The Haunting of Edge Hill | England's Most Documented Christmastime Ghost Sighting

On Christmas Eve 1642, shepherds witnessed something impossible — two phantom armies fighting a brutal battle in the sky over Edge Hill. When investigators arrived, they saw it too, and testified under oath to the king.

Episode 12 of 12 in the #12NightmaresOfXmas series!
IN THIS EPISODE: “Christmas Carols in the Woods”, “St. Mary’s Church”, “The Lady In The Pantry”, “Mrs. Eustace Returns”, “The Phantoms of the Mamie R. Mine”, “The Wreck of the General Arnold”, “Up In Flames”, “The Battle of Edgehill”, “50 Berkeley Square”
SOURCES AND ESSENTIAL WEB LINKS…
All stories in this episode are from the book, “The Spirits of Christmas: The Dark Side of the Holidays” by Sylvia Shults: https://amzn.to/3uT2vMA
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https://weirddarkness.com/EdgeHill

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
The English Civil War was a vicious contest between the
Roundheads led by Oliver Cromwell and the Royalists who backed
King Charles the First. The first and bloodiest battle of
the war was fought on a field called edge Hill
on October twenty third, sixteen forty two. The battlefield of
edge Hill was just seven miles outside the English town

(00:31):
of Banbury. It was here that two armies, each twenty
thousand strong, fought bitterly for hours, leaving four thousand soldiers
dead on the field. Neither side actually won the battle,
although both sides claimed victory. The result of the battle
was simply that the Roundheads were not able to stop

(00:51):
the Royalists on their march towards London. The battle was over,
but four thousand dead men still wanted to have. Two
months after the event, on Saturday morning, Christmas Eve sixteen
forty two, the armies met again to continue the battle.

(01:12):
But these were not the soldiers of Charles the First
in Cromwell. These were phantom armies, drums beating, muskets, firing,
horses neighing and cannons roaring all in the skies over
the battlefield. Several shepherds and other country folk were the
first witnesses to this ghostly reenactment. They stood rooted to

(01:33):
the spot in terror for three hours while the phantom
battle raged above them. When the armies vanished, the witnesses
raced to the nearby town of Kinnetton to find William Wood,
the magistrate, and a minister, Samuel Marshall. Just to be
on the safe side, Wood and Marshall listened to the
incredible story, but they wanted to see this phenomenon for themselves.

(01:57):
That night, the night of Christmas, the two men went
to the Edge Hill battlefield, accompanied by the original witnesses
plus most of the townspeople. Half an hour after they
got there, the spectral battle started up, just as fiercely
as the night before. The witnesses, all terrified at the
tumult of the raging battle, scattered and rushed home and

(02:20):
locked the doors behind them. The rest of the week
was quiet, and the townspeople dared to think that the
haunting was over. But the next Saturday night, the phantom
armies fought for four hours. Sunday night brought them out again.
The minister mister Marshall had to move out of town.
The continuous battles were simply too much for him. Others

(02:44):
left too, but would the magistrate and most of the
other townspeople stayed. Sure enough, the next weekend there was
another double feature. News of the repeating apparition reached the
ears of King Charles the First. He was immediately curious.
After all, it was his army that was tearing it
up in the skies over Edge Hill. He sent six

(03:06):
trusted men to Kinneton to investigate the phenomenon. The men
listened to Wood and others tell of the amazing sights
they'd seen, and that Saturday and Sunday nights they saw
the vicious battle for themselves. Staring up at the sky,
the man even recognized personal friends of theirs who had
fallen during the actual battle. In October, the six investigators

(03:30):
returned to the King and testified under oath as to
what they had seen. Within days of their report, the
King ordered a pamphlet written up containing all of the
eye witness testimony of the recurring Battle of Edge Hill.
The phantom armies that fought so bitterly for so many
nights gradually disappeared, but reports still come of the noises

(03:53):
of battle, of the pounding hoofs of hard galloping horses,
of phantom riders, heard thunder across the deserted battlefield, of
cannons still discharging their deadly loads. For centuries after the battle,
long after Cromwell's victory, long after Charles first lost his head,
the ghosts of edge Hill still could not find rest.

(04:31):
Welcome Weirdos, Merry Christmas. I'm Darron Marler, and this is
Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, mysterious, macabre,
unsolved and unexplained. If you are new here, be sure
to subscribe to the podcast on Apple or Android so
you don't miss future episodes. This is a special twelve

(04:54):
Nightmares of Christmas episode. Each day from December thirteenth through
Todayumber twenty fourth, I've been posting a new episode of
Weird Darkness featuring material from the new book The Spirits
of Christmas, The Dark Side of the Holidays by Sylvia Schultz.
And if you missed any of the twelve Nightmares of
Christmas episodes, you can find them all at Weird Darkness

(05:17):
dot com. Now bult your doors, lock your windows, turn
off your lights, put another lug onto the fire, or
yourself an eggnog and come with me into the weird darkness.

