THE HANGING AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE: When Death Delivers The Final Twist

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome Weirdos. I'm Darren Mortler, and this is Weird Darkness.
Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore,
the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained.
Coming up in this episode, I'm bringing you three tales

(00:30):
of fiction. I'll share a short story that has been
described as one of the most famous and frequently anthologized
stories in American literature. It's an occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge by the legendary Ambrose Beers from eighteen ninety. I
have a classic creepypasta from twenty sixteen that many people
mistakenly believe is a true story because it is so

(00:52):
well written. It's The Strange Case of Edmondson, Kentucky by
Joe Terrell. But first, it's a short story of fiction,
as told by one of the hardest working writers I
know of. She's always posting new stories on Facebook, Christina Skelton.
It's a story from April twenty twenty titled simply the
Ghost Bus. Now bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn

(01:18):
off your lights, and come with me into the weird
darkness The Ghost Bus by Christina Skelton. For years my
parents had told me about the horrible bus crash that

(01:40):
happened near our house years ago. One morning, just days
before I was born, my mother had been out in
the garden plucking weeds when she heard a horrible noise.
It was a series of high pitched screams, then a
screeching of tires, followed by a tremendous crash. All of
the people in the area rushed out of their houses
to see what was going on. Down at the bottom

(02:02):
of the old coach road, they found black tire marks
leading to a nearby cliff. When they rushed to the
cliff edge, they saw the wreckage of a bus down below.
It had apparently driven straight off the cliff and crashed
on the jagged rocks at the bottom. The people ran
down to where the smoking wreckage was lying strown about
in an effort to help the survivors. They were horrified

(02:24):
when they discovered that it was the local school bus.
In all the passengers on board were their own children.
The bodies of the dead kids lay tangled in the
twisted metal. Some had been thrown out of the bus
as it fell. The parents were screaming and crying as
they found the mangled remains of their sons and daughters
in the charred wreckage. When the ambulance and fire department arrived,

(02:48):
they found no survivors. Every single child on the bus
had been killed in the crash. It was the most
horrific disaster of the area had ever experienced. In one
horrible moment, an entire generation of our small town had
been nearly wiped out. The parents of the dead children
were inconsolable. A few days later, a huge funeral was

(03:10):
held for all of the kids who'd perished. People came
from miles around to pay their respects and to share
in the grief. Almost every family in the area had
lost a child in the accident. Some had even lost
two or three. Almost forty small coffins were lowered into
the ground that day. An inquest was held shortly afterwards,

(03:31):
and police got to the bottom of what had happened
and finally determined who was to blame for causing the
terrible crash. It seems that a prisoner from the local
mental hospital where he'd been for an invaluation, had escaped
the night before. He'd broken into the bus station and
stolen a driver's uniform. That night, he lay in wait
until the doors of the bus station were unlocked. Then

(03:53):
he crept aboard the school bus and drove out through
the gates without alerting anyone. That morning, he drove the school
wool bus around the countryside, picking up all the unsuspecting
kids who were waiting by the road on their way
to school. He was dressed on a bus driver's uniform,
so nobody suspected a thing. Once he'd collected every kid
on the route, the crazed man floored the accelerator and

(04:16):
drove at a high speed off the cliff. The people
in our area never forgot the terrible accident that escaped
prisoner caused. When I was growing up, there were not
too many other children to play with. Most had been
killed in the terrible bus crash. The only kids that
survived were those who had been too young to attend
school at the time or were in high school already.

(04:39):
The story I'm about to tell happened when I was
thirteen years old. My parents allowed me to go to
the movies at the theater in town. I met a
bunch of friends there and we had a great time
watching the movie. Afterwards, we lost track of time and
it was very late by the time we decided to
go home. I must have been waiting at the bus
stop for half an hour before I realized that I'd

(05:00):
missed the last bus. Cursing myself for being so careless,
I wondered how I would manage to get home. It
wasn't all that far to walk, perhaps a mile or two,
but the roads were treacherous at night because in our
area there were no street lamps to light the way.
A lot of people had been hit by cars as
they walked in the darkness. I found a payphone and

(05:22):
called home. My mom answered, and I told her that
I'd missed the last bus home. She began to panic,
telling me that my father was out and had taken
the car with him. She would not be able to
pick me up. I told her I'd just walk home,
but she begged me not to, saying that the roads
were much too dangerous at that time of night. Even worse,
it was beginning to snow, which meant that even if

(05:43):
a car did manage to see me in the dark,
it probably wouldn't have had time to break before it
hit me. She said she would try to contact our
neighbors see if maybe they would be able to drive
into town to pick me up. After I hung up
the phone, I began to get impatient. Eventually I decided
the only thing I could do was walk home by myself,

(06:03):
so I set off and hoped for the best. I
was walking along the long country road in complete darkness,
trying not to trip over a pothole or a fall
into a ditch, when I saw headlights coming up over
the hill behind me. Whether it was a car or
a bus, it was coming up very fast and quite
noiselessly through the snow covered road. As it drew nearer,

(06:25):
I could make out the outlines of the vehicle. It
appeared to be a bus, and my only hope was
that the driver would be able to see me in
the dark and stop for me. It came round the
bend of the road and bathed me in bright white light.
The headlights blazed through the darkness like a pair of
fiery meteors. I jumped to the side of the road
and waved my hand, but the bus passed me at

(06:46):
full speed, and for a moment I feared that I
had missed it. But then I heard the screech of
brakes and the bus stopped dead a short distance ahead.
Of me. I ran as fast as I could and
came up to it just as the door swung over open.
As soon as I stepped in, the door shut behind me,
and the driver took off again at full speed. The
bus was dark inside, but as my eyes began to adjust,

(07:09):
I could see that it was almost full, despite the
fact that it was late at night. I found a
vacant seat and sat down, resting my weary legs. The
atmosphere of the bus seemed cold, colder if possible, then outside,
and it was a strange and disagreeable smell. I looked
round at the other passengers. It was dark and they

(07:31):
were all silent. They did not seem to be asleep,
but each of them just stared straight ahead. The deathly
quiet was unsettling, and the smell was quickly becoming unbearable.
I felt much too ill to say anything at all.
The icy coldness inside the bus chilled me to the bone,
and the strange smell was making me sick, shivering from

(07:55):
head to foot. I turned to the young boy beside
me and asked if I could open the window. He
didn't answer, he didn't even blink. I repeated the question
more loudly, but still got no answer. When I could
no longer stand the stench, I reached across and tried
to open the window myself, but the latch broke off
in my hand. It was then that I realized the

