, I could never win. On
one wall, a mirror which I flipped over to face

(39:52):
the window. I watched tall shadow figures pace in front
of it. In my mother's room, the same shadow figures
paced in circles around her room. One night, she and
I sat up for two hours in her bed watching
these shadows. She was strongly religious and didn't know what
to make of it. During the time we lived there,

(40:14):
there was a lunary clips I'd never seen one before
and was really excited for it. When I went out
to look, every time, this terror took over me and
I couldn't stay outside. I couldn't explain it. When the
moon was fully cloaked, I went outside looked up, but
my head suddenly snapped down, and to my left I

(40:36):
could see three tall shadows walking in between the tall
pine trees in the yard. Panicked, I ran back inside
and into my room, flinging myself under the covers and
my eyes shut tightly, but listening to the pacing outside
my bedroom window. Three months of this, we moved out
at the end of the summer into a new house.

(40:58):
My mom and stepdad got back together, and I was
with my younger siblings again. We all agreed the house
on Acorn Street was screwed up. And still get chills
when we drive by it just to see. Thanks for listening.

(41:21):
If you missed any part of tonight's show, or if
you want to hear it again, you can subscribe to
the podcast in your favorite podcast app at weird Darkness
dot com slash listen. Not only will you hear a
copy of tonight's show, you'll also receive the Sudden Death
bonus content that I did not have time to use
in the show tonight, including the story of little Stephen McCarron,
a five year old boy having the time of his

(41:43):
life at a carnival and suddenly goes missing and when
found later, there is no evidence whatsoever as to how
he got where he was, who took him there, or
what happened to him before he was found. That's only
available in the podcast version of tonight's show, which you
can find at Weirddarkness dot com. I'll be posting it
on Monday. You can follow Weird Darkness on social media

(42:05):
by visiting the contact social page on the website, and
please tell others about Weird Darkness who love the paranormal
or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like
you do. Doing that helps make it possible for me
to keep doing the show. If you like to be
a part of the show, you can send in your
own paranormal experiences by clicking on tell your Story at

(42:26):
Weird Darkness dot com. All stories in Weird Darkness aren't
purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can
find links to the stories or the authors in the
show notes, which I will upload to the Weird Darkness
website immediately after tonight's show has ended. Ghostly Shivers of
the Arctic Circle is by Jody Smith or Ranker. The
most dreadful execution of the Salem Witch Trials is from

(42:48):
Sometimes Interesting and Hevan Corey for history, and never Trust
the Dark is from the lineup Weird Darkness as a
registered trademark copyright Weird Darkness. Now that we're coming out
of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light
Psalm one hundred and twelve, Verse one, Praise the Lord.
Blessed are those who fear the Lord, who find great

(43:10):
delight in his commands. And a final thought from George R. R. Martin.
Once you've accepted your flaws, no one can use them
against you. I'm Darren Marler. Thanks for joining me in
the weird darkness. When Klira Wilson turned sixteen, he was

(43:54):
ready to get out of foster homes and reform school,
so he lied about his age. He joined the US
Air Force, Blessed with a non stop personality. He entertained
fellow airmen with so many funny stories they claimed he
was Flipped out the name stuck. Leaving the Air Force,

(44:15):
Flip Wilson found work as a bellhop and started performing
between paid acts at the hotel's stage show. Before long,
he was a successful comedian. One of Flip's most popular
characters was Geraldine Jones, whom he portrayed in address a
copper colored wig and with exaggerated facial expressions. Geraldine was

(44:38):
constantly misbehaving, crossing the line and violating her conscience, but
she had a one sentence explanation for her behavior, The
devil made me do it. The phrase the devil made
me do it became part of entertainment lore. I wonder why,

(44:58):
on its surface, it's not a particularly funny line. Perhaps
it struck our funny bones because it struck a nerve.
We know we are not a deep down inside. We're
bewildered at how easily we do wrong, and how hard
it is to do right. We need a rationale for
our bad habits, or at least an excuse. It's as

(45:21):
good an excuse as any. In some way, this tagline
became an expression of national self justification. The devil made
me do it. But the line is not always uttered
in jest. Here in the real world, away from the
comedy club stage and TV cameras, there has been many

(45:42):
a time when a heinous crime was committed and the
one who committed the act was the devil himself. I'm
Darren Marler and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome Weirdos. I'm

(46:05):
Darren Marler and this is Weird Darkness Radio, where every
week you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore,
the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained.
If you're new here, welcome to the show. And if
you're already a member of this weirdo family, please take

(46:27):
a moment and invite someone else to listen in with you.
Recommending Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for
me to keep doing the show. And while you're listening,
be sure to visit Weirddarkness dot com and click on
Contact Social to follow Weird Darkness on social media and
also on the website. You can find the daily Weird
Darkness podcast, which comes out seven days per week. You

(46:48):
can enter monthly contests, find Weird Darkness merchandise and more.
You can even send in your own true story of
something paranormal that has happened to you or someone you know.
You can find it all a Weird Darkness dot Com
Coming up this hour. The Devil made me do it.
It's an excuse that has been used so often by

(47:08):
so many that it's kind of lost its meaning and
its effectiveness. It's only a fool or a madman would
commit a horrible act and then trying to blame it
on the devil or a demon, unless, of course, that
person truly believes that is exactly what happened to them. Now,

(47:29):
bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights,
and come with me into the Weird Darkness. Supposedly, demon

(48:01):
possessed criminals have been around for as long as people
have been murdering their wives, sexually assaulting young people, or
gunning down strangers in the street. Some criminals seem to
use this as a calculated excuse for their actions, while others,
usually suffering from mental illness, drug addiction, or both, seem

(48:24):
to truly believe they were under demonic control when they
performed their evil acts. One of the most famous cases
of a demon committing crimes involved serial killer David Berkowitz,
also known as the Son of Sam, who claimed a
demon inhabiting the body of his neighbour's dog compelled him
to walk the streets of New York for an entire year,

(48:47):
firing indiscriminately at anyone who was hanging out in a
parked car after dark. If you've ever been curious about
demonic possession or want to get the inside scoop on
some of the most vile acts ever committed by the possessed,
say the Lord's prayer, say a blessing over whatever your drinking,

(49:08):
and hope it becomes holy. And keep listening. You're about
to hear about some of the most heinous crimes supposedly
committed by demons. After uber driver Jason Brian Dalton went
on a shooting spree, killing six people in the early
hours of February twenty first, twenty sixteen, people wondered what

(49:30):
could drive a man to commit such heinous murders money revenge.
It turned out the real reason was something much more insidious.
Dalton told detectives that the Uber app on his iPhone
had taken over his mind and forced him to commit murder.
A detective for the case said, Dalton explained how when

(49:54):
he opens up the Uber taxi app, a symbol appeared,
and he recognized that symbol as the Eastern Star symbol.
Dalton acknowledged that he recognized the Uber symbol as being
that of the Eastern Star, and a devilhead popped up
on his screen, and when he pressed the button on
the app, that is when all the problems started. But

(50:16):
it's not just that the app demon forced him to kill.
It also helped him get from place to place in
a timely manner. Dalton explained how you can drive over
one hundred miles per hour and go through stop signs
and you can just get places. Dalton said he wishes
he would never have spoken what that symbol was when

(50:38):
he saw it on his phone. Dalton described the devil
figure as a horned cow head or something like that.
And then it would give you an assignment and it
would literally take over your whole body. New York City
during the summer of nineteen seventy six was a hotbed
of anger, frustration, and fear, and David Berkowitz, aka the

