THE KENTUCKY WEREWOLF: A Shapeshifting Shaman Who Terrorized Residents of The Land Between The Lakes

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Daryn Marler, and this is Weird Darkness.
Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre,
unsolved and unexplained. Coming up. In this episode, a Pittsburgh,

(00:30):
Kansas radio host gets a fright from a UFO and
his report is so convincing it became one of the
first officially investigated UFO reports in the US. Pauline Dakin's
childhood in Canada in the nineteen seventies was full of secrets, disruption,
and unpleasant surprises. She wasn't allowed to talk about her

(00:53):
family life with anyone, and it wasn't until she was
twenty three that she was told why. Located in rural
Kentucky and Tennessee, between Lake Berkley and Kentucky Lake is
a land that witnesses say his home to a strange,
almost unidentifiable creature. Will begin with that story. Now, bult

(01:15):
your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and
come with me into the weird Darkness. In the world

(01:39):
of strange mystery beasts, there are some that are certainly
stranger than others, and some that are more frightening than
others as well. Then there are those that are both
getting just the right balance of the bizarre and the terrifying.
This is exactly the sort of strange beast that is
set to hunt the forests of a patch of wilderness

(02:02):
in the US states of Kentucky and Tennessee. It is
a deeply odd case of a creature that seems to
not fit into any clear classification, and it's just as
horrifying as it is utterly weird. Located in rural Kentucky
and Tennessee in the United States, tucked between Lake Barkley

(02:23):
and Kentucky Lake, is a National Recreation area called the
Land between the Lakes, which was originally formed by President
John F. Kennedy in nineteen sixty three. Besides its modern
designation as a recreation area, encompassing one hundred and seventy
thousand acres of forest, over three hundred miles of shoreline,
and hundreds of miles of hiking trails, the area has

(02:46):
also long been plagued by a variety of high strangeness,
such as roving phantoms, indian curses, and mysterious lights. But
perhaps the most bizarre is the history of strange tales
of a bizarre bipedal creature which prowls the landscape here
and has been called the Beast between the Rivers, as

(03:08):
well as the Beast of the Land between the Lakes.
The creature itself is typically said to look rather like
a bipedal wolf, standing around seven feet tall and sporting
clawed hands, powerful jaws, with wicked teeth, glowing red eyes,
and cloaked in a fetid, rotting stench. The area and

(03:30):
its surrounding region have long held such dark legends from
before the time of the first settlers to trickle into
western Kentucky. Some of the first Europeans in the region
were French trappers and hunters, who claimed that the forests
were prowled by a massive beast, half man and half wolf,
which would howl in the night and leave the mutilated

(03:52):
carcasses of animals at its wake, a monstrous entity that
was called the Loup garou. In some instances, these hunters
and trappers were said to venture into the wilderness to
never be seen again, and this was blamed on the
mysterious ravenous beast. According to the Native Shawnee tribe, this

(04:13):
abomination was the spirit of a powerful shape shifting shaman
and outsiders were frequently warned away from the area when
settlers began to come to the region. They're said to
have been plagued by some large predator which lurked in
the shadows, killing and maiming their livestock, with witnesses saying
the culprit was a hairy wolf like beast on two legs,

(04:36):
which unleashed blood curdling howls and shrieks into the night.
Such incidents and sightings apparently occurred into more modern times
as well, with one post on a site called demon
Hunter's Compendium saying the sightings of the monster were still
frequent throughout the beginning of the twentieth century, and the

(04:57):
elderly group on the bench told some unsettling encounters they
or members of their own families had with it. Each
one told stories of finding livestock slaughtered, ripped to pieces,
and eaten upon cows and pigs with their legs dismembered
from the sockets. Even a few horses had met their
end with savage attacks upon their bodies. A few of

(05:20):
them described what they saw at different times when they
caught glimpses of the figure by peeking out of the
curtains of the windows into the night. One man said
had jumped out of one of the horse stalls one
evening while he was putting up some animals. It stopped
in front of him, arms spread out like it was
getting ready to grab him, let out a howl, and

(05:40):
then sprang past him and into the dusky shadows of
the sunset. This particular man said he wet his overalls
during the episode. Another man said he had never seen it,
but he would always hear its baleful wails frequently at night.
Not like a regular wolf or a coyote. No, he
said it was more deeper, longer, stronger sounding than what