(08:16):
window was covered in cobwebs and mildew. In fact, every
part of the bus seemed to be in a terrible
state of disrepair, almost decay. The leather seats were crusted
with mold, and the floor was literally rotting and breaking
away beneath my feet. I turned to the boy beside
me again and asked, what's wrong with this butt's Without

(08:39):
saying a word, he turned his head slowly and looked
me in the face. I will never forget that look
as long as I live. My heart turned cold, and
all the blood drained from my face. His eyes were
wide and seemed as if they were popping out of
his head. His face was as pale and leathery as
a corpse. His bloodless lips were drawn back. The words

(09:03):
that I was about to utter died upon my lips,
and a dreadful feeling of horror came over me. I
became aware that everyone on the bus was staring straight
at me with that same ghastly look on their faces.
Their awful faces were covered in rotting flesh, and their
clothes were covered in dirt. Only their eyes, their terrible eyes,

(09:25):
were living, and those eyes were all staring menacingly at me.
A shriek of terror burst from my lips as I
ran down the aisle, threw myself against the door, and
tried to open it. In that single instant, as the
bus door swung open, I heard a mighty crash, and
the bus rocked to and fro like a ship in
a storm at sea. Then I heard many voices, children's voices,

(09:48):
all screaming in unison, and I felt a crushing pain
before everything went black. Seemed as if I'd been unconscious
for days. When I woke up and found my mom
was by my bedside, she told me I'd fallen over
a cliff near the old coach road. The only reason
I hadn't have been killed was that I had landed
on a deep snow drift that had accumulated on the

(10:10):
rocks beneath. I was discovered at daybreak by a local farmer,
who carried me to the nearest hospital. The surgeon found
me in a state of raving delirium, with two broken legs,
a broken arm, and a deep cut on my forehead.
The place where I fell, my mom told me, was
almost the same exact spot where the horrible school bus

(10:32):
accident had happened thirteen years before. Now you can believe
what you want. Some people may call me a liar,
others may say I'm just crazy, But I know that
thirteen years ago, days before I was born, I was
a passenger in that crazy bus crash. Up next a

(11:00):
plastic short story that's been described as one of the
most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature. It's
a story from eighteen ninety entitled An Occurrence at Owl
Creek Bridge by the legendary Ambrose Bierce. When Weird Darkness
Returns An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose bers

(11:43):
Chapter one. A man stood upon a railroad bridge in
northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below.
The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound
with a cord a rope closely encircled his neck. It
was a matched to a stout cross timber above his head,
and the slack fell to the level of his knees.

(12:05):
Some loose boards laid upon the ties supporting the rails
of the railway, supplied a footing for him and his executioners,
two private soldiers of the Federal Army, directed by a
sergeant who in civil life may have been a deputy sheriff.
At a short remove upon the same temporary platform, was
an officer in the uniform of his armed he was

(12:26):
a captain. A sentinel at each end of the bridge,
stood with his rifle in the position known as support,
that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder,
the hammer resting on the forearm, thrown straight across the chest,
a formal and unnatural position enforcing an erect carriage of
the body. It did not appear to be the duty

(12:47):
of these two men to know what was occurring at
the center of the bridge. They merely blockaded the two
ends of the foot planking that traversed it. Beyond one
of the sentinels. Nobody was in sight. Railroad ran straight
away into a forest for one hundred yards, then curving
was lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost. Farther

(13:07):
along the other bank of the stream was open ground,
a gentle slope topped with a stockade of vertical tree
trunks loopholed for rifles with a single embrasure through which
protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon. Commanding the bridge
midway up the slope between the bridge and fort with
the spectators, a single company of infantry in line at parade,

(13:30):
rest the butts of their rifles on the ground, the
barrels inclining slightly backward against the right shoulder, the hands
crossed upon the stock. A lieutenant stood at the right
of the line, the point of his sword upon the ground,
is left hand resting upon his right. Excepting the group
of four at the center of the bridge, not a
man moved. The company faced the bridge, staring stonily, motionless.

(13:56):
The sentinels facing the banks of the stream might have
been statue to a door in the bridge. The captain
stood with folded arms, silent, observing the work of his subordinates,
but making no sign. Death is a dignitary who, when
he comes announced, is to be received with formal manifestations
or respect, even by those most familiar with him. In

(14:18):
the coat of military etiquette, silence and fixity are forms
of deference. The man who was engaged in being hanged
was apparently about thirty five years of age. He was
a civilian, if one might judge from his habit, which
was that of a planter. His features were good, a
straight nose, firm mouth, broad forehead from which his long

(14:40):
dark hair was combed straight back, falling behind his ears
to the collar of his well fitting frock coat. He
wore a mustache and pointed beard, but no whiskers. His
eyes were large and dark gray, and had a kindly
expression which one would hardly have expected in one whose
neck was in the hemp. Evidently this was no vulgar assassin.

(15:03):
The Liberal Military Code makes provisions for hanging many kinds
of persons, and gentlemen are not excluded. The preparations being complete,
the two private soldiers stepped aside, and each drew away
the plank upon which he'd been standing. The sergeant turned
to the captain, saluted, and placed himself immediately behind that officer,

(15:24):
who in turn moved apart one pace. These movements left
the condemned man and the sergeant standing on the two
ends of the same plank, which spanned three of the
cross ties of the bridge. The end upon which the
civilian stood almost but not quite reached a fourth. This
plank had been held in place by the weight of
the captain. It was now held by that of the sergeant.

(15:48):
At a signal from the former, the latter would step aside,
the plank would tilt, and the condemned man go down
between two ties. The arrangement commended itself to his judgment
as simple and effective. His face had not been covered,
nor his eyes bandaged. He looked at a moment at
his unsteadfast footing, then let his gaze wander to the

(16:10):
swirling water of the stream, racing madly beneath his feet.
A piece of dangling driftwood caught his attention, and his
eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared
to move, What a sluggish stream. He closed his eyes
in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife
and children. The water touched to gold by the early sun,

(16:33):
the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down
the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift
all had distracted him. And now he became conscious of
a new disturbance. Striking through the thought of his dear
ones was sound which he could neither ignore nor understand.
A sharp, distinct metallic percussion, like the stroke of a

(16:55):
blacksmith's hammer upon the anvil. It had the same ringing quality.
He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or
near by. It seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but
as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He
awaited each new stroke with impatience, and he knew not

(17:15):
why apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer. The
delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency, the sounds increased
in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the
thrust of a knife. He feared he would shriek. What
he heard was the ticking of his watch. He unclosed

(17:37):
his eyes and saw again the water below him. If
I could free my hands, he thought, I might throw
off the noose and spring into the stream. By diving,
I could evade the bullets, and, swimming vigorously, reach the bank,
take to the woods, and get away home. My hum
thank God, is as yet outside their lines. My wife
and little ones are still beyond the invader's farthest advance.

