The Voodoo Cursed Guitar That Destroyed a Musician's Life

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome Weirdos. I'm Darren 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, Air Force

(00:30):
veteran Charles Moody drove out into the desert to watch
a meteor shower, but he found a lot more than
he bargained for when he was abducted by extraterrestrials. We'll
fire up the flux capacitor and take a look at
the past, present, and possible future of time machines. Nearly

(00:51):
every place has its legends, stories that have passed from
person to person, generation to generation down to the present day.
Some are based on facts and are further embroidered in
the telling, while others seem to have come from next
to nothing at all. Such is the mysterious case of
the Witch of scrap Faggot Green. Some say the story

(01:15):
itself is true, others say it is pure science fiction.
Either way, just the circumstances behind the story of the
Shaver mystery are enough to scare the goosebumps out of you.
But first, just because a guitar is the only thing
to survive a building fire doesn't mean that guitar is lucky.

(01:37):
In fact, it might be the exact opposite, as Patrick
Cross found out when he bought the guitar in nineteen
ninety five. We begin with that story. Now bult your doors,
lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with
me into the weird darkness. In nineteen ninety five, Patrick Cross,

(02:39):
who is also an accomplished musician, bought a white electric
guitar in the shape of a V, a copy of
the more famous guitar made by Gibson called a Gibson
Flying V. The guitar purchased by a Cross was made
of heavy maplewood and looked like it had been passed
down by various musicians. He said it was made in

(03:00):
nineteen eighty nine and it was in very good shape
considering it was used. Other than a slight crack on
the top of the neck of the guitar as if
it had been dropped, it played well. The mysterious part
is the guitar had survived from a fire in a
Michigan bar where a band was playing and all of
a sudden a fire broke out. Everything in the bar

(03:23):
was burned to a crisp all except the guitar, which
survived without any burnmarks and fully intact. Apparently someone in
the band had died in the fire and the guitar
was sold, ending up in Oakville, Ontario. Cross recalled that
he was strangely drawn to the guitar. It was as

(03:44):
if it called him, saying play me. As soon as
he picked it up to play, he felt a tingling
electric sensation, like it knew he wanted it and it
was right for him. He didn't even check out the
other guitars since he couldn't put this one down. It
was an odd feeling, but most musicians will understand, he said.

(04:05):
The guitar played fine in the store, jamming to some
bluesy rock rifts and some classic chords, but when he
got it home, it seemed to go out of tune
when he picked it up to play it. He thought
this was odd since it played fine before, and now
it started detuning itself. When he started playing something like
Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple and Purple Haze

(04:28):
by Jimmy Hendrix, the guitar played back in tune. It
felt like it really liked a dark, heavy sound and
it played better than ever. After two days, Cross began
to hear weird sounds in his apartment. The noises seemed
to be coming from the closet in the second bedroom,
where the guitar was stored. He opened the closet door,

(04:52):
heard nothing, looked at the guitar, looked around and didn't
see anything, But he heard what sounded like men's voices
arguing with he each other. It was as if an
argument was going on in the closet between two men.
One sounded Spanish, the other Mexican, and they were talking
about money. He heard this from the front room, then

(05:13):
went into the bedroom to the closet to look again.
Suddenly everything stopped. As the days passed, weird things started
happening around the inside of Cross's apartment. His car keys
would disappear, then reappear some time later. He saw shadows
move on the wall, heard footsteps and bangs or knocks.

(05:36):
Cupboard doors opened and closed on their own. Lights turned
back on after he shut them off. The television set
was on when he would come home, even though he
remembered turning it off before he went out. His cat
would look in the air as if she saw something
move in the air and then look in the other
bedroom as if she could see someone walking around. If

(05:59):
the guitar left out, he could feel a chill around it,
like cold air or cold wind. As Cross began to
use the guitar in his rock band Sci Fi Prodigy,
strange things would also happen at music rehearsals and band performances.
They experienced power failures on their equipment and heard weird

(06:19):
voices coming through the music amplifiers. Lights would go off
and on and blow out. On several occasions, actual fires
started from the floodlights in the room for no reason.
The drummer experienced his symbols falling off and his drums
going out of tune every time he started to play.
The band members also heard other people talking in the

(06:41):
room around the guitar when they were out of the room.
The guitar could not be played and would detune itself
when anyone would try to play it, except for songs
of bad or loud negative music such as heavy metal
or aggressive rock songs with death and destruction meanings. The
guitar particularly liked one song Day Of wrote and played

(07:04):
entitled Something Is out There, which is about ghosts and
evil entities and fear of the unknown with a heavy
X Files type edge. This was one of the very
few songs the guitar would stay in tune for. The
guitar had a presence of evil, a bad aura around it.
It seemed to be three feet of cold presence. Other people,

(07:27):
including Rob McConnell from the X Zone radio show and
Janet Russell from Beyond the Unexplained, also felt this, said Cross.
More things of a paranormal nature occurred to Cross as
time went on. He said he had a series of
bad luck, which he believed was related to the guitar
being in his apartment. He lost his job, his health

