THE DEVIL CAME TO DEVON: 100 Miles of Unexplained and Impossible Cloven Footprints Appear Overnight

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
The world of cryptozoology is no stranger to odd footprints
found throughout the world, coming in a wide variety of
sizes and with their own peculiarities. These tracks often leave bewilderment, bafflement,
and spur on questions After questions to their origins about
what sort of creature could have made them. The answers

(00:28):
of what caused them are not always completely clear, but
they invariably are caused for much debate and speculation. Among
these anomalous prints are those that are from far flung
destinations yet seen to share some similar traits that of
some hoofed creature that has left its footprints behind, and
which have caused debate as to whether they are caused

(00:49):
by the same strange creature, a hoax, or just a
curious coincidence. By far, the most well known and widely
circulated stories of such mysterious footprints is that of the
original Devil's Footprints of Devon, England. I'm Darren Marler and

(01:10):
this is Weird Darkness. Welcome weirdos. I'm Darren Marler and
this is weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy,

(01:34):
mysterious macabre, unsolved and unexplained coming up In this episode
picture this, You're called to the scene of a murder.
The victim's shotgun was found in his room, it's been
used sometime recently, and there was an empty cartridge on
the floor. There was, however, no blood or any other

(01:57):
obvious signs of violence in the house, and something else odd.
A pot in the kitchen was discovered to contain large
amounts of streak nine. It sounds like one of those
murder mystery party games you solved with friends, But this
is from a true murder mystery in Australia that still
fascinates those who study the case. What do a Jesuit

(02:20):
missionary and a former slave have in common? The answer Bigfoot.
The FBI described Israel Keys as one of the most
meticulous and vile serial killers in American history, so much
so he even had the FBI scratching their heads. But first,

(02:43):
one morning in eighteen fifty five, citizens of the English
town of Devon were surprised to find strange footprints about
town in the snow, not just on the streets and sidewalks,
but on their doorways and on the house roofs. Haystacks,
walking up walls and through pipes. The tracks covered over
one hundred miles and there was no explanation of how

(03:05):
the prints were made, but many had a theory about
who made the prince. They say it was the devil.
We begin with that story. Now, bult your doors, lock
your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me
into the weird darkness. One cold winter morning in eighteen

(03:44):
fifty five, the residents of Devon, England woke to a
strange site. The area was blanketed with snow from the
night before, and it seemed as if everything was frosted
in white. Residents were surprised to find a long track
of strange boof like prints that seemed as if they
must have been freshly made. The individual prints reportedly measured

(04:07):
around four inches long and three inches wide and seemed
to have been made in a nearly perfect single file line,
with each print spaced between eight to sixteen inches from
each other. They looked to be cloven and from something
bipedal in short like tracks from nothing the locals had

(04:27):
ever seen, and they meandered through the snow for between
sixty two one hundred miles depending on the report. This
wasn't the only one of Devon's strange occurrences, but for decades,
the so called Devil's footprints have perplexed both skeptics and
believers alike. While Devon is perhaps the most popular instance

(04:49):
of Devil's footprints, similar incidents have occurred throughout history and
around the world. The bizarre footprints that appeared on Devon's
snowy countryside followed no discernible half, and they appeared in
more than thirty different locations all over the town's south
and east ends. They meandered across dozens of miles, even

(05:09):
leading up to people's doorsteps, frightening the residents. As odd
as this all was, what made it all even stranger
was the bizarre route that these prints took, going right
up over walls, along narrow fencing, over house roofs, through barns, haystacks,
gardens and courtyards, across frozen lakes fields, and spookily, often

(05:35):
seeming to come right to people's front doors, as if
whatever had made the Prince had been intently investigating these homes. Oddly,
in some cases, it seemed as if the Prince had
entered and exited pipes that were only around four inches
in diameter, passed through locked gates or seemed to wander
straight up trees, as well as in totally enclosed or

(05:58):
locked off areas and other improbable places. The unexplained tracks
shortly acquired the nickname the Devil's footprints or tracts of
satan Thinks, in part to their hoof like shape. This
supernatural implication was aided by the tracks unexplainable miles long
path Devons. Devil's footprints covered up to one hundred miles

(06:21):
of land, reaching as far as Topsham, Dallish and Tainmouth.
According to some reports, the tracks may also have reached
as far south as Tautness or Torquay, and as far
away as Dorset or Lincolnshire. Overall, the strange prints were
found spanning an area of anywhere from forty to one
hundred miles, making most rational explanations seem completely implausible. Without

(06:46):
a fresh snowfall, the distinctive marks would have been imperceptible
to locals. Moreover, while accounts of the snowfall's heaviness seemed
to vary, most agree not only that the previous night
was particularly cold, but that a thaw occurred sometime before morning,
which may have allowed animal tracks to become distorted. Skeptics