(51:03):
Son of Sam, didn't help the matter by killing six
people and wounding seven others in the span of one year.
After his arrest, Berkowitz told people that he was under
the control of a demon named Harvey, who inhabited his
neighbour's dog and implored him to kill people. Once, during
a three month break from his murdersbury, Berkowitz wrote The

(51:26):
New York Post to say, I am still here, like
a spirit roaming the night, thirsty, hungry, seldom stopping to rest.
After being incarcerated, Berkowitz received a sentence of three hundred
sixty five years in prison. He became a born again Christian,
but he still believes that the devil and God are

(51:46):
fighting for possession of his soul. Bazuzu Algarod was arrested
in twenty fourteen for killing a person and then burying
the body in his backyard in July two thousand and nine,
as well as helping his girlfriend bury someone she killed
later that year. He had taken the name Pazuzu in

(52:07):
reference to a demon mentioned in the Exorcist, and he
had a forked tongue and sharpened teeth. An anonymous man
who lived at the home where the bodies were buried
told police that he felt Pazuzu was possessed. It was
very serpentine, and his eyes would kind of get a
little like glazy, like almost not there, like the inner

(52:30):
part of him would kind of phase away. You could
tell when his demons needed something from him, because they
took over about once a month, and it was usually
on a full moon. They sacrificed at least one rabbit
and then he would eat the heart of it and
then burn the flesh of the rabbit. Investigators on the
scene later deemed the home the sight of many animal sacrifices,

(52:52):
as unsafe for human life. In nineteen seventy four, Michael
Taylor was just as simple butcher living in Osset, England,
who was suddenly overcome by an evil spirit. He had
an exorcism performed on October fifth and sixth of nineteen
seventy four, and while it went okay, the priests weren't

(53:15):
able to expel all the demons. According to Bill Ellis,
an authority on folklore and the occult in contemporary culture.
In an all night ceremony, the extorcists believed they had
invoked and cast out at least forty demons, including those
of incest, bestiality, blasphemy, and lewdness. At the end, exhausted,

(53:37):
they allowed Taylor to go home, although they felt that
at least three demons insanity, murder, and violence were still
left in him, so you know the big Three. After
he returned home, Taylor immediately murdered his wife by ripping
out her eyes and tongue, then tearing off most of
the skin from her face, finally strangling their pet Pooh.

(54:01):
Police found Taylor standing in the street naked and covered
in blood, shouting it is the blood of Satan. In
twenty twelve, after living in what they believed to be
a demon possessed house and becoming convinced that the world
was ending, Deborah and Adolpho Gomez admitted to restraining their children,

(54:22):
ages seven to five, with duct tape inside an suv
and a Walmart parking lot because they were demon possessed.
The couple was arrested in Lawrence, Kansas, where investigators learned
that not only was the couple under demonic possession, but
Adolpho had not slept for the last nine days, so
maybe that had something to do with it. In March

(54:45):
twenty sixteen, seventeen year old Tommy Smith attempted to rob
Peter Churm, a sixty six year old man, for the
keys to his son's range rover. When Schrm refused to
hand the keys over, Smith flew into a rage, stabbed
Churn in the face, neck and ears. The teenage boy
stabbed the old man so fiercely that the knife actually

(55:07):
broke in two. Cheram ended the attack by bashing Smith
in the head with a claw hammer. Smith, a diagnosed
paranoid schizophrenic, later told a psychiatrist that he was magnetically
drawn toward his victim and that he saw a demon
float out of Cherm's wounds, where he attacked him. According
to Reverend Cecil Begbie, South African al jar Schwartz was

(55:32):
possessed by demons when he strangled a Ravensmead teenager to
death before beheading him and leaving his body in an
abandoned school. In October twenty thirteen, Schwartz claimed that he
had become possessed by a vague collection of satanic attacks,
but he never went into further detail. Allegedly, after beheading

(55:55):
his victim, he'd intended to sell the man's head to
a traditional healer called San Goma. Reverend big b did
his best to help out Swartz and instructed church groups
all over Africa to pray for big Bee on the
Good Friday following Swartz's incarceration. Schwartz said that when the
collective prayer was held, he felt that he was standing

(56:16):
under a waterfall with pure, clean water flowing through his body.
He claims he's no longer possessed by demons. However, the
courts have stated that they will not mitigate his sentence
based on his supposed recovery. Jason Nelson, a thirty two
year old Englishman, claimed to be under the spell of

(56:38):
a demon when he went on a spree of violence,
raping a woman, attempting to rape her daughter, and then
murdering Jordan Maguire after inviting the man into his home
to sell marijuana. This case is a little opaque due
to the lack of verifiable facts. It seems that in
twenty fifteen, while Reverend Connery dug was attempting to perform

(57:01):
a multiple day long cleansing ceremony on Rowland Zenna of Darby, Pennsylvania.
He was strangled to death by Zenna, who then immediately
ran outside and started beating on a mini van with
a shovel. First responders noted that Zenna seemed to be
dancing when they arrived on the scene, and when they
tackled him to the ground and slapped him in cuffs,

(57:23):
he allegedly began shouting, I kill demons, which is confusing
because we thought he was the guy who was possessed
by demons. Louis Zambrano, thirty, was sentenced to twenty six
and a half years in prison for the murder of
his girlfriend Angi Escobar by stabbing her over eighty times

(57:44):
with a pair of scissors. After she died, he shoved
her into the trunk of his car. He told a
judge that he was under demonic possession when he killed Escobar,
but that there were also trust issues at play in
the gruesome murder. On April twenty ninth, twenty sixteen, two
police officers responded to a phone call about a man

(58:06):
screaming and yelling in the street and found a man
who proceeded to give one of the officers a piece
of his mind like he knew him from high school,
before biting the other on the hand. Pamela Fornett, the
biter's wife, told w t KR. I apologized to those
police officers about what happened, but I begged them, please
don't shoot my husband. The officers did not shoot him,

(58:30):
but were able to take him into custody. He is
believed to be mentally ill. Fornett later said that her
husband had been possessed by a demon. I caught it
on camera, she said, a demon. It really was, so
I figured that's what got into him, knewer. Waliel, a
thirty eight year old English immom, raped a boy in

(58:51):
the bathroom of the church where he was giving lessons.
When the elders of the mosque found out what had happened,
Waliel simply said that the devil made him do it.
The elders told Waliel that his choices were to face
the police in England or to return forever to his
native India. Walil fled to escape persecution from the police,

(59:13):
but later secretly returned to Leicester, where he was promptly
arrested and slammed with a rape charge. Quite possibly the
most famous of all demon caused crime cases is Arney
Cheyenne Johnson. The twisted story of Arne Cheyenne Johnson, also

(59:38):
known as the Devil Made Me Do It case, comes
directly from the case files of demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren.
You might recognize the controversial ghost Hunters from the Conjuring
movie franchise, where the real life couple is played by
Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga. While the various spin offs
of the franchise have gone in more overtly fictional directions,

(01:00:01):
the core titles have stuck closer to their inspired by
true events logline. Twenty thirteen's The Conjuring covers the haunting
of the Perrin family, while twenty sixteen's The Conjuring Two
centers on the Amityville Horror and the Enfield Poltergeist. The
third installment, scheduled for release in September of twenty twenty,

(01:00:23):
looks to be no exception for the new movie titled
The Conjuring. The Devil Made Me Do It. Filmmakers are
digging into the case of Arnie Cheyenne Johnson, the first
known person in America to attempt to use demonic possession
as a defense plea in a murder trial. On February sixteenth,
nineteen eighty one, Johnson, then nineteen years old, stamped his