(07:48):
started to suffer, rashes and sores appeared on his legs
for no apparent reason. His car would shoot out flames
from the top of the engine every time he started it,
though there was no mechanical reason to account for this.
One day, there was a horrible stench that seemed to
come from the guitar, like a burnt dead smell. Then

(08:11):
the terrible odor would go away as quickly as it appeared.
Cross began to take pictures of the guitar and investigate
why all these bizarre happenings and bad luck occurrences should
be taking place. He captured some ghost orbs around the
guitar many times, and on occasion he could see a
misty presence. It always felt cold when he would pick

(08:35):
up the guitar, and he would get small electrical shots
even when it wasn't plugged in. He said everywhere he
went with the guitar, it seemed to cause things to happen.
On one occasion in Ontario, where his band was performing,
a fire broke out in the bar area. Glasses filled
with water would shatter as they passed near the table

(08:56):
where the guitar lay. On May sixteenth, nineteen ninety nine,
Cross was a guest speaker at a UFO ghost conference,
the X Zone Symposium in Saint Catharine's, Ontario. He brought
his Devil Guitar, also known as Haunted Guitar along to
see if he could find some individuals who could psychically
channel anything that might explain the phenomena surrounding it. Psychics

(09:20):
said they felt weird around the guitar and expressed their
opinion that it contained an evil presence. Cross recalled two
people who said they could help were psychic sensitives. Janet
Russell and Eugenia Maser's story. Eugenia proceeded to channel the
guitar and found out it had a living entity attached

(09:41):
to it. The entity was inside the wood of the guitar.
She found it had a controlling effect on Cross and
anyone who touched or felt it. It seemed to have
intelligence and was clearly talking to Eugenia, saying it did
not wish to be put on display, but wanted to
cause e and destruction. It wanted to fly like a

(10:03):
condor with large wings, and it called itself I of
the Condor. They later found out this was a popular
song in Mexico and South America, where condors do live.
The guitar wanted to start fires. It wanted Cross to
kill with it, actually use it to kill, swinging it

(10:23):
like an axe. Cross felt sickened when he heard these
words being channeled by Eugenia. For many times he had
frightening images u in his mind of wanting to kill
when he was around the guitar. He had also experienced
very vivid dreams of going out to commit murder, using
the instrument as if it were an axe. The entity

(10:45):
that possessed the guitar went on saying that it had
started many fires and survived while all else burned. It
said it had been spawned by the devil and it
was here to rise up to do its father's bidding
in the world. It wanted to fly free like a condor,
spreading evil throughout the world. Eugenia found the guitar had

(11:07):
the most powerful of voodoo hexes et you placed on
it by previous musicians who had owned it. The hechts
was supposed to bring wealth to anyone who owned it
and did its bidding. The x u hex backfired on
the owners who were involved with drug money, and they
were killed. The spirit inside the guitar wanted to be

(11:27):
released into human form in order to kill and destroy.
It liked Cross to play only dark, evil music and
said it detuned itself if the music was good, happy,
or up tempo. The entity said that it never wished
to become good. It only wanted to commit evil acts.
It used profanity, swearing in vulgar language as it spoke

(11:50):
to Eugenia, trying to latch onto her. The spirit said
that it wanted to come into her body and kick
out her soul. Eugenia felt the press coming in to
her and she let go and moved away from the
guitar as it tried to possess her. After a two
hour psychic talk with the spirit, Eugenia suggested the guitar

(12:11):
be destroyed or reblessed to change the evil inside. When
she asked the guitar if it wanted to be blessed,
the entity responded by saying no, and speaking in Spanish,
began blaspheming Christ in God. On the advice of Eugenia,
Cross did destroy the guitar by taking it to a
remote park, putting it in a steel garbage can, and

(12:34):
dousing it with gasoline and lighter fluid. Before lighting the
guitar a flame, Cross put a circle of salt around
the container to stop the evil entity from escaping or
attaching itself somewhere else. He recited the Lord's prayer three
times and told the evil entity to go back to
its source. After that, he saw a misty cloud of

(12:56):
air rise up inside the garbage can. There was wind
all around him minutes before it had been calm. He
attempted to light the guitar on fire, but the fire
kept going out. He poured more gasoline all over it.
He also found some wood to put around it. It
took a while to light the fire and a while

(13:18):
to get the guitar to burn. Obviously, the entity did
not want to be destroyed. As the flames went higher,
Across heard a high pitched shriek coming from the burning guitar.
It sounded like a sick, wounded animal. He was standing
there watching it burn, adding more gasolene to the fire,
when some of the flames jumped onto his arm. Now

(13:41):
he was on fire. As he tried to put it out,
he dropped the full can of gasoline. He was horrified
because now the whole can of gas could explode and
engulf him in flames. Cross said at that time he
was panicked, but somehow he managed to put out the
flames that had begun to burn his clothes. Breathed to
sigh of relief as he watched the guitar burn away