(07:07):
often point to this theory to explain the bizarre phenomenon
of the Devil's footprints. Non paranormal explanations have encompassed everything
from hoaxes or the distorted tracks of mice, birds, rabbits, badgers, ponies, horses,
and even escaped kangaroos. Mike Dash, a Welsh writer and historian,

(07:28):
proposed that the tracks were made by several different animals
at once, though he conceded at the end of his
study that his solutions did not explain all of the
tracks elements, and they are still a mystery waiting to
be solved. Other theories were things like raindrops falling and
creating the depressions, and the even more far out theory

(07:49):
attributed to British novelist Jeffrey Household, who claimed that the
tracks were actually made by some sort of experimental balloon
accidentally released from the Deafenport dockyard. According to Household, a
pair of shackles dangled from the balloon's mooring ropes, and
their intermittent dragging left the tracks in the snow. Household

(08:11):
claimed to have learned of this event from a man
whose grandfather had worked at the docks in eighteen fifty five.
While this explanation initially seems feasible, the theory is not
entirely sound. The notion of a drifting balloon leaving uniformly
spaced tracks seems very implausible, and what's more, no such

(08:31):
balloon was ever reported. According to Household's account. However, the
event was covered up after the balloon caused some damage
and eventually landed near Honiton. People came to believe that
the devil walks in Devon, as newspapers would later claim,
and took to staying indoors after dark. Some observers even

(08:52):
claimed the tracks appeared burned or branded into the snow.
This claim was seemingly substantiated one hundred and two years
later after the original Devon incident, when in nineteen fifty seven,
an anthropologist and psychical researcher reported hoof prints found on
a Devon beach that looked as if each mark had

(09:13):
been cut out of the sand with a flat iron.
These nineteen fifty seven hoof prints were also spaced six
feet apart, implying a much longer stride than those reported
in eighteen fifty five. Also in nineteen fifty seven, Linda
Hansen wrote to the forty eight Times detailing tracks she
found in her parents' garden. Her description matched the Devil's

(09:35):
footprints of eighteen fifty five almost exactly, and beneath these
tracks she claimed to see dry concrete, as if the
tracks had not just melted the snow, but transformed it.
According to some accounts, people genuinely came to believe the
devil was responsible for the tracks and refused to venture

(09:56):
outside after dark. Convinced the devil was still proudly, they
claimed he could sniff out their sins. Further fueling their
fears was the manner in which the footprints seemed to
approach doorways and then stop, as if the creature responsible
was keenly interested in the people on the other side.

(10:17):
While some sources claim the phenomenon was widely covered in
newspapers at the time, first hand accounts of the Devil's
footprints were difficult to locate for many years. Not until
nineteen fifty did accounts of the event return to the
public eye. References to the incident were discovered in records
from the former Vicar of Christ Saint George Among these

(10:39):
papers were tracings or sketches of the tracks themselves, as
well as a letter to the Illustrated London News marked
not for publication. The letter described the tracks as the
perfect impression of a donkey's hoof, but instead of progressing
as that animal would have done, or indeed as any
other animal would have done, feet right and left left,

(11:00):
it appeared that foot had followed foot in a single line. Furthermore,
the letter noted that the tracks were found in multiple parishes,
and that in every case they were the exact same size,
about four inches by two inches, and always the same
distance apart. Several courageous individuals attempted to follow the strange tracks,

(11:24):
and some reported strange findings. A story credit to Reverend J. J.
Rowe and RH Busk claims the pair tried to follow
the trail with hounds, but at last in a wood,
the hounds came back, baying and terrified. Another report tells
of a man who followed the prince to their apparent
end when he found nothing but a toad. Since the

(11:48):
prints in Devon were so numerous and covered such a
broad area, multiple sources were likely responsible. This is one
of the underlying tenets of skeptics who claim at least
some of the hoof prints were likely the work of
hoaxers if the marks existed at all. As Brian Dunning
points out on the hoof Prints episode of the Skeptoid podcast,

(12:10):
the very length of the trails discredits the notion that
any one source could possibly have seen all the tracks
in eighteen fifty five. The means didn't really exist in
Devon to travel one hundred miles in a single day
to verify the length of this track, especially when the
ways obstructed by two mile stretches of water, Dunning said.

(12:32):
In detailing the various fantastic properties of the footprints, Dunning
reaches what he considers a foregone conclusion, is there really
any reason to believe that this happened? Skeptics have attempted
to advance a pantheon of reasonable explanations for the Devil's footprints. Interestingly,
on March fifth, two thousand and nine, it seems that

(12:53):
there was a very similar phenomenon reported from precisely the
same area. In this case, as a resident named Jill Wade
of Woolsey, North Devon claimed to have found a strange
line of pointed cloven hoof like footprints in freshly fallen
snow in her own backyard. Wade reported that the tracks

(13:14):
were five inches long, with a stride of between eleven
and seventeen inches, and stretched on for sixty to seventy
feet across the garden in an arch like shape, starting
at her window and going out to the other side
of the yard, where they disappeared. The bizarre tracks were
examined by a biologist with the Center for forty in Zoology, CFZ.