(01:00:47):
landlord several times with a five inch pocket knife. It
was the first murder on the books in the one
hundred ninety three year history of Brookfield, Connecticut. According to Johnson, however,
while his was the hand that held the knife, the
murder was committed by a demonic force that had overcome him.
For Johnson's victim, the story ended there. But for Johnson

(01:01:11):
and the Warrens, it had started months earlier, when eleven
year old David Glantzill allegedly had a strange encounter. Glatzill's
older sister, Debbie, was Johnson's fiance. David Glatzill, Debbie Glatzill,
and Johnson were cleaning up a rental property when David
told them that an old man had appeared, pushing and

(01:01:31):
threatening him. At first, the couple wrote it off as
a kid trying to get out of doing his chores,
but David remained adamant. The odd sightings not only continued,
they increased in both frequency and intensity. At night, David
would wake up sobbing, describing visitations by a man with

(01:01:52):
big black eyes, a thin face with animal features, and
jagged teeth, pointed ears, horns, and hoo hoofs. The Glatzels
asked a priest from nearby Saint Joseph's Catholic Church to
bless their home, but David's frightening encounters continued unabated. Over
the next few months, he gained sixty pounds in rapid succession,

(01:02:16):
and family members had to sit up with him through
the night. David would suddenly jerk awake at all hours
to hiss, growl, speak in strange voices, and suddenly began
reciting passages from the Bible or from Milton's Paradise Lost.
His nocturnal visitor also began making daytime appearances, during which
it took on the more innocuous shape of an old

(01:02:39):
man with a white beard, dressed in a flannel shirt
and jeans. The family was so desperate at this point
they called upon self styled demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren.
We'll find out what happens next on Weird Darkness. I'm

(01:03:17):
Darren Marler. Welcome back to Weird Darkness. You can get
more Weird Darkness seven days a week through the Weird
Darkness podcast, which you can find wherever you listen to podcasts,
or visit Weirddarkness dot com slash listen and find a
list of all the apps where you can listen to
the show that's Weird Darkness dot com slash listen. The

(01:03:38):
Glancels were so desperate to get help for their son, David,
who was dealing with the demonic possession. They called self
styled demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, and apparently the demon
was not too happy about that. When the couple first
interviewed the family, Lorraine reported seeing a black misty form

(01:03:58):
next to David, which told me we were dealing with
something of a negative nature. During the course of David's possession,
the Warrens had feared that they were sitting on a
powder keg. In October of nineteen eighty, the Warrens contacted
the Brookfield Police and warned them that the situation was
growing increasingly dangerous. David made numerous references to murder and stabbings,

(01:04:23):
Lorraine claimed. David complained of being choked and hit by
invisible hands, and witnesses reported that red marks appeared spontaneously
on his body. As the situation worsened, the Warrens claimed
to have been present at three lesser exorcisms in an
attempt to rid the boy of whatever dark spirit was

(01:04:43):
troubling him. Four priests from Saint Joseph's were said to
have been in attendance. During these lesser exorcisms, David purportedly levitated,
ceased breathing, and gave the names of the forty three
demons that were possessing him. In desperation, Arney Cheyenne Johnson,
who was present at the extorcisms, demanded that the demons

(01:05:07):
leave David alone and possess him instead. After the extorcisms failed,
Johnson was in a car accident during which he claimed
that a demon took control of his vehicle and forced
him off the road and into a tree. He was unharmed,
but determined to do something to try to put an

(01:05:27):
end to the demonic activity. According to an episode of
the Discovery Channel series A Haunting, which aired in August
of two thousand and six, there was a well on
the same rental property where all the trouble had started.
The Warrens warned Johnson not to investigate the well, but
after his car accident, he did just that. Johnson recalls

(01:05:49):
making eye contact with the demon in the depths of
the well. According to Johnson, this was the last time
that he was completely lucid until after the murder. Shortly thereafter,
Debbie Glatzill and Arnie Cheyenne Johnson moved out of the
Glatzel home, which was becoming unbearable. Debbie had been hired

(01:06:11):
by Alan Bono as a dog groomer at the Brookfield
Pet Motel, and the couple also rented a nearby apartment
from Bono. But Debbie began to fear that they had
brought David's demons with them. Johnson, who had played Little
League and sang in the church choir when he was younger,
would growl and say he saw the beast. Debbie recalled

(01:06:33):
later he would have no memory of it. It was
just like David. On February sixteenth, nineteen eighty one, Johnson
called in sick to work and joined Debbie at the
Brookfield Pet Motel. Bono took them auled out to lunch
at a local bar, where he apparently drank heavily. Later
in the day, there was an altercation, at which point

(01:06:54):
Johnson stabbed Bono repeatedly while growling like an animal. Keme
time for the trial. Martin Manella, Johnson's attorney, attempted to
enter a plea of not guilty by reason of demonic possession.
While this was the first time such a plea had
been attempted in the United States, Manilla cited two cases

(01:07:15):
in England where similar pleas had been used, although neither
case ever went to trial. Lorraine Warren agreed that Johnson
had been possessed at the time of the murder, and
Manella planned to fly in experts from Europe and subpoena
the priests who had been involved in the extorcisms of
David Glatzill, none of which ultimately came to pass. Robert Callahan,

(01:07:39):
the presiding judge in the case, rejected the plea, arguing
that such a defense would be impossible to prove and
that testimony on the subject was irrelevant and unscientific. Ultimately,
Johnson's legal team entered a plea of self defense. However,
the jury was not persuaded of his innocence. On November

(01:08:02):
twenty fourth, nineteen eighty one, Johnson was convicted of first
degree manslaughter and sentenced to ten to twenty years in prison,
though he served only five. Upon his release, he married
Debbie Glatzell. The bizarre events surrounding Alan Bono's murder were
published in a book called The Devil in Connecticut, written

(01:08:24):
by Gerald Briddle in collaboration with Lorraine Warren. The case
was later dramatized in a TV movie called The Demon
Murder Case, which premiered on NBC in March of nineteen
eighty three. The movie featured Andy Griffith and a very
young Kevin Bacon playing the role of the possessed boy, who,
in the movie version, goes on trial for murder. In

(01:08:48):
two thousand and six, The Devil in Connecticut was re released,
prompting David's older brother, forty two year old Carl Glatzell,
to sue Gerald Briddle, Lorraine Warren, and the William Morris Agency,
who own the rights to the book. According to Carl Glatzel,
his brother David suffered from mental illness and had been
exploited by the Warrens. The book also painted Carl as

(01:09:10):
a villain quote simply because I had a sane voice
and knew the story was false. Since the beginning. Carl
isn't the only one to cast aspersions on the Warren's
account of what happened to the Glatzell family. While Father
Nicholas Grico of the Diocese of Bridgeport did concede that
David's case was investigated by the church, he denied that

(01:09:32):
any extorcism was performed. As for the priests who were
supposedly present for the rituals, they weren't talking and were
transferred to other parishes after the ordeal. So did Arnie
Cheyenne Johnson really believe that he was possessed by demons
or was it just an excuse to distance himself from
his deplorable actions. We will likely never know what happened

(01:09:56):
in the small Connecticut town of Brookfield back in nineteen
eighty one, though the questions surrounding this chilling true crime
case will certainly return come September twenty twenty with the
release of the Conjuring Three. The Devil Made Me Do It.