(18:01):
As these thoughts, which have here to be set down
in words, were flashed into the doomed man's brain, rather
than evolved from it. The captain nodded to the sergeant.
The sergeant stepped aside. Chapter two. Pete in Farquhar was
a well to do planter of an old and highly

(18:21):
respected Alabama family. Being a slave owner, and like other
slave owners, a politician, he was naturally an original secessionist
and ardently devoted to the Southern cause. Circumstances of an
imperious nature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had
prevented him from taking service with that gallant army which
he had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the fall

(18:44):
of Corinth, and he chafed under the inglorious restraint, longing
for the release of his energies, the larger life of
the soldier, the opportunity for distinction, That opportunity he felt
would come, as it comes to all in wartime. Meanwhile,
he did what he could. No service was too humble
for him to perform in the aid of the South,

(19:06):
no adventure too perilous for him to undertake. If consistent
with the character of a civilian who was at heart
a soldier, and who, in good faith and without too
much qualification, assented to at least a part of the
frankly villainous dictum that all is fair in love and war.
One evening, while Firequhar and his wife were sitting on
a rustic bench near the entrance to his grounds, a

(19:27):
gray clad soldier rode up to the gate and asked
for a drink of water. Missus Farquhar was only too
happy to serve him with her own white hands. While
she was fetching the water, her husband approached the dusty
horseman and inquired eagerly for news from the front. The
Yanks are repairing the railroads, said the man, and are
getting ready for another advance. I have reached the Owl

(19:48):
Creek Bridge, put it in order, and built a stockade
on the north bank. The Colendant has issued an order
which is posted everywhere, declaring that any civilian caught interfering
with the railroad, its bridges, tom or trains will be
summarily hanged. I saw the order. How far is it
to Owl Creek Bridge, Farquhar asked, about thirty miles? Is

(20:10):
there no force on this side of the creek? Only
a picket post half a mile out on the railroad
and a single sentine all it this end of the bridge.
Supposing man, a civilian and a student of hanging, should
elude the picket post and perhaps get the better of
the sentinel, said Farquhar, smiling. What could he accomplish? The
soldier reflected, is there a month ago? He replied, I

(20:33):
observed that the flood of last winter had lodged a
great quantity of driftwood against the wooden pier at this
end of the bridge. It's now dry and would burn
like tinder. The lady had now brought the water, which
the soldier drank. He thanked her ceremoniously, bowed to her husband,
and rode away. An hour later, after nightfall, he repassed

(20:55):
the plantation, going northward in the direction from which he
had come. It was a Feederal scout Chapter three. As
Peyton Farquhar fell straight downward through the bridge, he lost
consciousness and was as one already dead. From this state.
He was awakened ages later, it seemed to him, by

(21:16):
the pain of sharp pressure upon his throat, followed by
a sense of suffocation. Keen poignant agonies seemed to shoot
from his neck downward through every fiber of his body
and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well defined
lines of ratification, and to beat with an inconceivably rapid periodicity.
They seemed like streams of pulsating fire, heating him to

(21:37):
an intolerable temperature. As to his head, he was conscious
of nothing but a feeling of fullness of congestion. These
sensations were unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his
nature was already effaced. He had power only to feel,
and feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion, encompassed

(21:58):
in a luminous cloth of which he was now merely
the fiery heart, without material substance. He swung through unthinkable
arcs of oscillation, like a vast pendulum. Then, all at once,
with terrible suddenness, the light about him shot upwards with
the noise of a loud splash. A frightful roaring was
in his ears, and all was cold and dark. The

(22:21):
power of thought was restored. He knew the rope had broken,
and he had fallen into the stream. There was no
additional strangulation. The noose about his deck was already suffocating him,
and kept the water from his lungs. To die of
hanging at the bottom of a river yet seemed to
him ludicrous He opened his eyes in the darkness and
saw above him a gleam of light, But how distant,

(22:43):
how inaccessible. He was still sinking, for the light became
fainter and fainter, until it was a mere glimmer. Then
it began to grow and brighten, and he knew that
he was rising toward the surface. Knew it with reluctance,
for he was now very comfortable to be hanged and drowned.
He thought, that's not so bad. But I do not

(23:05):
wish to be shot. No, I will not be shot.
That is not fair. He was not conscious of an effort,
but a sharp pain in his wrist apprised him that
he was trying to free his hands. He gave the
struggle his attention, as an idler might observe the feet
of a juggler, without interest in the outcome. What splendid effort,
What magnificent what superhuman strength? Ah, that was a fine endeavor. Bravo.

(23:29):
The cord fell away, His arms parted and floated upward,
the hands dimly seen on each side in the growing light.
He watched them with a new interest as first one
and then the other pounced upon the noose at his neck.
They tore it away and thrust it fiercely aside, its
undulations resembling those of a water steak. Put it back,
Put it back, he thought. He shouted these words to

(23:51):
his hands, for the undoing of the noose had been
succeeded by the direst pang that he had yet experienced.
His neck ached horribly, his brain was on fire. His heart,
which had been fluttering faintly, gave a great leap, trying
to force itself out of his mouth. His whole body
was racked and wrenched with an insupportable anguish, But his

(24:12):
disobedient hands gave no heed to the command. They beat
the water vigorously, with quick downward strokes, forcing him to
the surface. He felt his head emerge. His eyes were
blinded by the sunlight. His chest expanded convulsively and with
a supreme and crowning agony. His lungs engulfed a great
draft of air, which instantly he expelled in a shriek.