(06:03):
would come out of any animal I've heard. Another old
timer said his wife had seen it trying to get
into the chicken coop, but gave up after getting tangled
in the chicken wire. They all had tales of someone's
hound dog getting killed, ripped apart limb from limb, someone's
pig or cow or chicken getting eaten, the mysterious footprints

(06:25):
left in the mud, and the stench it left behind
wherever it happened. There have seemingly been quite a lot
of alleged counters with the Beast of the land between
the lakes, even up into more modern times. In nineteen
seventy three, a group of students from Murray State University
were purportedly camping in the area one evening, and one

(06:46):
of the group went off into the trees to relieve himself.
When he came back, he was reportedly quite pale and
shaking with fear, and explained that he'd heard something large
breathing in the darkness, and that he had an overpowering
sense of being watched eyes heavy upon him. Not long
after this, something could be heard moving and crashing through

(07:08):
the surrounding brush, snorting and sniffing the whole time, as
if circling the campsite. The increasingly spooked campers could not
actually see anything at the time, even when the light
of their flashlights stabbed out into the clinging dark, but
they definitely hurt it, and whatever it was seemed to
be quite agitated. Just as they thought things couldn't get

(07:31):
any more frightening, there was supposedly a sudden, deafening and
completely unearthly howl that boomed forth from the forest to
shape them to the core, followed by the unmistakable side
of a pair of eyes glowing red in the night.
This was enough to send the panicked group running as
fast as they could to their nearby Volkswagen bus to

(07:52):
drive off. Whatever the hulking beast was gave chase, and
it reportedly actually caught up to them and grabbed the
back of the vehicle with enough power to stop it
in its tracks. The driver then floored it wheels, squealing defiantly,
and managed to finally break free from its grip. When
the students got back to their university, they claimed that

(08:14):
there had been quite a lot of damage done to
their vehicle, including gashes, gouges, and bits of missing metal.
Another account related by a frequent blogger on this phenomenon
named Jan Thompson, allegedly occurred to her and her cousin Joe,
in the summer of nineteen seventy eight. Joe apparently was
an avid rider of dirt bikes, with which he would

(08:37):
go tearing about over forest trails in the land between
the lakes, and on this day he was out as
usual as Jan and her other cousin sat outside. At
some point, they claimed that they could hear Joe's dirt
bike suddenly issue a frantic whine as it rapidly picked
up speed and began racing in their direction at top speed,
and he soon came bursting from the trees to make

(08:59):
a French bee line towards the house, finally skidding wildly
to a halt, after which the visibly shaken Joe began
gazing back towards the tree line. Jan would explain what
happened next. Thus we followed his gaze, not understanding what
this escapade was all about. In silence, we watched him
for about thirty seconds, and then the dogs started barking, growling,

(09:23):
and then whining, trying to get out of the pen
in a frantic panic of digging and gnawing at the fencing.
It grabbed me. Look at my leg, Joe screamed, making
us jump with alarm at the sound of his voice.
We looked down at his levies and saw scratch marks
going across his right thigh, scratches that tore through the
tough denim and left small bloody marks on his skin.

(09:45):
The marks were like a bear's claw rake, not those
caused by branches or sticky bushes, but a definite, wide
pattern of a pawprint. It walked on two legs. His
voice startled us again. As he was trying to tell
his story between huge gulps of air. He was frightened
beyond belief, and the bits and pieces of what he

(10:06):
was striving with extreme effort to tell us was coming
out in loud syllables that filled us both with the
same dread. It was following me through the woods along
the path from the old sawmill, Harry. It was so hairy,
and its snout was so long, and it walked on
two legs. It ran on two legs. His voice was sputtering, slowing.

(10:27):
His eyes were still wide, and I could see the
pulse of his heartbeat throbbing under the skin of his temples.
This very dramatic and impressively detailed report goes on to
say that the air was then pierced by what sounded
like the howl of a wolf, only with a nightmarish
intensity that invoked a profoundly deep sense of heavy dread.