(14:03):
into a charred chunk of wood. After an hour, he
made sure the flames had burned out. He poured more
salt over the burned up guitar, just to make sure
it would contain whatever spirit energy was still left. He
left the guitar in the garbage can and took the case,
closed it up with salt inside it and wrapped the

(14:23):
blue cloth back around the case. He was shaking, but
he felt good that he had destroyed the evil entity,
hoping that it wouldn't haunt or possess anything else again.
He left the park around ten thirty pm. Immediately after
returning home, Cross felt a sense of relief. He didn't
hear any voices or see or feel any more ghostly

(14:46):
activity around him. The next day, Monday, everything immediately changed
for the better. He had a phone call for a
new job, his health was coming back, his sores and
rashes had all disappeared, and his plants came back to life,
he said. Also, he won one hundred and fifty dollars

(15:07):
on a Bingo scratch ticket. There were no more power
failures on his TV, and his car started normally. Miraculously,
everything that had been going bad changed overnight. Since getting
rid of the Haunted guitar, since nineteen ninety nine, Cross
has investigated all sorts of hauntings and ghost activity, but

(15:29):
he has never had anything happen as bad or bizarre
as when he owned the haunted guitar. Coming up, Air
Force veteran Charles Moody drove out into the desert to
watch a meteor shower, but he found a lot more

(15:51):
than he bargained for when he was abducted by extraterrestrials.
We'll fire up the flux capacitor and take a look
at the past, present, and possible future of time machines. Plus,
despite its very odd and cringe worthy title, you'll want
to hear the story of the Witch of Scrap Faggot Green,

(16:12):
these stories and more when Weird Darkness returns. On the

(16:38):
evening of August thirteenth, nineteen seventy five, approximately at about
one twenty am, a veteran Air Force Sergeant Charles L.
Moody drove out into the desert of Alma Gordo, New Mexico,
to watch a meteor shower that was due to occur. However,
he got much more than he bargained for. As he
was watching for shooting stars, a glowing, fifty foot long

(17:00):
with eighteen to twenty feet wide, metallic saucer shaped craft
landed about seventy feet away from him. Moody could hear
a high pitched humming sound. He also noticed a rectangular
window in the craft through which he could see shadows
resembling human forms. Frightened, Sergeant Moody jumped into his car

(17:21):
and attempted to drive away, but for unknown reasons, his
car would not start. Then his entire body became numb.
Just when his fear increased, the object suddenly took off.
Moody raced home to tell his wife. He was shocked
to find it was already three a m. And that

(17:41):
two hours had passed had he been taken on board.
Within a few days, a rash broke out over his
lower body. Upon the recommendation of a physician, he began
to practice self hypnosis in an effort to recall what
had occurred during the lost time period. At first he
didn't remember, but over the next few days and weeks,

(18:04):
he eventually recalled everything that had happened. He remembered that
he was in fact taken on board. He was sitting
in his car when the numbness came over his body. Next,
he had observed several beings exit the craft and approach
his car, says Moody. The beings were about five feet

(18:25):
tall and very much like us, except their heads were
larger and hairless. Their ears were very very small, eyes
a little larger than ours, nose small in the mouth
had very thin lips. I would say their weight was
maybe between one hundred and ten and one hundred and
thirty pounds. They have speech, but their lips did not move.

(18:45):
Their type of clothing was skin tight. I could not
see any zippers or buttons at all. The color of
their clothes was black, except for one of them, who
had a silver, white looking suit on. The alien leader
asked Moody telepathically if he was pared to behave peacefully.
When Moody agreed to do so, the leader applied a
rod like device to his back, which relieved the paralysis. Later,

(19:10):
Moody was taken into a very clean room with white
rounded walls and indirect lighting. One of the beings examined
him and told him I will not hurt you. We
are not meant to hurt you. Moody asked if he
could see the engine room. They agreed and took him
to a lower level. He saw a complex machine involving

(19:30):
long metallic rods and large crystal like spheres. The ets
explained that the ship operated using the principle of positive
and negative magnetic polls. They told him that they had
a much larger mothership and that there were many other
races of ets who were also observing and studying the planet.

(19:51):
They warned him against the use of nuclear weapons. He
was promised a future meeting with the ets, but warned
that closer contact with earthmen would not be attempt for
another twenty years. They also said they would one day
reveal their existence publicly to the world. Finally, he was
told that it was time for him to go, and
that he wouldn't remember what happened until a few days afterwards.