(13:36):
Graham Inglis, who noticed their striking similarity to the devil's
footprints of eighteen fifty five from the same vicinity, could
not find an easy answer to what made them. However,
Ingliss did have reservations about jumping straight to a paranormal
explanation instead of the tracts. This is certainly a first
for me. The footprints are peculiar, but they are not

(13:58):
the devils. I don't believe the whole has been in woolverry. Personally,
I think it belongs to a rabbit or hair, but
quite an academic punch up has started over it. In
his book The Case for the Ufo Astronomer, Morris K.
Jessop mentions the Devil's footprints of Devon, hypothesizing that no
animal walks by putting one foot directly in front of

(14:20):
the other. So these holes in the snow were made
with a mechanical precision by something mechanical. Therefore, let's make
the broad conclusion that something mechanical passed over Devon in
the air. Jessop goes on to theorize that the marks
were possibly the result of some type of ray or beam.
While the Devil's footprints of Devon are rather well known,

(14:43):
more obscure cases of a very similar phenomenon have come
in from various places around the world. One such account
comes to us from May of eighteen forty on the
remote Kregulian Islands of the Southern Indian Ocean. These windswept,
rocky swaths of tr treeless, frozen land are surrounded by
mercilessly rough gray waters, and are located more than thirty

(15:07):
three hundred kilometers or two thousand fifty one miles from
the nearest traces of civilization Madagascar Island, making them one
of the most isolated places on Earth and earning the
islands their nickname less de La Desolation The Desolation Islands.
The only plant life to be found here in this chilly,
uninhabited domain are some lichens, mosses and grasses, and the

(15:31):
only animal life here are a few species of insect, seals,
and some seabirds and penguins, as well as feral rabbits,
cats and sheep that have been introduced by passing ships.
In May of eighteen forty, Captain Sir James Ross found
himself on these shores as part of an expedition to
catalog the plant and animal life of the archipelago's main

(15:52):
island of Grand Terra. The island was described as being
mostly a barren, lifeless wasteland of sparse like oasans and moss,
with no land animals seen at all. Indeed, at the
time there were no introduced large land animals present on
the island, and the only creatures to be found were insects, seabirds,

(16:12):
and seals along the coast. It was for this reason
that one discovery would be all the more bizarre. One
small detachment led by a Lieutenant Bird came across a
rather odd site as they went about searching the inhospitable,
snow swept land for any sign of life there in
the freshly fallen snow was a line of horseshoe shaped

(16:35):
hoof like tracks measuring three inches long and two and
a half inches wide, which meandered through the snow for
a while before disappearing in a rocky area without snow.
Since the island had proven to be devoid of any
large land animals and the expedition had no horses or ponies,
it was baffling as to what could have possibly made

(16:56):
the prints. In the end, Lieutenant Birds that a horse,
pony or donkey must have been left there by a
previous expedition, or made it to the island from a
wrecked ship. But considering that a horse would have died
in the arctic conditions of the island on its own,
if it was a castaway, then it must have arrived
there fairly recently, and there had been no sign of

(17:19):
any other expeditions or shipwrecks in the vicinity at all.
Could these prints have possibly been left by a horse
or pony that had been left there by someone, or had,
even more improbably escaped a wreck and managed to swim
to shore through unforgiving rough waters full of choppy waves
and deadly currents. Or was this something else? It also

(17:42):
seems improbable that it could have been a hoax, considering
no one else was there. It remains a mystery. Yet
Another unexplained set of Devil's footprints was found in nineteen
forty five near Everburg, Belgium. On January tenth of that year,
a curious set of bizarre prints was found etched into

(18:03):
the snow on a hill behind a place called the
Chateau de Morveaux. The hoof like prints measured two and
a half inches long by one and a half inch
wide and were composed of a series of a pair
of two prints nine inches apart that then formed a
perfect single file line of tracks spaced twelve to fifteen
inches apart, as if whatever had made them had been

(18:25):
hopping along. The tracks wandered for several miles across the hillside,
forest fields and a stream, and strangely, they went right
over some deep snow drifts. Yet there was no sign
of an animal's body sinking within the snow, only those
odd footprints perched atop the frozen white. Locals in the

(18:46):
area had never seen anything like it, and one man
who investigated the Prince and Eric Frank Russell, specifically said
that they were reminiscent of the Devil's Footprints of Devon
in eighteen fifty five. Although have theorized that the tracks
were made by a goat, which are common in the area,
the Belgian prints have never been satisfactorily explained. Other cases

(19:10):
similar to Devon's devil footprints have been reported all over
the world. A cathedral in Munich is home to a
single tile bearing a footprint said to have been made
by a frustrated devil tricked into aiding the cathedral's construction. Similarly,
a stone in a rock wall in Manchester, Maine, bears
marks left behind when a construction worker struck a deal

(19:31):
with the devil to move the large stone. At the
Devil's Gate Dam in Pasadena, California, photographers have captured images
of claw marks in stone. A comic book series called
The Devil's Footprints, written by Scott Alley, received its title
and inspiration from a legend Ali remembered from his hometown.