(05:48):
The old man had retired from the Baltimore and Ohio
rail line. The engineer had been known for his love
of the Christmas season. Every December, he'd buy sacks of
candy toss to the children who lived in the houses
along the tracks like a rolling Santa Claus, and he
would bellow Christmas carols as he worked, filling the railroad

(06:10):
cars with cheerful song. His retirement package had allowed him
to buy a phonograph and start a collection of records,
most of them, predictably, were of Christmas music. The old
man got a few visitors during the Christmas season, even
with his house tucked away in the woods. Any time
a friend or a family member stopped by, the old

(06:31):
man would cheerfully invite them in to sip coffee and
enjoy his small collection of records. When the old man
passed away, his relatives came to clean out his tiny house.
They took his records and his cherished phonograph, and the
house was left empty. In nineteen sixty eight, the old
V and O tracks that ran past the house were

(06:54):
taken up and not replaced. The old Man's house fell
to the wrecking ball as well. No sense in leaving
it if no one lived there and the tracks were gone,
All that was left was the old track bed. Hunters
found it a useful trail into the deep woods. Years
after the old man died. Not long after his house

(07:17):
was demolished, a hunter was in that part of the woods.
It was two days before Christmas. The hunter was driving
carefully down the track bed, mindful of the noises of
the forest around him, when he heard a sound that
had no place in that part of the woods any more.
It was the sound of a Christmas carol coming from

(07:38):
a well worn and well loved record. Pops, scratches, hisses
and all. As the needle coaxed the tune from the
aging vinyl. The hunter stopped his car and turned off
the engine to make sure his imagination wasn't playing tricks
on him. All around him, the music rose, threading through

(07:58):
the trees. The hunter shook his head at the weirdness
of it and turned the key in the ignition his
car wouldn't start. Frantically, he stomped on the gas and
twisted the key again. The motor just wouldn't turn over.
Then the hunter saw movement. Ahead of him, an old

(08:19):
man was crossing the track bed. The man walked slowly
up to the front porch of a house that had
shimmered into view next to the phantom train tracks. The
hunter watched the man open the front door of the
tiny house. As the music got fainter and fainter, the house,
the old man, and the last strains of music all

(08:41):
faded away together. This time the engine caught, and the
hunter wrenched the steering wheel around and slewed through the
woods to get out. On his return to town, he
stammered out his tail. He was astounded to find that
some of his audience, beat older folks actually believed him.

(09:02):
They remembered the old engineer who lived in the house
in the woods and loved the Christmas season so much,
and who invited visitors in to listen to his favorite records.
The next night, Christmas Eve, thirteen boys sat out for
the woods in three cars. They wanted their own experience

(09:22):
in the dark of the forest. They drove on the
track bed out to where the old engineer's house had
once stood. They parked, shut off their cars, and waited.
The boy's experience was just a little different than what
the hunter had reported. They didn't see the phantom house,
and they didn't see the old man crossing the tracks

(09:43):
to get to the house, but they heard the music
rising among the trees, sounding just like an old victrola
cranked up to wheezy full volume, and their cars would
not start until the music faded away. The boys went
back out for a few nights after Christmas, but nothing

(10:03):
happened on those visits. Legend has it that the music
can only be heard in the days leading up to Christmas.
After Christmas Day, the old phonograph falls quiet and silence
returned to the woods along the tracks until the next
Christmas season comes around. The town of Crompton, Rhode Island,

(10:30):
now part of West Warwick, began in eighteen o seven
when a cotton mill was built on the Pawtucks At River.
The town thrived with the success of the mill. In
the eighteen forties, the potato famine struck Ireland and Irish
immigrants skilled and textile trades emigrated to America. Many of

(10:51):
them were drawn to the employment offered by the mill
at Crompton. Unfortunately, the area had originally been settled by
English product the Irish Catholics, who moved into the area
a generation later, found a firmly entrenched intolerance. The closest
Catholic church was in Providence, which was a good ten

(11:12):
miles from Crompton. Few of the mill workers could afford
wagons at a ten mile walk every Sunday soon became onerous.
The Irish were desperate to build a Catholic church of
their own in town, but the Protestants refused to sell
them the land on which to build. The Irish Catholics
finally found friends in Paul and Mary Doran. The Dorans

(11:36):
bought a one acre lot, then turned around and deeded
it to the Roman Catholic Bishop of Hartford. In eighteen
forty four, the ground was broken for the construction of
a church. Mary Doran died young. In fact, she died
soon after work was begun on the church. There were
whispered rumors that her death was the result of a

(11:58):
retaliatory curse flowed by the enraged Protestants, but whether Mary
Doran's death had a supernatural aspect or not, it seems
pretty clear that she is still very much a part
of the church. She helped to found. A small church
holds an air of eerie mystery. Many members of the congregation,

(12:19):
especially children, feel uneasy within its walls. Even today, some
parishioners refuse to go into the church alone at night.
Father Edmund H. Fitzgerald, who was pastor of Saint Mary's
from nineteen eighty four to nineteen ninety two, readily admits
that he believes the church is haunted by the spirit

(12:41):
of Mary Dorian. He's been alone in the church countless times,
and many times he would hear footsteps on the hard
cedar floor. The footsteps would come up right behind him,
but when he turned around there was no one to
be seen. Sometimes the church's majestic tones would ring out

(13:03):
even when the instrument was closed, locked, and covered with
its cloth. As unnerving as these episodes may have been, though,
Father Fitzgerald says he never felt uncomfortable in the church
or frightened of the invisible presence, Father Fitzgerald experienced a
very special aspect of the haunting. One Christmas Eve in

