STOCKSBRIDGE BYPASS: So Haunted That Construction Crews Won’t Return, Security Guards Call Police

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
The haunting of the Stocksbridge Bypass began even before the
stretch of road was finished being built. The first incident
took place September eighth, nineteen eighty seven. Two security guards
were employed by the MacAlpine Construction Company during the building
of the bypass. That night, their supervisor, Peter Owens, received

(00:29):
a frantic call from them. He arrived at the site
to find two big tough men in a state of hysteria.
They told him of what had happened the night before.
Shortly after midnight, they'd been driving along Pyroid Lane close
to the steelworks. They noticed some children playing on the
construction site they were tasked with guarding. The children were

(00:52):
close to the electricity pylon and far from any houses.
They decided to investigate and parked the car, pausing to
watch the kids skipping and playing. While doing so, they
noticed the children were oddly dressed, wearing strangely out of
date clothing. As they approached the children, they unexpectedly vanished,

(01:15):
leaving no trace behind. Even after investigating the spot where
the children were playing, the men could find no footprints
and the muddy ground. The following morning, they talked to
other workers on the site and were told that others
had heard children's voices during the night while they were resting,
and the caravans provided for them. The following night, these

(01:37):
two men were once again on patrol when this time
they encountered something more frightening. As they approached the Pyroid
Lane sight once more, they saw a tall, dark figure
that they described as a monk, who then promptly vanished
when the headlights reached him. It was this that caused
them to ring Peter Owens once again, and Owens was

(02:00):
so concerned about their state and their story that he
called the local police station. The officer on duty, P. C. Ellis,
said they sounded like they needed a priest rather than
a policeman. Later in the day, the same officer received
a phone call from a priest named Stuart Brinley. He
was asking for help with two security guards from the

(02:21):
building project who were in his church, demanding that he
performed an exorcism at the Piroyd Lane construction site. I'm
Darren Marler and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome weirdos. This

(02:46):
is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy,
mysterious macabre, unsaved and unexplained coming up in this episode
of Weird Darkness. Experiencing something strange is one thing. Experiencing

(03:11):
two strange things in two different places might be called
a coincidence. But when you experience three strange things in
three different places, as Chet Guthrie did, you have to
wonder if maybe the weirdness is following you around. The
Georgian Brittons were obsessed with clean air, which was not

(03:33):
surprising because there was practically no clean air to obsess about,
even less so in and around the cemeteries. A woman
typically carries a baby for nine months before pregnancy, sometimes
a bit longer, sometimes a bit shorter, but that's the average.
Technology has made it possible for the baby to be

(03:55):
borne much sooner if complications were to arise, and still
survive to be a healthy child. But we might have
a new record on shortest pregnancy. One woman in Indonesia
is claiming she gave birth after being pregnant for only
one hour. Heavy fog is commonplace in London, and in

(04:17):
nineteen fifty two, one particular fog rolled in for a
full five days, hovering over the city. But when it
finally dissipated over twelve thousand Londoners lay dead, a borrowed gun,
romantically linked cousins and a rigged jury all the makings

(04:38):
of a great murder trial. In eighteen eighty seven, New Jersey,
here's an idea on how to fight the black plague
throat lozenges made from toad vomit. Hey, it was good
enough for Isaac Newton. It was his own recipe. But first.
It's a stretch of road that only opened in nineteen

(05:00):
eighty eight to connect two existing roads, but it's known
for being one of the deadliest roads in all of
Britain and one of the most haunted places in all
the world. The official designation is the A six one six,
but most people know it as the Stocksbridge Bypass. We

(05:20):
begin there now vulture doors, lock your windows, turn off
your lights and come with me into the weird darkness.

(05:45):
Cutting through the north part of England, stretching from Newark
to Huddersfield, is the road called A six one six
and one area in Stocksbridge, near Sheffield holds a section
of the highway called the Stocksbridge Bypass. This portion of
the road opened in May nineteen eighty eight in order

(06:07):
to connect the M one motorway with the Woodhead Pass
and the A six one six, passing through quaint hills
and moorland on the way. It is most well known
for being one of the deadliest roads in the country,
as well as one of the most haunted places in
the world. The bypass purportedly has had high strangeness revolving

(06:29):
around it ever since construction began in nineteen eighty seven.
Construction workers at the time frequently reported hearing strange sounds
as they worked, including anomalous bangs, voices, or the laughter
of children which seemed to skirt about the periphery of
the site. Most dramatically were the sightings made of ghostly

(06:50):
apparitions around the construction site, with one of the first
and perhaps most notable case being that of the two
site security guards by the names of Stephen Brook and
David Goldthorpe, who were on patrol at around midnight one
night of September nineteen eighty seven when they saw a
group of mysterious children playing in the construction site in

(07:11):
a muddy field near an electricity pylon at a place
called Pyroid Lane. This was obviously not a place for
children to be playing especially at that hour, so the
guards approached to see what was going on. As they did,
it became apparent that the children were wearing very old
fashioned clothing, which seemed very odd to the guards, but

(07:34):
that was not enough to cause any concern at this point.
The children seemed to be dancing about, holding hands in
a circle, and did not seem to notice the approaching men. However,
as they drew closer, the kids allegedly just blinked out
of existence, simply there one second and gone the next.