(19:52):
The devil reportedly showed up at the local church in
the old town, and the priest chased him up the steeple.
The devil jumped and left one foot print in the
stone outside. Are any of these cases of mysterious tracts related.
They certainly share some similar traits in their size, appearance, disposition,
and the fact that they keep showing up in the

(20:13):
strangest of far flung places. They could be unrelated, but
even if they are, we are left with the question
of what formed them. Was this the work of known animals,
strange weather or atmospheric phenomena, paxers, or something else. Whatever
the cause may be, one wonders when the next set

(20:34):
of these bizarre clothing tracks will turn up next, and
what significance they'll have. And while there may very well
be a mundane explanation at their route, they still manage
to incite debate and stir the imagination coming up. The

(20:58):
victim's shotgun was found in his room used recently, with
an empty cartridge on the floor and a large amount
strych nine found in his kitchen. No blood anywhere. Apparently
somebody really wanted the man dead, but also wanted it
kept a secret. Why. Plus what do a Jesuit missionary
and a former slave have in common? Bigfoot? Of course,

(21:23):
those stories and more when Weird Darkness returns. True crime

(21:50):
historian William Roehead once commented that the setting of a
great crime should be properly forbidding murder to be fully effective,
he said, should be done out of doors, and if possible,
amid surroundings agreeably savage. One in got A Station, a
cattle ranch located in an isolated valley in Australia's Victoria Alps,

(22:11):
is to this day a harsh and lonely spot. In
the early twentieth century it was as out of doors
and agreeably savage a place as any murder fancier could
hope to find. So far as I know, the edinburghie
and mister Roehead had never even heard of the place,
but it would have gratified him immensely to note that
One and Goda hosted one of Australia's most notorious murder mysteries.

(22:36):
Beginning sometime in nineteen sixteen. One in got A Station
was run by a man named James Barclay. He'd been
working alone there for some time, but in December nineteen
seventeen he hired one John Bamford to act as cook
and general handyman. The two seemed mismatched couple. Barclay had
a good reputation both professionally and personally, but Bamford was

(23:00):
widely disliked, as he was a quick tempered, surly sort
who was fond of quarreling. There were even rumors that
he'd murdered his wife. However, the two men seemed to
get on well enough. About a week after Bamford was hired,
the pair traveled to the town of Talbotville, about twenty
miles from the station, in order to vote on a

(23:20):
referendum on introducing the military draft. If any of you
are curious, it is recorded that the pair voted the
same way, but it's lost to history whether they were
for or against the measure. They spent the night at
the home of a mutual friend, Albert Stout, and the
next morning, December the twenty first, the two men began
the ride back to One and Gotta Little, knowing that

(23:40):
their recent votes would prove to be totally irrelevant to
either of them. The next time anyone had any reason
to visit One and Gatta was on January twenty second,
nineteen eighteen, with a local man named Harry Smith visited
the station to deliver some mail. He was perplexed to
find no one there. The only clue to the whereabouts

(24:02):
of the men was the message home tonight written on
the door of the kitchen. Assuming that one or both
of the men would turn up at any moment, Smith
decided to wait around for them. When after two days
there was still no sign of Barclay or Bamford, Smith
gave up without making any further investigation. He shrugged off

(24:23):
the mystery and returned home. On February fourteenth, Smith returned
to Wanangata when he saw that nothing had been touched
since his last visit, The unopened mail was just as
he had left it, and Barclay's dog, Baron, was obviously starving.
It finally dawned on Smith that something very awful must
have happened. He stayed there overnight, doing a fruitless search

(24:47):
for some sign of the men, and the next morning
traveled to the nearest town, Dargo, to report that Barclay
and Bamford had vanished. He also sent telegrams to the
ranch's owners alerting them to what had happened. Police were
notified and a search party was quickly assembled. The bedrooms
of the two men were disarranged as if they had

(25:07):
been ransacked. Some of Bamford's possessions, including his horse, were missing.
The horse, which was lacking its saddle and bridle was
later found running wild over the plains. Barclay's shotgun was
found in his room. It had been used sometime recently,
and there was an empty cartridge on the floor. There was, however,
no blood or any other obvious signs of violence in