(10:49):
The dogs at this time were reportedly shaking, cowering in fear,
and staring expectedly at the dim forest. Then out of
the trees crept a creature the likes of which none
of them had ever seen. It was described as being huge, hairy,
and walking on two legs. The snout was long, and
the witness was very specific that it was much different

(11:10):
in appearance than Bigfoot. When the security light of the
driveway turned on, the startled creature was illuminated, and with
the darkness melted away, it went from a vague shadow
figure to something that was very wolf like in appearance,
with large black eyes. The witnesses purportedly then ran into
the house in a panic, grabbed kitchen knives, and then

(11:32):
hid under a bed in terror as they listened to
the beast bang around outside of the house and break
one of the upstairs windows, the dogs barking viciously the
whole time. It was not until the ant came home
in her car that the strange creature seemed to give
up and flee away into the night. Jan also presented

(11:53):
another case just as terrifying, which allegedly happened in the
early nineteen eighties when police called to a campground in
an area known for its abandoned military bunkers, where they
were greeted with a rather morbid and grizzly sight. There
in the campsite were the badly mutilated bodies of three
of the four campers. A young couple and their child,

(12:15):
with their corpses in an appalling state. They seemed to
have been ruthlessly savaged and half eaten by some powerful
wild animal, with limbs missing, flesh flayed or torn from bone,
organs scattered about on the ground, and deep scratches and
bite marks all over them, none of which matched any
animal known to inhabit the region. As authorities searched for

(12:39):
the missing child, one police officer called Adam went up
ahead to investigate, and Jan would describe what happened next.
From somewhere in the nearby woods, about fifty yards from
the campfire, a scream was heard, a man's shriek that
turned into a long wail and then to whimpering. As
others arrived, they could see by the gleam of several

(13:00):
flashlights that the cop was holding his hat in one
hand at his light in the other. There was blood
on his face, the front of his shirt, and on
the brim of his hat. More blood could be seen
dripping on him. It was coming from above, high in
the trees. The flashlights swung searching for the source of
the mysterious bleeding. A very small hand could be seen

(13:20):
dangling down from a tree limb way up high, as
well as a slender, lifeless leg that still had a
white sock still on the foot the missing child had
been located. It had been Adam that the blood had
trickled upon hitting his hat, first making him look up
and then feeling the thick, cold fluid sprinkling his face,

(13:41):
then sliding down to his neatly buttoned shirt. It had
been Atom that had screamed. The little girl had apparently
been carried up the tree and leisurely eaten upon while
carefully laid across a large tree branch. More of the
same long, gray and brown hair was found sticking in
the bark at the tree near the body. Samples of

(14:02):
saliva were supposedly sent for analysis and keen back as
being from an unidentified species akin to a wolf. According
to Jan, this report never made it into the news
or media and was covered up by the local government
as it was seen as a threat to the tourism
industry if word of such a mysteriously gruesome incident got out.

(14:23):
This lack of any concrete sources to follow up on
makes it quite hard to corroborate any of this tale,
making its veracity of truth uncertain. Without any evidence, coverage
in the news, or known documentation of any kind, it's
impossible to substantiate any of this, and it remains merely
another tantalizing, yet ultimately inconclusive, witness account. Jan's report apparently

(14:47):
met with a good amount of scathing skepticism online, with
many accusing it of being a fabricated urban legend, but
for her part, she remains adamant that it is true,
and has related other accounts of the beast of the
land between the Lakes as well, saying, there are several
more stories that I have heard about this werewolf over

(15:07):
in LBL that have been told to me over the years.
After this particular incident. There were several groups of boy
Scouts that had seen it, several more campers, fishermen, and
boaters that had seen it from the safety of their
boats floating in some of the many bays that touched
upon the shoreline. Hikers and bikers have heard its howling
and have seen something stalking them while they were on

(15:29):
rural trails hiding amongst the trees and foliage. Hunters have
run across deer carcasses that had been brutally torn apart
in the meantime, others have come forward with their own
experiences with the fierce, elusive beast, and reports of a
feeling of being watched, hearing howls, or coming across the

(15:49):
badly mulled carcasses of deer and other wildlife have come
in on occasion. Many experienced hunters who are aware of
these spooky stories are said to avoid the cursed area
altogether and will warn others to go hunting there at
their own risk. Sometimes physical evidence is claimed, such as
odd footprints, tufts of hair, and dugout nests that appear

(16:14):
to have been slept in by something large, but these
have all remained inconclusive at best. There is simply no
indication that anything is out lurking in the land between
the lakes other than the witness testimony, much of which
is uncorroborated and can only be found floating around the
Internet and repeated on various websites, meaning any truth behind

(16:35):
it all remains murky and uncertain. The only real, solid
and organized chronicle of these events is presented in a
documentary by Marton Nunneley called Hunt the dog Man. High
Strangeness in Western Kentucky. I'll place a link to the
documentary in the show notes so you can watch it
for yourself later. What is the beast of the Land