(07:55):
An inspection of the area showed no sign of any
footprints or disturbance the mud, which should have certainly been
there considering all the dancing and playing the kids had
been doing. This was startling and odd enough that the
next day they asked around to some of the construction
workers who slept in caravans nearby, and they too, confirmed

(08:17):
that they had also heard the laughter of children the
night before. The two guards were definitely spooked, but returned
to their duties that evening. Once again, as they passed
the very same area, they experienced something very unusual, although
this time it was a bit more sinister than a
bunch of phantom kids. On this occasion, they were driving

(08:40):
past when there suddenly appeared in their headlights the tall,
dark figure of what looked like someone in robes reminiscent
of a medieval monk. They slammed on their brakes and
noticed that the headlights seemed to pass right through the stranger.
It stood there glaring at them for a moment before
suddenly vanishing right before their eyes. The odd incident was

(09:02):
terrifying enough for them that they called their supervisor in
a state of panic. Although no sign of the figure
they described would be found, the supervisor was skeptical of
this talk of ghosts, instead suspecting that it was some
trespassers messing around, and called in two police officers by
the names of PC Ellis and Special Constable John beat

(09:27):
The two men then went about conducting a stakeout to
try and catch the intruder in the act. As they
sat there, spacing out in the dark, not really expecting
to see anything at all, something then pressed up against
the side of the car that they were in, appearing
to be the torso of a person wearing some kind
of cravat and a waistcoat. As the startled policeman looked on,

(09:50):
the figure then instantaneously appeared on the other side of
the car and just stood there peering in at them.
As they got out to confront the stranger, the figure
just vanished, leaving them completely dumbfounded as they stood there
wondering where the man had gone. They claimed that their
car had then been banged and jolted by an unseen

(10:13):
force enough to send it rocking. At that point, they
said that they had been overcome with a palpable dread
and quickly drove out of there. In the days after
these encounters, the ghostly children and the dark figure of
the monk would be reported by numerous construction workers at
the site, to the point that some of them supposedly

(10:34):
refused to even come to work. Frightened locals claimed that
the children were the spirits of kids who had died
by falling into the numerous abandoned mine shafts that dot
the area, while the monk was said to be the
ghost of a monk who had been buried there, his
grave defiled by the building of the road. Whatever the

(10:54):
case may be. Even when the road was completed, there
were frequent sightings of these fans children and the sinister
monk at the side of the road by passing motorists,
as well as a phantom black dog and a mysterious
woman in white. Some cases of paranormal encounters along the
road are particularly spooky or harrowing, such as one involving

(11:18):
witnesses Graham Brooke and his son Nigel. This allegedly happened
in nineteen eighty seven, when the bypass hadn't even been
finished yet, and at the time Graham was in training
for an upcoming marathon race, making regular runs through the area.
On this day, his son joined him and they were
taking his regular route right past the bypass. Mister Brooks

(11:40):
would tell researcher doctor David Clark of what happened. Thus,
I could normally complete the run in about thirty minutes,
but on this occasion my son asked if he could
come with me. We reached the church in about three
quarters of an hour, but Nigel kept getting the stitch,
so on the way back I ran on to make
time until he come up. I was not tired because

(12:02):
I was not running at my normal speed, and it
was dusk at the time but not dark. As we
approached a lay by coming towards Whirly Village, I suddenly
saw a chap walking with his back toward oncoming traffic.
I looked at this figure and my brain just could
not take in what I was seeing. He was dressed
in what I would say was eighteenth century costume and

(12:24):
wore a dark brown hood with a cape covering his body.
He was walking in the ground, not on the level
of the road itself, and I just could not make
out what I was seeing. Then I looked at him
directly and saw his face. He was carrying a bag
and it was slithering along the surface of the road.
It was a dark colored bag with a chain on it,

(12:45):
and Nigel said he could hear the chain rattling on
the ground. I just gasped and said, who is this
silly person? And realized my son was seeing him too,
And at that moment, the hairs on the back of
both of our heads just stood on end, and we
could smell something really musty, just like we were standing
in an antique shop. I saw him clearly and was

(13:07):
looking directly at him, probably no more than fifty yards
away from me, with his face towards me and his
back to the traffic. He was so close I could
see that every half inch down the cape there was
a button. It was that clear. It was a long cape,
dark brown in color and very worn, with a lived
in look about it. It was so real you could

(13:29):
have walked up and touched it. He walked straight past
us as we stood there, amazed in the middle of
the road. Then a lory came with its lights on,
and he just disappeared. I'll never forget that musty smell,
the cape he wore, and the blank face. I looked
right into the face and everything was black, just like

(13:49):
a miner's face, but without any eyes. It was the
strangest experience of my whole life. With all these supposed
ghosts paranormal phenomena startling drivers along the road, one might
get an impression that this would not be a safe
place to drive, and one would be right. The bypass

(14:10):
has an unusually high concentration of traffic accidents for just
this one stretch of road, to the point that it's
often nicknamed the death Road, an accidental black spot, and
the most dangerous road in Britain. Many of these accidents
could be just a symptom of the heavy traffic the
road sees, but others have been blamed on ghosts. There