(01:10:29):
Norway is perhaps remembered as two things, either as the
savage vikings plundering Europe and beyond, or they're perhaps remembered
as this rich oil country. They are today most often
perhaps not remembered at all. Where it sits at the
edge of the world, but few people know of the

(01:10:49):
dark times in between. It was only in the fifties
and sixties that the country grew in wealth, and before
that it was one of Europe's poorest count so centuries
with coldness, starvation and ghosts. The folklore is still thriving
and the ghosts of the past lurking around the corners,

(01:11:12):
in between the walls and inside the houses and homes.
On a very unscary place like Bermvirk, a village in Norway,
the quaint streets and not the most busy city life,
we find one of the country's most haunted places. Along
the river and mountains where it's built between the old
wooden walls of the ancient houses creeks. The history from

(01:11:35):
many lives that walked through this place since it was
first built in the sixteen hundreds when it was found
iron ore. There the tails of the Berreumvirk are many
dogs refuse to go into certain rooms. There are steps
and doors, creaking doors that never want to open. Norway

(01:11:58):
is not very known for their factsctory and mining skills,
but at the birth of the Industrial Revolution, the mountains
were hacked into the waterfalls harvested to use as energy.
The grouping of people changes from being spread out on
small farms and along the coast, they grouped together inland
to work the land, hack into the mountains, train the

(01:12:22):
water to make their bidding. Some of these communities are
alive and thriving today, like at Berremburg, where people still
live and work long after the iron foundry the settlement
was founded on, closed, and so do the ghosts of
the past as well. The legend wants to tell of

(01:12:42):
the former owner, Conrad Klausen, that haunts the Urkskada. At
least he's one of them, and according to the workers
and people living there, there are a lot of them.
Conrad was only a young guy when the whole place
fell on his shoulders. He took over the iron boundary
in seventeen seventy three at eighteen years old. In those times,

(01:13:05):
small villages for the workers were often built around foundries
like this, a lot of them standing to this day.
Clawson gave all of his life his energy to the
place where he lived and worked, even if his life
was going to be a very short one. Only at
the age of thirty one, he died in the bedroom
the same bedroom now operating as a meeting room for

(01:13:28):
people working there today. Now the foundry is turned into
a shopping mall. Typical, isn't it. A young man dies
too soon, steps in the night, creaking of the doors.
But perhaps the strangest with the haunting must be the phones.
It's the middle of the night, no one is at work,

(01:13:51):
no one is there to answer the phones, no one
is up to make a call to them, but still
they are ringing. The people employed in the offices of
the shopping mall where Clawson lived, claims that phones call
constantly during the night to the same time, quarter past
twelve or quarter past one, depending if it's summer or

(01:14:14):
winter saving time. It's rumored that if you try to
take the phone, it will only answer with a strange
beeping sound. Straight after, the phone in the room next
will start calling, and then in the room next again.
That's how it continues through the whole building. Yes, and

(01:14:36):
why haven't they just called the telephone company? Yes, they
have several times, but no one seems to be able
to figure it out. The leader of the shopping mall,
gry Skaden, told the local newspaper that it was exactly
what the workers at the mall tried to do. When
we get into work in the morning, the whole switchboard

(01:14:58):
is blinket away. But when the telephone company comes to
fix the whole thing and explain it all, only more
questions rise. Before I started here, we found that the
phone signals came from the lunchrooms that was back in
the day, the bedroom of Conrad Clausen and where he died.

(01:15:18):
Skaden says it's not the only reported ghost haunting this
settlement of iron workers on the oldest tavern in the country.
There are also been reported many cases of unusual happenings.
Barham's Verk has become somewhat of a cultural place. That's
what the people planned, at least when working at the tavern,

(01:15:39):
thought of when serving recipes based on old ones and
classical Norwegian food. Perhaps that's contributing keeping the ghosts alive here.
The buildings are protected and will remain as part of
the cultural heritage. The smell of the food and the
tavern perhaps similar to the ones they used to eat
when they themselves were alive. In any case, the strange occurrences,

(01:16:03):
like with the phones to the malls, is happening all
over the settlement, so unusual, in fact, that several journalists,
ghost tourists, paranormal investigators, mediums, and the ghost Hunter TV
show in Norway stopped by to get a glimpse of it.
Most claim they did. At the tavern, for instance, the

(01:16:26):
staff as well as the owners have had trouble dealing
with a green clothed woman, a very lauded imagery in
Norwegian culture. It's just not practical working in the oldest
tavern when a ghost in green clothes just walks around,
the owner, Ula Laycock told the local newspaper, but she
and her husband found a way to work for their advantage. Though,

(01:16:48):
as they now published their book on the persistent hauntings
at the place, the local history team have identified the
woman in green as a woman called and a crefting
that still walks amongst the yes the tavern, as it
fits with her period clothes she's observed in There's a
lot in the walls in this place, and it's important
to take care of the writer of the book, Caroline Paulsburg,

(01:17:11):
says it is, however, interesting how the locals and workers
feel about living in the country's most haunted place, or
rather haunted village. On their own Facebook group. They claim
that yes, it is haunted, but they would like to
keep them around. Most of the people around haunted places
would perhaps not feel the same way, but according to them,

(01:17:34):
the ghosts are nice and they have the same right
to be there as the living, having once themselves lived
and worked there. When we'd darkness returns, there have been

(01:17:58):
more than a few stories from people around the world
claiming to have seen tiny humans, perfectly proportioned, but a
third of the size of a normal human man. What
are people seeing? We'll talk about that coming up. If
you're a weirdo and proud of it, you can find
Weird Darkness t shirts, buttons, hoodies, office supplies, clothes for

(01:18:22):
your kids, stickers, magnets, coffee mugs, and a whole lot
more in the Weird Darkness Store, with dozens of designs
to choose from and a variety of colors to match
your style. Even tie died. Grab some weirdo merchandise for
yourself or maybe as a gift for the weirdo in
your life by clicking on store at Weirddarkness dot com.

(01:18:42):
That's weird Darkness dot com slash store now and again

(01:19:12):
a story will surface that is so bizarre it's difficult
to know what to think of it. In this story,
the subject matter falls firmly into that particular category. In fact,
there are several such stories, not just one. We're talking
about those who claim to have seen but can only
be termed little people. I'll let you, the listener, offer

(01:19:36):
comments and suggestions on what might have been the cause
of such tales. Frank Banner's family tells of the time
that Frank, in nineteen seventy one, encountered a group of
around fifteen strange, diminutive beings in the woods surrounding Tremplone Mountain, Wisconsin,
as he took a stroll with the family dog. According

(01:19:58):
to Banner, as he walked along in one particular track,
he suddenly developed a sense of being watched. He was
Within seconds, a group of very human looking but only
about two feet tall creatures came out of the woods
in front of Banner. Curiously, the dog did not act
in a hostile fashion, but wagged its tail vigorously as

(01:20:20):
if it was greeting a bunch of old friends. Banner, however,
was terrified by the sight of this strange band of
many people, all of whom were dressed in what Banner
described as primitive clothing. The group did nothing more than
smile at Banner, wave and then continued on their way
into the woods on the other side of the track.