(13:23):
nineteen eighty nine or nineteen ninety. He had offered the
Mass of the Christ Child that afternoon. By five pm,
the last of the parishioners had left, and Father Fitzgerald
was locking the church to leave himself. Suddenly, the tower
bell began to ring on its own, peeling out over
the church grounds. Father Fitzgerald immediately went back into the

(13:48):
church to investigate. The bell rope was moving up and
down all by itself, but there was nobody in the church.
He wrote later that bell can only ring from someone
pulling the rope. Even recent hurricanes did not cause the
bell to ring in this way. But Father Fitzgerald wasn't

(14:08):
alarmed by the spectral bell ringer. What better time for
it to ring, he said, than to celebrate the birth
of the Christ Child. On Christmas Eve. In eighteen eighty five,

(14:31):
a Canaan living in CON's Half, Ireland was relaxing at
home in the rectory when his cook came into the room. Nervously,
she pointed out that there was a strange noise going
on in the kitchen. It sounded to her like the
noise of a heavy wagon rolling past a rickety house.
The Canaan had no idea what to make of this,

(14:53):
but his cook was obviously alarmed, so he called another
servant and the three of them, Canaan, cook and man servant,
went down to the kitchen, which was in the basement.
By the time they got to the kitchen, the house
was vibrating, as if in the grip of an earthquake,
but none of the furniture or dishes were being chostled.

(15:14):
They were all perfectly still. The two servants were on
either side of the canan, each holding on to an arm,
terrified at the eerie disturbance. Suddenly the vibration stopped, but
beyond the closed pantry door, the three of them could
hear a tremendous racket. It sounded like someone was throwing

(15:35):
every china, plate, bowl and glass onto the flagstone floor.
Crash after crash came from behind the locked door, while
the servants clung to the canan for dear life. The
door was locked, but the key was in the lock,
and the canaan decided to open the door and investigate.
He reached for the door, but before he put his

(15:55):
hand on the key, the locked door the pantry swung open.
A tall woman glided out of the pantry. She was
wearing a loose white dress with a short black cape
around her shoulders. The canaan was paralyzed with fright, and
his two servants were holding out of his arms so
tightly in their own fear that days later the Canaan
had bruises from the panicky grip of their fingers. The

(16:19):
Canaan wrenched away from the servants to follow the ghost,
who had moved across the kitchen to the stairs. When
the ghost reached the bottom of the stairs, it vanished,
and the Canaan's two small boys in their bedroom three
stories above started screaming. The three thundered up the stairs
to the boy's bedroom. The boys were shaking, terrified at

(16:41):
the ghostly intrusion. The older boy, who was ten, told
his father that he'd been lying awake in his bed
waiting for Santa Claus. But instead of the jolly old Elf,
a strange lady glided into the room and then went
back out, and she hadn't left any toys. The Canaan
at his servants searched the rectory from top to bottom,

(17:03):
but they found no trace of the lady in white,
and when the cook opened the pantry door, which was
still locked, she found no broken china, and nothing was disturbed.

(17:34):
The dead must leave us for a while, it's true,
and sometimes our grief at losing them can feel overwhelming.
But if we're lucky, our loved ones will find a
way to let us know they still care for us,
even beyond death. Doctor Eustace's wife died early on Christmas Day,

(17:55):
nineteen thirty two. The widower was devastated by his loss,
but he believed that his wife's spirit lived on and
that they would some day be reunited. But as the
bleak days and weeks without her wore on, doctor Eustace
drew his grief around him and resigned himself to her loss.

(18:16):
About seven weeks after his wife's death, Doctor Eustace was
taking an evening stroll in his garden. Suddenly he stopped
in his tracks. There, in the fading light of the
setting sun, stood his beloved wife. Doctor Eustace later wrote
about the experience. She stood looking straight at me, as

(18:37):
though she had been expecting me. Her face and figure
were as distinct and clear cut as in life. She
gazed intently at me. Translated into words, her expression would
have been well rendered by how stupid of you? Why
so foolish? I believe that I smiled and that my
face reflected my joy. But the surprises were not get

(19:00):
over for Doctor Eustace. His wife's friend, missus Welch, came
by to offer her condolences. During her conversation, Missus Welch
claimed to have seen Missus Eustace on Christmas Eve, the
night before her friend had died. Missus Welch had attended
the midnight's service at the Convent of Poor Clare's. She'd

(19:20):
gotten to the church at five minutes before midnight, and
she said Missus Eustace had been at the church too.
Missus Eustace had greeted her friend and taken her by
the arm, helping her to her seat with a smile.
When Missus Welch had learned the next day of her
friend's passing, she realized that, of course it hadn't really
been Missus Eustace at the church, but that her friend's

(19:43):
spirit had been the one to help her to sit.
As Missus Welch spoke of her experience, doctor Eustace recalled
something else about that Christmas Eve As he stood by
his wife's bedside. He had noted that she lost consciousness
at eleven fifty five PM, the exact time her spirit

(20:04):
was guiding Missus Welch to her seat at the church.

(20:36):
The winter of eighteen ninety four was a very bad
time to work at the Mamy r mine on Raven
Hill at Cripple Creek, Colorado. Three men had already died
at the mine over that year. In the darkness, any
misstep had the potential to kill. One miner had been
killed in an unexplained blast. Another miner had the bad

(20:59):
luck to be standing under the bucket used to transport
workers to the surface. When a new cable broke, the
falling bucket smashed the miner into an unrecognizable mass. Outside
the mine, things were no less dire. A man named Garson,
who ran the mine's boarding house, came down with mountain fever.