(24:35):
He was now in full possession of his physical senses.
They were indeed preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the
awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and
refined them that they made a record of things never
before perceived. He felt the ripples upon his face and
heard their separate sounds as they struck. He looked at

(24:57):
the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the
individual trees, the leaves, and the veining of each leaf.
He saw the very insects upon them, the locusts, the
brilliant bodied flies, the gray spiders stretching their webs from
twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors and all
the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming

(25:19):
of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream,
The beating of the dragonfly's wings, the strokes of the
water spider's legs like oars which had lifted their boat.
All these made audible music. A fish slid along beneath
his eyes, and he heard the rush of its body
parting the water. He come to the surface, facing down

(25:39):
the stream. In a moment, the visible world seemed to
wheel slowly around himself the pivotal point, and he saw
the bridge, the fort, the soldiers upon the bridge, the captain,
the sergeant, the two privates, his executioners. They were in
silhouette against the blue sky. They shouted and gesticulated, pointing

(26:00):
at him. The captain had drawn his pistol but did
not fire. The others were unarmed. Their movements were grotesque
and horrible, their forms gigantic. Suddenly he heard a sharp report,
and something struck the water smartly within a few inches
of his head, spattering his face with spray. He heard
a second report and saw one of the sentinels with

(26:20):
his rifle at his shoulder, a light cloud of blue
smoke rising from the muzzle. The man in the water
saw the eye of the man on the bridge, gazing
into his own through the sights of the rifle, he
observed that it was a gray eye, and remembered having
read that gray eyes were keenest and that all famous
marksmen had them. Nevertheless, this one had missed the counter swirl,

(26:43):
had caught Farquhar and turned him half round. He was
again looking at the forest on the bank opposite the fort.
The sound of a clear, high voice and a monotonous
sing song now rang out behind him and came across
the water with a distinctness that pierced and subdued all
other sounds, even the beating of the ripples in his ears.
Although no soldier. He had frequented camps enough to know

(27:05):
the dread significance of that deliberate, drawling, aspirated chant. The
lieutenant on shore was taking a part in the morning's work,
how coldly and pitilessly, with what an even calm intonation,
presaging and enforcing tranquility in the men, with what accurately
measured interval, fell those cruel words company attention, shoulder, arms ready,

(27:31):
aim fire. Farquhar dived, dived as deeply as he could.
The water roared in his ears like the voice of Niagara.
Yet he heard the dull thunder of the volley, and
rising again toward the surface, met shining bits of metal,
singularly flattened, oscillating slowly downward. Some of them touched him
on the face and hands, then fell away, continuing their descent.

(27:55):
One lodged between his collar and neck, who was uncomfortably warm,
and he snatched it. As he rose to the surface,
gasping for breath, he saw that he had been a
long time underwater. He was perceptibly farther downstream, nearer to safety.
The soldiers had almost finished reloading the metal. Ramrods flashed
all at once in the sunshine, as they were drawn

(28:16):
from the barrels, turned in the air, and thrust into
their sockets. The two sentinels fired again, independently and ineffectually.
The hunted man saw all of this over his shoulder.
He was now swimming vigorously with the current. His brain
was as energetic as his arms and legs, he thought,
with the rapidity of lightning. The officer, he reasoned, will

(28:37):
not make that Martinette's error a second time. It's as
easy to dodge a volley as a single shot. He
is probably already given the command of fire. At will
God help me? I cannot dodge them all. An appalling
splash within two yards of him was followed by a loud,
rushing sound de minuendo, which seemed to travel back through
the air to the fort, and died in an explosion

(28:58):
which stirred the very river to its deep. A rising
sheet of water curved over him, fell down upon him,
blinded him, strangled him. The cannon had taken a hand
in the game. As he shook his head free from
the commotion of the smitten water, he heard the deflected
shot humming through the air ahead, and in an instant
it was cracking and smashing the branches in the forest beyond.

(29:20):
Now I'll not do that again, he thought. The next time,
they'll use a charge of grape. I must keep my
eye upon the gun. The smoke will apprize me. The
report arrives too late, it lags behind the missile. That
is a good gun. Suddenly he felt himself whirled round
and round, spinning like a top. The water, the banks,
the forests, the now distant bridge, forts and men all

(29:43):
were coming Lid and blurred. Objects were represented by their colors,
only circular, horizontal streaks of color. That was all he saw.
He'd been caught in a vortex and was being whirled
on with a velocity of advance and gyration that made
him giddy and sick. In a few moments, he was
flung upon the gravel at the foot of the left

(30:03):
bank of the stream, the southern bank, and behind a
projecting point which concealed him from his enemies. The sudden
arrest of his motion, the abrasion of one of his
hands on the gravel, restored him, and he wept with delight.
He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over
himself in handfuls, and audibly blessed. It looked like diamonds, rubies, emeralds.

(30:25):
He could think of nothing beautiful which it did not resemble.
The trees upon the bank were giant garden plants. He
noted a definite order and their arrangement, and healed the
fragrance of their blooms. A strange rose. Yet light shone
through the spaces among their trunks, and the wind made
in their branches the music of Aeolian harps. He did

(30:45):
not wished to perfect his escape. He was content to
remain in that enchanting spot until retaken. A whiz and
a rattle of grape shot among the branches high above
his head, roused him from his dream. The baffled cannoneer
had fired him a random farewell. He sprang to his feet,
rushed up the sloping bank, and plunged into the forest.

(31:09):
All that day he traveled, laying his course by the
rounding sun. The forest seemed interminable. Nowhere did he discover
a break in it, not even a woodman's road. He
had not known that he lived in so wild a region.
There was something uncanny in the revelation. By nightfall, he
was fatigued, footsore, famished, the thought of his wife and

(31:33):
children urged him on. At last he found a road
which led him in what he knew to be the
right direction. It was as wide and straight as a
city street, yet it seemed untraveled. No fields bordered it,
no dwelling anywhere, not so much as the barking of
a dog suggested human habitation. The black bodies of the

(31:55):
trees formed a straight wall on both sides, terminating on
the horizon in a point like a diagram, and a
lessen in perspective overhead. As he looked up through this
rift in the wood, shone great golden stars, looking unfamiliar
and grouped in strange constellations. He was sure they were
arranged in some order which had a secret and malign significance.

(32:17):
The wood on either side was full of singular noises,
among which once, twice and again he distinctly heard whispers
in an unknown tongue. His neck was in pain, and
lifting his hand to it, found it horribly swollen. He
knew that it had a circle of black where the
rope had bruised it. His eyes felt congested, he could

(32:37):
no longer close them. His tongue was swollen with thirst.
He relieved its fever by thrusting it forward from beneath
his teeth into the cold air. How softly the turf
had carpeted the untraveled avenue. He could no longer feel
the roadway beneath his feet. Doubtless, despite his suffering, he
had fallen asleep while walking. For now he sees another.

(33:01):
Perhaps he's merely recovered from a delirium. He stands the
gait of his own home. All is as he left it,
and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine. He
must have traveled the entire night. As he pushes open
the gate and passes up the wide white walk, he
sees a flutter of female garments. His wife, looking fresh

(33:22):
and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to
meet him. At the bottom of the steps, she stands waiting,
with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless
grace and dignity. Ah, how beautiful she is. He springs
forward with extended arms. He's about to clasp her, and
he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck.