(14:33):
have often been reports of these specters appearing right in
front of cars to cause them to veer or carene about.
Such as is a case from nineteen ninety when a
Judy Simpson was traveling the road with her husband David,
when they had a rather frightening experience, of which she
would explain, I couldn't actually see an outline or any

(14:55):
facial expression, and there were no clothes as such. It
was just a gray outline line of a person. I
could see a head and shoulders, with arms and legs
flying everywhere. It was just running aimlessly across the field,
and I thought it was a jogger until I realized
that it wasn't actually touching the ground. It was around

(15:15):
three feet above it. There's an embankment that comes up
to the road, and it leaped from the field over
the embankment and landed in the middle of the road
in front of us. It seemed to hit the car
and just vanished. I just screeched to a stop and
it just seemed to melt into the car, and all
of a sudden it was gone. I looked at David
and said, what's happened. It's just gone. And we got

(15:39):
out and looked around, but we could not find any
trace of anything. We were both left really shocked and upset,
and I could not believe what had happened. All I
could think was that it must have been a ghost,
whatever a ghost is. A similarly scary encounter was experienced
by a couple by the names of Paul and Jane

(16:00):
in nineteen ninety seven. On New Year's Eve of that year,
they were driving along the bypass when they were confronted
by one of the highway's ghosts, and almost had a
serious crash as a result when they veered to try
and avoid it. Paul Ford would say of the encounter.
From a distance, it looked like someone trying to cross

(16:20):
the road, but as it got nearer, I could see
it was like a man in a long cloak. Then
I realized it had no face and it was just
hovering above the road. I just slammed the brakes on
and swerved to avoid hitting it, and it was only
through Jane grabbing the wheel that we managed to stop
the car from crashing. In some cases, phantoms have even

(16:41):
appeared inside of vehicles, such as is a two thousand
and two case in which a woman claimed that she
had smelt a horrific odor pervade the car like a
rotting body, after which she looked around to see a
robed figure sitting right there in the back seat of
her vehicle. The wraith then glared at her with glowing

(17:02):
eyes before vanishing into thin air. There are also reported
loud bangs of thuds on cars passing through, often described
as sounding almost as if someone had landed on the roof,
cars being shaken when there is no wind, and various
vehicular malfunctions, all of which add to the speculation on

(17:23):
the real reason behind the road's deadly reputation. In recent years,
the news of these hauntings and the ominous rumors orbiting
the Stocksbridge Bypass have attracted media attention and garnered appearances
on supernatural TV and radio programs, and the area has
become a magnet for paranormal researchers, some of whom have

(17:45):
had strange experiences of their own here. In twenty seventeen,
paranormal investigator Phil Sinclair decided to make a trip out
to the bypass to do a little ghost hunting and
got more than perhaps he even bargained for. Sinclair approached
his endeavor with the perhaps not necessarily subtle technique of

(18:06):
wandering blindly about in the dark, calling out to any
spirits that might be lurking nearby, which seems silly but
seems to have worked. As he and his colleagues walked
along videotaping the whole thing, he claims that they could
sporadically hear the faint sound of children's laughter from out
in the woods, and an electronic device he was carrying

(18:29):
started to blurt out voices saying various things such as erase, hate,
get out, and more ominously, need your soul. Particularly scary
is when he noticed a dark, shadowy figure standing in
some nearby trees, shortly after which he heard a terrifying growl.

(18:53):
The ghost hunter says in the video, I saw effin
man there. Who was that? There was a man? There
was something there? Is there something evil here. I'm a
little bit shook up, to be honest. Definitely saw a man,
but can't explain it. What is that growl? There's something
not very nice around here asking me for my soul.

(19:15):
Something is mocking me around here. Sinclair would later pose
the entire fifteen minute episode to YouTube, and while he
does seem genuinely terrified, in the video. It's hard to
tell that the footage is actually genuine or not. It's
too dark to tell exactly what's going on, and there
is very little information on the specifics of these circumstances

(19:38):
the footage was taken in. Is it real or is
this a fake blair Witch style video? It's hard to say,
but whatever the case may be, it is compelling viewing nevertheless,
and you can see the video for yourself. I'll place
a link to it in the show notes. For his part,
the investigator himself remains adamant that it is all saying

(20:02):
I literally struggle to find the words to describe what
I witnessed during this investigation. I will be left with
an image I will never forget. I feel I was
making contact with multiple spirits, either children or that of
a male. I can't help to think I was dealing
with an evil presence which ultimately told me to get
out what secrets and mysterious forces does this stretch of

(20:26):
road hold. Are there really spirits here or is this
all urban legend and spooky campfire tales. It is interesting
to note that many of the paranormal experiences reported from
the Stocksbridge Bypass have been witnessed by more than one person,
making it harder to write off as delusion or the
hallucinations of a tired mind out on the road at night.