(21:21):
Nine days later. He was dead. On November fifteenth, eighteen
ninety four, E. D. Blake was appointed manager of the
boarding house. On Thanksgiving night, Blake was working at the
top of the mine along with a foreman named Fatty
Root and two other men. They were all working near
the hoist bucket. Suddenly the signal bell rang three times

(21:45):
than once. This was the signal for man aboard, twist away.
The hoistman started the bucket up on its upward climb,
but before it got all the way to the top,
the bell rang once, the signal for stop, Then it
rang twice for lower away. Then the bell started ringing randomly,

(22:06):
throwing out a bizarre, contradictory mix of signals. This was
all kinds of wrong. The bucket and wind last were
the miner's lifeline to the surface. It was far too
serious of a piece of equipment to waste the operator's
time with silly games and mixed signals. Blake and Root
decided to put a stop to the shenanigans. Ignoring the

(22:27):
bell's signals, they hauled the bucket up and climbed in.
They bumped and clanged their way to the bottom of
the shaft, grabbing lanterns. They both went all the way
through their workings. There was no one down at the bottom.
When the two men came back up, the hoist operator
said that no one had come up before them either.

(22:48):
A few nights later, a miner was working at the
three hundred seventy five foot level. He came up to
the top ashen faced a man he said had just
been killed. The miner said he been placing charges for
blasting as he worked. Someone had walked right past him,
straight into the middle of the blast zone. He had
yelled at the man to get out, but whoever it

(23:10):
was had ignored him. The charges had detonated. As soon
as the smoke from the blast had cleared, the fore
men sent workers down to investigate. When they got down
to three hundred and seventy five feet, they were met
by a horrifying sight. A man stood in the lantern light,
blood streaming from several ugly gashes on his head. One

(23:32):
of his arms had been blown off. He stood with it,
slunk smartly over his other shoulder like a rifle. The
men were appalled at the sight of the mutilated miner,
but they were astounded he was still alive. They yelled
at the man, but he ignored them, perhaps and quite rightly.
He was in shock. One of the rescue party stepped

(23:55):
forward to take the miner's good arm, and his hand
went right through the injured miner. The shift boss grabbed
a drill and poked at the man, and the drill
swished through the specter as though the man was made
of smoke, not flesh and blood. The ghost brushed past.
The men, headed for the bucket and rode up to

(24:16):
the top. The rescue party waited until their racing hearts
had calmed down. Then they too, rode the bucket up
to the surface. The hoist operator at the surface swore
he hadn't pulled the bucket up, but once for them.
The hauntings continued. On Christmas Eve, Blake, Root and two

(24:36):
other workers were once again at the top level of
the mine near the bucket. The bell sounded three times,
then once, Who's down there? Root, the foreman asked. There
isn't anyone down there. The hoist operator said, but he
couldn't just ignore the signal. Better safe than sorry, after all,
he started up the hoist. What happened next, acording to

(25:00):
e Ed Blake, was recorded in a WPA writer's program
report dated nineteen thirty six to nineteen forty two. All
three of us started back, and the blood curled in
our veins. I hope to be spared ever seeing such
a sight again. Garson got out of the bucket first. Garson,
with his yellow, pinched face and staring eyes just as

(25:23):
he looked the night I saw him die of mountain fever.
Then came the one armed man, with the blood splattered
over his features and the shattered stump of an arm.
Between them. They lifted out the body of a poor fellow,
lashed to a plank, and laid it on the platform.
Then the one armed man reached down in the bucket

(25:43):
and brought out his arm. As he rose from the
stooping posture, he looked toward us the most ghastly object
I ever beheld, his face all cuts, his clothing torn
to shreds. He laid the arm on top of the
body that was lashed to the plank, and the two
raised the whole horrible thing to their shoulders and walked

(26:03):
out into the night. For a minute, no one spoke.
Then we all rushed to the door, and as true
as I live, we saw the two dead men, ghosts
or whatever they were, walk over the edge of the
dump and disappear in the darkness. But the maybe R
wasn't finished claiming its victims that night. The mine flooded

(26:27):
the next day, Christmas Day. The miners had to work
on emptying it one hoisted bucket at a time. Around midnight,
Fatty Root relieved the bucket dumper and was working the hoist.
The men on that shift had brought up dozens of
buckets of water, and the thirteenth was nearing the top
when the winding spool slipped out of its own frame

(26:49):
and the cable whipped out in great deadly loops. One
of the cable loops caught root around the neck and
lopped his head right off, quick as thought and as
cleanly as a geat. Many of the mines in the
American West were worked by Welsh, Irish and Cornish immigrants,
men descended from miners themselves, men who brought with them

(27:11):
generations worth of expertise in working underground. The immigrants also
brought with them a rich tradition of folklore tailored to
their specific calling of working deep under the earth. The
Tommi Knockers were a fairy race who lived underground. Sometimes
these pixies were helpful locating miners lost tools, leading them

(27:32):
safely out of the tangle of mine shafts, or warning
them of impending kyvans. But sometimes the Tomynakers would be
maliciously manipulative. They would steal tools and lunches. They would
tap a miner on the shoulder and laugh at his confusion,
and sometimes their tricks were deadly. The tomiyknockers would toy