(01:20:43):
Despite the fact that the family made jokes about Frank
having met a tribe of pixies, until his dying day,
Banner believed he had encountered an extraterrestrial race of very
human like, albeit small aliens. Of course, there is an
important question to ask. If they were so advanced extraterrestrials,

(01:21:04):
why were they dressed in primitive clothing? Oh well, moving on,
Dave Shaw's experience in nineteen ninety nine is another perfect
example of high strangeness. While walking through the woods surrounding
Texas Lake Worth, he saw a little man that raced
past him at a very fast speed, and who was

(01:21:25):
dressed in a yellow one piece outfit. Little is undeniably apt,
as Shaw estimated that the man was between one and
one and a half feet in height. The little man
didn't turn back to look at Shaw. He just carried
on running, vanishing into the undergrowth. Alien sprite goblin, There

(01:21:48):
is no answer to the question. Adelaide, Australia was the
site of a profoundly odd encounter reported by Samantha Kay
in September nineteen eighty four. Walked home from a late
shift at the restaurant she worked for at the time.
She almost stumbled into what she too described as a
little man. He was about two feet tall, raced across

(01:22:11):
the quiet road, was dressed in a silver one piece
suit and a large helmet. He vanished into a nearby alleyway.
Sam says she was too amazed to be scared by
the weird experience. A similar saga comes from Janice Bakewell,
who encountered a small ufo as in extremely small, in Marlborough, Wiltshire, England,

(01:22:35):
in January nineteen seventy seven. Just like Frank Banner in
nineteen seventy one, Janice was walking through the woods with
her dog. It was early one morning when she heard
a loud, buzzing noise that quickly filled her ears and
clearly those of her dog. Puzzled, she looked around, but
it was all to no avail, at least for around

(01:22:57):
two minutes. Then everything came amazingly clear, as if out
of nowhere, a small flying saucer appeared before her, hovering
at a height of around four feet off the ground
in a small clearing in the trees. It was circular
in shape, silver in color, and had a red band

(01:23:18):
around its middle, and it was barely four feet across.
She watched astonished as the diminutive craft settled to the
ground in decidedly wobbly fashion and a small door opened.
Janice still recalls holding her breath, wondering what might happen next.
She soon found out. Out of the door flew three

(01:23:41):
three to four inch tall small humanoid figures, clearly female
and glowing brightly. They fluttered around Janice for a minute
or two, dressed in silvery mini skirts. At one point,
the tiny trio landed on Janis's right arm, smiled, then
flew back into the craft, which shot away into the skies,

(01:24:02):
never to be seen again. Bizarre YEP theories, anyone. Thanks
for listening. If you missed any part of tonight's show,

(01:24:24):
or if you want to hear it again, you can
subscribe to the podcast in your favorite podcast app at
Weird Darkness dot com slash listen. Not only will you
hear a copy of tonight's show, you'll also receive the
sudden Death overtime content, which can only be heard in
the podcast with the story of John and Eva, who
were married and told relatives they planned to honeymoon on

(01:24:44):
the Atlantic coast. But John had another plan and it
would not be his last deception, but it would be
the first act in what ended up being a mystery
that has still gone unsolved to this day. That story
is only in the podcast version of Night's show, which
will be posted on Monday. At Weirddarkness dot com. You
can follow Weird Darkness on social media by visiting the

(01:25:07):
contact social page on the website, and please tell others
about Weird Darkness who love the paranormal or strange stories,
true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do. Doing
that helps make it possible for me to keep doing
the show. If you'd like to be a part of
the show, you can send in your own paranormal experiences
by clicking on Tell your Story at Weird Darkness dot com.

(01:25:30):
You can also email me anytime at Darren at weird
Darkness dot com. Darren is d A R R E. N.
All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true
unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the
stories or the authors in the show notes, which I
will upload to the Weird Darkness website immediately after tonight's
shows ended. A dmon Made Me Do It is by

(01:25:51):
Jacob Shelton for ranker and orin Gray for the lineup.
The most Haunted village in Norway is from Moon Mausoleum,
and Big Stories About Little People is by Nick Redfern
for a mysterious universe. Weird Darkness is a registered trademark
copyright Weird Darkness. And now that we're coming out of
the dark, I'll leave you with a little light one

(01:26:11):
Peter three, verse fourteen. But even if you should suffer
for what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear
their threats, do not be frightened. And a final thought,
don't sit back and let things happen to you, go
out and happen to things. I'm Darren Marler, thanks for

(01:26:31):
joining me in the Weird Darkness. Darkness. I was born

(01:27:04):
and raised in Brazil, and unfortunately not in a nice
or safe neighborhood. Being the youngest child, I was raised
by my four brothers, more specifically my brother Caesar, whom
took care of me while my parents worked all day.
I loved my brother more than anything in the world,
but unfortunately, on February fourteenth, two thousand and one, he

(01:27:28):
was taken from me at the young age of twenty one.
My brother was shot twelve times two blocks down the
street where I grew up. I was only twelve years old,
and to make things worse, I was forced to see
and recognize my own brother's body in a pool of
blood laying on the streets, while people surrounding his body
didn't seem to care at all. My world ended there,

(01:27:54):
but time went on and I was forced to accept
the fact that I would never see him again. Moving on,
I used to go to church with my family every weekend,
and my mom, being very religious, I've always heard my
mom saying ghosts don't exist, joy, but the devil he
is real, and he uses your weakness to manipulate you

(01:28:16):
and make you believe that ghosts are real, especially when
it takes the form of someone you love. I heard
that when I was eight years old, because I'm used
to experiencing the paranormal. My mom did too. So three
or four years had passed after my brother passed away,
and I almost forgot what his smile was like until

(01:28:37):
one morning I woke to someone touching my feet in
the sleep stage I was in. I thought it was
my mother waking me up to get ready for school.
I opened my eyes just to be surprised, just to
see my brother Caesar, sitting by my feet looking down
on me. I closed my eyes again to think that

(01:28:58):
maybe I was dreaming. At that very moment, I started
praying that maybe, yes, it was just a dream. I
waited a couple of minutes and opened my eyes again,
and there he was, still sitting on my bed. I
don't know why, but I decided to sit down on
my bed and I looked into his eyes. I couldn't
believe it. I wasn't dreaming. It was really him. I've

(01:29:24):
missed him so much. And I smiled at him and
he smiled back. I didn't know what to say. I
just wanted to hold him. But then something weird, even
more so, happened. He got up and asked me to
follow him to the backyard, and that's exactly what I did.
I followed him. When we got there, he sat down

(01:29:45):
on a big rock that was in the backyard, and
my curiosity kicked in. I started asking him questions. My
first question was, who did this to you. He replied,
you'll find out soon you know who did it. And
then he asked me, how will you ben little sister.
I miss you so much. I'm so sorry I had

(01:30:07):
to leave like this, and I'm so sorry for not
being here for you. But I'm here right now and
I'm never going to leave you again. I started crying.
I did miss him, and the pain, the pain of
that day, came back, hitting me like a tornado of emotions.
He said, I love you, little sister. I said I

(01:30:29):
love you too, and I ran into his direction, ready
to hold him. When I felt something. Someone pull me
back and whisper into my ears. Don't do it, Joy,
it's not your brother. This whisper of voice didn't scare me.
On the contrary, it made me feel calm and safe.
And then I remembered what my mom said to me.