(20:50):
Could there be anything to any of this? And if so,
why should these lost souls be tethered to this place?
Whatever the answer to these questions may be, the Stocksbridge
Bypass remains one of the eeriest and most haunted roads
in all of England. Up next, the Georgian Britons were

(21:15):
obsessed with clean air, which was not surprising because there
was practically no clean air to obsess about, even less
so in and around the cemeteries. A woman says she
gave birth after being pregnant for only one hour, and
a heavy fog covered London for five days and when

(21:36):
it rolled out, over twelve thousand lay dead. What happened
these stories and more when weird darkness returns. It was

(22:09):
cold and clear the morning of December fifth, nineteen fifty
two in London. People were hunkered down in their homes,
huddled around their fireplaces, wading out an unusually early cold snap.
The skies soon began to fill with coal, smoke and soot,
and as the day progressed, a fog rolled in, limiting

(22:31):
visibility throughout the city. The chimney smoke mixed with the
fresh fog, turning it a sickly yellow colored pea soup.
Londoners went about their day as usual. Heavy fog was
very commonplace and there was no need for alarm. Yet
over the next five days, this fog hovered over the city.

(22:52):
The lack of wind in a high pressure system combined
to keep the fog. Cloud from movinginued to grow during
those five fateful days, nearly covering thirty square miles, growing
more dense with each passing day, until people literally could
not see their hands in front of their faces. Transportation

(23:14):
came to a standstill. Air travel was impossible, no ships
could safely move along the waterways, and driving a car
was impossible. Even the dependable British railway system was unable
to operate. Those souls who dared to step outside found
themselves slipping and sliding as the walkways were covered with

(23:36):
a greasy black film. Upon returning to their homes, those
same travelers found that greasy black film also covered their
exposed skin and clothing, as if they'd been working in
a coal mine. The local citizens called the thick haze
the Great smog, and soon found themselves having difficulties breathing.

(23:57):
Family pets and farm animals started due to respiratory failure.
Wild Birds either avoided the area or simply fell dead
from the skies, and the entrance ways to buildings became
more blackened with soot each time the door was opened.
The fog then turned its attention to the human population,

(24:18):
with those already in respiratory distress succumbing to the deadly cloud. First.
Babies and young children, and the elderly also fell victim
to the cloud, which, after several days, began to stink
like rotten eggs. Undertakers found themselves suddenly overwhelmed with corpses,
so much that they ran out of available caskets. Each day,

(24:41):
more people slipped away, and yet no action could be
taken to alleviate the now poisonous environment. People tried to
make crude gas masks, however they were ineffective. It seemed
that many were about to give up hope when without warning,
a brisk wind rolled in from the west, breaking up

(25:02):
the thick fog and pushing the remnants far out to sea.
The casualties from the five day fog were unbelievable. Over
one hundred and fifty thousand people were hospitalized for breathing
related issues, and the human death toll surpassed over twelve thousand.
No accurate records were kept of the number of animals

(25:25):
that died, but without the protection of a house to
at least shield them somewhat, most assumed that nearly all
exposed animals died. The aftermath was an eye opening message
for the British government. With so many dead, some likened
it to the aftermath of German bomb attacks made during
World War II. Bodies were discovered in unexpected places, as

(25:48):
many of the victims simply stopped breathing and quietly dropped
in their tracks. The British government, after some investigation and
reviewing the death toll, realized they needed to act. A
few years later, the Clean Air Act of nineteen fifty
six was passed by Parliament. This act put restrictions on

(26:09):
burning coal within areas of high population and established smoke
free zones. Those with coal fireplaces were forced to switch
to alternative heating systems. This piece of legislation was the
beginning of the end for the coal industry, as oil
and natural gas systems became the norm. Even with the

(26:29):
new law, the change was slow, and not everyone could
afford to simply invest a large sum of money into
their dwelling. A smaller event in nineteen sixty two killed
an additional seven hundred fifty people, reinforcing the validity of
the law. It was believed that the fog became toxic
due to sulfates sulfuric acid particles formed from the sulfuric

(26:54):
dioxide that was released from the burnt coal. At the time,
no one knew how how this chemical change occurred, and
the event went as unexplained for nearly fifty years. Modern
scientists studying air pollution ascertained that the natural fog was
the catalyst for the change. Nitrogen dioxide, another byproduct of

(27:16):
burning coal, was introduced to the naturally occurring fog. Another
key aspect in the conversion of sulfur dioxide to sulfate
is that it produces acidic particles, which subsequently inhibits this process.
Natural fog contained larger particles of several tens of micrometers

(27:37):
in size, and the acid formed was sufficiently diluted. Evaporation
of those fog particles then left smaller acidic haze particles
that cover the city. In simpler terms, the combination of
the coal smoke and a natural fog produced a rare
moment for the chemical change, which in turn made the

(27:58):
air turn deadly. The lack of wind kept the killer
concoction suspended over the city and allowed the reaction to
continue for several days with terrifying results. The Georgians were

(28:28):
obsessed with clean air, which was not surprising as there
was so little of it about. There were bad smells
effluvium everywhere. The most offensive were decomposing animals on the street,
in the rubbish heaps, or at the slaughterhouse. These hazards
to health were well known and did not only extend

(28:49):
to animals. The other health hazard was the decomposition of
human remains buried a few feet into the ground and
the graveyards of parish churches that could not cope with
the explosion of birth in the late eighteenth century and
the concommitment blooming of death a generation later. This problem
was known but not solved in the Georgian period. It

(29:12):
was the Victorian social reformers that dealt with the problem
of the overstuffed graveyard, but the Georgians did go as
far as to worry about it a little. Experts gave
out warnings. Joseph Taylor's The Danger of Premature Internment eighteen
sixteen condemned the use of over full graveyards, but reserved