(27:54):
with senses gone dull in the unrelenting darkness. They would
pretend to be a lost child crying for help, luring
miners deep into an unshored shaft, leading them into the
very real danger of a cave in. The miners claimed
they could tell when the Tommy knockers were around. They
spoke of a feeling of being watched, but if a

(28:16):
miner whipped around to catch the culprit, all he would
see was a skitdering shadow, the shadow that would disappear
right into a rocky wall. The miners also spoke of
hearing voices, unintelligible whisperings that would melt away maddeningly into
the dark. When they did catch glimpses of their tormentors,

(28:37):
it was a horrifying sight. The evil imps were said
to be two to three feet high, thin and wiry,
with eyes that glowed a sullen red in the black
shadows of the mine shafts. The many r mind closed
shortly after the Christmas Day tragedy of eighteen ninety four.
There's no record of that particular mine, as the mining

(28:59):
records of the State Bureau of Mines for Colorado only
begin in eighteen ninety five, but perhaps in an abandoned
mine somewhere in the rocky wilderness of Cripple Creek, Tommy
knockers still chatter in the darkness, and dead miners still
travel up and down in the derrella toist still toiling

(29:20):
in the mines, decades after the accidents that stole their lives.

(29:43):
The year was seventeen seventy eight. The young country of
America had declared its independence from Britain just two years before.
King George the Third wasn't about to let his colonies
go without a fight. The American militia needed all the
help it could get. In December, the Brigantine General Arnold
set sail from Boston. She carried twenty guns, with a

(30:06):
crew of one hundred six to man them. The brig
was a privateer, meaning that she was privately owned and
outfitted as a warship by her owner. Ships like this
were issued letters of marquis by the Providence of Massachusetts,
allowing them to legally chase down British ships and plunder them.
With these letters of marquis, the ships and their crew

(30:29):
rode the fine line between legitimate raiding in a time
of war and outright piracy. By Christmas Day, the ship
had gotten as far as Garnett Point, outside of Plymouth Bay.
The captain James mc gee anchored there and signaled for
a pilot to take the ship safely into the harbor.

(30:49):
But a storm was brewing up fast, and no sane
pilot would risk his life in such nasty weather. Without
a local mariner to guide the brigantine into the harbor,
Captain McGee would have to take his chances navigating the
unfamiliar shoals on his own. McGee decided to ride out
the storm in Cape Cod Bay for the night and

(31:11):
hope a pilot made his way out to the brig
the next morning. That turned out to be a cataclysmically
bad decision. The storm grew worse during the night. The
General Arnold, already dragging anchor, went aground on white flats
in Plymouth Bay. The ship was still a mile off
Plymouth's shore and being forced further into the sand. Then

(31:33):
the tide went out, leaving the ship stranded and listing
in very shallow water, and a storm that had been
menacing the ship turned into a deadly nor'easter. For three days,
wind and snow pummeled the General Arnold, with temperatures plummeting.
The snow froze to the sails and lines of the ship.

(31:55):
Captain mc gee ordered the man to chop the masts
down to lighten the ship in hopes of FeAs loading
her off at the sandbar. His plan didn't work. Also,
The men, once they had access in hand, used them
to break into the ship's casks of run. The men
went below decks to wade out the fury of the storm,
but under the force of the pounding waves, the seams

(32:16):
split and frigid water poured into the ship. The men
were forced back up onto the deck into the wind
and snow. Then the tide came back in waves washed
over the deck, adding to the misery of the already
freezing crew. There was one small boat on board. Three
of the men decided to take the yawl and row

(32:39):
ashore for help. They risked being battered to pieces by
the pounding waves, but they decided it was worth a try.
It's unclear whether they came up with this plan on
their own or if they had Captain McGee's permission to
make a run for it. The men piled into the
yawl and were able to row to a frozen part
of the bay, where they walked across the ice to

(33:00):
a schooner that had gotten trapped. The three men who
made their escape never did come back. Around sunset on Saturday,
December twenty sixth, the tide went out again. The brig
was no longer battered by the pounding waves, but during
the night the wind shifted to the northeast, bringing bitterly
cold temperatures. Soon enough, the tide came back in with

(33:24):
accompanying waves. Unable to seek shelter below decks, the men
were exposed to the cold on deck. Sailors clinging to
their ropes of the rigging to avoid being washed overboard,
froze to death where they were. By the next morning,
thirty of the men were dead. The survivors stacked the
frozen bodies to provide a wind break as the storm's

(33:47):
fury and lashed the decks. As the snow continued to
fall thick and fast, and waves battered the decks, the
stacked corpses froze into a solid wall of flesh and
wet clothing. By Sunday, December twenty seventh, the townspeople of
Plymouth realized the brig was stranded on white flats. They

(34:07):
tried time and again to row out to the foundered ship,
but the storm was still too strong. And Plymouth Bay
was a churning mass of ice floes. The crew was
forced to wait another agonizing night. The morning of December
twenty eighth brought hope. The people of Plymouth, desperate to
provide some help to the suffering crew of the ship,

(34:29):
had worked through the night piling ice floes together to
form an enormous bridge out of the sand bar. After
three days of bitter cold and howling winds, the storm broke.
The people of Plymouth cautiously ventured out onto White Flat.
The storm had brought such vicious cold that the salt
water in the harbor was frozen. The townspeople, bundled against