(33:43):
A blinding white light blazes all about it by a
sound like the shock of the cannon. Then all is
Darkness and Silence. Peyton Farquhar was dead. His bonny with
a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath
the timbers of the Owl Creek Bridge. Coming up, It's

(34:14):
our final story. A well known creepypasta written in December
of twenty sixteen by Joe Terrell. It's so well written
many people have mistaken it as a true story. It's
called The Strange Case of Edmondson, Kentucky, and it's up
next on Weird Darkness. The Strange Case of Edmondson, Kentucky

(34:48):
by Joe Terrell. On October sixteenth, nineteen sixty two, every man, woman,
and child disappeared from the town of Edmondson, Kentucky. The
date is relatively easy to pin down. The day before
October fifteenth, a traveling salesman named Arnold Johnson passed through
the small town in an unsuccessful attempt to sell an

(35:11):
exciting new product, the bagless vacuum cleaner. During an interview
with authorities afterward, Johnson said he noticed nothing unusual about
Edmondson in the day before the disappearances. He did, however,
remark that none of the housewives he spoke with during
his brief stay seemed remotely interested in his product, something
he found slightly surprising compared to the response he typically

(35:33):
received when demonstrating the vacuum cleaner to similarly sized towns.
Not only did I not sell a single vacuum cleaner,
but no one even wanted to see the product in action,
he said during the interview. If you could get in
the door and show the women what that vacuum could do,
you were guaranteed to say. Johnson chocked up his failure
to the apprehension related to the Cuban missile crisis, which

(35:55):
had begun a day before and had been dominating the airwaves.
It's hard to sell a vacuum cleaner when your audience
thinks there's a possibility there'll be radioactive dust by the
end of the week, he said. Johnson left the town
of Edmondson the evening of October fifteenth. The next town
on his sales route, Clement, was eighty miles away. He
drove all night and didn't think about Edmonson until investigators

(36:18):
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation knocked on his door
two weeks later. During the early morning hours of October seventeenth,
Randall Pierce, the farmer who sold his produce to the
only grocer in Edmonson, drove into town to discover empty
streets and closed storefronts. It was eerie, Pierce told the
county newspaper later, usually at seven in the morning, that

(36:41):
little town was bustling. I thought I had maybe driven
up during a holiday. Pierce lived with his wife and
three children on a farm fifteen miles outside of Edmonson.
Like most farming families in the early nineteen sixties, Pierce's
wife homeschooled their children when they weren't helping their father
attend the farm. I couldn't think if any holiday that

(37:01):
would close up a town in the middle of October,
so I started getting a little spooked, Pierce said. I
locked all the doors of a few houses and didn't
get a response from any of them. Around eight o'clock,
I realized there wasn't a single soul in Edmonson. Shaken
and a little disoriented, Pierce returned home to his wife

(37:21):
and children. He told them what he had seen or
not seen in Edmonson, and, with nationalistic fears of a
communist invasion running rampant, his wife convinced him to drive
to Clement and report what he had seen to the authorities.
The Pierce family had no phone at their farm. Pierce
arrived in Clement shortly after noon and immediately pulled into
the parking lot of the local police department. He told

(37:44):
the authorities what he had witnessed at Edmondson. Initially, as
Pierce tells it, his story was met with disbelief and ridicule,
But after multiple calls to Edmondson's police chief when unanswered,
Clement's sheriff Jonathan Ambrose gathered a group of men and
traveled to Dunson to investigate Pierce's claims. Sheriff Ambrose died

(38:04):
of lung cancer in nineteen sixty eight. However, in spite
of being a veteran of both World War II and
the Korean War, on his deathbed, Ambrose said that his
visit to Edmonson on October seventeenth was the most disturbing
and halting experience of my life, and thinking about the
events of that day would still turn the blood in
his veins to ice. According to the most recent census,

(38:27):
two hundred and thirty six individuals lived at Edmonson in
nineteen sixty It was a small town nestled between the
Hills of western Kentucky, named after a captain who was
killed during the Battle of eighteen twelve. Edmondson was populated
primarily by the ancestors who founded the town in eighteen
twenty five. Edmondson had one public school, a grocery store,

(38:48):
a bank, wells fargo, a hospital, clinic, two churches Baptist
and Methodist, and a post office. Most of them worked
small farms like Pierce or ran a trade. Edmondson, like
most small communities in rural areas, was self sufficient and
self sustaining. Every two weeks, the grocery store would be
re stocked and the post office would deliver mail every Tuesday.

(39:11):
For entertainment, residents of Edmondson would have to visit Clement
or another nearby town. On October seventeenth, sixteen ninety two,
Clement sheriff Ambrose, two deputies, and the Clement's primary physician
piled into a squad car and followed County farmer Randall
Pearce back into Edmondson. Ambrose carried a service pistol a

(39:31):
M nineteen eleven a one forty five ACP, and ordered
his deputies to bring their shotguns. Browning twelve Gage pump actions.
The physician Alan Cathy was brought along in case a
mass casualty event had taken place. Before he died. In
nineteen sixty eight, Ambrose recounted the events of October seventeenth
to his older son, who transcribed his father's testimony and

(39:54):
published it in a men's magazine to little fanfare. In
nineteen seventy four, tw hour drive from Clement to Edmonson,
who we all expected to show up in that little
town and find nothing wrong except for a drunk police
chief overslept his shift. Ambrose said, However, I couldn't deny
the fact that a palatable tension was present in the
squad card. My two deputies kept fiddling with their shotguns,

(40:17):
and Kathy wouldn't stop rummaging through his physician's bag. It
was the same type of behavior I observed among soldiers
before we were set to launch a big assault. Upon
arriving at Edmonson, they immediately realized something was, in fact,
very wrong. Pierce and Ambrose parked their cars in front
of the grocery store along the main street. It was

(40:38):
just as Pierce had described it. The town seemed completely
devoid of life. Ambrose, who personally knew Edmonson's police chief
and where he lived, decided they should check out his
home first. The five men set out on foot into
the residential neighborhood. All the men were struck by the silence.
It was then that one of the deputies realized that

(40:59):
not only where there are no people in town, there
were no animals to speak of. Yards with fences that
clearly meant to keep in dogs were notably empty. The
men arrived at the police chief's home to find the
front door unlocked. Ambrose, with his gun drawn, entered the
house first and was followed by his two shotgun toting deputies.