(29:34):
special scorn for the burial of corpses indoors in large,
damp on ventilated buildings where windows were never opened and
fires were never lit, that were occupied very rarely during
the week, but often full what it was in use,
that is a church. There was nothing sacred about this,

(29:55):
he said. No other civilization, Ancient Rome or Greece, modern
Jewish or Islamic, did such a dangerous thing. Only the
most conscientious cleric would meet the corpse at the lych
gate if it had died of fever. The only thing
that prevented a disease disaster was that the church and
cathedral were not heated. Doctor Bouchan, in his widely read

(30:19):
Domestic Medicine, condemned large crowded funerals. Infections, especially fevers, did
not die with the patient. If you attended the funeral
of somebody who had been laid on a buyer from
a weak in a crowded house, there was a chance
that you would die of the same thing they did.
The poor and desperate would often be in danger from

(30:40):
the recycling of the dead person's clothes, so it was
thought the rich and famous had to wait even longer
to go to their grave. In eighteen oh five, the
Duke of Gloucester had been lying in his lead lined
coffin for five days, delayed by the desire for intricate
decoration of the outer one. As he was about to

(31:01):
be lifted in. The effluvia was obvious caused by the
smallest of cracks in the lead. The two coffin solution
for the rich was designed to solve this problem of
offensive decomposition during the long drawn out ceremonies, and mostly did. However,
in the average parish graveyard it was common for gravediggers

(31:22):
to smash through earlier burials, or for the sexton to
check the ground beforehand to make sure it was empty.
Graveyards were full, but the desire to treat the consequences
as a social rather than a religious problem were not present.
Some Georgians were defending unhealthy burial practice until the end.

(31:44):
William Reader, defending burials in church in eighteen thirty, pointed
out that a building with secure foundations and large ventilated
upper stories could deal with the inconvenience. Lead coffins for
all would solve the problem, he thought. Although the metal
lined coffins actually slowed down decomposition, the fact that Jews

(32:05):
and Muslims did something different was turned on its head.
Perhaps they were wrong, like they were on other things,
this was Reader's conclusion. But the custom renders our solemn
assemblies more venerable and awful. For when we walk over
the dust of our friends, or kneel upon the ashes
of our relations, this must strike a lively impression of

(32:27):
our own mortality. And what consideration can he more effectual
to make us serious and attentive to our religious duties.
Your ancestral dead were performing one last function for you,
according to Reader, and perhaps he had a point about
the degree of danger. The mold on the walls of
an unheeded old church probably caused more death and suffering

(32:49):
than the bodies buried beneath. It was horrible, but the
threat to health of buried corpses was overestimated. Noxious effusions
from the lung of the living were a much bigger problem,
and in many parts of newly industrialized Britain, a row
of slums smelled worse than a cemetery. There were occasional

(33:11):
horror stories in the newspapers. Sextons were being poisoned when
they tapped a vault to release noxious gases, which had
to be done in the first months after a death
to avoid explosions. Cleaners who had found a decomposing body
in the bottom of a well and had died breathing
in the effluvia, body snatchers who had been directed to

(33:31):
the wrong grave and opened up the wrong one. Deaths
and households where a murdered body had been hidden, or
a funeral that took too long to organize. Nothing serious
was done about the problem until the eighteen forties. The
Georgians did not have the benefit of the germ theory
of disease and relied in the belief that bad air

(33:53):
in itself caused disease. When improvements were made in public health,
it was the smell that motivated reformers. All smell is disease,
said Edwin Chadwick, and introduced effective reforms on the basis
of a wrong analysis. It was hard to prove scientifically
that ineffective burials caused anything more than inconvenience, and some

(34:18):
scientists disagreed with Chadwick. Some suggested that liquefying corpses could
pollute water sources, but the evidence was not conclusive, but
was believed. You could not see germs with your eye,
but your nose could smell decay, which was fortuitous. In
eighteen twenty three, the Nenchapel was built near the Strand,

(34:39):
which consisted of a place of worship, social space above
and a palace of burial below, separated by now more
than a floorboard. The problem of the Enenchapel was not
solved until the eighteen forties. For the previous twenty years,
large numbers of cheap, unregulated burials meant that at least
twelve thousand the corpses were crammed in. Customers who used

(35:03):
it as a dance hall could taste something nasty on
their sandwiches, and worshippers took to praising the Lord with
a handkerchief pressed to their nostrils. If you'd like to
read more, I'll place a link to the book. This
story came from the Dark Days of George and Britain
by James Hobson. In the show Notes Human Pregnancies normally

(35:32):
lasts around nine months, but one Indonesian woman has been
making news headlines in her country for claiming that she
gave birth just one hour after experiencing pregnancy symptoms. Henny Nirani,
a thirty year old woman from Mandalasari, a village in
Indonesia's Tascic Malaya Regency, has become the main topic of

(35:54):
conversation in her country after it was revealed that she
gave birth to a baby boy after allegedly experiencing pregnancy
symptoms for about an hour. Henny claims that on Saturday night,
July eighteenth, twenty twenty, her belly started growing and she
started experiencing painful cramps, which she immediately associated with childbirth,