(34:52):
the cold, walked over the bridge of ice to see
if any one was still alive aboard the stricken ship.
Seven men were dead. The townspeople dragged sleds over the
ice bridge to rescue the survivors. Thirty three survivors were led,
shivering to warmth and safety on shore. Of those men,

(35:13):
nine died later. Then the gruesome task of recovering the
frozen bodies began. Here was presented a scene unutterably awful
and distressing, wrote a witness. It is scarcely possible for
the human mind to conceive of a more appalling spectacle.
The ship was sunk ten feet in the sand. The

(35:35):
waves had been for about thirty six hours sweeping the
main deck. Seventy dead bodies, frozen into unimaginable postures were
strewed over the deck. The townspeople of Plymouth decided to
lay the bodies in the courthouse, as it was one
of the largest buildings in town with plenty of floor space.

(35:55):
There was, however, one horrifying flaw in this plant. The
bodies of the sailors that had been stacked to provide
a grizzly wind break on the General Arnold's deck were
now frozen into a solid chunk, far too big to
fit through the courthouse door. No one wanted to hack
the frozen meat apart, so the massive bodies was put

(36:18):
into the town brook to thaw. The town's water supply
was a fresh water spring that bubbled up in a
constant stream, so it was slow to freeze. The fresh
water helped to thaw the bodies enough that they could
be pried apart. The bodies were arranged in rows on
the courthouse floor. While thawing the bodies, the rescuers noticed

(36:39):
something odd about the corpse of Barnabas Downs, the twelve
year old cabin boy. A fresh tear seemed to leak
from his open eye. Suddenly, the boy blinked. He was
still alive. Although paralyzed with hypothermia, Downs was saved. Although

(36:59):
he lost both of his feet to frostbite, he lived
into his fifties and wrote a memoir of his experiences.
In the book, he wrote that as bad as losing
his feet was, the pain of getting thawed out was many,
many times worse. In the end, several of the bodies
were claimed by relatives, but many of the sailers had

(37:21):
simply signed on to the ship in Boston, and Captain
McGhee hadn't yet had time to add them to the
ship's log. They remained unknown and no one came to
claim their bodies. After a couple of weeks, the townspeople
realized that even in the cold weather, the corpses had
to be buried, and soon around sixty unclaimed bodies were buried,

(37:45):
and a ten x twenty foot pit on Burial Hill.
The pit, probably a rubbish dump that had been dug
before the ground froze, was pressed into service as a
mass Grave. Captain James McGee lived on and had a
successful career as a merchant captain. He died in eighteen
oh one, and at his request, his body was buried

(38:08):
in the mass grave that held the bodies of so
many of his comrades. This tragedy left a stain on
the courthouse in Plymouth, both figuratively and literally. It's said
that the floorboards were so saturated with blood and body
fluids they had to be taken up and turned over,
and the psychic residue has led to active hauntings and

(38:30):
continues even today. Janis Williams, leader of Dead of Night
Lantern tours in Plymouth, tells the story of the wreck
of the General Arnold with ghoulish relish. Of course, that's
the way she tells all the stories on her tour.
She describes the sound you might hear if you stand
in the ladies restroom, which is located in the basement

(38:53):
of the courthouse. It's a shuffling, sliding sound, the sound
of freshly thawed bodies being across the courthouse floor and
arranged in row after row. She will show you the
picture on her phone that shows three young cabin boys
peering out of one of the courthouse windows and another

(39:13):
picture of one of the dead sailors. And Janis will
warn you with glee that if you are a woman
visiting the Courthouse Museum, you might feel a friendly arm
slide around your waists in an affectionate hug. But it's
not anyone, you know. When you turn around to smile
at your companion, there's no one there, just the spirit

(39:37):
of a lonely sailor looking for warmth and maybe a
smile from a pretty girl. Every family has their own

(40:03):
way of celebrating the holidays. Some gather with friends for
a big meal on Christmas Day. Some celebrations are a
little smaller, more laid back. But the Rooneys, a couple
in their seventies living in Seneca, Illinois, Christmas Eve eighteen
eighty five was a time to sit back and relax
with a drink or three. Patrick and Matilda Rooney, both

(40:27):
seventy two years old, owned a small but prosperous farm
just north of Seneca, about seventy five miles southwest of Chicago.
Joining them for the festivities was John Larson, their hired hand.
Neither Patrick nor Matilda were shy about lifting a glass
Patrick kept his little brown jug of whiskey topped off

(40:50):
once a week handily. His son in law, Michael Murphy,
who lived nearby, owned a saloon and was happy to
keep his father in law in booze. That night, Larson
came in from doing his chores. Patrick and Matilda were
already enjoying a cup of Christmas cheer. Larson had two
glasses of whiskey, then went off into his bedroom, which

(41:12):
was on the second floor of the house, just above
the kitchen. He had chores to do in the morning,
but the Rooneys decided to stay up for a little
while longer. Larson woke up in the middle of the night.
His eyes itched, his throat was scratchy and raw, and
he had a hard time catching his breath. He thought

(41:32):
miserably that he must be coming down with a cold.
Before he could get up to get a drink of
water to soothe his parched throat, he drifted back to sleep.
The next morning, Larson got up and went downstairs to
start in on his chores. He went to mister Rooney's
room to wake him. He found Patrick Rooney unresponsive in

(41:54):
his bedroom. Larson, concerned that Rooney had passed out after
a night of drinking. Tried to wake Rooney to help
him to his bed, but after shaking Rooney a few times,
Larson realized that the old man was dead. Larson hurried
to Matilda Rooney's room, but his boss's wife was nowhere
to be found. Larson began to work out what had happened.