(20:15):
Moody was then placed back in his car, where he
watched the UFO take off. After remembering the onboard part
of his experience, Moody realized how important his story was,
and he contacted local UFO investigators. However, a thorough investigation
by an investigator named Jim Lorenzen revealed a couple of

(20:35):
contradictions in Moody's account about the incident. Today, Moody's case
remains undisputed. The dream of time traveling to the past

(21:39):
or future is probably as old as the human imagination.
When H. G. Wells published The Time Machine in eighteen
ninety five, he called it a scientific romance because no
one knew whether time travel was possible, A mere ten
years later, Albert Einstein would put forth his theory of
special relativity, and part of the question would be answered,

(22:02):
to the astonishment of many in the affirmative. One of
Einstein's predictions, now verified by countless experiments, is best illustrated
by the parable of the twins. One twin stays home
while the other makes a round trip voyage into outer space,
traveling at nearly the speed of light for ten years,
as measured by the stay at home twin. When the

(22:25):
travel twin returns, she finds her sisters aged ten years,
while she has hardly aged at all. The traveled twin
has jumped ten years into the future. This is the
time dilation effect of special relativity, and although it is
most noticeable when extreme velocities are involved, it is happening

(22:45):
around us all the time. As we move relative to
each other, we are all of us traveling into the
future at different rates. The differences in these rates are
very small, sure, but they are real. Travel into the
future is inescapable consequence of the structure of the universe.

(23:06):
Time Traveling to the past or returning back from a
trip to the future is a somewhat more challenging proposition
until a few decades ago, the subject was consigned to
science fiction. In fact, a query from a first time
science fiction author provoked the beginnings of the first serious
and sustained study. In nineteen eighty five, astronomer Carl Sagan

(23:30):
was working on the manuscript for his novel Contact. The
book's heroine required some means of rapid interstellar transit, and
since Sagan wanted to get the physics right, he solicited
advice from his friend Kip Thorn, a Caltech theoretical physicist.
Thorne recommended the use of a wormhole, a tunnel like
shortcut through space and time predicted by Einstein and well

(23:54):
known among science fiction aficionados. Sagan dutifully incorporated the suggestion.
That same year, Thorn realized that if you treated the
two mouths of a wormhole as you treat twins, keeping
one mouth fixed, moving the other at a velocity near
the speed of light, and then returning it to the
vicinity of the fixed mouth, you could create a time machine.

(24:17):
If the traveling mouth had been moving for ten years,
as measured by the fixed mouth, then Thorn could jump
into the traveling mouth and emerge from the fixed mouth
ten years into the past. Physicists had been skittish on
the subject of time travel, considering its science fiction, but
Thorn's work was licensed to take it seriously, and suddenly

(24:40):
there appeared a torrent of papers, many of which were
published in the most prestigious journals. By the mid nineteen nineties,
there were at least half a dozen ideas for other
ways to twist and fold space time like Origami. All
this thinking was decidedly theoretical. No one was building a
time machine in his basement. One reason was that in

(25:03):
most cases the plans required a kind of anti gravity
called negative energy to sustain the warping of space and time.
Negative energy is difficult, if not impossible, to produce, and
the quantities necessary. Still, the idea of time travel was
getting serious attention. Naturally, not all that attention was enthusiastic.

(25:25):
Stephen Hawking, for one, suspected that by some as yet
undiscovered mechanism nature prohibited traveling back in time. One sticking
point was the grandfather paradox. If I traveled back in
time and killed my grandfather, I could not have been born.
But if I have not been born, I cannot live
to travel back and kill my grandfather. The Russian born

(25:47):
physicist Igornovakov, an enthusiastic investigator into the subject of time travel,
has suggested that the paradox doesn't apply because space time
is probably self consistent. That is, I may be able
to travel back in time and somehow become interwoven into
a past of which I was already a part. But
I will not be able to kill my grandfather, quite

(26:09):
simply because I have not killed him already. Novikov has
also thought a good deal about the other time travel conundrum,
the bootstrap paradox. Suppose I travel to two thousand and nine,
find a design for a zero emission automobile engine, and
return with it to two thousand and eight and patent it.

(26:29):
Suppose further that the patent is developed into the design
that I find in two thousand and nine. The obvious
question who would have invented the zero emission engine? The
answer is no, one would have invented it. The design
would have been generated quite literally from nothing, courtesy of
a time machine and perhaps a skirting of some yet

(26:51):
to be written intellectual property laws. British physicist David Deutsch,
invoking the many universe interpretation of quantumcare, believes that pastword
time travel would require travel to another parallel universe, one
in which I could kill my grandfather and in which
I therefore would never be born. Via a time machine,

(27:13):
I would have removed myself from this universe to take
up residence in that one. The idea has some interesting implications.
Deutsch suggested that one reason we have detected no extraterrestrial
civilizations may be that, using time machines, they have left
this universe, preferring to live in another. Metaphysical and philosophical

(27:36):
questions aside exactly how realistic is the physics of pastword
time travel. Each of the several schemes for making a
time machine creates a region in which pastword time travel
is possible and separates it from a region in which
time travel is impossible. The boundary between these regions, the

(27:56):
chronology horizon, has remained a mystery in part because its
nature depends upon the characteristics of space time on the
smallest possible scales. We have at best a dim understanding
of these scales, and we will not have a real
understanding until we have developed a full theory of quantum gravity.