(16:57):
between the Lakes? Witnesses claim something other than Bigfoot, So
what could it be? Is it a misidentification of some
other animal? Is it an actual werewolf as some have claimed,
or a variation of the various dog man cryptids reported
from all over the United States. Could it perhaps be
some sort of specter or spirit and this is why

(17:20):
it leaves behind little to no physical evidence and is
the reason for its outlandish appearance? Or is this all
just tall tales, myth and urban legend. No one really knows,
and it remains an unsettling case of what might or
might not be something very strange indeed roaming about in

(17:42):
the wilderness of the Land between the Lakes. Up next
on Weird Darkness. Pauline Dakin's childhood in Canada in the
nineteen seventies was full of secrets, disruption and unpleasant surprises.
Wasn't allowed to talk about her family life with anyone,

(18:03):
and it wasn't until she was twenty three that she
was finally told why there was always something unusual about

(18:33):
Pauline Dakin's family my brother and I would say, what
do you think is wrong with our family? Why are
we so weird? But that was the mystery that just
didn't get answered. Pauline's parents, Warren and Ruth, had separated
when she was five, the summer before she started school. Warren,
a successful businessman, was a heavy drinker who could become violent,

(18:55):
and a point came when Ruth just couldn't take it anymore.
Pauline was seven. Ruth took the children on a holiday
to Winnipeg, more than a thousand miles or sixteen hundred
kilometers from their home in Vancouver. But when they arrived,
Ruth told them that they were never going back. There
was no opportunity to say goodbye. It was just this

(19:16):
abrupt severing of relationships. Pauline says when she asked her
mother why she had done this, there was never a
good explanation. She would only say, I'm sorry, I can't
tell you. When you're older, I will tell you. The
same thing happened again four years later. This time the
family moved to New Brunswick on Canada's eastern coast. Apart

(19:40):
from this, life was quite normal for Pauline's family. They'd
start again and build a new life in a new town.
But below the surface, Pauline was confused, anxious, and falling
into depression. I knew something bad was happening, she says.
I didn't know what it was, but there was always
a sense of something dire that was unspoken. By the

(20:03):
time Pauline was eleven, she had attended six different schools
and nearly as many years, and had lost touch with
her dad. But another man had come into the family's life,
a church minister called Stan Sears. Pauline's mother had met
Stan at a support group for the families of alcoholics.
Stan was a counselor there and Ruth had gone to

(20:24):
him when she was struggling with Warren's drinking and preparing
to leave him. Both times that Pauline's family had disappeared,
Stan's family had moved in lockstep with them. So whatever
had been going on, they were a part of I
knew that, Pauline says. Once in New Brunswick, they put
down roots. By nineteen eighty eight, at the age of

(20:45):
twenty three, Pauline had graduated from university and was working
on a local newspaper in the city of Saint John
when her mother telephoned with an unexpected proposal. She said, Okay,
I'm ready to explain all of these strange things that
have happened and throughout your life. Pauline was to meet
her mother outside a motel halfway between the two cities

(21:06):
they were living in. When she arrived, Ruth slipped a
note and an empty envelope into Pauline's hands. The note read,
don't say anything, take your jewelry off, put it in
the envelope. I'll explain, Just don't talk. It was the
most bizarre thing, Pauline remembers. I thought, who are you?
What are you doing? But I did what she told me.

(21:29):
Her mother took her to a motel room, where Pauline
was surprised to find Stan Sears waiting for them. Stan
and Ruth told Pauline that for the past sixteen years
they'd been on the run from the mafia, and that
Pauline's family had been targeted because her father, Warren, had
been involved in organized crime. She couldn't wear her jewelry

(21:49):
because it needed to be tested for bugs. It was unbelievable,
Pauline says, but I remember a feeling of terror coming
over me, that this might be something we could never escape.
Stan explained that it had all started after he'd counseled
a mafia kingpin who wanted to turn his back on
his criminal past. When the mob discovered that the man

(22:10):
had broken its code of silence and come to Stan
for counseling, they had assassinated him and then come after Stan,
thinking he probably knew too much. Later, when Ruth, the
embittered ex wife of a mobster, had started working as
a secretary at Stan's church, she too had become a target.
I was then told that each of us had somebody

(22:32):
following us, keeping an eye on us from a distance,
Pauline says, and that there had been many attempts to
either kidnap, poison, or kill me, but that these agents
had intervened to keep me safe many times over the years.
As well as this government sanctioned task force. Stan also
explained that there were shadowy communities, towns, or villages in

(22:54):
different parts of the country where people who'd been targeted
by the mafia could go into protective custody. This was
known as the Weird World. After years on the run,
Pauline's mother said that she was going to go inside
for protection. She was going to disappear again. Stan was
already living in one of these communities called Place of Hope,

(23:16):
he said, but his wife hadn't wanted to go inside
with him, so he was now living there alone and
working in this weird world with its agents. Stan and
Ruth told Pauline that this was their chance to finally
be together. They'd been in love for many years, but
they'd never been able to act on their feelings. Pauline
was in shock. It was too much to take in.