(25:30):
the house honest of all, A pepper pot in the
kitchen was discovered to contain large amounts of strychnine. Less
than a quarter mile from the house. The search party's
worst fears were realized when they discovered a man's skull
poking out of a shallow grave. A bit of digging
uncovered the rest of the body. The belt and tobacco

(25:51):
pouch found with it helped identify the corpse as that
of James Barclay. Barclay's autopsy revealed that he'd been killed
by a single shit through the back. Time of death
was estimated as sometime between December twenty one and January
fourth notes Trick nine was found in his system. While

(26:11):
no one could say why Barclay was murdered, police had
little trouble naming his probable murderer, John Bamford. It seemed
obvious that the two had fought, after which Bamford shot
his employer, grabbed a few belongings, and fled. A reward
of two hundred pounds was offered for any information regarding
this dangerous fugitive, and a state wide manhunt was on.

(26:35):
The hunt for Bamford dragged on without finding the slightest
trace of him. It was as if he had somehow
managed to vanish from the face of the earth. His
whereabouts remained an utter mystery until early November nineteen eighteen,
when the search ended in a most unexpected way. Some
men were scouring the how It Plains, an area of about

(26:56):
twenty miles from the station and near where Bamford's horse
had been recovered. They came across an old, abandoned hut.
Outside of this hut was a pile of logs. The
logs they noticed had a man's boot sticking out from
under them. Attached to this boot was what was left
of the erstwhile murder suspect John Bamford. An examination proved

(27:18):
that he had been killed by a shot to the head.
The authorities were disconcerted to realize that they were dealing
with not just one bizarre unsolved murder, but two. To
this day, this is about all we know for certain
about the deaths of James Barclay and John Bamford. The
police had no success whatsoever in solving the riddle of

(27:41):
why the men were killed, let alone by whom naturally
many theories have been floated in the century since they died.
Perhaps Bamford killed Barclay only to be assassinated by his
victim's friends and revenge. Or were both men slain by
some passing robbers or horse thieves. Was James Barclay, who
had a reputation as a ladies man, killed by some

(28:03):
jealous rival who then murdered Bamford in order to silence
the only witness to the crime. Could Harry Smith, the
first man to alert the world to the mystery, have
known more than he ever let on? Who knows? As
for that strict nine filled pepper pot well, As far
as I know, no one has ever even tried to
explain that one, the one and Goddess Station murders have

(28:26):
remained one of Australia's most solution defying crimes. Adding to
the enigma in his statement made by Barclay's son, James Junior,
when he was interviewed about the case in the nineteen seventies,
he commented, it was all a long time ago, and
both the murderers are long since dead. I can't see
that anything can be gained now. It's all best forgotten,

(28:49):
both the murderers. What did the younger Barclay know about
the mystery? And why does he obviously wish it to
remain a mystery. Some of the strongest sources of anecdotal

(29:20):
evidence regarding the existence of the Sasquatch are those that
pre date the coining of the term bigfoot, in an
article about a cat skinner named Jerry Crewe who found
massive human like tracks around his road building equipment in
California's Six Rivers National Forest in August of nineteen fifty eight,
and the explosion of the Patterson Gimlin footage on the

(29:41):
world stage in October of nineteen sixty seven. Sightings reported
before these two seminal events cannot be dismissed as the
work of hoaxers seeking to hop on the Bigfoot bandwagon.
The Sasquatch was all but unknown to the Europeans who
began flooding the North and South American continents in the
fifteen hundreds, and to the slaves that they brought with them.

(30:06):
Their accounts of bipedal hair covered creatures simply cannot be
dismissed out of hand. I'd like to discuss here two
such historical sightings. The incidents are not well known, but
they may well be extremely important when attempting to trace
just how far back sightings of wood apes might go.
The similarity between these two accounts cannot be denied, and

(30:28):
both lend credibility to the opinion of those who believe
the animal commonly referred to as Bigfoot was being seen
well before the nineteen fifties by people of different cultural
backgrounds living many miles apart. The first incident comes directly
from the writings of a Jesuit missionary who worked among
the people of the province of Sonora, Mexico, a region

(30:49):
that stretched up from northwest Mexico to the Sierra Madre
near the California coast to Tucson in the eighteenth century.
Father Ignaz Peppercorn, a German Jesus, lived and worked among
the Pima Indians from seventeen fifty six to seventeen sixty seven.
Details of his work and life among these people can
be found his description de la Provincia de Sonora. The diaries, journals,

(31:14):
and logs of missionaries have long been highly valued by
anthropologists and historians. Thephfercorn's work was no different that he
is considered by academics to have been an extremely reliable
and credible observer. His writings continue to be cited by
historians to this day. Among Feffercorn's writings were descriptions of