(28:16):
This is the holy grail of theoretical physics. The so
called theory of everything that would eliminate disparities between relativity,
which explains nature on very large scales where gravity becomes important,
and quantum mechanics, which explains nature on very small scales
where quantum effects become important. Some physicists think the theory

(28:39):
of everything is ten years away. Others suspect it is
a good deal further off. For the moment, then, the
question of whether time travel is possible has been put
on hold. The reason and no doubt temporary decline of
interest in traveling to the past is welcomed by physicists
who argue that work in less fanciful areas might yield

(28:59):
a greater intellectual prophet. New Zealand physicist Matt Visser, himself
the architect of a number of theoretical time machines, calls
that attitude overtly cautious and boring. More than two decades
after Thorne's seminal work, we still don't know whether time
travel is possible, but one thing is certain. Even as

(29:21):
an idea, it's anything but boring. A couple of hundred

(29:46):
years ago, in the Essex village of Great Lee's, of
which named Anne Hughes, was burned at the stake for
the crime of bewitching her husband to death. Denied a
Christian burial, her chart remains were buried at a place
known as scrap Faggot Green, and a large stone was
placed on top to mark the site. Still greatly feared,

(30:07):
Ann's resting place remained undisturbed for the next two or
three centuries. During World War II, however, the road that
passed by the green needed to be widened in order
to accommodate the new Boreham airfield. The work was not
as careful as it should have been, and bulldozers displaced
the stone, something that would have serious repercussions. Strange events

(30:31):
began to be reported soon afterwards. The bells of the
local church rang at midnight with no one there to
ring them. Sheep were found out in their fields with
no sign of how they had got there. Strange noises
were heard in the night. Painting supplies were moved from
one room to another by unseen hands. Haystacks were blown

(30:52):
around without wind. Scaffolding poles were scattered about a yard
in an impossible fashion. Reputable folk, who were for their
level headedness and taking no nonsense were reporting these and
other fantastical things, and the strangeness at Great Lee's showed
no sign of abating. In desperation, Harry Price, the distinguished

(31:14):
paranormal expert, was called in the cause of the disturbances
was glaringly apparent to this seasoned investigator, and he diagnosed
a poltergeist angered by the moving of the stone. The
solution was thankfully simple. Following Price's advice, the stone was
replaced in its original position and the remains of the

(31:34):
witch buried with due ceremony in the local churchyard. From
that point on, the inhabitants of Great Les and nearby
villages were disturbed no more, the witch once again at rest,
as she remains to this day. Although this is the
basic legend of the Witch's Stone of Great Leaves, there
are many variations and facts that both help and hinder

(31:58):
when trying to unpick the factscinating tale. The most obvious
place to start is to attempt to ascertain the identity
of the witch in question. There was indeed an Anne
Hughes accused of witchcraft on March twelfth, sixteen twenty one,
and was before the Chelmsford Lent Session of the Essex
Assizes on the following indictments, Anne Hughes, of Great Lee's

(32:22):
widow on twenty four June sixteen fifteen at Great Lee's
bewitched John Archer, who languished until twenty four June following
when he died. She was also guilty of bewitching Thomas
Meade and Margaret Bright, both of whom were wasted and consumed,
and who continued in that sorry state at the time.

(32:42):
Anne came to court on top of that, and had
also bewitched to death a cow belonging to Richard Edwards
that was valued at three pounds. It would seem a
clear cut case that our witch had been found, apart
from two rather important details. Firstly, despite a hugely popular misconception,

(33:03):
English witches were very, very seldom burned. In fact, there
are only one or two verifiable cases throughout the entire
period of the witch trials where witch went to the flames,
and then it was for the crime of petty treason
killing her husband rather than for witchcraft itself, and perhaps
the most pertinent to this case, Anne Hughes was acquitted,

(33:26):
as with the case of Anne Wagg of Ilkeston in
Derbyshire in sixteen fifty. Modern sources delight in repeating how
Hughes was hanged for her crimes. However, a perusal of
the parish registers for Great Leaves revealed that in December
sixteen sixty nine, Ann Hughes's widow was buried. Although Anne
is therefore ruled out as the witch behind the disturbances,

(33:50):
there is, however, another potential candidate. Elizabeth Brooke of Great Lees,
was accused of witchcraft several decades previous, brought before the
Chelmsfordicizes on the second of March fifteen eighty four. Her
crimes had taken place in fifteen eighty seven, and in
that year she was said to have been guilty of
murdering Margaret Cleveland, wife of John Cleveland, by witchcraft. Elizabeth

(34:15):
was also indicted for bewitching six cows and six horses
belonging to James Homestead, the cow, five heifers and four
hogs that were worth ten pounds belonging to James Spielman,
two cows and two mares worth five pounds of Thomas Korch,
and some sows of George Fitches that were worth forty shillings.