(23:39):
I was sick with fear and sadness, and it just
felt like life was shattering all around me, she says.
Pauline spent that weekend listening to Stan and Ruth's stories,
which explained many of the odd things that had happened
while she was growing up, like the times she'd come
home to find her mother throwing away all the food
from their fridge. The story orry at the time was

(24:00):
that the food had gone bad, but I remember thinking,
ketchup and mustard don't go bad. There are things in
there that don't go bad quickly. Why would you do that?
Stan explained that they'd received word that somebody was trying
to poison them, so everything had to be thrown away.
And there was the time her family had gone hiking
in the middle of the school week and stayed overnight

(24:23):
in a mountain cabin. People had been coming after them,
Stan explained, and they had to get away for a
day or two. Then there was the day the family
had skipped school to go bowling, and the time that
children had come home from school and been rushed through
the house, told to scrub their feet in the bath,
and made to wear plastic bags over their socks for
the rest of the day. There was a sinister reason

(24:45):
for all of these strange episodes. As unbelievable as it sounds,
there were all these explanations that made pieces that had
been so troubling fall into some kind of pattern, a
narrative Pauline says. When it was time for Pauline to leave,
Stan asked if he could put a transmitter on her
car to make it easier for the good guys to

(25:06):
follow her and make sure she was safe. He also
gave her a small transistor radio that he said had
a broadcast function, so that Pauline could send a call
for help. He warned me, only use it if your
life is really in danger, because people will respond and
put their life on the line for you. Pauline returned

(25:26):
to the home she was renovating with her boyfriend and
to her job in the newsroom, but she was struggling
to come to terms with what she'd been told and
growing more and more fearful by the day. She was
constantly looking over her shoulder for people or cars that
might be following her, and became too scared to eat
at restaurants in case somebody tried to slip something into

(25:47):
her food. She planned escape routes from inside her own
home and assumed that her telephone line was bugged. Over time,
more and more alarming information came from Stan and Ruth
about the weird world, including the news that many people
they knew weren't really the people they seemed to be.

(26:08):
The story was that some people who had been around
us during my childhood who were involved with organized crime
had been picked up, arrested, killed, or otherwise disappeared and
then replaced by doubles. Pauline says, sometimes the double was
put in place by the good guys, and sometimes the
double would be put in place by the bad guys,

(26:29):
so you were never one hundred percent sure whose double
it was. It was espionage. The doubles, Stan explained, spent
months studying home videos to learn how to behave convincingly,
and used specialist plastic surgeons and makeup artists to perfect
their disguises. Pauline encountered these doubles from time to time.

(26:51):
On the day her brother got married, for example, she
met her father and her aunt for the first time
in years. Both, she was told were doubles. My mother
was so upset at that wedding because her sister was
supposed to be a double. Pauline recalls, she kept saying,
but look at her toes. Those are exactly Penny's toes.
How could you make somebody else's toes look like that?

(27:13):
Pauline remembers looking at her dad that day. He had
a nevus, a little overgrowth of cells just over the
iris of his eye. How on earth could it have
been replicated, she wondered. But then I said that to Stan,
he said, Oh, it's contact lenses, and there's prosthetics, and
there's this, and there's that. There was always an answer,

(27:35):
she says. Pauline and her mother also received dozens of
letters from people inside the weird world. From her father
and godfather, for example, who were being held in a
top secret prison there. Stan said, the handwriting always looked authentic,
and the letters talked about things from their shared past.
They were convincing. Who on earth would have time to

(27:57):
forge them if they weren't real, Pauline wondered. Despite being
plagued by doubts, Pauline always had to acknowledge that the
two people telling her this incredible story were her mother
and Stan, the most trustworthy people. She knew. It was
a crazy story, and I did have some challenges believing it,
she says. But if I couldn't trust them, who could

(28:19):
I trust. Pauline began to feel that her work as
a reporter covering school board meetings and town council meetings
was irrelevant when her own life was in constant danger,
and being sworn to secrecy had placed a gulf between
her and her boyfriend and everyone else in her life.
I just thought, I can't live like this, Pauline remembers.