(36:17):
having previously given birth to two children. The problem was
that not only had she been oblivious to the pregnancy,
she also hadn't made love to her husband in nineteen months.
I was at home and nothing was out of the ordinary,
Henny recalled about the night of her childbirth. Suddenly I
felt something moving on the right side of my abdomen

(36:39):
and the cramps started. I asked a neighbor to take
me to my father's house, and about an hour later
we called a midwife and I gave birth. Despite gaining
some weight in the months leading up to the childbirth,
the thirty year old woman claims that she experienced none
of the symptoms she had when she gave birth to
her other two children, including mornings ixdness, protruding belly, or

(37:02):
even the ceasing of her monthly menstruation. Narani insists that
she had her period every month for the last nine months,
which doctors attribute to a hormonal imbalance. But the most
incredible part of this already incredible story is that Henny
Narani and her husband Eric hadn't been intimate for nineteen

(37:23):
months since she gave birth to their daughter. They had
apparently abstained from sex after the birth of their second
child for medical reasons, which was confirmed by zal Cap Drasman,
the head of Postpaying subdistrict. It is this small detail,
the lack of intercourse, that makes the doctors reluctant to
provide the symbolst explanation the case of cryptic pregnancy where

(37:47):
the mother doesn't know that she's pregnant. This is what
makes this incident strange but true. But we are grateful
because with God's will, anything can happen. Said zhucap I
alleged one hour long pregnancy has been garnering a lot
of interest, with reporters, medical experts, and officials from all

(38:08):
over Indonesia visiting the young mother to learn more stories
about her seemingly miraculous childbirth. All the attention has apparently
caused Henny a lount of stress, and her family has
asked for some privacy when weird darkness returns. Experiencing something

(38:33):
strange is one thing. Experiencing two strange things in two
different places might be called a coincidence. But when you've
experienced three strange things in three different places, as Chet
Guthrie did, you have to wonder if maybe the weirdness
is following you around. A borrowed gun, romantically linked cousins,

(38:56):
and a rigged jury all the makings of a great
murder trial in eighteen eighty seven, New Jersey. And here's
an idea on how to fight the black plague throat
lozenges made from toad vomit. Hey, it was good enough
for Isaac Newton. It was his own recipe. These stories

(39:16):
are up next. As a resident of Cleveland and part

(39:38):
time ghost hunter, I've seen and heard several things that
Most people would say I'm crazy if I told them.
The truth is ghosts, demons, spirits, all of them are
very much real, especially when you've been attacked by one.
I will recount three different stories that have happened to
me and my friends. The first is an apartment my

(40:01):
best friend lived in for a year. I will not
give the address of the apartment, although it is not
far from eminem Mars. Nothing terrible happened at first. My
best friend was happy with his selection. He was good
friends with the landlord, just as I was. And after
about three months of him living there, we're walking the

(40:22):
green Way and he says to me, I think there's
a spook in my apartment, and I said, what do
you mean. I was making coffee after work and fell
asleep with the coffee maker on, and when I woke up,
someone had turned it off. My best friend was the
only person who lived there. I brushed it off and
nothing much else happened for a month or two until

(40:43):
my best friend started noticing that stuff was disappearing and
reappearing in other parts of his apartment without his doing.
I asked him if he thought about moving out, because
after knowing him for thirteen years. I knew that stuff
had bothered he and his family before. I'm waiting until
the lease is up, he said, which was understandable. He

(41:04):
and the landlord were good friends and he didn't want
to break that lease. Early, knives would go missing, keys
would go missing, and then his cat started acting strange.
His cat, Scrappy, would never enter my best friend's bedroom.
In fact, he would stand in the doorway with an
ominous look on his face, and he would hiss at

(41:25):
empty corners of the room. Scrappy also stopped eating and
was acting off, considering I had known that cat since
I was in high school. And that's when stranger things
began to happen. My best friend told me that he
was hearing children's laughter and a woman's crying and knocking
in threes. Now, our friend, the landlord, who was Catholic,

(41:49):
was hanging out one night about three months earlier, and
he told us about the knocking of threes, which was
mocking of the Holy Trinity. If you've seen the Conjuring,
you know what I'm talking about. That is very much real.
Then I started hearing from his brother and another friend
that a tall shallow has appeared to them on different occasions,

(42:10):
and then I started to worry. But the next few
things I'm about to tell about had me in terror
and worrying for my best friend's safety. Whatever this thing
was was growling in his ear at night, and one night,
while we were watching TV, we heard a loud knock
at the door. We checked it and there was a

(42:31):
large handprint coming from the inside of the glass door.
We checked and that glass door was locked. Another night,
Scrappy was sitting in my lap and about of nowhere,
he started hissing between me and my best friend. There
was nothing there, but knowing that something was only a
couple inches away from us made me very uncomfortable. And

(42:53):
then there's the kicker of all of this. It was
New Year's morning and I was trying to sleep on
the count I began to feel something tall standing over
me in heavy breathing, as if it were waiting for
me to do something. After the year was up, my
best friend moved out, and a few days before we left,

(43:13):
his landlord asked him, have you seen anything? Whatever it
was was playing with his son. Later, we found out
from the neighbor next door that two people on the
second floor had died about twenty years before. It was
a man and a woman. The man was married to
this woman and they had a son who died early on,

(43:34):
and the man was very abusive to his wife. We
don't know how they died, but they were haunting my
best friend who was just below them. The second experience
was from the hales Bar Dam. This one was caught
on camera while filming an episode of Adventures United, and
to this day I don't know how to explain it.