(34:36):
All of the above animals died not as fortunate as Anne, Hughes.
Elizabeth Brooke, who confessed to the second of the charges
against her, was found guilty under the fifteen sixty three
Witchcraft Act, which stated categorically that murder by witchcraft was
a capital offense, and she was condemned to die by

(34:56):
the noose. It is highly probable that these two two
witches became conflated over time and local telling, and that
the ever popular witch trial tropes of fire and husband
murder were added for good measure as the legend developed
over the years that followed. Whiches were known to be vengeful,
spiteful creatures, and that one would return from the grave

(35:18):
to wreak havoc on the descendants of her neighbors would
have been easily believable, both to their contemporaries and down
to the present day. What of the stone itself, sources
such as they are, are decidedly vague on not only
the location of the stone but also what happened to it.
Stones have been mentioned in relation to Saint Anne's Castle,

(35:40):
a local pub that is also said to be haunted
by the ghost of Anne Hughes, Borham Airfield itself, and
the aforementioned scrap Faggot Green Over the years, it's become
increasingly difficult to determine which stone was the original and
where it had originally been located. Intriguingly, and perhaps most
pertinent to the known facts, there is mention of a

(36:03):
stone marking the place where an unlucky gamekeeper was murdered
in Duke's Wood, resting to the south of great Lees
and Borham. The wood was cleared to make way for
the building of the airfield in nineteen forty three, and
it's possible that the airfield, the story of a moved stone,
and the local witch were further merged together over time.

(36:24):
Although the story has been much repeated, sources from the
time these events were supposed to have occurred are scant. Indeed,
none of the local papers seem to have reported the
strange events or the reinterment of these supposed remains a
curious state of affairs for something so newsworthy. The only
known contemporary report was an article run by the Sunday

(36:46):
Pictorial in October nineteen forty four relating the strange events
at Great Lees and attributing the phenomena to the scrap
faggot Green Witch. There was also potentially a cartoon in
an American magazine from around the same time that gave
a humorous account of what was said to have taken place.
Another source close at the time was Harry Price, the

(37:08):
ghost expert who had aided with the diagnosis of the
problem and replacement of the stone. Price was in fact
the founder of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, the
great nemesis of medium Helen Duncan, and most famed for
his investigations into the hauntings at Borley Rectory. In his
own account of what took place, Price was less forthcoming

(37:29):
than he is often attributed to be, and in his
nineteen forty five publication Poltergeist Over England, he states that quote.
The villagers declared that their misfortunes dated from the day
when American bulldozers widened the road at scrap Baggot Green,
the center of the village, thus displacing a two ton
stone that marked the remains of a seventh century witch
who'd been buried with a stake through her chest at

(37:51):
the crossroads there. They asked me what they had better
do about it. I told them that if they believed
the witch to be responsible for their troubles, the logical
thing to do to restore her tombstone to its original site.
This they did ceremonially at midnight on October eleventh and twelfth,
placing the stone east and west in the traditional manner.
The phenomena ceased that real events were cobbled together in

(38:17):
the public imagination, both at the time and in the
years that followed, seems the most likely background of this
compelling story, with witches and stones woven inextricably into the
fabric of the history and folklore of Essex and Ripe
for the picking. As for the strange events reported in
Great Leaves themselves, however, things are less clear cut. Did

(38:38):
things really happen as reported with haste acts demolished and
bells ringing unbidden? Or is there a simpler explanation for
Along with the believers, there are those who maintained that
the strange happenings were nothing more than villagers having a
joke at the expense of a too trusting reporter from
the Sunday Victorial. In this telling, the supposedly incredulous locals

(39:02):
and the witch of scrapback at Green have the last laugh.
After all. Some say it's a true story, others say
it is purely science fiction. Either way, the story of
the Shaver mystery is incredibly freaky, as you'll find out

(39:26):
when weird darkness returns. Have you ever looked out at

(39:59):
the craziness of masses and wondered what possesses people? How
are you wearing a face mask during a contagious pandemic?
Become a political issue? Why are there anti vaxers? Why
do some people insist on a flat earth? Why do
others insist on a hollow earth? Why are these delusions
so contagious? Camire weirdos. You want to hear a real

(40:22):
freaky story, Your uncle Darren has one for you. Some
say the story itself is true, that is neither here
nor there. But I do know that even the circumstances
behind the story are enough to scare the cupcakes out
of you. The year is nineteen thirty two, the peak
of the Great Depression. The place a forward auto factory

(40:43):
somewhere in the Rust Belt region of the United States.
A factory worker named Richard Sharp Shaver has an undefined
accident and soon after begins to report strange phenomena. By
his account, a welding gun somehow allows him to hear
the thoughts of his coworkers. He then claims to have
received a telepathic record of a torture session conducted by

(41:06):
evil beings who lived deep within caverns under the earth.
Richard Sharp Shaver quit his job at that factory not
long after this event and became a drifter for a while.
His subsequent misadventures are unknown until nineteen forty three, in
the thick of World War II, when he wrote a
letter to a then obscure sci fi pulp magazine called