(28:42):
She decided that she would go inside with her mother.
Stan told Pauline that there was work inside that she
could do, that there was a community of good people
there that she could be a part of. He was
building a cottage for himself and her mother, and said
he could arrange for one to be built for her too.
He brought her carpet samples and her plans and a
photo of the house that she would have. Pauline left

(29:04):
her job, sold her house, and broke up with her boyfriend.
She moved to Halifax in Nova Scotia, where she found
work and a new home. While she and her mother
waited for word that it was safe to go inside,
we were told there had been threats against family members
and that if we were to disappear again, all hell
would rain down on anybody left behind. Pauline says, the

(29:27):
intelligence gatherers were telling us through Stan that the mob
had some sense that we might be planning to disappear,
so they were threatening us. We were always on hold.
Pauline met Kevin, who would later become her husband. Stan
gave Pauline away on her big day. Of course, she
couldn't invite her real father, and Kevin was allowed in

(29:48):
on the dreadful secret. Kevin agreed that he would go
inside too, but the time was never right. By nineteen
ninety three, five years after she'd been led into the secret,
Pauline's doubts had reached a climax. I was at war
with myself, and I wanted to find some definitive way
to prove it right or wrong, she says. Pauline decided

(30:10):
to set up a sting at a time she knew
Stan was visiting her mother. I called her and said,
somebody's broken into my house. What should I do? Pauline's
mother replied, I'll ask our friend and call you back.
Stand had made it clear to Pauline and Ruth that
they must never go to the police to report any
of the threats and strange goings on in their lives.

(30:31):
The police, he said, couldn't be trusted. If there was
ever any trouble, they should come to him and he
would let them know if he got word of any
plots that put them in danger. He had a special
contraption implanted in his wallet for receiving messages. It would
do a Morse code dash in dot's message, and he
would then take out a little notepad and decipher it.

(30:51):
Pauline says. Ruth called Pauline back a few minutes later.
I was terrified because it was the moment that I
was going to get the answer to this horrible quandary
that I'd been living with, she says. Ruth said she
couldn't talk on the phone, Pauline must go to her
house immediately. Once there, Pauline listened horrified as Ruth and

(31:11):
stand told her that two people had been picked up
just down the street from her house earlier that day,
that they had photographs of her, that they'd been following
her and were looking for certain things in her house.
When she said that, I knew the whole thing was
a hoax, Pauline says, because there had been no break in,
I made it up. That was the moment I knew

(31:33):
all of those severed relationships, all of the crazy running,
all of the strangeness, it was all a lie. Pauline
was so shell shocked and angry it was a week
before she could confront her mother. When she did, Ruth
was horrified and upset, but not because she believed Pauline's
accusations against Stan. What worried her was that if Pauline

(31:55):
no longer believed the story, she would be putting herself
in danger. When Pauline confronted Stan, he told her there
must have been a mistake. The report about the man
who'd been picked up after searching her house. Must have
been incorrect. There'd be an investigation, he assured her. My
memory of that night is how sad he was. She
says that I was no longer one of them. Pauline

(32:19):
spent months trying to convince her mother that Stan had
been lying to them, While her mother tried to convince
Pauline that she was wrong, they reached a standoff. I
was furious and resentful, and I thought I hated Stan
for a long time, Pauline says, but I finally decided
that my mother was not in on this. Stan was
making it up, but I just couldn't think why he

(32:41):
would have done it. In her search for an answer,
Pauline went to see a psychiatrist. I said, what do
you think this could be? He's clearly not schizophrenic. He
does not appear to be psychotic. He's a professional and
well respected. People always talk about what a great guy
he is. What could be going on? The psychiatrist suggested

(33:02):
that it sounded like a case of folet adu, a
syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are transmitted
from a dominant personality stand to a less dominant personality. Ruth.
Pauline and her father, Warren, reconnected after many years, but
he was by now quite ill with emphysema and he'd
started drinking again. I thought about telling him, Pauline says,

(33:27):
but then I thought it would enrage him and that
would not be good for him. I just didn't think
there was anything to gain from it. Pauline's relationship with
her mother never entirely recovered, though it improved when Pauline
started a family. When I had children, things changed, Pauline says,
because they became a focus for all our love. Ruth