(01:30:52):
The devil uses your weakness to manipulate you and make
you believe that ghosts are real, especially when it takes
the form of some one you love. I froze. I
suddenly realized what was happening, and I said to my brother, wait,
it can't be you. It's not you. And then I yelled,
you're not my brother, I know who you are. Immediately

(01:31:16):
after I said that, the demeanor on my brother's face changed.
It wasn't him anymore. His body started to decompose slowly
right in front of me. He had an evil look
at his eyes, and I could feel the anger, the
darkness coming from him. But I wasn't scared. I felt strong,
and I felt embraced by that good energy that was
surrounding me. I could feel it embracing me. I then

(01:31:39):
closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I was
alone in my backyard. I saw the devil manifested as
my brother that morning, and I know it wasn't a dream.
Nineteen years have passed and I have never ever seen
that thing again, But that doesn't mean that he hasn't

(01:31:59):
tried in other ways to get to me. When John

(01:32:26):
Keys and Eva Dickinson were married and Cincinnati on August
twenty first, eighteen ninety, they told their relatives that they
planned a honeymoon on the Atlantic coast. But John had
another plan. He purchased an Ohio River shanty boat and
planned a slow trip downriver to Saint Louis. It would
not be their last deception. In fact, what transpired on

(01:32:49):
that fateful journey would remain forever shrouded in mystery. When
the boat left Cincinnati, it was carrying four passengers. A
friend of John's, whom he allegedly introduced to Eva as
Billy Moore, would be the cook on the trip. At
the last minute, John also agreed to take his friend,
Bert Rusk, who had taken one hundred and fifteen dollars

(01:33:11):
from his mother and was afraid she was searching for him.
John told Rusk to pose as his brother so it
would not look so suspicious. One woman traveling with three men.
John was nineteen years old, Eva seventeen. The other two
men were in their early twenties. The boat left Cincinnati
and traveled west on the Ohio River, then docked near

(01:33:34):
a group of shanty boats in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. They remained
there for several days that all four passengers disappeared, leaving
behind the shanty boat and all their furnishings. Shanty boats
on the Ohio River would dock gunwale to gunwale, and
what went on in one boat would soon be known

(01:33:55):
by all. Several witnesses had seen three men and a
woman take us gift from Key's boat to the Kentucky
shore of the river. Shortly after, one man returned alone.
The witnesses heard three gunshots and a scream that heard
the man who returned say, oh, dear, my brother has
shot his wife. When a body was found floating where

(01:34:17):
Big Bone Creek fed into the Ohio River, it was
assumed to be one of the four who had abandoned
their shanty boat. It was the corpse of a man stark, naked,
with a gunshot wound to the chest and a slit throat.
The body was hastily buried in an unmarked grave, but
later was exhumed for identification. It was first believed that

(01:34:40):
the dead man was Bert Rusk, but when his sister
and his uncle saw the corpse, they said it was
not Rusk but Billy Fee. Fee turned out often used
the alias Moor. The dead man had been the cook
of the shanty boat. Warrants were issued for the arrest
of John and Eva Keys and Bert Rusk. In Cincinnati,

(01:35:02):
the police located Eva Keys, who claimed she did not
know the whereabouts of Rusk or her husband. She told
them of her wedding tour on the shanty boat and
confirmed that Billy Moore had been their cook, but she
had never known anyone to call him Fee. She said
the shots heard on the river were fired by her
practicing with a small rifle her husband owned. The shouting

(01:35:25):
heard was her husband trying to scare her by jokingly
pretending to be shot. She said that Moore had left
them on Monday and they suspected him of robbing them.
Rusk had left them on Wednesday, bound for Cincinnati. The
warrant for Eva's arrest had been requested by Billy's brother,
Richard Fee, who told a different story. He claimed that

(01:35:47):
Eva had been the wife of his brother Billy. They
both disappeared, and the next he heard of Eva, she'd
married John Keyes. John Keyes was arraigned in Lawrenceburg, Indiana,
and although several witnesses heard the gunshots on the Fateful night,
none could tell which side of the river they came from,
except Thomas South, who said they came from the Kentucky side.

(01:36:10):
The defense offered no evidence, but moved for a dismissal
for want of jurisdiction, and Mayor O'Brien, who presided over
the hearing, promptly dismissed the charges. Officers from Petersburg, Kentucky
asked Lawrence Burg to hold him until a requisition could
be secured from the governor, but the request was refused.

(01:36:30):
Key's attorney said he would give himself up when the
proper papers were presented. Eva Keys was out on bail.
In October, John Keyes was arrested again and Bert Rusk
surrendered voluntarily. All three were charged jointly for the murder.
Rusk's attorney accused the Cincinnati police of unscrupulous tactics to

(01:36:51):
get him to confess, offering him whiskey to loosen his
tongue and falsely telling him that the Keys had accused
him of murder. Dusk contended that he had nothing to confess.
John Keys and Bert Rusk agreed to go voluntarily to Kentucky.
Eva Keys was released on her own recognisance and was
not expected to be extradited. In January eighteen ninety one,

(01:37:16):
Bert Rusk went to authorities in Petersburg, Kentucky, and under oath,
confessed to his role in the murder of Billy Fee.
He said that on the night of the murder, all
four had taken the skiff across the river to the
Kentucky side, and John Keys sat with a thirty eight
caliber revolver loaded and cocked in his hand. As soon

(01:37:36):
as they got off the skiff, Keys sent him back
to the shanty boat to get a trot line for fishing.
When he got to the shantyboat, he heard three shots,
heard Eva scream, and heard Fee exclaim, Oh, Johnny, for
God's sake, don't kill me. That was when he said
to missus Korns on a nearby shantyboat, my brother has
killed his wife. Rusk wrote back across the river and

(01:38:01):
saw Fee's clothing saturated with blood. He asked Keys what happened,
and Keyes said, I've killed the sob. Damn him. He
knew too much about me, and I've put him out
of the way. He's not the first man I've killed,
and if you ever say a word about him, I'll
kill you. Keyes told him that he and Fee had

(01:38:21):
done up a man in Newport, Kentucky, and was afraid
that Fee might give him away. He also said that
Fee had courted his wife for two years before they
were married, and there was some bad blood over that.
When Rusk and the Keys returned to the shanty boat,
they met Thomas South, who asked about the shooting. That

(01:38:42):
was when Keyes first told the story of Eva firing
the rifle and trying to fool her into thinking that
he was shot. The next day, the Keys took a
train to Saint Louis, and Rusk went to Cincinnati. Following
Key's orders, he sent a telegram to John Keyes in
care of a third part and Lawrenceburg to throw suspicion
off of them, saying that Billy Fee had gone from

(01:39:04):
Cincinnati to Richmond, Indiana. In April eighteen ninety one, John
Keys was tried alone for the murder of William f
In his testimony, Keys told a different story of the
night of the murder. He said that when they reached Lawrenceburg,
Rusk claimed he was missing forty dollars and accused Pee
of taking it. Fee denied it, and they continued to quarrel.

(01:39:28):
Twice Keys had to break up fistfights. Monday evening, they
took the skiff to Kentucky and Rusk accompanied Fee to
buy provisions to cook a meal. When they returned, they
began fighting again. Suddenly three shots were fired. He heard
two or three o oh's, then all was still. Eva
began to scream and Rusk came running, saying stop that

(01:39:51):
yelling or I'll slap your mouth. John and Eva began
to row away in the skiff, and Rusk called for
them to wait. Rusk got in the boat while holding
the hand of the naked corpse floating in the water.
They rowed out to the middle of the river, Rusk
still holding the hand. Then when Rusk let him go
and the body sank out of sight, Keyes denied that

(01:40:12):
Rusk or anyone else had rowed back to the boat alone.
The state had failed to secure any testimony beyond Bert Rusk's,
and there was little evidence beyond Rusk's story and Key's story.
The jury returned a verdict of not guilty, and John
Keyes was released. The following August, Eva Keys filed suit

(01:40:34):
for divorce, citing cruelty and failure to provide. At that time,
she said under oath that her husband and another man
had murdered Billy Fi. Coming up WEIRDO family member James

(01:41:09):
Pearce brings us a true story of the strange and weird.
With the story he calls it came through the screen
door sun in Death over time, sun death overtime, here darkness.