(41:28):
Amazing Stories. Shaver's letter claimed that he had discovered a
hidden language called Mantong, which was a system of sounds
with hidden meanings embedded in them and supposedly the origin
of all human language. Shaver claimed that Mantong could be
mapped over any other language to reveal hidden meanings. That

(41:49):
letter arrived at the desk of Ray Palmer, editor at
the magazine, who applied a few examples of mantong in
Shaver's letter and thought the theory sounded pretty airtight. Palmer
wrote back to Shaver asking for more detail about this language,
and in response, Shaver sent back a longer letter narrating
his experience in uncovering the secret underground society of inhuman

(42:11):
monsters who lived in caves under the Earth's surface. These monsters,
called Darros, made periodic tricks to the surface to abduct
humans and take them back to their lair to conduct
tortuous experiments. Editor Palmer liked this story enough that he
edited it into a fictional account and published it in
the magazine. Already, it seems unlikely that a person clearly

(42:35):
suffering from some form of mental distress could pawn off
this rant to any magazine at the time without being
dismissed as a kook. But we're just getting started. What
happened next defies all explanation. Thus was launched the Shaver
Mystery franchise, beginning with the first story I Remember Lemuria.

(42:56):
This story sold out the magazine and became so hugely
popular that a series of stories produced by Shaver continued
to run in Amazing Stories until it almost crowded out
every kind of other content. Shaver continued building this universe
of the subterranean Darrow, a race of proto humans whom
had gone underground because they found direct exposure to sunlight

(43:19):
to harsh. Later, most of them would build spaceships and
flee to other stars, leaving their most derelict. Members behind
the universe of the Darrow grew to include rare noble Tarots,
good aligned reformed Darrows who tried to help humans escape.
There were also increasingly fanciful elements of underground hangars, spaceships, robots,

(43:43):
bands of human mercenaries leading a resistance, and whatnot, all
the elements of a good sci fi adventure series. The
series sold the magazine Amazing Stories. Subscriptions rose from one
hundred and thirty five thousand to one hundred and eighty
five thousand over the course of the series, running from
nineteen forty five to nineteen forty eight. Thanks to Shaver's stories,

(44:06):
be they fact or fiction, Amazing Stories was now out
selling every other sci fi publication, and there could be
no doubt that the extra subscribers came from fans of
Shaver's stories, because they wrote in to say some. First, dozens,
then hundreds of letters poured in from readers, who, one

(44:26):
after another confided that they too had encountered telepathic violence
from the underground Darros. A few even claimed to be
some of the surviving humans the Darros kidnapped. Several readers
in their letters winked slyly at Amazing Stories for telling
the truth and disguising it as fiction. What a clever ruse,

(44:48):
they would write admiringly to throw the Darros off. Furthermore,
Shaver and his fan base shared enthusiasm over the Montang language,
extending to Shaver's new discovery of terror and Darro's hieroglyphics,
which were written in the very rocks of the earth.
Clubs of Shaver fans began to form, dubbed Shaver mystery clubs.

(45:10):
One woman claimed to have gone down a secret elevator
in a sub basement of a building in Paris, France,
and found a Darros enclave which kidnapped her, raping and
torturing her for a month until a heroic Tarot rescued her.
The magazine's staff, then, eventually most of the science fiction
community became first fascinated and then horrified by this phenomenon.

(45:32):
As fans became more and more insistent that the Shaver
stories were true, the science fiction community around Amazing Stories
began to pressure editor Palmer to discontinue the series and
denounce it as a hoax. By nineteen forty eight, Palmer
caved to the outraged masses demands and stopped publishing the stories,

(45:53):
while he also quit working for Amazing Stories and started
his own shoebox publishing title, The Hidden World, where he
continued to run Shaver's ramblings. Palmer, the definition of a
number one fan, stayed loyal to his muse Shaver until
the bitter end. The Shaver cult followed them. So what

(46:13):
was going on? It's difficult to say. Even today, Shaver
Mystery Club chapters continue to thrive as historians re examined
the phenomenon. Shaver had not only started a fiction universe
based on funny noises he heard in his head, but
had inadvertently founded a cult dubbed Shavirology. Contained within this

(46:34):
story is an intangible common hook to a well documented
instance of contagious craziness, politically dubbed the influencing Machine. It
seems that within the subjective symptoms of those suffering from
paranoid schizophrenia, a specific kind of hallucination recurs from one
individual to another, whereby a machine is used to insert

(46:55):
tortuous and bizarre thoughts into the victim's mind. Is always
operated by a gang of unsavory villains who persecute the
victims for their own twisted ends. The gang is inevitably
an organized party of a group such as the CIA,
the Mafia, or the Freemasons. Recall, Shaver's version of the

(47:16):
machine was a malfunctioning welding gun. This is a very
well documented phenomenon by now. It is included, for example,
in the psychological record of James Tilley Matthews, considered to
be the first recorded case of paranoid schizophrenia. Matthew's version
of the influencing machine was called an heirloom, and it
was operated from a distance by a group of spies

(47:39):
named the Middleman, the Glove Woman, Sir Archie, and Bill,
also known as the King. The machine's torments included reading minds,
inserting unwanted thoughts, and doing inconceivable things to the body,
such as blocking blood flow with magnetism. Paranoid schizophrenics report
an almost identical pattern of delusions, as if multiple minds

(48:03):
had the exact same nightmare. There's always a shadowy group
with psychic weapons who are blamed for nearly all of
society's ills. Both the tormentors of mister Matthews and the
Darrows of Shaver's stories were supposed to be bent on
taking over the world and destroying humanity, using their thought
bending powers to cause assassinations, wars, and huge tragic disasters.