(33:48):
developed cancer, which eventually killed her in twenty ten, but
she spent the last nine months of her life living
with Pauline. I hadn't fully forgiven her at that point,
but we both knew that we were out of time
to sort through this, Pauline says. We had to find
some place of peace, and eventually we did. Ruth never
stopped believing Stan's story, even after his death. When the

(34:12):
letters from the Weird World dried up, there were no
more messages about the activities of the mafia, and there
couldn't really be any doubt it had all been a
figment of his imagination. Shortly before she died, she tried
to warn me to be careful, Pauline recalls. I said
to her, I don't need to be any more careful
than anybody else. And she said, oh, Polly, if you

(34:34):
don't believe this, how you must have hated me? And
I said, no, I didn't hate you. I've been really
angry at you, but I do love you. Four years ago,
still trying to understand why Stan had concocted the elaborate hoax,
Pauline came across an article in a medical journal about
a condition called delusional disorder. As I read this article,

(34:57):
I thought this completely describes Stan, somebody who is in
every respect of normal and competent, but has this crazy delusion,
she says. Pauline contacted the author of the paper, a
psychiatrist at Harvard University. It is very excited to hear
her story. Stan had all the hallmarks of a person
with delusional disorder, he said. Another academic, the leading expert

(35:21):
on the disorder, agreed. Finding a reason for what Stan
did to her family may have helped Pauline come to
terms with her past, but it can't ever repair the
damage that he did to their lives. I feel very
sad for my mother, Pauline says, she had such a
difficult life and she was vulnerable to Stan, mostly because

(35:42):
he was a gentle, caring guy. Too bad he had
this terrible delusion. But I also feel sad for myself
and my brother, two little kids whose lives were hijacked
when weird Darkness returns. A Pittsburgh, Kansas radio host gets

(36:05):
a fright from a UFO and his report is so
convincing it became one of the first officially investigated UFO
reports in the US. It was one of the first

(36:37):
admitted entity sightings and probably also one of the earliest
close encounters of the third kind investigated officially at the
time it took place. The incident occurred just northeast of
Frontenac at about seven miles northeast of Pittsburgh, Kansas. On
August twenty fifth, nineteen fifty two, at five point thirty am,

(36:58):
William Squire's, a KOA AM radio entertainer in Pittsburgh, was
driving through farmland along Highway sixty. He was on his
way into town to work early that morning. As he
drove through a heavily wooded area, suddenly something shiny and
odd caught his attention in a pasture field, usually accompanied
by a large herd of cattle. Squires drew closer and

(37:20):
saw an oval shaped object hovering with a rocking motion
just above the ground. He saw the waving grass and
vegetation affected by the down blast of the UFO's hovering system.
The object was silver gray in color, approximately twenty one
meters or seventy feet across and three point seven meters
or twelve feet high. Based on the witness's more detailed description,

(37:44):
the UFO was rather like two soup bowls placed rim
to rim and then flattened somewhat. William Squires drove up
until his car was alongside the field and only about
ninety meters or three hundred feet from the UFO. He
then stopped the car and began to study the object
more closely. The witness could clearly distinguish the underside of

(38:06):
the object and its faint, bluish glow. The unidentified flying
object parked in the field approximately one hundred yards off
the road. The object's rim, that could also be a walkway,
was especially interesting. From this rose a number of vertical poles,
each topped by what seemed to be a series of

(38:27):
six to seven inch spinning propellers revolving at high speed.
At one end of the UFO, there were slightly opaque
window like openings through which Squires could observe indistinct objects
moving all the time. According to Squires, the activity behind
these windows was rather obscured, like a window shade pulled down,

(38:47):
and he could see figures behind it. At the other end,
the unknown vehicle was equipped with another a rectangular window
through which a man, perhaps a pilot, could be seen inside.
The stranger, whose head and shoulders were clearly visible, was
working with controls or some kind of other instruments on
board the vehicle. I definitely saw a human being through

(39:09):
the window, the witness, said. Squires, thought the man observed
by him looked entirely human. Fascinated by what he saw,
he got out of his car and began to approach
the hovering vehicle to take a better look. He approached
the UFO to within a hundred feet or so, and
almost instantly, the UFO began to rise vertically into the air.