(01:41:41):
This is a true story that occurred in rural Arkansas
farming country in nineteen fifty nine. We had a hard
scrabble eighty acre farm and we made a bear living
from it. Along with our livestock, we kept chickens, POGs,
and some dairy cattle. I was seven years old when
this incident occurred, and it stuck with me all the

(01:42:02):
days of my life. It was also a lasting memory
of my dear mother until she passed away. She told
me that she thought of what had happened on that
summer afternoon almost every day later in life, after I'd
grown up, When we were all alone, I asked her, Mom,
just what was that that came through the screen door
and into the kitchen that day so long ago. All

(01:42:26):
she could reply, as she gazed at the floor, was
I just don't know, Jimmy, I just don't know. It
was August nineteen fifty nine and it was hot and
humid in Arkansas. The sky was clear, with very few
clouds in the bright blue sky. My father was out
in the back forty plowing to get ready to plant

(01:42:47):
sugarcane to make a fine money crop of sorghum molasses.
Mom knew he'd be gone quite a while, so she
took out a cold, foulstaff beer. My father forbid alcohol,
but she stuck a beer every great. Once in a while,
she brought out the dominoes and began to play at
the kitchen table. It was hot, so we had the
back door open, but the screen door was closed to

(01:43:09):
let any breeze come through. The game was spirited, and
Mom was her usual ace at the game, and we
gave each other the usual banter as each hand was passed.
When suddenly I saw Mom just freeze. She had dominoes
in her hand, eyes staring at the table, but she
was just frozen. And then she said, Jimmy, be still

(01:43:32):
right now. I knew she meant business. And then I
saw it too, an I froze as well. It came
through the screen door and floated into the kitchen at
about four feet above the floor, and then it stopped
stark still, and you could feel that it was observing us.

(01:43:53):
It was a ball of light between the size of
a soft ball and a volleyball. It was bright, but
not overpoweringly bright. It shimmered, but it had clearly defined edges.
Then it started to move again. It floated through the
room some more and then got much closer to us,
and then froze again. I heard Mom say, Jimmy, you've

(01:44:16):
be still now here. All I could muster was a week, yes, ma'am.
Once more, I gotta say. This thing was checking us out.
It was alive. It was a living, sentient being, and
I could clearly tell that it was analyzing us. It
seemed like forever, and then the ball of light began
to move again. I thanked God because by this time

(01:44:37):
I was scared to death. It had gotten closed to
us last time, and I was afraid that the next
time it was going to actually touch us. As it
slowly floated around the room, it seemed to notice an
electric clock on a new stove my mother had just received.
The ball of light circled the clock two or three times,
and then it made a high pitched zip type sound

(01:44:57):
and a bright flash of light and burning, and the
ball of light was gone. The clear plastic cover on
the stove clock was melted, but the clock never worked again.
Mom and I did not say a word. We put
up the dominoes, she poured out her beer, and I
left to go hunting, and she went back to her chores.
We were both shell shocked over this event and did

(01:45:20):
not speak of it. For some time, we were just
simple hillbilly folk trying to scratch out a living from
these hills, and when something like this happens, it was
totally out of our realm of understanding. I've told the
story to several people and everyone says ball lightning. Maybe so,
But there was not a rain cloud in the sky.

(01:45:40):
And I'll swear on my mother's grave this thing was alive.
It could sense our presence, and it knew we were there,
and it was moving up to us, checking us out.
There is not a doubt in my mind. I think
it was some kind of plasma based electric life form
unknown to us. Remember, there was always something weird in

(01:46:04):
the darkness. The following stories are taken from various asca

(01:46:28):
Reddit threads and are all supposedly true. I would always
have the same dream. Up until about I was eight
or so, I lived in a really old house that,
since the beginning of time had been bounced around from
relative to relative until eventually my mother had been handed

(01:46:53):
over the keys. It was basically a dump two stories,
a collapsed balcony on the second level, mold and mildew
all over most of the ceilings, one tiny bathroom, and
the toilet was outside, overrun with frogs and spiders and
whatever other kind of hell spawned the Australian out back
would throw at us. I was terrified as a child,

(01:47:16):
scared of basically everything. I'm much braver now, and I
probably have this old house to thank for it. I
remember as a child that I'd always have the same dream.
I'd start in the kitchen. No idea how I got there.
Of course, it was during the day, probably later in
the afternoon. Nobody was around, so naturally I'd go looking

(01:47:39):
for my mother and father. I'd go to all the
normal places. Mom wasn't in the laundry shed or the
lounge room. Dad wasn't on the patio outside or up
the back of the chicken coop, and my sister wasn't
around either. I was starting to get worried, thinking that
everyone was gone and they left me alone, until I

(01:47:59):
heard a noi above me, coming from the second floor,
where the bedrooms are relieved. I darted towards the stairs
and jumped on the first step. Then I felt it.
There was something in the back of my head making
me stop. Legs still raised up as I prepared to
move on to the second step. Something telling me that
I shouldn't go up there. Of course, this thought was

(01:48:21):
running rampant in my mind. Don't go up there, don't
go up there, stay doun here, don't go up there.
There's something up there. Finally, my leg dropped. Before I
could reconsider, I pushed myself up those stairs, and even
though I didn't want to anymore, I couldn't stop myself
only slow down. Each step up was taken at an
agonizingly slow pace, and I wanted so bad just to

(01:48:44):
go back downstairs and find someone, run to my grandparents'
house and stay with them until my mom was home.
But eventually I rounded the corner, leaving only the last
few steps leading up to the floor ahead of me.
There was nothing there. I couldn't see anything in the stairwell.
I started getting hopeful at this point, maybe it's okay,
nobody's here. I was just imagining things and it's gonna

(01:49:07):
be fine. I'm still taking the slow steps up. When
it appears something's there, I can't actually remember what it was,
and I never could after I woke up, but it
was horrifying, beyond belief. I'd always try to close my
eyes because that was my thing as a child, if

(01:49:27):
you can't see it, then it can't see you. But
I could still see it. I couldn't blink, I couldn't
shut my eyes. It was like my eyelids weren't working.
I'd even try holding my hands in front of my face,
but still I couldn't block it out. I could see
through my hands, and I couldn't do anything. I was frozen,
unable to do anything except stare at this thing all

(01:49:49):
but a meter away from me. Whatever I saw, whatever
I did. For those eight years I was at that house,
I had to force myself up the stairs day. It
was horrifying. My mother sighed and tried to reason with me.
My father growled at me and called me a coward,
and my sister just laughed and said I was retarded.

(01:50:11):
But every time I had to go up those stairs,
as soon as I hit the top stairwell, I had
to stop and make sure that I could cover my
eyes with my hands, or that I could shut my eyes,
to make sure I wasn't in another dream. Of course,
it would terrify me most when I'd go to blink
and wave my hand in front of my face and
it wouldn't work. It had realized I was dreaming the neighbor.