(31:35):
the local wildlife. Among the descriptions of what would be
considered common animals, the good Father wrote about the different
bears differentiated by their color found in the region. He
wrote of the Sonora bears, some have black hair, others
dark gray, and the smallest number are a reddish color.
These last are the most cruel and harmful. According to

(31:55):
the statements of herdsman, only two species of bear are
known who have ever lived in the province of Sonora
during the eighteenth century, the black bear and the grizzly.
They both made Sonora a part of their home range
during the time in question. While black bears can be black, blonde,
or reddish, it's likely the cinnamon colored bears that were

(32:17):
the most cruel and harmful the grizzlies. While these grizzlies
were likely the animals most often responsible for the killing
of livestock in the region. Some of the other activities
attributed to them may well have been the work of
something else. Peppercorn, while documenting bear activity related to him
by the indigenous tribesmen, in some cases may have actually

(32:40):
been recording accounts of Bigfoot interacting with humans. If so,
his accounts are some of the earliest ever written down
in North America. Here's one intriguing passage. Bears are a
special menace to stock raising, for they eat many a calf,
and if no smaller prey falls into their clutches, they

(33:00):
will attack even horses, cows, and oxen. They delight especially
in eating maize as long as it is still tender
and soft. Woe to the field. If a hungry bear
breaks into it at night, he eats as much as
he can and makes off with as much as he
can grasp and carry in his mighty arms. In so doing,
he ruins even more of the field by breaking it

(33:20):
down and treading upon it. The inhabitants assert that a
bear defends himself by throwing stones when one attempts to
chase him away, and that a stone hurled from his
paws comes with much greater force than one thrown from
the hand of the strongest man. I don't think I
have to tell anybody that a bear can't throw stones,
nor is it capable of walking by peedally in order

(33:43):
to carry off large amounts of corn in its mighty arms.
That for Corn was familiar with bears. He traveled across
the region for many years and had seen many bruins.
That for corn even witnessed a grizzly kill his Indian
guide on one trip across Sonora. The guide had attempted
to kill the bear, succeeding only in wounding it, and

(34:04):
paid the ultimate price when the animal turned on its
tormentor this being the case, it's strange that Feffercorn would
attribute rock throwing and the ability to carry large amounts
of corn away while walking on two legs to grizzlies.
I think it's entirely possible that the stone hurling, corn
stealing bipedal bears of Sonora might have actually been wood apes.

(34:28):
A strikingly similar account comes from another historical source. A
former Arkansas slave, Doc Quinn, was one of the oldest
living residents of Miller County, Arkansas. Yes, the same Miller
County that would become known as the home of the
folk monster of the legendary Vogee Creek fame. When he
was interviewed by Cecil Copeland at his home in Texarkana

(34:49):
in the nineteen thirties, doc recalled when he was first
brought to the plantation of one Colonel Augburn, between Index
and Fulton on the Red River, that there was a
section of the proper dominated by an immense cane break.
This cane break was a favorite retreat of bears and
other wild animals. It was all but impossible to go
in after problem bears that would steal out of the

(35:11):
thicket at night and take livestock, so the plantation owner
had the slaves round up the hogs and animals and
placed them in pens. At the end of the day.
Several slaves were charged with standing guard at night over
the domesticated animals. The efforts of the slaves helped somewhat,
but bears were still seen often and some of their
actions were almost human. The following is a passage taken

(35:35):
from the book bearing Witness Memories of Arkansas Slavery Narratives
from the nineteen thirties WPA collection in which don Quinn
describes to Cecil Copeland the odd behavior of a bear
he came across in a cornfield one day. The bear
picked off an ear of corn and put it in
his bended arm. He repeated this action until he had
an armful, and then waddled over to the fence. Standing

(35:59):
by the fence, carefully through the corn on the other
side ear by ear. The bear then climbed the fence,
much in the same manner of a human being, retrieved
the corn and went on his way. Sounds familiar, does
it not. The simple truth is that bears cannot stroll
around in a bipedal fashion while plucking ears of corn
from stalks in the field with one front paw and

(36:22):
placed them into the crook of their other front arm.
The description of how Quinn witnessed this animal klina fence
in the same manner of a human being is fascinating.
The entire incident simply does not describe bear behavior in
any form or fashion. Quinn provides another interesting anecdote in
the same interview. I thought long and hard about including

(36:45):
it here, but not because it's interesting, but because Doc
Quinn's words are transcribed in such a way that is
dialect is evident some hot button words, including the N word,
are used. After wrestling with it for a while, well,
I decided to include the account here with only one
minor edit. I decided not to use the N word.