(42:16):
He figured that maybe the Rooneys had had a fight,
Matilda had killed Patrick then run away. Larson walked to
the Murphy home and told the family of his theory.
Michael Murphy came back with Larson to the Rooney home
to investigate further. The two men searched the whole house,
trying to find any clue as to where Matilda might

(42:38):
have gone. As they passed Larson's bedroom, Larson glanced in
through the open door and noticed something that had escaped
his attention in the grogginess of first waking up. His
pillows were black. Larson picked one up and looked closely.
The pillowcases were covered with greasy, black soot. Larsen humped thoughtfully,

(43:02):
this was probably why he had woken up coughing and
short of breath in the middle of the night. The
two men search for Missus Rooney ended in the kitchen.
The stove, the table, the chairs were all covered in
the same black slick of soot, and in the center
of the room there was a hole in the floor
sharred around the edges several feet wide. Sickened, Larson and

(43:26):
Murphy made their way to the edge of the hole
and looked down on the cellar floor beneath the kitchen
one floor below lay all that was left of Matilda Rooney,
part of her spine, her skull, one hip bone, and
a pile of white ashes. Her left foot was still
in the kitchen, standing at the edge of the hole

(43:46):
in the floor. Her leg had burned through at the ankle,
and when her body had fallen through the floor, the
charred bone had snapped. Her foot, with the shoe still
in it, had toppled upright on the kitchen floor. He
was the only part of Missus Rooney that wasn't incinerated.
Besides being covered in soot like the glass chimney of

(44:09):
a smoky oil lamp. The only damage to the kitchen
was that the edge of the tablecloth had been scorched well.
That and the charred gaping hole in the middle of
the floor the LaSalle County Coroner, doctor Floyd Clendendon, had
only one body to autopsy. He determined that Patrick Rooney
had died of smoke inhalation. John Larson, since he slept

(44:32):
with his bedroom door closed, had been lucky to escape
the same fate as for Matilda Rooney. The coroner just
scraped the ash up on the cellar floor, along with
the bone fragments. He later reported that it would have
taken a fire burning at over twenty five hundred degrees
fahrenheit to incinerate Matilda's one hundred sixty pound body so completely.

(44:55):
He was at a loss, however, to explain how such
an intense fire could burn only her body and not
the rest of the kitchen or the house. John Larson
was briefly considered a suspect in the deaths of Patrick
and Matilda Rooney, but a couple of months later he
was exonerated on the strength of his character. Matilda Rooney's

(45:16):
death is one of the best known cases of spontaneous
human combustion, but it is by no means the only one.
There have been over two hundred reports of people mysteriously
bursting into flames. One of the earliest recorded in Paris
in sixteen seventy three involved a woman who caught fire
and exploded on the street. Witnesses said she had been drinking,

(45:40):
which seems to fit the pattern of alcohol involvement in
cases of spontaneous human combustion. Victims are also usually heavy set,
and they are often female. Strangest of all, nearly all
of the reported cases have occurred in the Northern Hemisphere,
many of them during the winter months. Sadly, the Rooney's

(46:02):
reputation suffered after their grisly ends. The Ottawa Republican Times
ran their story on December thirty one, eighteen eighty five,
with the judgmental headline tragic end of an old couple
whose weakness was the cause of their sad demise. Even
some of their descendants believe that the deaths were the

(46:22):
result of divine retribution for the Rooney's excessive drinking on
Christmas Eve, some houses just seemed to exude an air

(46:50):
of evil. They don't have to be crumbling stone castles
with ghosts from centuries past. Some, like Boorley Rectory in England,
seemed to be repositories of creeping horror, with poltergeist activity
off the charts for no known reason. Some like the
LUTs Home in Amityville, were the scene of some ghastly

(47:13):
crime in years past, the stem of which still clings
to the walls and permeates the air. And some houses
are just plain creepy for no reason. A shut in
died in the house decades ago, or a mass murderer
was rumored to bury the bodies of his victims in
the cellar floor for whatever reason, real or imagined, people

(47:35):
talk about certain houses in hushed tones, and kids cross
the streets to avoid walking past them on their way
to school. Fifty Berkeley Square is such a house. Built
in the late eighteenth century. The home was in a
fashionable district of London, but there was always something unfashionably

(47:56):
off about the house. Prime Minister George Canning, who lived
in the house until his death in eighteen twenty seven,
complained of hearing strange noises in the house. The hauntings
really began, as far as anyone can tell, in the
eighteen thirties. Apparently a maid went mad with fright when
something suddenly appeared in her bedroom. One account published in

(48:20):
a magazine of the day said that she was found
standing in the middle of the room, rigid as a
corpse with hideously glaring eyes, unable to speak. She was
taken to Saint George's Hospital, an insane asylum, where she
died the very next day. After this disturbing incident, the
family who lived in the house refused to go into