(43:55):
After finding a hand painted sign while diving the flooded
generator rooms, getting a US small cut on my knee
that swelled to the size of a nickel, and getting
a shower in the Marina showers, one of the teammates
had a thermal detector and on the far end of
the dam you could see a figure of what I
can describe was a little girl in a dress. We

(44:15):
went up the stairs where it was and there was
no heat detected and we couldn't find any source where
there may have been a reflection of heat. The same teammate,
who had a double battery attached to his phone and
was in the same area, noticed his phone and the battery,
which were at eighty one percent, dropped all the way
to zero in fifteen minutes, and the scary part was

(44:38):
that after we left, their phone was working just fine.
Another time, while filming at the Dam for the same episode,
Nathan and John heard what sounded to be Cherokee chanting,
which they recorded as well. The lore behind that is
that the Cherokee referred to that area as cursed Land.

(44:58):
They didn't put a curse on it, but because of
all the bloodshed in that area over the years, it
had stirred something. The old South Pittsburgh Hospital is only
fifteen minutes away from the Dam, which may explain why
it's such a hotspot for paranormal activity. Shout out to
Jeff and Vicki Holder, who run the tours at the Dam,
and Stacy Sively, who formerly ran the tours at the hospital.

(45:22):
And the third story, which is less benevolent but is
still scary, happened when I was living with my dad. Now,
this only happened for a few months until one day
I really started praying and finding my relationship with God again.
One night, I was sitting downstairs working on a novella
of mine, and a light in the kitchen just randomly

(45:44):
came on. That's weird, I thought. I turned it off
and went back to what I was doing, and the
same thing happened again. I would have said it was
an electrical glitch, but the light switch had moved. I
said hell no and went upstairs. I came back down
later to find that my shoes that had been sitting

(46:04):
next to the garage had been moved to the guest
room about forty feet away. Dad and I were the
only ones in the house, and I was sitting next
to him before I went down there. I heard someone
moving and heard the door to the guest room close,
and I asked Dad, who was in the bathroom then,
if he had gone downstairs, and he said no. Why.

(46:27):
I don't know why. It just stopped after that, unless
maybe rekindling my relationship with God scared it away. Mary

(46:47):
Catherine Anderson Katie to her friends, was in good spirits
when she went out the evening of Monday, February seventh,
eighteen eighty seven. Sixteen year old Katie Anderson was a
domestic servant living at the home of her employer, stat
Colcotte on his farm in Mount Holly, New Jersey. She
said she was just going out for a walk, but

(47:10):
Katy was not seen again until Tuesday morning, when a
neighboring farmer found her laying down an embankment alongside a
public road, barely clinging to life, with a gunshot wound
to her temple. She was recognized by people at the
Colcotte house and was taken by wagon to her uncle's house.
A doctor from Mount Holly was summoned. Around dawn that morning.

(47:33):
Another neighbor, Missus Brewer, on her way to Colott's house,
saw some vomit on the road and near it a
pistol with one chamber discharged. At the Colcott's house, a
young man named Whitcraft recognized it as the pistol he
had traded to Barclay Peak the week before. Nineteen year
old Barclay Peak was the cousin of Katy Anderson and

(47:54):
was also said to be her lover. When told of
her wound, peaks that he believed Katy had come admitted suicide.
She had been despondent over trouble with her employer. He
admitted that the pistol was his and said that Sunday
night he and Katie had been using it for target practice.
After he reloaded the gun, Katie took it from him.

(48:14):
When he asked for it back, She said he would
get it back when she was through with it, and
took it home with her Sunday night. He stayed at
home all day Monday and did not see Katie at all.
Peak's story was contradicted by four people who had seen
him on Monday walking down the road where Katie was found.
Another damning statement came from Andrew Brewer and his wife,

(48:38):
who lived near the col Kits. Katie was with them
a week earlier and they were talking about Barclay Peak.
Both heard Katie say of Peak, if a girl would
refuse him, he would take her life. Most people believed
that Peak had tried to assault Katie and either succeeded
then shot her to keep her from talking, or had

(48:58):
failed and shot her her out of anger. Katy was
kept under constant medical observation, but with a bullet lodged
in her brain, she was not expected to live very long. Remarkably,
she began to recover. When she regained consciousness and was
conscious enough to speak, she was asked who would shot her,
and she replied Barklay Peak. Peak's hearing was postponed until

(49:23):
Katy was healthy enough to testify. Though she showed signs
of improvement and gave her relatives hope that she might recover.
On March twelfth, five weeks after the shooting, Katie died.
The coroner held an inquest the following day, and the
jury charged Barclay Peaks with first degree murder. The murder
trial and Mount Holly opened on May twenty fifth, eighteen

(49:45):
eighty seven, to a courtroom filled to overflowing the spectators.
Peaks stuck to his original story, and most of the
witnesses contradicted him. After three weeks of testimony, the jury
found Peak guilty on July ninth. He was sentenced to hang.
On September first, Peak's attorney appealed to the state Supreme