(01:50:41):
A few years back, I rented an apartment from a
friend of mine. It recently bought it and had it
completely renovated. He put it up for sale, but couldn't
find a buyer, so I offered to rent it in
the meantime. After moving in, I realized there was something
wrong with the lady next door forty five but looked

(01:51:01):
much older. She'd sit up all night listening to Christian
radio shows and talking loudly to someone. It got to
the point where I couldn't sleep, so I went over
to her place and asked her to keep it down.
She opened her door and I got a quick peek.
Her walls all had crosses painted on them in different colors,

(01:51:21):
and words like Jesus and Angels scribbled everywhere. The windows
were painted black, letting no light in at all. It
was damp, yellow stained, fifty year old carpets, dog poop
and cockroaches everywhere, no dog. Though I asked her to
please keep it down, she just looked at me and

(01:51:43):
shut the door. Then she turned up the radio even louder.
The next night, I had my girlfriend staying over. I
wake up in the middle of the night and see
a shadow of a person next to the bed looking
at us sleeping. I think I'm hallucinating, as I usually
do in the dark when i'm sleep, But then the
shadow starts talking. It's my neighbor. She's holding something in

(01:52:05):
her hand. She broke in during the night, and who
knows how long she stood there. You should lock your
door at night, she says, and walks out. Next morning,
I hear somebody making strange noises below my bedroom window.
It's my neighbor, talking to herself in tongues. She has
a plastic bag in her hand and her rotting dead

(01:52:25):
dog inside. It's hot outside and I can smell death
from the bag. At this point, I am scared. She's
obviously very insane. I go upstairs and knock on another
person's door and ask what is going on. This guy
is as scared as I am. Apparently she broke into
his apartment one evening as well, while he was watching

(01:52:45):
TV with his kids. He got up from the couch
to get a snack, only to find her behind the
couch staring at him holding a power drill. Now I
know what was in her hand. At this stage, I'm
basically pooping myself I call the cops, and they know
all about her. Apparently she's a violent schizophrenic and she
has not taken her mets. But they can't force her

(01:53:07):
or enter her apartment without her permission because she owns it.
The only thing they can do is get her when
she goes outside. I sit up for the next two
days waiting for her to run out of cigarettes. When
I hear her leave at two am to go across
the road to the seven to eleven, I call the cops.
They have three cars and a special van over In

(01:53:30):
less than two minutes, they restrain her and throw her
in the van and drive off to some institution, and
in less than a minute, it's like she was never there.
I never see her again, but I still have nightmares
about her looking at me in my sleep. When Weird

(01:53:51):
Darkness returns, a five year old boy having the time
of his life at a carnival suddenly goes missing, and
when found later, there's no evidence whatsoever as to how
he got where he was, who took him there, or
what happened to him before he was found. Sid Intent

(01:54:22):
over Time with Your Darkness September seventeenth, nineteen eighty eight
was said to be one of the happiest days in
the brief life of Stephen McCarran. The five year old

(01:54:42):
from Hamilton, Scotland, was on a week's holiday in Air
at the home of his aunt and uncle Lynn and
Ian Sneddin. He was eagerly anticipating his visit to Air's
wonder West World Holiday Park, a seaside amusement center featuring rides, games,
entertainment and all the other features guaranteed to thrill the
heart of any lively little child. For some three hours,

(01:55:04):
Stephen had the time of his life at the crowded
Mary Park, and then suddenly the unthinkable happened. While the
boy was playing on an escalator, the Sneddens, each thinking
that the other was watching him, briefly lost sight of Stephen.
Although he was only out of their view for a
matter of seconds, it was time enough for him to

(01:55:26):
vanish completely. The increasingly frantic Sneddens quickly searched the park
but found no trace of the child. They then went
to the park's security team, who in their turn called police.
The hunt for Stephen McCarran was the largest missing child
search in Scotland's history. A six mile radius around the

(01:55:47):
park was searched by hundreds of officers and volunteers. His
description was widely circulated. Divers searched to local rivers and
water tanks. A special helicopter was brought in that had
heat seeking equipment that could detect a body. It all
did no good. Stephen appeared to have vanished into dust.

(01:56:10):
The publicity brought in several alleged sightings of the boy.
One person claimed to have seen a distressed looking Stephen
in a wonder West World cafe several hours after he
went missing. He was in the company of a middle
aged man. Another park visitor said he saw a boy
matching Stephen's description climbing wunder West World's seven foot high fence.

(01:56:32):
A number of motorists believed they had seen Stephen walking
alone along the air Turnbury Road about a half hour
after the sned Ends last saw him. Whether those reports
were credible or not, they were of little help in
finding the child. After a few days had passed, the
police admitted that they were desperate for leeds. The assumption

(01:56:55):
was that Stephen had been kidnapped. He was a happy
child with no motive to away, but that didn't square
with the eye witnesses who claimed to have seen him
wandering alone. In any case, where was he. Stephen's loved
ones were left tormented by horrible suspense until over two
weeks after he vanished, when their worst fears were realized.

(01:57:20):
On the afternoon of October Tewod, a woman was walking
her dog in open country near her home at Biache,
over six miles from the holiday park. She was stunned
to come across the dead body of a little boy.
He was lying in a fenced ditch about a half
mile away from two farmhouses. When police arrived on the scene,

(01:57:40):
they quickly confirmed that Stephen McCarran had finally been found.
He was lying just outside the search area. It was
ruled the child had died of exposure. There was no
sign that anyone had harmed him in any way. Authorities
believed that Stephen had walked to the site alone, six

(01:58:01):
miles over some of the most difficult and unappealing countryside
in Scotland, full of marshes, hills, gullies and thick woods.
A local described it as hellish territory. It would have
been hard for a strong adult to walk so far
through such an area. For a five year old it

(01:58:21):
seemed virtually impossible. The police came in for a good
deal of criticism for not making the search area a
wider one. The department spokesperson retorted with how far do
you go? Law enforcement pointed out that their search area
had been based on previous experience, as well as professional
estimates on how far the boy could possibly have traveled

(01:58:43):
on foot. What happened to Stephen was quite simply beyond
anything anyone could have imagined. The puzzle of Stephen's disappearance
and death was, of course, far from solved. His distraught
family insisted that he would not could not have walked
to this remote site on his own. They believed that

(01:59:06):
someone must have abducted the child and then left him
in that ditch to die. His father also highlighted the
odd fact that when Stephen's body was found, his socks
had been removed and were in his pocket. Mister mcaerron
pointed out that his son did not know how to
tie his shoes. Not only would it have made little
sense for Stephen to take off his shoes, remove his socks,

(01:59:29):
and then put his shoes back on, he could not
have done it at all. Of course, it makes no
sense that anyone else would do it either. The question
at the heart of the tragedy, namely why Stephen would
voluntarily leave the park at all, was also impossible to answer.
An official inquiry was held in March nineteen eighty nine

(01:59:51):
before the local sheriff, Neil gow. After considering the various
theories involving foul play that someone had kidnapped Steven and
left him in this remote spot to fare for himself,
or killed him and then dumped his body in the ditch,
Gal ruled that the boy had simply died a strange
but completely natural death. Stephen's enterprise and stamina had been

(02:00:15):
seriously underestimated by all concerned. The sheriff concluded that, for
whatever unknowable reason, the boy had wandered away from the
park and continued to hike until he collapsed and died.
As far as the authorities were concerned, the case was closed.
Case closed, however, does not necessarily mean mystery solved.

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SALEM’S MOST BRUTAL EXECUTION: The 1692 Death of Giles Corey | #WDRadio WEEK OF AUG 31, 2025

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}SALEM’S MOST BRUTAL EXECUTION: The 1692 Death of Giles Corey | #WDRadio WEEK OF AUG 31, 2025