(41:21):
I don't know what we were expecting to find, Ambrose said.
I honestly thought we'd find a body. Maybe poisonous gas
had leaked from the ground at some point during the
night and killed off the whole town. But I think
what we found was worse. The police chief's house was empty,
the bed was made up in the bedroom, and the

(41:41):
fridge still contained bottles of fresh milk. The men were baffled.
Maybe they thought the townspeople had left to attend a
large community picnic, But as the hours dragged on and
the search continued, that possibility grew less likely. We searched
six other houses in the neighborhood. After we canvassed the
police chiefs house, Ambrose said, it was always the same story.

(42:03):
The house seemed fine, no sign of forced entry, unlocked doors,
and no occupants. However, a few similarities began to make
themselves parent as the men made their way from house
to house. For one, there was no luggage to be
found anywhere in the homes, and it appeared as if
a majority of the clothing was missing from drawers and wardrobes.

(42:25):
Pierce the farmer also noticed that much of the food
left in the pantries and refrigerators was perishable. There were
no canned goods. Ambrose, who just finished reading C. S.
Lewis's The Great Divorce, remembered thinking it's as if the
whole town had just packed up their belongings and boarded
a bus to Heaven. Some of the discoveries were less benign.

(42:47):
In the backyard of one home, the men discovered a
dead Labrador retriever. One of the deputies stumbled across the
animal and thought at first it was sleeping. The dog
was wearing a collar and was loosely chained to a
tree in the backyard. It was the first animal they
had seen in Edmondson since arriving two hours earlier. While
the men searched the home, Kathy, the physician, performed an

(43:08):
ad hoc autopsy on the animal. Rigor mortis had only
recently set in, indicating the dog had not been dead
for more than a day. Additionally, Cathy found raw hamburger
meat in the animal's stomach, hamburger meat that had been
peppered with small white pills. The dog had been poisoned.
In another home, they found the words Revelation nine, verse

(43:32):
one scrawled on a bathroom mirror in a light pink lipstick.
The men were unfamiliar with the Bible verse, and this
led to the next disquieting discovery. They could not find
a single Bible in the town. Edmondson had two churches,
and it can be deduced that a majority of the
township probably attended one or the other. In the early
nineteen sixties, a vast majority of Americans considered themselves Christian,

(43:56):
and even those who would not consider themselves very devoted
could be expected to at least own a Bible. However,
Ambrose and his men couldn't locate a Bible in any
of the homes they searched. When they expected both churches,
they found only hymnals or books of common prayer in
the pews, except for the poisoned dog. During their three

(44:16):
hour search of Edmondson, they found no signs of violence
or struggle. Every home's interior looked impeccable, and running water
and electricity appeared to be in working order. Ambrose was
reminded of the model communities the US Army had built
in New Mexico to test the destructive power of the
atomic bomb. As the sun began to slip beneath the

(44:37):
trees and the men's shadows grew longer and dimmer, Ambrose
detected another palpable sense of urgency brewing among the members
of the group. It res olvious the men didn't want
to remain in Edmonson after sundown, Ambrose said, and I
felt it too, somehow, since that if we stayed in
Edmundson overnight, there'd be another group of men from Clement

(44:58):
trying to find us the next afternoon, and I don't
think they'd find us before twilight ended. The men loaded
up in their cars. The two deputies, Kathy and Ambrose,
in the squad car and Pierced in his truck and
left Edmondson. Even though they knew the town was empty.
Each man reported a creeping sensation that they were being
watched from the darkened windows of the homes they passed

(45:20):
on their way out of town. We didn't talk much
on the ride back to Clement, and I'd be lying
if I said I was driving with any regard toward
the speed limit. Ambrose said, we had to get out
of there. At that point, I was convinced we had
stumbled across ground zero of some new communist weapons system,
something that could vaporize the inhabitants an entire town without

(45:41):
causing any collateral damage. But even then I knew that
story didn't completely add up. After the men arrived in Clement,
they agreed that Ambrose would contact the federal government in
the morning. None of the men expressed any interest in
returning to Edmondson. That night, Ambrose retrieved his families by
from their study and flipped to Revelation nine, verse one,

(46:04):
and the fifth Angel sounded, and I saw a star
fall from heaven onto the earth, and to him was
given the key of the bottomless pit. I didn't know
what to make of that, Ambrose said. The next morning,
Ambrose reported what he had seen in Edmondson to the
governing authorities in Frankfort. Things began moving very quickly after that.

(46:26):
While the rest of the world was transfixed by the
escalating tensions between Cuba and the United States, the FBI
sent an investigative team to investigate the disappearances at Edmondson.
Fearing a communist plot, or, as Ambrose had suspected, the
use of a powerful new weapon, the FBI shut down
access to Edmondson on October nineteenth, nineteen sixty two. The

(46:47):
strange case of Edmondson made its way into a few
local papers, but it was a story that always ended
up buried behind pages of international news. Because many of
the town's inhabitants were ancestors of the people who found
founded the town, there weren't too many relatives inquiring about
the status of their loved ones. The roads that passed
through Edmondson, there were very few, were re routed around

(47:09):
the town. The FBI finished their investigation in nineteen sixty seven,
but by then no one really cared about Edmondson anymore.
In between the town's disappearance in nineteen sixty two and
the FBI's final report on the incident, the nation's attention
had been distracted by a number of earth shattering events,
the assassination of President Kennedy, the burgeoning civil rights movement,

(47:33):
and the US's involvement in Vietnam. Unfortunately, the results of
the FBI's investigation were sealed and deemed confidential. As the
decades progressed, nature began to overtake Edmondson, Kentucky, no attempt
was made to rebuild or resettle the town. Edmondson soon
became a little known historical footnote in Kentucky's history. While

(47:56):
many of the structures collapsed due to exposure, a handful
of homes and one of the churches remained standing, enshrouded
by thick vines and a thriving deer population. In two
thousand and two, the official report from the FBI was
made public after a local historian placed a freedom of
information request. Dennis Miller, president and sole member of the

(48:17):
Edmondson Historical Society, learned the FBI officially declared the reason
for the town's spontaneous abandonment as quote fears related to
the possibility of nuclear annihilation and unexplained atmospheric phenomenon led
to a panic induced dispersal of the town. Of course,
that reasoning, as bull Miller said, the report doesn't even
mention the fact that none of the townspeople had ever