(48:27):
Yet another version of an influencing machine setup appears in
the later works of legendary sci fi author Philip K. Dick.
Starting around the time of the novel Vallus, Dick asserted
that an alien consciousness was communicating telepathically with him through
a vast active living intelligence system Vallus. The fact that P. K.

(48:49):
Dick wrote so many revered works of classic sci fi,
including the novels that became the basis for the blockbuster
films Blade Runner and Total Recall, it indicates that he
had a tinge of schizophrenia enhancing his imagination the whole time,
and certainly that his lucid awareness of sci fi genre
tropes allowed him to recognize the fabric of this delusion,

(49:11):
and yet cruelly was not enough to prevent his succumbing
to it. If you're beginning to suspect that, at least
as far as the Hollow Earth conspiracy goes, we finally
now know how one popular delusion got started, ding, you're correct.
In fact, we have ready evidence of more collective shared
delusions taking form right now the internet infamous Mandela effect,

(49:35):
which manifests itself in huge collective false memories of Nelson
Mandela dying in jail. He didn't mistitling of the children's
book series The Bernstain Bears. It wasn't in the existence
of a nineties comedy movie called Shizam where the comedian
Sinbad played a genie. Nope. The thing is, even when

(49:55):
confronted with hard evidence that a memory is false, people
will double go down and insists, nope, time travelers must
have changed it. After Palmer had quit his editor job
in solidarity with Shaver, he went on to take up
interest in darros encoded hieroglyphs on rocks, which, in Shaver terms,
form a rock book. Collecting these rock books, he formed

(50:19):
a lending library for true believers. As for schizophrenics and
their influencing machines, well they're still out there, as are
the Shaver true believers. Doubtless we're all familiar with some
of the more modern day interpretations of the same base
ideas spread more easily through the Internet now than ever before.

(50:39):
Some even go so far as to mobilize together in
groups to insist that they are the sane ones and
the rest of us live in delusion. The Shaver story
and the prevalence of influencing machines suggests only two possibilities.
Either the human mind can be affected by a disease
whose symptoms are so precise that id identical delusions occur

(51:01):
in multiple patients. Or else, there really are lizard people
and what's not assaulting us with psychic weapons, and we
treat our few woke individuals like the crazy people. Both
of those possibilities are eerie. By one account, Shaver, during
his wandering years, was arrested for vagrancy, but the hallucination

(51:22):
of a beautiful woman that he'd been experiencing also appeared
to a jail guard who was persuaded to release Shaver.
Our shared delusions that powerful somewhere between psychedelic drug effects, hypnosis,
and very good storytelling could lie a kind of magic
power to conjure hallucinations in another person's mind, yet make

(51:46):
them so indelible that they stay there. Us creative people
worry about this sort of thing. It's a power that's
fun to play with for about five minutes until Sorcerer's
apprentice it gets out of control. Maybe it was never
under our control to begin with. It's things like this
that can make the rest of us begin to doubt

(52:07):
our grip on reality. Shaver wasn't the only one with
a cult. Let's not forget two other sci fi authors
who had an unusual effect on their fans in the
mid twentieth century. One was Robert A. Heinland, who came
this close to founding a cult in his book Stranger
in a Strange Land. And the other science fiction author

(52:28):
who influenced a wide audience to adopt his unique vision
of reality. They might have heard of him he was
l Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology. Thanks

(52:56):
for listening. If you liked to show, please share it
was you know who loves the paranormal or stream stories,
true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries 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 alien abduction

(53:17):
of Sergeant Moody was posted at Animalian. The Shaver Mystery
is by Penguin Pete for geeky domain dot com. The
Witch of Scrap Faggot Green is by Willow Winsham for
Folklore Thursday. A brief history of time machines was posted
in Forbes, and Patrick Cross and his Devil Guitar was
posted at Animalian. And now that we're coming out of

(53:39):
the dark, I'll leave you with a little light Hebrews thirteen,
verses five and six. Keep your lives free from the
love of money, and be content with what you have.
Because God has said, never will I leave you, never
will I forsake you. So we say with confidence, the
Lord is my helper. I will not be afraid what

(54:00):
can mere mortals do to me? And a final thought,
if you want to live a happy life, tie it
to a goal, not to people or things. Albert Einstein.
I'm Daryn Marler. Thanks for joining me in the weird darkness.

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