(39:31):
The pulsating, dull noise that all the time accompanied the
hovering UFO began to increase in volume, It was like
a covey of a hundred quail taking off, the witness said.
The object continued to rise slowly for some seconds, then
suddenly accelerated and flew off at high speed. Squires reported

(39:52):
the incident to the US Air Force. A few days later,
an Air Force officer contacted him and asked to be
taken to the sight of the incident. It had been
found that in the center of the field the long
grass had been flattened in a large circle about eighteen
meters or sixty feet in diameter. Also, the grass stems
had been bent over but not broken. The affected grass

(40:14):
in the field was like the backwash of where the
thing took off and formed a swirling spiral pattern. Samples
of grass and soil were collected and sent for analysis. However,
experts found nothing particularly unusual in them. Officially, the encounter
with the UFO was classified as a close encounter of
the second kind. The sighting of a pilot of the

(40:37):
flying object was considered as nothing more than the witness's hallucination. However,
the flattened grass found in the area was definitely not
any hallucination. It confirmed the presence of the UFO, which
landed in the field for an undefined period of time.
The later investigation, however, confirmed the reliability of the witness,

(40:58):
William Squire's, and was turned good in the Special Report
Number fourteen completed March seventeen, nineteen fifty four, where the
case was mentioned among many other UFO incidents considered as reliable.
The UFO incident described by William Squires coincides with another
UFO sighting that occurred at about the same time in

(41:19):
August nineteen fifty two, and was experienced by Missus Suzanne E. Knight,
a resident of Maryland, USA. Certain features regarding these two
UFO encounters reported by William Squires and Missus Knight in
seat Pleasant, Maryland, are indeed strikingly similar to each other.
In August nineteen fifty two, at around nine thirty p m.

(41:42):
Missus Suzanne E. Knight was in her kitchen when she
suddenly heard a strange buzzing noise similar to that of
a large insect. The woman approached the window of her
kitchen and looked out. A flying object that bore a
striking similarity to a fuselage of a plane was descending
rapidly at about a forty five degree angle smoke was
coming from the rear of the craft, and her first

(42:04):
thought was that an airplane was just going to crash,
but nothing like that happened. Instead of an impact, the
object of a dull silver color came to a hovering
position approximately three hundred feet above ground level and at
a right angle to missus Knight looking out her kitchen window.
It was equipped with a row of large square windows,

(42:24):
and in one of them, missus Knight noticed a helmeted
manlike figure looking straight ahead. No instruments or controls were visible.
On the underside of the UFO was an undercarriage with
a row of smaller square windows, lit up by a
brilliant yellow light. Through these windows, missus Knight was able
to recognize the backs of little seats. Another interesting detail

(42:48):
was a small mast or perhaps an antenna, placed at
the front of the UFO. This small vertical construction seemed
to be very similar to vertical poles observed by Williams'siss
in his sighting on August twenty fifth, nineteen fifty two.
The UFO incident lasted approximately three minutes, and at least

(43:09):
for two minutes the witness was continuously observing the object,
having it in a clear view. Missus Knight left the
window only once, trying to call local media, but she
returned to the window the UFO's lights suddenly went out.
The object began to glow red, and the witness watched
its back and forth rocking motion. The helmeted manlike figure

(43:30):
was no longer visible, and surprisingly, the undercarriage with small
windows also disappeared. I thought maybe it had moved up
into the fuselage, because not even an outline of the
car was visible, but it should have been because the
street light would have shown it. Soon after the UFO
left the area, Missus Suzanne E. Knight witnessed the UFO

(43:52):
at close range, but reported her sighting for the first
time fifteen years later in nineteen sixty seven. Who was
the stranger missus Knight saw that summer evening in nineteen
fifty two. According to nicap dot org, at present, there
is not sufficient information concerning occupant reports to make any
final judgments on their authenticity, although there is good evidence

(44:15):
in a few cases to suggest that at least some
of the witnesses could be telling the truth about such encounters.
Thanks for listening. If you liked the podcast, please share
a link to this episode and recommend Weird Darkness to
your friends, family, or coworkers who love the paranormal, horror

(44:38):
stories or true crime like you do. All stories in
Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise,
and you can find source links or links to the
authors in the show notes. The Beast of the Land
between the Lakes was written by Brett Swansor for Mysterious
Universe Dota Org. Sworn to Secrecy as a Child was
written by Sarah McDermott for BBC's in nineteen fifty two's

(45:02):
Close Encounter of the Third Kind is by Asutherland for
Message to Eagle dot Com. And now that we're coming
out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light.
If I have the gift of prophecy, they can fathom
all mysteries and all knowledge. And if I have a
faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I
am nothing one Corinthians thirteen, verse two. And a final thought,

(45:28):
you aren't wealthy until you have something money can't buy.
Garth Brooks. I'm Darren Marler. Thanks for joining me in
the Weird Darkness.

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