(48:40):
been accounted for. There were no reports of atmospheric phenomenon
by anyone in the area. However, by then, a new
theory had emerged regarding the fate of the Edmundson's inhabitants,
a theory that began circulating after two self proclaimed backyard
adventurers stumbled upon a hatch in the basement of the
abandoned First Baptist Church of Edmondson. The Mammoth Cave in

(49:04):
Kentucky is the world's largest known cave system. At least
four hundred miles have been mapped, and some scientists estimate
there could be another six hundred miles that are unexplored
and have never been seen by human eyes. As of
twenty sixteen, twenty six entrances into the cave system have
been discovered, and in nineteen eighty one, one of those
entrances was discovered in the ruins of Edmondson, Kentucky. During

(49:28):
the late nineteen seventies, the abandoned ruins of Edmondson attained
a cult status among backpackers and hitch hikers in the area.
With the roads leading to Edmonson in disrepair, getting to
the abandoned town is extremely difficult, but every year intrepid
amateur adventurers and curious locals would make the trek to
one of the country's greatest but forgotten unsolved mysteries. Nineteen

(49:52):
years after the disappearances, hikers Amelia Stephens and Julie Page
parked their vehicles thirty miles outside the edges of the
forest that surrounded the abandoned township and began their trek
to Edmondson. We visited Edmondson two years before that day,
Stephen said to Scientific Journal afterwards. It's creepy as hell.
Takes about a day and a half to reach the

(50:13):
town from the trailhead, and when you get there, you
really don't feel like sticking around. Most hikers passed through
it or camp overnight on the outskirts. That November, Julie
and I planned on staying overnight in the church. I
think it was more about testing our nerves than anything else.
The church Stephens is talking about is the first Baptist
Church of Edmondson. It's the largest structure still standing in

(50:35):
the town. The grocery store and Methodist church collapsed in
the late nineteen sixties. We arrived in Edmondson around nightfall.
On the second day. Stephen said, Julie wasn't feeling too
hot and it was beginning to sprinkle. We set our
tent in the center of the church and prepared for
our night at Coutella. Was going to be a miserable night.
The roof of the church leaked and a lot of

(50:57):
pews had been destroyed by vandals and raccoons. As they
settled in for the night, Stephen's in page, both couldn't
shake a creeping sense of dread. Even though they had
hiked into Edmondson before, they both felt unprepared for the
degree of uneasiness they were experiencing. Around midnight, however, exhaustion
got the better of the two of them and they

(51:18):
fell asleep. Two hours later, stevens awoke to a loud,
cracking sound. At first I thought it was thunder, but
then the floor slanted and we were falling. Stephen said,
there's nothing more disorienting than waking up an a tent
and experiencing the sensation of free fall. The floor of
the church had collapsed in the middle of the night,

(51:38):
flinging Stephen's and Page into an as of yet undiscovered basement. Luckily,
both Stephen's and Page survived to the fall without any
serious injury. We were both pretty shaken and frankly a
little banged up, Stephen said. But in all the time
we had spent in and around Edmondson, we'd never heard
of a basement in the Baptist church. We knew we

(51:59):
had found something no one else knew about. Armed with
only their flashlights, Stephens and Page set exploring the decrepit basement.
The room, hidden beneath the floorboards of the church was
small and appeared to have been carved into the bedrock
beneath the building's foundation. Stevens said there wasn't much to see.
It looked as if the room had been used to
store extra tables and chairs, presumably for after church socials.

(52:23):
But then they found the hatch. Page found it in
the far corner of the basement. Stephen said it was
set flush against the floor of the basement, and it
was made of four thick wood planks and the hinges
had been bolted into the bedrock. On the left side.
The door had one of those old fashioned drop ring handles.
Stevens gripped a hold of the drop ring handle and

(52:45):
after several tries, wrenched the hatch open. A square of
darkness stared back up at him. Page activated and dropped
a glow stick into the shaft. The pale green glow
of the stick stopped about five feet from the mouth
of the hatch. Well, we had to go down there,
Stephen said. It was probably three in the morning, and
we for sure as hell weren't going back to sleep.

(53:07):
Stevens tied a climbing rope to his back pant loop
and dropped down through the hatch. Page stayed above and
metered out the rope. As Stevens progressed into the darkness.
At the bottom of the shaft, a passageway opened up
to my left, pointing westward. It was obvious by then
that I was traveling through a cave tunnel and that
it was not man made, Stephen said. Eventually the tunnel tightened,

(53:31):
and Stevens found himself crawling on his hands and knees.
The roof of the passageway scratched his back and his
hands began to get rubbed raw by the cave's rough floor.
I'm not claustrophobic, but it started getting pretty tight, Stephen said.
I began to worry about not being able to turn
around and get back to the hatch, but I started
to hear something coming from up ahead of me. I

(53:52):
should have been freaked out, but at that point I
figured I had gone too far to bail out. After
fifteen minutes of crawling, Stephen's was straining to push his
shoulders through the ever tightening passageway, but the eerie noises
emanating from a head drove him deeper into the cave. However,
his adventure came to an abrupt end. The passageway ended

(54:13):
at a pile of rocks. Stevens said, each rock looked
to be about the size of my head, and they
completely blocked any further splunking. I could hear the noises
clearly now could even distinguish words and phrases, but my
journey was done. However, right before the passageway terminated at
the cave in, Stevens found a couple of objects. He

(54:34):
put them in his jacket and began backing out. It
took him thirty minutes to back up out of the
tight passageway. When he made it out of the shaft
and back into the church's basement to a relieved Page,
he took out the objects and inspected them. I found
a pair of eyeglasses like old fashioned readers glasses, and
a woman's shoe with the heel missing. Stephens said it

(54:55):
didn't mean anything to us at the time. Stevenson Page
hiked out out of Edmondson early the next morning, battered
and spooked. When they reached their car, they immediately headed
into Mammoth National Park and reported what they had found
to a park ranger. In the investigation that followed, it
was determined that Stephens Vanpage had discovered an entrance into
an unmapped portion of the Mammoth Cave system. Unfortunately, geologists

(55:19):
determined that the cave in that had stopped Stephen's progress
was at least one hundred feet thick. Unless they used explosives,
there was no way to investigate further. However, it was
the discovery of the cave entrance, coupled with the objects
that Stephens found, that held disturbing implications for the unsolved
mystery of the disappearances. In Edmondson twenty years prior, historians

(55:42):
dated the eyeglasses and the woman's shoe to the late
nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties. Most historians and geological
experts are now in near unanimous agreement about what had
happened to the inhabitants of Edmonston, Kentucky in nineteen sixty two.
Driven by fears of a first strike by Cuba during
the While Crisis and religious fanaticism, the people of Edmondson