(37:06):
I fear in today's climate, I'd be accused of approving
of it or some such thing. Again, I would remind
you that these are not my words. These are the
words spoken by former Arkansas slave Doc Quinn and transcribed
by his interviewer Cezell Copeland. The text comes straight from
the book previously mentioned. To try to focus on the

(37:27):
story doc Quinn is telling, not the language and terminology
he uses. The account is as follows. Late one evening,
ME and anotter named Jerry was coming home from fishing
round in a bend in the trail. What do we meet,
almost face to face a great, big old bar. Being

(37:47):
young and blessed with swift feet, I'll make Photonia's tree
and hastily scrambles to safety. Not so would my fat
friend peer it out and through the branches over the tree.
I'll seize the bar making for Jerry, and I says
to myself, Jerry, your sins. The show catched up with
you this time. But Jerry, all being to mean, must
have had to double by his side, pulling out in

(38:09):
his bowing knife that jumps to one side as the
bar come charging pass and stab it in the side
near the shoulder. As the bar started toning around to
make another lunch at him, he noticed the blood spurting
from the shoulder. What do you think happened? That old
bar forgets all about? Jerry? Hastily scrambling around, he begins
to pick up leaves and trash and clamps him on

(38:30):
the wound, trying to keep from bleeding to death. You act,
did the bar died well? So I don't wait to
see the result, Jerry, he done left them parts, and
not wanting to stay up in that tree all night
by myself, I scrambles down and run for a mile
home and double quick time. I ask you what kind
of bear notices it it's bleeding, stops in the middle

(38:54):
of an altercation, begins gathering leaves, and then packs its
own wound. I'll tell tell you the answer. None. No
bear behaves in this manner. If Doc Quinn is not
spinning a yarn to his interviewer, the creature his fishing
partner Jerry tangled with was certainly no bear. Was it
an aggressive sasquatch? Certainly the location was right, as the

(39:18):
aggressive nature of the folk monster would be well documented
some years later. There's a real shortage of viable alternatives
if the creature in question was not a bear. The
parallels between these two accounts, accounts separated by more than
a century and approximately fourteen hundred miles, are uncanny. Bears

(39:39):
cannot and do not gather up corn in their arms
and walk away with it in a bipedal fashion. Yet
a Jesuit missionary and a former Arkansas slave describe observing
this same behavior. Doc Quinn's account of how his fishing
partner Jerry tangled with an animal that packed its own
wound after being stabbed lands credence to the theory that

(40:01):
something other than a bear was roaming about Miller County,
Arkansas in his youth. Is it possible that these two
men from very different worlds, father Ignas Fevercorn and former
slave Dot Quinn described the same type of animal, an
animal they had no name for, an animal that just
might have been a wood ape, sasquatch, bigfoot. Food for thought.

(40:35):
When we'd darkness returns the FBI described Israel Keys as
one of the most meticulous and vile serial killers in
American history, so much so he even had the FBI
scratching their heads. That story is up next. For sixteen

(41:12):
years and maybe even longer, serial killer Israel Keys traveled
the country, robbing banks, burglarizing homes, burying kill kits and
home depot buckets, and preying upon victims who seemed to
share nothing in common. He was an investigator's worst nightmare,
a serial killer with no apparent pattern or type. By

(41:35):
the time he died by his own hand while awaiting
trial for the abduction, rape, and brutal murder of Samantha Konig,
he had been linked to at least eleven deaths and disappearances,
and his true number of victims may never be known.
He's died in his jail cell on December second, twenty twelve,
as a result of self inflicted cuts on his wrist

(41:57):
and strangulation. He left behind a bloods mirrored four page
suicide note that's been called an ode to murder. Doctor
Stephen Montgomery, a forensic psychiatrist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center,
described Key's chilling note, written partially in loosely rhyming meter
as showing no remorse, no regard for human life. It's

(42:19):
certainly not an ordinary suicide note. Doctor Phil Resnick, director
of forensic psychiatry University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, said,
after reading the haunting note, he doesn't talk much about
his own dilemmas of being in prison or why he's
taking his own life. It's more of a final statement
of contempt for the American style of life. Doctor Resnick

(42:40):
went on to say, I think the other thing he
emphasizes is his own superiority, that he has guile and
can take advantage of people who are naive and trusting
of him. In his suicide note, Keyes, who was raised
in a cultish survivalist family, keeps disdain upon what he
perceives as the normal American way of life and refers

(43:01):
to one of his victims as quote my pretty captive butterfly. Quote.
The skills that Key's survivalist upbringing had instilled in him,
along with a three year stint in the military, proved
helpful as Keys committed his crimes while evading authorities. He
had zero victim profile. Marine Callahan told A and E.