(48:42):
the maid's room. They said that when they touched the walls,
they were found saturated with electric horror. The house became
plagued with poltergeists phenomena, all the standard issue creepiness of
a haunted house, rattling chains, rapping noises, eerie blue lights
that drifted from room to room, and unearthly screams. Lord

(49:07):
Lyttleton heard of the maid's haunted room and showed up
at the house, asking to spend the night there. He
armed himself with two blunderbusses loaded with buckshot and silver
coins easier to come by than silver bullets. Lyttleton came
down the next morning, his cocky attitude shaken right out
of him. He claimed that something horrible had come into

(49:29):
the room and launched itself at him. He was able
to fire one of his guns at it, and it disappeared.
Littleton couldn't describe what it was that he had seen
in the room. Another visitor, Sir Robert Warboys, was deeply
skeptical of the whole idea of a haunting. He demanded
to be allowed to spend the night in the haunted room.

(49:52):
He too was armed with a pistol, and he took
a bell with him, just in case he needed to
summon help quickly. Time after midnight, the family was jolted
awake by the violent ringing of the bell. They raced
up to the maid's room, listening all the while for
the shot of a pistol. It never came. They burst

(50:13):
into the room and found Sir Robert sprawled half on
the bed. The pistol lay on the floor, unfired. Sir
Robert was dead. That he had not died peacefully. His
wide open eyes stared unseeingly at some unspoken horror, and
his lips were drawn back over his teeth in a

(50:34):
feeral grin of fear. Sir Robert Warboys read the coroner's report,
had been frightened to death. In the eighteen fifties, reports
of the haunting began to circulate more widely in the neighborhood.
In eighteen fifty nine, a man named Myers bought the
house at fifty Berkeley Square. The story goes that he

(50:56):
had been jilted by his beautiful fiance. He retracted to
an attic room of the huge house and slowly went
mad as the once gorgeous home fell into disrepair. He
was rumored to walk the house at night, candle in
hand to light his dismal way, weeping and calling out
his faithless fiance's name. During the day, he shut himself

(51:20):
up in his tiny attic room, only answering the door
to his servant, who brought him food and drink. In
the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, long after Myers was gone,
the house sat empty. The stories of fatal hauntings and
a brooding homeowner worked their dark magic on the imaginations

(51:41):
of many in the neighborhood. The neighbors spoke of ghostly
phenomenon disturbing the peace of Berkeley Square. At number fifty,
windows were thrown open, bells rung stridently at all hours
of the day and night. Stones and books were tossed outside,
and the furniture was thrown around the house. The owners

(52:02):
tried to rent out the vacant property, but nobody in
the area wanted anything to do with fifty Berkeley Square.
The house sat empty until Christmas Eve of eighteen eighty seven.
Two sailors from the frigate h M. S. Penelope were
on shore leave carousing their way through London. Edward Blunden

(52:25):
and Robert Martin had drunk all their money and were
stumbling through the streets in search of a warm place
to sleep. It was starting to snow when they reached
fifty Berkeley Square. Seeing the four rent sign on it,
the sailors decided no harm would come of their spending
the night there. They staggered their way up to the
second floor bedroom. Martin soon fell fast asleep, but Blundon

(52:49):
tossed and turned two keyed up to sleep. Also, he
kept hearing scratching dragging footsteps in the hallway outside the room.
At around two in the morning, Robert Martin cannoned out
of the front door of the house, gibbering and hysterical
with fright. He stared wildly around the square. He caught

(53:11):
sight of a policeman walking his beat and raced over
to him. Martin stammered out a nearly incoherent story about
how he and Blundon had broken into the empty house
to spend the night. They'd been attacked by something horrible,
but Martin couldn't describe what it was. He could only
gibber about some dark and shapeless thing with a gaping mouth.

(53:33):
He begged the policeman to come back to the house
with him. He had escaped, but he was afraid for Blundon.
The front door of number fifty was open. The policeman
cautiously went into the house, with Martin following fearfully behind him.
They searched the house but found no monster. They found
Blundon's shattered body impaled on the decorative iron railings of

(53:57):
the basement steps. He had made it out of the
house right through the second floor window. Edward Blunden's neck
had snapped in the fall. His face was frozen in
a rictus of terror. The sight of that face followed
the policeman in his dreams for the rest of his life.

(54:26):
If you enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with others
and build the Weird Darkness community by converting your friends
and family into weirdos as well. You sharing this on
your own social media and on Reddit really makes a
huge difference, and I appreciate it. Also, leaving reviews and
ratings on iTunes is a great help, and thank you

(54:48):
in advance for doing so. This special episode is the
final submission in my twelve Nightmares of Christmas series, the
collaboration with paranormal blogger and author Sylvia Schultz. The stories
I used in this episode are all from her book
The Spirits of Christmas, The Dark Side of the Holidays,
and you could find a link to that book in

(55:10):
the show notes. And if you missed any of the
twelve Nightmares of Christmas episodes, you can find them all
at Weird Darkness dot com. Do you have a dark
tale to tell? Share your story at Weird Darkness dot
com and I might use it in a future episode.
Music in this episode is provided by Midnight Syndicate. You
can find a link to purchase and download this dark,

(55:32):
creepy Christmas music in the show notes. You might want
to play it in the background of your holiday parties
this year. I'm your creator and host, Darren Marler. Merry Christmas,
Happy New Year, and thanks for joining me in the
Weird Darkness