(56:03):
sought refuge in a secret labyrinth cave system underneath their town. Unfortunately,
a cave in, perhaps triggered by their panicked influx through
the tight passageways, trapped every man, woman and child deep underground.
It's deeply unsettling when you realize that at the same
time Sheriff Ambrose and his men were exploring the town

(56:24):
that everyone they were searching for was probably about four
hundred feet underneath their feet, said Sam so, a ranger
of Mammoth National Park. If they had fresh water and food,
and if the cave had a clean air supply, some
experts believe the people of Edmondson could have survived for
at least six months underground. I reckon. It's a pretty

(56:45):
good theory, Stevens said, but it still doesn't explain what
I heard that night. The reason I dropped down through
that hatch and crawled on my hands and knees for
fifteen minutes doesn't explain the singing I heard while I
was crawling down there. I clearly heard voices singing the
hymn Come Thou Fount. Dennis Miller started the Edmonson Historical

(57:06):
Society in two thousand and one to raise awareness about
the town and the mystery surrounding it. He was twelve
years old. It really is a twentieth century Roanoke, Miller said,
referencing the New England colony that disappeared in fifteen ninety,
and there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to
figure out what had happened. Miller lives in Clement. Not

(57:26):
his days. When he's not researching Edmondson, he runs a
small pawnshop. Many people would consider Miller's fascination with Edmondson
to border on obsession, but when they learned about Miller's
personal history with the area, it begins to make sense.
During a family camping trip in nineteen ninety seven, Miller's
father and mother went missing after making camp in the

(57:46):
wilderness three miles north of Edmonson. Miller, who was seven
at the time, was with them when they disappeared. We
camped often, and we used a big tent for the
three of us. Miller said that night we went to
bad around nine after cooking hot dogs. I woke up
around one in the morning and realized my parents weren't
in the tent anymore and the front flat was open.

(58:08):
Miller spent two days alone in the woods, never straying
far from the campsite in case his parents came back.
After sustaining himself on hot dog buns and marshmallows, he
was discovered by another group of campers passing through the area.
After searching the area for two weeks, the police officially
concluded that I've been abandoned in the woods by my parents,
Miller said, but that's not true. My parents loved me.

(58:31):
I never doubted that, and if they had abandoned me,
why didn't they hike to their car. It was found
untouched at the trailhead. After the investigation closed, Miller spent
the next decade of his life in and out to
the foster care system, driven by a desire to protect
his parents' reputation and validate their love for him. Millard
began reviewing historical records and libraries and did a sweep

(58:54):
of the police records in the surrounding areas. Some might
accuse Miller of attempting to connect unrelated dots, but some
of his data and findings are shocking, to say the least.
For example, the three counties that border the location of
Edmondson have a missing person's rate seventeen times higher than
similarly sized counties in the United States. It's an area

(59:15):
we sometimes refer to as the Kentucky Triangle, said FBI
agent Brittany Hooper had of the state's Missing Persons Division.
For some reason, a lot of people seem to disappear
in those counties. Some of the disappearances can be attributed
to caving accidents, the vast swaths of unmapped wilderness, and
the recent boom of meth operations and rural areas. Also,

(59:37):
Stevens wasn't the first person to report hearing strange voices
and singing in and around the Mammoth cave systems. Some
people consider Mammoth National Park to be the most haunted
National Park in the United States, there have been dozens
of accounts of people hearing strange noises in the woods
and caves since the nineteen seventies, as well as sightings
of a tall, humanoid like creature called the Black Demon,

(01:00:01):
according to unrelated local lore. Geologists and historians dismiss many
of these accounts. After Stevens told authorities that he'd been
following the voices of singing as he made his way
through the passageways, expert cavers were quick to point out
that even if he had heard people singing, it could
not have come from behind the caved in rocks. The

(01:00:21):
cave in was too thick for sound to penetrate. Also,
because Mammoth National Park sits on top of the Mammoth
Cave system, it's not unreasonable to assume that a lot
of the strange noises and voices are a result of
sound bouncing and echoing throughout the caverns. Caves are, after all,
notorious for their disorienting acoustics. But Miller has a different theory.

(01:00:43):
The theory as macab As. It would be revelatory if
it turned out to be true. I think some of
the trapped people of Edmund cent are still alive. Miller said,
I think they're down there in an unmapped portion of
the cave system, and that they've chosen to stay below.
It's been about seventy years since went in, which means
the first generation's probably mostly died off and there's an

(01:01:04):
entire second or a third generation that only knows life underground.
As for the disappearances, Miller has an answer for that
as well. I think they have found other exits, and
every now and then they come out and take people, hikers, drifters, campers,
and locals. Miller said, I think that's what happened to
my parents, and it's been happening for years before they

(01:01:26):
were taken, and it continues today. On his off days,
you can find Miller searching the forests around Edmondson and
the outskirts of Mammoth National Park for additional entrances into
the Mammoth Cave system. He carries a GPS locator, repelling gear,
multiple flashlights, and a CULT forty five automatic pistol. For
some reason, they don't want to be seen by us,

(01:01:48):
Miller said, I don't know what they do with the
people they take, but I know what it takes to
maintain an underground society. It requires food and a fresh
gene pool. I don't like thinking about what that meant
for my mom and dad. But even if the truth
is ugly, at least I'll know and I'd be able
to do something about it. In spite of being armed.

(01:02:10):
As soon as the sun begins to slink behind the trees,
Miller makes sure to abandon his search and head back
to his vehicle. You'll never find me spending the night
in those woods again. Miller says, thanks for listening. If

(01:02:32):
you like the show, please share it with someone you
know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters,
or unsolved mysteries like you do stories on Thriller Thursday.
Episodes are works of fiction, and links to the stories
or the authors can be found in the show notes.
An Occurrence at al Creek Bridge was written by Ambrose Bierce,
The Ghost Bus was written by Christina Skelton, and The

(01:02:54):
Strange Case of Edmondson, Kentucky was written by Joe Torell.
Weird Darkness is a production the trademark of Marlar House Productions.
And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll
leave you with a little Light Romans twelve, verse eleven.
Never be lacking in zeal but keep your spiritual fervor
serving the Lord. And a final thought from Carmelo Anthony.

(01:03:17):
Every morning you have two choices. Continue to sleep with
your dreams, or wake up and chase them. I'm Darren Marler.
Thanks for joining me in the weird darkness.

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