(43:22):
Callahan is the author of American Predator, a recently released
book about the life and crimes of Israel Keys. I
think of him as an analog killer in a digital world.
All he did was by a one way plane ticket
to a major city, ran a car drive thousands of miles.
In those drives, he'd be digging up kill kits that
he had hidden all over the US. The kits were

(43:44):
home depot buckets that he filled with guns, ammo, rope, cash,
and draino, which he used to accelerate human decomposition. The
locations were only in his mind, never documented. He's partly
funded his murderous hobby by committing strings of robberies and
burglaries across the country. He'd been connected to several bank robberies,

(44:06):
and he suspected of having burglarized twenty to thirty homes.
If he could, Callahan said, describing Key's modus operandi, he'd
take the bodies to another location and dispose of them
so expertly that he left no trace of them or
his DNA behind. This seems to have been what happened
to Bill and Lorraine Courier, the Essex, Vermont couple who

(44:27):
vanished suddenly in twenty eleven. Ke's later confessed to killing
them using a murder kit that he had buried near
their home two years earlier. More than merely a methodical killer,
Keys actually studied criminal profiling in order to learn what
not to do. In fact, according to CBS, the FBI

(44:48):
has described Keys as one of the most meticulous serial
killers in American history. He claimed to have first read
John Douglas's book mind Hunter, inside the FBI's elite serial
crime unit, the basis for the Netflix series of the
same name, when he was a teenager. According to Callahan,
Keyes stated that he suddenly realized he wasn't alone after

(45:10):
reading Douglas's descriptions of violent offenders and their pathological urges.
Keys was finally arrested in March of twenty twelve. More
than a month earlier, he had abducted eighteen year old
Samantha Konig by gunpoint from the coffee booth where she
worked in Anchorage, Alaska. Weeks later, her dismembered body would
be found at the bottom of Matinuska Lake. In the meantime, however,

(45:33):
Keyes went on a pre booked two week cruise with
his family in the Gulf of Mexico, while Koenig's brutalized
body lay in a shed back in Alaska. When he returned,
he posed her body to look like it was still
alive and took a photo of it alongside a day's
old copy of the Anchorage Daily News, demanding a thirty
thousand dollars ransom from her family. It was this ransom

(45:56):
demand that eventually led to Key's arrest. The money was
to positant into Koenig's account, and Keys used her debit
card to withdraw funds across the southwest United States. Authorities
were able to track the withdrawals and ultimately arrested Keys
at the Cotton Patch Cafe in Lufkin, Texas. Once he
was in custody, Keys began confessing to crimes, but was

(46:18):
never as forthcoming as investigators would have hoped. Even the
top criminal profilers at the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit were
terrified of him and flummixed by him. According to Callahan,
I can tell you right now there is no one
who knows me or who has ever known me, who
knows anything about me. Really, He's himself told authorities, I'm

(46:39):
two different people, basically. As an example of this duality,
on The same day, the Keys dismembered Samantha Koenigg's body
and sank it in the frigid waters of Matinouska Lake,
he attended a parent teacher conference for his own daughter.
American Predator is dedicated to the victims and their families
known and on the known. While Keys admitted to several murders, rapes,

(47:03):
and other crimes while he was awaiting trial, his suicide
left the total tally of his victims unknown, probably forever.
One of my hopes, Callahan said of why she had
written the book is that some potentially Keys related missing
person's cases are reopened to find more victims. Unfortunately, Key's

(47:24):
strange suicide note, written in a combination of pencil and
ink on a blood stained legal pad, provided no investigative
clues or leads as to the identity of other possible victims,
according to the FBI. In twenty twenty, the FBI released
a series of crude paintings discovered underneath Key's jail cell bed.

(47:45):
The paintings depicted eleven skulls and a pentagram, and the
FBI believes that the eleven skulls signify Key's victims. Still,
the mystery endures and the messages provide one last cryptic
look into the mind of a sick and monstrous man.
Forget the lady called luck Keys wrote in his bloody
final communication with the world, she does not abide near me,

(48:08):
for her powers don't extend to those who are dead.
Thanks for listening. If you're listening to the show via
podcast or on YouTube, be sure to subscribe if you
haven't already done so, and leave a review of the

(48:30):
show in the podcast app you listen from. And if
you're already a weirdo, please take a moment today and
share Weird Darkness with somebody you know who loves paranormal
or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or mysteries like you do.
All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true
unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links or

(48:51):
links to the authors in the show notes. The Devil
Keen to Devin is by Orin Gray at Ranker and
Brent Swanzer at Mysterious Universe. The one on God a
Murders is by Undine for a Strange Company. The Missionary,
the Slave and Bigfoot is from Michael Mays for a
Texas Crypti Hunter and a Meticulous serial killer is by

(49:11):
orin Gray for the lineup. And now that we're coming
out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light.
John eleven, Verse twenty five. Jesus said to her, I
am the Resurrection and the life. The one who believes
in me will live even though they die. And a
final thought, I don't need a perfect life. I just

(49:33):
want to be happy, surrounded by good friends who love
me for who I am. I'm Darren Marler. Thanks for
joining me in the weird darkness.

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