(50:07):
Court for a new trial, citing numerous exceptions in the
Peaks trial, including in valid jury selection, admission of the
dying girl's statement, and admission of a physician's expert testimony.
The Supreme Court rejected all but the exception regarding jury selection.
The jury pool should have been sixty men selected at random. Instead,

(50:32):
it was forty five men hand picked by the sheriff
and prosecutor. Peak was awarded a new trial. The second
trial began on May twenty first, and proceeded much the
same way as the first trial. Then, on the fifth
day of testimony, it was announced that, following a meeting
between Peak's attorney and the prosecutor, Peak pled guilty to

(50:54):
second degree murder and the prosecutor accepted as plea Barclay
Peak was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Sir Isaac Newton,
famous for developing the Three Laws of motion and advancing calculus,

(51:17):
apparently had a far out idea for how to treat
the plague also called the Black Death toad vomit lozenges.
In addition to recommending a number of gemstone amulets against
the plague, he gave detailed instructions on how to make
the putrid toad vomit treatment. According to two unpublished pages

(51:39):
handwritten by Newton, Newton describes in detail how to suspend
a toad by its legs in a chimney for three
days until it vomits up earth with various insects in it.
This vomit must be caught on a dish of yellow wax.
He added. After the toad dies, its body should be
turned into power, mixed with the vomit and a serum

(52:03):
and made into lozenges and worn about the affected area.
This treatment would drive away the contagion and draw out
the poison. Newton wrote the toad treatment was best, but
if someone was in a pinch, then amulets made out
of the gemstones hyacinth, sapphire or amber could also serve

(52:23):
as antidotes, he wrote. Newton and his contemporaries didn't know
that the plague doesn't respond to toad vomit or gems.
It wasn't until eighteen ninety four that the French Swiss
scientist Alexander Jerson learned that the disease is caused by
a bacterium, which was later named Urcinia pestis in his honor.

(52:44):
These days, plague is treated with antibiotics, not vomit from
toads that were hung upside down. Newton likely wrote these
notes on the plague shortly after returning to the University
of Cambridge in England in sixteen sixty seven. The plague
just swept through Europe, forcing the University of Cambridge to
temporarily close its doors in sixteen sixty five. During that time,

(53:08):
Newton quarantined at Woolsthorp by Colsterworth a hamlet in Lincolnshire, England,
where he investigated the laws of gravity in motion. The
year sixteen sixty six became known as his Annis mirabilis
Latin for wonderful year. However, while the polymat's laws of
motions became blockbusters, his writings on the plague's causes, symptoms,

(53:32):
and treatments did not enjoy world renown. In truth, these
notes weren't entirely his own. Rather, Newton had been reading
Tumulus Pestis The Tomb of the Plague, by Jan Baptist
van Helmont, a chemist, physiologist and physician from the Spanish Netherlands,
a collection of Holy Roman Empire states also run by

(53:53):
the Spanish Crown. Newton's notes are not verbatim transcriptions of
Van Helmont's text, but rather asynthesis of his central ideas
and observations through Newton's eyes. Not everything Van Helmont wrote
was dismissed by later generations. For instance, he found that
chemical reactions could produce substances that were neither solids nor liquids,

(54:17):
which led him to invent the word gas, according to
the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, But religious zeal led
to some unusual medical Treatments. A verse in the King
James Bible at the time proclaimed the Lord created medicines
from the earth, and a sensible man will not despise
them Ecclesiasticus thirty eight four. Van Helmont interpreted this line

(54:41):
to mean that doctors were ordained by God and spent
the rest of his life convincing others that this was
his role. According to the Science History Institute, in nineteen
thirty six, Newton's Plague manuscript was sold along with a
vast troveh of his other writings in U. Southeby's Portsmouth Sale,

(55:02):
but these two pages with the toad Vomit Lozenges were
uncovered only recently after being lost for more than seventy years,
but were shortly thereafter sold at auction. Thanks for listening.

(55:24):
If you liked the podcast, please share a link to
this episode and recommend Weird Darkness to your friends, family,
and co workers who love the paranormal, horror stories or
true crime like you do. All stories in Weird Darkness
are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you
can find source links or links to the authors in
the show notes. Toad Vomit Lozenges was written by Laura

(55:47):
Giggle for Live Science. The Three Events in Three Places
of Really Weird Happenings was written by Check Guthrie for
Cleveland Banner. The Deadly Fog of nineteen fifty two is
from the Gypsy Read. The One Hour Pregnancy is by
Spooky from Oddity Central. The Stench of Georgian Graveyards is

(56:08):
by James Hobson from his book Dark Days of George
and Britain. A Mount Holly Tragedy is by Robert Wilhelm
from Murder by Gaslight, and the Deadly Stocksbridge Bypass is
by Brent Swantzer for Mysterious Universe. We're Darkness theme by
Alibi Music. And now that we're coming out of the dark,

(56:29):
I'll leave you with a little light One Timothy four,
verses four and five. For everything God created is good,
and nothing is to be rejected if it is received
with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the Word of
God and prayer. And a final thought, respect yourself enough

(56:51):
to walk away from anything that no longer serves you,
grows you, or makes you happy. Robert two. I'm Darren Marler.
Thanks for joining me in the weird Darkness.

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